At the risk of getting flamed here, I have to ask... With so much available research $ and a huge R&D/development staff, what is Apple doing with all of that? Innovation seems to be at a trickle, updates have been incremental for hardware and software, and Apple is always playing catch up. Where is all the money and brain power going?
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What is Apple up to anyway??
- Thread starter New Mexico Bob
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I think they are really just buying as many carbon credits as they can so they can be the saviour of the world with zero emissions. Apple is so green!
What do you want them to do? What do you think is 'innovation'? Is it gimmicks like smart rings? Should MacBooks fold into a pocket square?
All that virtue won't signal itself!
You need to remember that one person’s idea of “innovation” may be another person’s idea of “wasted time”. For example, some folks may see the Dynamic Island as innovation whereas I see the Dynamic Island as a waste of resources. Many people who complain about “lack of innovation” are simply bored with what they have or are unhappy with the path a particular device is taking.
To be honest, if you buy a device for what you think it might become or what it might do in the future then you’re likely going to end up bored or disappointed. However, if you buy a device for what it can do now then you’re likely to be happy for a long while. Our expectations have everything to do with our happiness.. the trick is to go into a purchase decision without any preconceived expectations.
Apple Silicon
Apple Vision Pro
Tandem OLED
Apple Intelligence
There are many more. You might not find these things particularly interesting but they cost a fortune in R&D to develop.
Apple Vision Pro
Tandem OLED
Apple Intelligence
There are many more. You might not find these things particularly interesting but they cost a fortune in R&D to develop.
I recently watched a video about how a CPU is made and it began to dawn on me how much money Apple has dumped into their custom chips (A series and M series). Research, design, equipment, tooling, materials, manpower, required skills.. this stuff isn’t exactly cheap. And that is just for the SoC’s!
The technology (not Apple's but TSMC at Apple's request) for just a single generation of Apple silicon (A17 pro, m3, M3 Pro, M3 Max) that Apple alone is responsible for is on the order of ~2.0^18 transistors. That is just one major player in the whole semi industry for one year. When you think that the number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy is likely on the order of 1^11-4^11 it puts what humans can do with technology into perspective. Basically 10 million times more transistors ordered by Apple from TSMC than stars in the galaxy. Insane.
As several others have said - the development of Apple Silicon in collaboration with TSMC was a pretty massive undertaking, being more-or-less first with 3nm (-ish) technology in a consumer product doesn't suck, either. The "incremental" improvements since the M1 launch have been no worse than we were seeing beforehand from Intel.
If you look at what Apple is actually doing themselves (or in close partnership):
- Designing the chips (they're not even using ARM inc. core designs, just the instruction set)
- Writing and maintaining the operating systems
- Writing and maintaining an application suite, including two major "pro" Apps (Logic & Final Cut)
- Running media and file sharing services
- Designing and building phones, computers, watches, peripherals...
- Distributing the products
- Selling the products to consumers
- Desperately trying to invent the next iPod (Watch, Vision Pro, the Car [deceased]...)
So they're doing quite a lot. They're still leading the pack with laptop design (note all the new Copilot+ laptops being measured against the MacBook) as they have done since the PowerBook 100.
I think what people are waiting for is that "next iPod/iPhone" moment - which may never come. Steve Jobs had an unmatched batting average when it came to spotting a new technology "bubbling under" (Apple ][, Lisa/Mac, iPod, iPhone... any one of those would have made him famous) - probably "genius" but also being in the right place at the right time when those technologies were emerging (it's not like he really invented anything - just picked the right horses more often than not). You can't just throw a lot of money and technical experts together and expect the magic to just happen.
Vision pro and failed car and failed mobile modem (using someone elses patents)
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I find that people wanting Apple to 'innovate' often wrap up their own ego into Apple. If Apple 'innovates' then 'they' look good because they are carrying the 'innovative' device that has set them apart from the masses toting inferior devices.
Most of them don't care about Apple innovating for the sake of advancing technology and improving people's lives - it's all about them.
No one, not even Apple can consistently keep pulling technological revolutions out of their hat every few years. It just doesn't work that way, especially when current technology is at the edge of what it can do. It is us that need to adjust our expectations.
I don't need Apple to innovate (although that's nice). I'm already not using a large part of what people would have considered innovative features in the past. I just want my device to function as I need it in the here and now. It does that.
Well, like...now?
I'd make a fair guess that they're working on iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and WatchOS 11 and all that stuff, yada yada.
Being like more general I'd guess they're working on reducing the size / cost of the Apple Vision, I heard and read they might be working on doing foldable devices, they are also probably working on hardware and software years ahead of their release / announcement, and so on.
Don't get me wrong, I also wonder what a trillion-dollar company does with square miles of space and thousands of employees. It's like those Tycoon sim games where I wish I could just see what everyone is doing.
But who knows, maybe only the board of directors / higher employees only know.
But if we learn anything from other giants like Kodak who are barely what they used to be, I can for sure say they're trying hard to bring interesting stuff to our plates.
TLDR; Idk, only they know.
I'd make a fair guess that they're working on iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and WatchOS 11 and all that stuff, yada yada.
Being like more general I'd guess they're working on reducing the size / cost of the Apple Vision, I heard and read they might be working on doing foldable devices, they are also probably working on hardware and software years ahead of their release / announcement, and so on.
Don't get me wrong, I also wonder what a trillion-dollar company does with square miles of space and thousands of employees. It's like those Tycoon sim games where I wish I could just see what everyone is doing.
But who knows, maybe only the board of directors / higher employees only know.
But if we learn anything from other giants like Kodak who are barely what they used to be, I can for sure say they're trying hard to bring interesting stuff to our plates.
TLDR; Idk, only they know.
Apple threw away over 10 billion dollars on Apple Car. A total, abject failure by Tim Cook.
Stock buybacks.
2024 = $110 billion
2023 = $90 billion
2022 = $90 billion
2021 = $90 billion
2020 = $50 billion
2019 = $75 billion
2018 = $100 billion
If you try 1000 times and fail, don’t look at it as having failed 1000 times, rather look at it as finding out what doesn’t work. That is indeed a benefit.
Well -- they are working on "AI generated playlist art" apparently
Among other complete wastes of time
oh .. and lots of stock buybacks of course
Among other complete wastes of time
oh .. and lots of stock buybacks of course
Don't forget all the new emojis! And memojis were an amazing breakthrough.
They could spend some time on making Numbers and Pages as functional as Excel and Word.
Well they sure are breaking their legacy with this push to services that has gotten everything messed up. How about some common sense; if I'm logging into my icloud over the web, there is a very good chance it is because i don't have access to one of my apple devices. Yet I need around to 1st even log in, and then again to look at my files! And something else is wrong when the homepod Siri can't even pause a song because she is always having trouble connecting to the internet right now. Or contacts just disappear at random. Maybe since I have it in my wife's contact card that she is my wife, Siri could see that instead of making me set it up with her every other month, imessages not syncing, duplicating calendars, or the best is switching my wife's and I's avatar. Apple can't be relied on anymore to do simple tasks that they imply " just works". Get back to that Apple!
I’m sure Apple is heavily invested in many innovative projects.
The challenge is choosing which ones to move forward with and which ones to axe.
You could spend a decade and billions of dollars and resources only to realize, your vision was wrong.
I’m certainly not bullish on Cook’s leadership. Predicting the next big thing is not easy. But beating a dead horse for ego/legacy, can come back to tarnish his reputation.
I wish Tim stuck to his strengths and passed the creative stuff to someone else. Because I’m guessing Jobs didn’t pick Tim for his visionary acuity.
The challenge is choosing which ones to move forward with and which ones to axe.
You could spend a decade and billions of dollars and resources only to realize, your vision was wrong.
I’m certainly not bullish on Cook’s leadership. Predicting the next big thing is not easy. But beating a dead horse for ego/legacy, can come back to tarnish his reputation.
I wish Tim stuck to his strengths and passed the creative stuff to someone else. Because I’m guessing Jobs didn’t pick Tim for his visionary acuity.
Well, that would be a spectacular waste of money!
Pages and Numbers look great to me - they're pretty capable, do a pretty good job of importing/exporting .docx/.xlsx and it's good that Macs and iPads come with half-decent wordprocessing and spreadsheet tools. If you want something for purely personal use, or live in a little Apple-only bubble, that's fine.
However, I never use them for work because that requires continually bouncing files back and forth with people who use MS Word & Excel on PC and Mac - and however good Pages & Numbers are at importing/exporting .docx/.xlsx files it's never perfect and I just don't need one more thing that can go wrong.
Apple could make Pages the most brilliant and powerful word-processor ever and nobody would look twice at it before reaching for MS Office or Google Docs because - like it or not - MS and Google own the office app market, work on PC, Mac and more and having everybody on the project using substantially the same software just makes sense.
If I want an online/collaborative document I'll use Google Docs because that's what everybody else is most likely to be familiar with and it's "free". If I really want to poke MS/Google in the eye I'll use Libreoffice because anybody can download it and it runs on anything. What I'm not going to choose is something that only Apple users can access and which exported files that I'd still need to check in MS Office before distributing to less tech-savvy people.
Like it or not, MS and Google have the office software market sewn up.
As someone else notes, there's a tremendous amount of R&D that goes into developing all their processors in house. So think of them as having their own AMD inside Apple.
This is the only way they keep up with exponential growth in expectations. At this point, seemingly small advancements on the front end require massive advancements in processing... and a good example of this is the integration of on-device AI. If they've done their job right, most of it will go unnoticed and we'll just become accustomed to its capabilities.
We are a long, long, long, long way off from the days when one innovation wowed the hell out of everyone. Everyone's gaze is transfixed on the black mirror now, every second of every day. It's like the news cycle: Nothing surprises, any more, because we are constantly bombarded with incremental updates.
There is also the problem of making giant leaps too fast, so fast that nobody really understands what to do with them. In 1987 I got a copy of Apple's Annual Report on a hypercard stack. Let me rephrase that: Apple had, in 1985, developed the means to display graphics and text in a browser that could be navigated via hyperlinks. They had the beginnings of the World Wide Web (what kids today interchangeably refer to as the internet), in their hands...
And they used it for a slide presentation of corporate financials.
BRAVO! what a great synapse of past and present, thanks for sharing this specially the the black mirror aspect of how we are. Seems to me we expect too much and contently get half in return.
i came here to say that does sabotage or under develop software as now my iPad wont air drop to my MacBook Pro 2012 as that did 2 years ago.... i guess i'm supps'd to buy a new this and new that every year.