For decades, Apple’s defining characteristics as a hardware and software maker have been simplicity and quality. “It just works,” as Steve Jobs repeatedly told users.
Sure, Apple products have had flaws and lacked some capabilities offered by competing products. But the company would rarely ever be drawn to acknowledge them. When it did (begrudgingly) admit a problem, as it did with the Maps debacle of 2012 and the iPhone “you’re holding it wrong” saga in 2010, it became international news. Apple made a mistake! Can you believe it?
Today, Apple is having to become a different type of company. Its two most important products are being developed very much in the full view of the public, and I would say before they have met the previous Apple standard. “It just works” is now “we’re working on it.”
It’s happening because Apple is under two sources of intensifying pressure. Progress made by its competitors in the artificial intelligence space has exposed that Apple has been slow to develop AI tools in its products. At the same time, Wall Street is wondering where Apple’s future growth is going to come from now that the iPhone seems to have reached its sales peak. (The company reports its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings later on Thursday.)
The first experiment is Apple Intelligence, the company’s haphazardly pulled together answer to efforts from OpenAI, Microsoft and Google in applying AI to their consumer-facing tools and devices. Partially released to the public this week (more features will come out next year), Apple Intelligence is light on functionality and considered to be more than two years behind the competition. One of its main applications — summarizing notifications — is inconsistent. (Sometimes comically so; one recent example shared on Threads: “Jeff Bezos criticizes the [Washington] Post’s lack of presidential endorsement in an op-ed” … huh?)
Each example of AI shortfalls will cause Apple employees to wince — particularly those in Cupertino whom, I suspect, know Apple Intelligence marks a shift in standards at the company, a software release that the Apple of yesteryear would not have put out in such an incomplete form.
The same might be said for its second public experiment — the Vision Pro mixed-reality headset. M.G Siegler, a longtime technology commentator (and partner at Google Ventures) suggested in April that the Vision Pro, in its current incarnation, should have been a “dev kit” — a prototype sent to third-party developers so they could be ready with their software for when the truly consumer-ready device was released to the public later. I’m inclined to agree. Instead, the public’s first interaction with the Vision Pro, maybe their first experience of mixed reality of any kind, has been with a clunky, heavy device with poor battery life and no real compelling use case. Developer interest since the device’s launch has fallen off a cliff, with just 10 apps for Vision Pro added to the App Store in September.
Since being released in February, sales of the $3,500 device have been low — likely hitting around 420,000 by the end of the device’s first year, according to The Information, citing data from Counterpoint Research. Apple is “sharply” scaling back production of the first version of the device, and Apple’s engineers have pushed back work on developing the second one, according to reports. Instead, the company is now focused on building a cheaper model that will more closely compete with Meta Platforms Inc.’s Quest headset and is said to be working on something similar to Meta’s impressive work with smart sunglasses. The fact that Meta is forcing Apple to catch up, rather than the other way round, is a striking sign of the times.
The counterargument to the Vision Pro’s performance is that this was all to be expected. “It’s not a mass-market product,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal recently. This wasn’t a product they were expecting to sell by the millions, like the iPhone or Apple Watch. Indeed, the company — as Apple commentator Jon Gruber noted — was only really able to manufacture around 450,000 of the headsets in the first year anyway because of a finite supply of display components sourced from Sony.
And yet, in a sign that Apple’s marketing teams don’t quite know how to navigate the company’s new modus operandi, the Vision Pro was launched as though it was a mass market product. The company put out TV spots and converted corners of its stores into demonstration areas. Cook did a glitzy interview with Vanity Fair and was on hand to cheer on the first buyers of the device at the company’s flagship New York store.
That’s not what a company should do if it thinks this is just a thing for the nerdiest of fans. It is something it should do when wanting to reassure Wall Street that its new idea is creating some much-needed buzz.
I’m still of the belief that mixed reality — or the “metaverse” or “spatial computing” or whatever we decide to call it — has a place in our collective future. Anyone who can’t see the potential of convincingly transporting ourselves to a virtual world, or enhancing the real world around us, is suffering from a severe lack of imagination. The same goes for AI — the productivity potential is enormous, even if many of the applications today seem clumsy and unreliable.
But it’s clear that Apple, backed into a corner, has this year released hardware and software that doesn’t feel ready for prime time. Yes, these products will improve, but this isn’t an Apple most of us recognize. It will be worth watching how the company strikes the balance between experimenting in public and maintaining its treasured brand image, which for years has been built on the delicate myth that Apple’s products are perfect in almost every way.
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