I often hear rants in Apple communities that each year Apple is failing to ‘innovate’ in the software space with their annual MacOS / IOS / everything elseOS updates, and that phrases such as ‘Peak Smartphone’ are consistently thrown around online.
My question is this - what change or development are people really expecting with each subsequent software cycle? For all the posts about how Apple “isn’t doing enough” each year, there’s 2-3x that amount complaining that updates are causing too many bugs and lamenting the “lack of polish”.
Generative AI is being thrown around as the next big leap in consumer electronics, but outside of a vastly-improved Siri I’m at a loss as to what it is exactly consumers are wanting in this space.
I don’t think many people are seeing the big picture here, and that’s Apple design direction is moving in a very coherent direction.
Take for example the Vision Pro. This is going to be a small corollary, but hard to miss if you’ve used the feature: Presenter View. They’re trying to get you used to the notion that you can share a screen at the same time someone is looking at your entire camera feed. Now add Continuity Camera, and you’ve got LIDAR that allows you to make sharp defined border cuts between you and the floating screen behind you. This is a very small example.
But it’s obvious the direction they’re going. They’re aiming to mesh ordinary waking reality with a computerized one, aka augmented reality.
People put a lot of stops on this idea, but it is peak smartphone times, and the obvious next step is a movement from the phone to making their forms of AR more usable and commonplace. If Jobs were still here, they’d probably have done privacy-respecting lightweight AR glasses with full day batteries already.