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.
That’s the point of innovation isn’t it? To invent something we don’t currently have. If we can make a list of things, that isn’t innovative, it’s just features we’d like to see.
Apple doesn’t push the boundaries anymore. They don’t even try really. Their game now is to put time and effort into the silicon. In that department they are making really good progress, and deserve a ton of credit for pushing the industry forward. Otherwise, they are just collecting money every year with minimal itiritave updates.
We need breakthroughs in battery technology. Imagine an iPhone battery that lasts a full week. An Apple watch that you don’t have to charge for 2 weeks…
Maybe the Vision pro will deliver some of that innovation. Spatial video has real potential to be a bonkers feature. Reliving a memory through a video as if you were there is mind blowing type of stuff.
Watching an NFL game as if you were on the field, or basketball, etc is the kind of “pushing” the limits thing that I could see apple being able to do.
If you’re looking for innovation out of the current products, you’ll be severely disappointed. That’s the cash cow, they aren’t messing with that.
When I first started messing around with VR devices, I thought these types of experiences would be game changing. But honestly after the initial “wow” wears off, a lot of these types of things just aren’t that pleasant in VR. Maybe Apple can find a way to make them so much better than the devices I’ve got now, I don’t know.
IMHO smartphones already reached where they needed to be 5 years ago. Everything now is entirely iterative, and you’re probably not going to see a paradigm shift in smartphones. The real paradigm shift will come from wearables, which is where we see Apple focusing its efforts on now (wearables including smartwatches and AR/VR).
Why is it on Apple to revolutionize battery technology? They are not a battery company. If someone can actually come up with a battery that lasts 5 times longer than what’s currently possible, we’re looking at EV with 1500 mile range. We’re looking at real chances of reversing climate change.
It would have global implications across all industries, political lines, and change human trajectories. I don’t think it is fair to put such a responsibility on Apple, when the brightest minds all across the world are not able to figure out (yet).