VR/AR has a lot of room to grow, as does autonomous cars. These things take time. I feel like the Steve Jobs mourners need to take a step back, and look at the industry as a whole.
Many of us look at those two as possible areas where Apple will insert itself and emerge as an innovator again. My doubting Thomas viewpoint, however, looks at how “limiting” those two technologies are vs. prior homeruns like Apple computer UI, iPod, iPhone, iPad, ultra-portable powerful MBA, which let the customer not only
engage fully in the
doing of things important to the user, but also to use them
quickly and easily (and FUN) anytime while in the real world, since the “real world” is the ultimate destination and/or thing none of us could ever do without. Real music, real musicians, real doctors, real trees and grass, real ice cream, real coffee and basketballs. Ahead of any application innovation way out of today’s understanding of VR/AR, using VR/AR is so tied to needing “prep work” to engage with it (hardware, headsets, a safe area to use it) while also potentially taking one further away from the real world, where, again, the real world is to me the must-have thing that no technology should ever take you fully out of other than maybe temporarily for recreation, or for bettering the world (medicine, exploration, etc), or for someone, say, with no eyesight, that there feels to be such a high barrier towards VR/AR ever having the same universally useful impact as the other consumer devices Apple has dreamed up. In other words, going more towards very specific applications vs. flexible. We could use our iPod, iPhone, MacBook, iPad, etc., virtually in part of every hour of the day as tools to better engage in the real world, while living in a VR situation nearly 24/7 for the average person would seem like a jail sentence eventually. As for autonomous cars, Once again, and conveniences aside, autonomous cars are destined to take the user further away from
engaging in that very thing....further away from the driving in the real world. Sure, maybe it lets you use your iPad or iPhone while being commuted around, but at the heart of it, autonomous vehicles remove the user, essentially, from control of the thing they are using. In fact, we basically have autonomous vehicles now-they’re called buses and taxis and Uber/Lyft. They basically already exist. Very unlike the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBookAir at the time of their intro, etc. Pretend for a moment that for $40,000, you can have a taxi or bus at your disposal for the next four years; how does that change your world?
I’m realizing as I write this how a divorcing away from the real world plays a large part in my critiques of iOS 7-11 UI and its flattened, over-simplified, minimalized and less contrasty representation. None of us, I think, would ever give up a lush, green grassy backyard where you can see blades of grass waving in the wind… richly honey/colored hardwood floors… a shiny, attractive and fun to press start button in our cars. I often critique iOS7-11 and OSX starting with Yosemite for their bland, artificially oversimplified UI's on devices intended for use in a rich, engaging world. So good luck to Apple if they next focus on trying to make VR/AR and autonomous cars have the wide-reaching, everyday-life-improving impact that their prior innovations did...They have a large task ahead of them in my opinion! Me, I’m afraid we’ll get too much focus in Apple stores on forced innovation (Apple Watch...) further separating ourselves from the real world, like Facebook has unfortunately done over the past 10 years -- I volunteer for a social club that brings in musicians from out of town and attendance has drastically decreased since around 2009: the only way to hear those musicians now is on Facebook or Youtube.... Not to sound too much like a science fiction book... Not in favor of more and more products that don't us enjoy the real world more directly and engagingly.
