Would Steve have kept sinking money into the Apple car? Would he have worked with Rivian?
I think the Vision Pro was a statement product, not a disappointment. It's not ready for prime time, but it will likely get there, along with the rest of the market. They've made a claim for the high end, and a statement about their capacity for innovative UI. Meta's headsets are a promising gimmick or toy.
Apple Intelligence will likely close a good portion of the distance with OpenAI, Google and Claude. They have too many resources not to. If not.. they've never had a search engine and that worked out fine. The major players will want to be on their devices.
We all have 'wish lists' for what Apple would change, but "bean counting" does matter because it gives you flexibility for major R&D.
I think he would have considered an acquisition or investment of Tesla when there was a chance, as well as working with or acquiring either Lucid or Rivian later.
He probably would have hated LLMs at first, since they encroached on human art and things, then been all in on them when he saw how they enhance technical creativity like coding, buying or building GPUs like Elon does. He would recognize this opportunity is bigger than search. He would be investing in robotics like crazy.
Maybe apple intelligence will catch up, I hope it does to be honest, I love the idea of it, but so far it's embarrassingly awful, MS Vista, Apple Maps bad. So, if we go by apple maps, it will take a decade to be good.
The vision pro is not ready. period. Its one thing to have a v1 product, like OG iPad, its another to have this heavy monstrosity, the ergonomics are awful. I wanted one, I would have bought one, but I tried it for a whole day at a dev event and was the most disappointed I've ever been. Weight alone is a non-starter.
Meta's headsets are actually more practical, they just don't have a software ecosystem to leverage and the baggage of **** privacy choices of Facebook. To be fair, there's no headset I like, they all fall short.
When you make just 1 phone, 2 ipads, and 4 macbooks, 2 desktops, you have the flexibility to pursue new innovations as they come your way.
When your engineering teams are burdened with all the variations and QA and support for 5 phones, 5 ipads, 6 macbooks, 3 desktops, surprise surprise, you have less room to try something totally new, R&D budgets don't make a difference. It's about having the talent that can push things forward in totally new industries instead of talent that is only focused on endless iteration.
BMW had a bigger R&D budget than Tesla, didn't work too well for them. BMW has amazing talent, but having a leadership culture of innovation rather than iteration matters.
The software stack alone at Apple has gotten so complicated and the quality has worsened. This is not by chance. This is a leadership problem. Its leadership that says we need 5 iPads at 5 different price points across 3 sizes and 2 apple pencils at 2 price points instead of just one. Its so unnecessary and severely limits innovation. This is the effect of the bean counters.
Of course you need good supply chains, or course you need to count things, you need to scale. Tim Cook and leadership are very good at these things. They are very good at a lot of things. This is why Apple is still "OK," but, I believe from my points above, they have lost something special and thats why they're no longer great.
Apple is peak innovator's dilemma right now, same as Blackberry was, same as BMW was. Both those companies made the wrong decisions and I'm sad to say Apple is making the same mistakes, thought not as badly as those companies. They will probably shake out ok just because they are so big, but growth will slow, brand loyalty will wane, and they leave themselves open to disruption.
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