Since Apple’s visionary founder/CEO Steve Jobs died 5 years ago, you’ve heard the phrase “Apple is doomed” uttered with increasing frequency each year. Forbes compiled a list of the popular critiques of the company, of which I’ve listed a few:
- Tim Cook is not a visionary; he’s just an operator.
- Apple is producing incremental updates to its products, nothing truly innovative.
- Apple doesn’t get services, and it’s future is services.
- Apple’s stuff is overpriced, and the world has changed.
- Apple should buy Netflix, Tesla, etc.
The haters would have you think that Apple is gearing up for its next product to be a big flop:
But, this weekend, Daniel Eckler presented a refreshingly contrarian vision of Apple’s future, and it inspired me to write this post. Go read it here.
His basic point is this: what if, in the face of all this criticism, Apple has been quietly laying out the future of its next big innovation in plain sight?
The evidence is straightforward. Tim Cook has literally said that Augmented Reality (AR) “is a big idea, like the smartphone.” Apple has filed or acquired a number of patents around AR. It has hired a badass team of AR engineers and product leaders, as Bloomberg recently reported. Apple has released devices like the Apple Watch and AirPods, which cram a significant amount of computing into a wearable form factor. These devices conveniently provide both a visual and audio interface for a wearable camera, and Apple now has years of data on how users interact with these interfaces. Dating back to the iPod and its symbiotic relationship with the Mac, Apple has always relied on an ecosystem of hardware centered around its proprietary operating system and services. If Apple launches an AR device sometime in the next few years, it will have at least 3 other devices to connect to (iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods) and an established voice interface (Siri) with which it can integrate.
Apple has more experience than any other company in studying its competition, arriving late to market, and launching the most beautiful consumer electronics products:
- A number of vendors launched portable digital audio devices in 1997. Apple launched the iPod in 2001.
- RIM released the first Blackberry with both voice and data services (the 6800 series) in 2002. Apple launched the iPhone in 2007.
- Pebble launched a Kickstarter for a smartwatch with an electronic paper display in 2012. The same year Fitbit released the “One.” Apple launched its Watch in 2015.
I could add one more to this list. Google released Glass in 2013. The same year, Oculus shipped the development kit of the Rift. Judging from the above 3–5 year lag, we are in for an AR surprise from Apple sometime this year or next.
The reports of Apple’s death may be greatly exaggerated.
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