Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apple's 'It's Glowtime' Keynote

Computing and the Internet have matured and become so much more central to daily life. For better or worse, that&#x27;s going to put limits on the quirks something like a smartphone can have. If your photo library, banking, social media, or even job depends on your phone, it really does need to be rock solid and reliable.<p>I think what people forget is pre-iPhone, we all saw _something_ coming. Maybe we didn&#x27;t expect it to look exactly like the iPhone, but there was a sense of excitement around what was coming next for computing. Sony Style magazine was still in print. eCommerce was picking up. Palm phones, Blackberry, Windows Mobile. Super quirky laptops and UMPCs. I remember lusting after some wildly impractical UMPCs, because it meant that everything I did on my desktop could now fit in my pocket.<p>Even after smartphones took off, I remember sometimes thinking &quot;man, imagine in the future when this stuff is good and it actually just works.&quot; A lot of stuff was basically just demos back then. Well, here we are. A huge portion of my life happens on my iPhone, and that really does mean it has to Just Work.

Gruber edges up to this in a footnote, but I think the prerecorded keynotes are particularly corrosive to the spirit of risk and excitement that he misses in Tim Cook’s Apple.<p>Jobs cared deeply about the keynotes and was ruthlessly strategic about which feature was in and which was out, who—other than Steve—would present, and which guests would be invited onto the stage. That didn’t mean they were perfect—as Gruber points out, we saw plenty of busted demos and boring partner CEO’s.<p>But now all the pressure to put on a high-wire act is gone, and Apple can rely on increasingly sterile and repetitive “ultra-production” to make every new supported Fitness activity seem like a headliner, which means everything’s just indistinct, cheerfully delivered mush.

&gt; If anything, under Cook, Apple more consistently achieves near-perfection. Tolerances are tighter. Ship dates seldom slip.<p>I&#x27;m surprised that Gruber doesn&#x27;t mention the fact that Apple is now in the habit of announcing products or features 6+ months before they ship, both software and hardware (not talking about things like the iPhone which have to be submitted to the FCC). And sometimes, they never ship at all (see AirPower). This would never happen under Jobs.<p>Also, while Steve Jobs straight up lied in order to protect future announcements (i.e. &#x27;we&#x27;re not making a video iPod&#x27;, Tim Cook will say things like &#x27;we are very interested in the AR&#x2F;VR space&#x27; for close to a decade before announcing any products).

Gods, how much longer until we all accept that phones have reached a local (if not global) maximum?<p>There&#x27;s really not much left to &#x27;innovate&#x27;. More cameras, more memory, bigger and bigger and bigger screens, less ports.<p>The next innovation here is gonna have to be a total paradigm shift, and I&#x27;m not particularly convinced that Apple and&#x2F;or Google are capable of that anymore. The only levers in their grasp left to pull are software. So now we are innundated with capital-F Features. And these Features are so important that users must be constantly bombarded with tips and popups and hints and notifications telling them about the latest Features. Google even calls their extremely normal and standard update cycle &#x27;Feature Drop&#x27;.<p>People just want to buy a phone that fits their preferred physical dimensions, lasts at least most of the day, and generally <i>does what you tell it and stays the hell out of the way</i>.<p>Nobody, not one person on this planet wants their phone to swoop in an animated rainbow-bordered modal telling them that their calculator app now includes AI, for some reason, and that they now are compelled to accept some new terms and license for a calculator.

&gt; That fat Nano was quirky. It was also, in hindsight, obviously a mistake. I’m quite sure that inside Apple there were designers and product people who thought it was a mistake before it shipped. Steve Jobs shipped it anyway, surely because his gut told him it was the right thing to try. Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t make mistakes like that.<p>Look, I&#x27;m willing to accept a certain level of fanboyish Apple defense, especially from Gruber. It <i>does</i> seem like a bit of a stretch to say the fat iPod Nano was a failure for selling 10 million+ units but the Vision Pro somehow wasn&#x27;t a mistake by comparison.

Obvious counter argument is the Vision Pro

Buys a vanilla bean but get surprised when it&#x27;s plain and simple. Not sure what he expected. Apple is a cash cow harvesting brand loyalty. 2 years of r&amp;d and they got what? A usbc port and a button? Folks are joking if they think this is the peak of tech.

The elephant in the room of this article is the Apple Vision Pro.

&gt; My dissatisfaction flying home from last week’s event is, ultimately, selfish. I miss having my mind blown. I miss being utterly surprised.<p>Welcome to middle age, John. I&#x27;m here too, so I can&#x27;t tell you what comes next, but I hope it&#x27;s more fun.

&gt; I’ve been pondering this for the remainder of the week. One factor is that the iPhone defined the apex of personal computing. In the early years of PCs, everyone knew we wanted portability. Most of us — including me — thought we reached that with laptops. But laptops don’t go with us everywhere, and, it turns out, we want computers that go with us everywhere. That’s the iPhone, and the original iPhone in 2007 established the all-touch-screen form factor and general concept right out of the gate. That first iPhone blew our minds the moment Steve Jobs showed it to us.<p>Gruber seems to think of iPhones as portable, use-everywhere computers when such characterization puts Apple in good light. However, his opinion about what the iPhone is seems to change when dealing with sideloading and, in general, App Store shenanigans:<p>&gt; The iPhone and iPad are not PCs; they’re consoles for games and apps.<p>(From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;coming_to_grips_with_apples_seemingly_unshakable_sense_of_app_store_entitlement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;coming_to_grips_with_appl...</a>)

Things that haven&#x27;t changed: mafia-like 30% cut of app developers&#x27; income. No access to privileged APIs for NFC or JITs.

I have no idea why anyone gives credence to Gruber after his history of “incredible to the point of incredulity” pro-Apple bias over the years.

It&#x27;s not just that Tim Cook wants to help humanity, or more accurately avoids the false positive products.<p>Nor should Apple aim to deliver &quot;I&#x27;m so special!&quot; feeling of a new product category.<p>The key is: Tim Cook understands the criticality of goodwill in the context of pervasive computing.<p>If you used computers from the 1990&#x27;s-2010&#x27;s, you grew to hate - <i>hate</i> - the fact that you <i>had</i> to use Microsoft. Office was king, and blue screens and viruses only evolved into more subtle pain.<p>Now, we just settle into our lives, as enhanced by devices we carry. That scale happens when you hit not 99% but 99.999% quality. (Yes, Android+Samsung is a copycat, one that wouldn&#x27;t exist or have any direction without Apple.)<p>Gruber&#x27;s not sure what the next thing will be. I am. It will be the natural UI&#x27;s - voice and maybe vision - augmented with AI assistants. Voice computing, like speech recognition more generally, is jarring because 3-5% of the time you&#x27;re dropping back into correction mode. But on-device speech-interactive AI will learn and correct all that. It will be understood as such in 2025, voice-only apps will go big in 2026, and voice-only devices will be available in 2027, along with lightweight voice+vision.<p>Then we&#x27;ll only need to carry airpods, and we&#x27;ll be happy to pay $3k for that.

I get it, being mind blown in this industry is getting further apart with time. It is just that the industry is becoming mature, we have picked most of the low hanging fruit and now it is a case of refining the refinded. Triple distilled design in action. More broadly this is a middle aged industry and unfortunately it is leading to some mid life crisis moments like metaverse, crypto hype and AI everything but generally it is still in decent shape, at least when you ignore some details.<p>The last time I was blown away by any tech would have been the first time using generative AI stuff, yes we figured out its limits, but just that feeling of being able to just type something and just have these thing created on demand was wild. The time before that, I couldnt really say, it has been that long. Maybe seeing realtime raytracing on commodity hardware and even that wasnt ground breaking.<p>In a way it us like the 10th season of a sitcom, we know all the characters and it is familiar but nothing much is new or fresh any more. The jokes are still fine and the catch phrases are there but it all just feels same-ish. That is ok so long as that is your expectation.