Apple Rumor Hallucinations. Human Ones.
by Jean-Louis Gassée
Of late, Apple has been remarkably calm, even-keeled, no big layoffs. The upcoming June 5th Worldwide Developer Conference is likely to quell some rumors — and perhaps kindle new ones.
Back in Palo Alto after weeks in the Country Of Good Sins, I’m confronted with a sea of topics for this week’s essay, from the truly Never Seen Before Generative AI explosion, to France’s troubles with its maternalistic social safety net and democracy derangement, to say nothing of our own repertoire of insanities…
Recoiling from the frenzy, I find refuge in the familiar realm of Apple rumors. The fervor with which we (some of us, many of us) chase Apple gossip is a sign of the company’s unique place in the tech world and in the wider culture.
We can start with the perennial Apple Car fantasy. The never-acknowledged but repeatedly-corroborated project was first mentioned in these pages eight years ago(!), in a 2015 Monday Note titled The Fantastic Apple Car. Recent speculation tells us we’ll see an introduction in 2025 or 2026. No need for us to wring this one’s neck, the accelerating EV industry might do the job for us, leaving little or no room for Apple to innovate in hardware or software.
We can also quickly dispose of iPhone 15 scuttlebutt: It’s what psychoanalysts call “regressive fixation on partial objects”. Everything will be better, although perhaps not at the same price. If rumormongers had a better sense of humor — or access to GenAI video software — they’d put together a fake iPhone 15 intro featuring a Tim Cook oration followed by a jovial Greg Joswiak feature wrap-up.
The same can be said of more distant prospects such as a touch-screen MacBook. As quotes from insiders reverberate from one site to another, with promises of a dream that will materialize “in a couple of years”, I’d much prefer a replacement for my aging, seven-year-old 27” iMac, maxed out at the time, a decision that still pays off.
There is much material to go on… Closer to us and most interesting, we have insistent rumors of an Augmented Reality (AR) device that will be introduced at Apple’s annual and sacramental June 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference — in person this year, at the Cupertino Apple Park.
My first thought is Why? Certainly, Apple AR devices were once thought of as capable of inaugurating a huge iPhone 2.0 wave, but the AR lustre has paled recently as psychic (and financial) energy has suddenly shifted to a new fixation: Generative AI (GenAI). It’s becoming clear that the Fifth Revolution — after semiconductors, PCs, the Web, and smartphones — won’t be AR, but “AI For The Rest of Us”. So why worry about the unnecessary, self-applied pressure to meet a June delivery date?
Perhaps Apple will surprise us (again). Maybe the company has taken the opportunity to fine-tune the positioning and introduction of its putative AR product.
Not long ago, at a September 2022 visit to an Italian university, Tim Cook expressed great hope [as always edits and emphasis mine]:
“I’m super excited about augmented reality. Because I think that we’ve had a great conversation here today, but if we could augment that with something from the virtual world, it would have arguably been even better. So I think that if you, and this will happen not too long from now, if you look back at a point in time, you know, zoom out to the future and look back, you’ll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality. Just like today, we wonder, how did people like me grow up without the internet. And so I think it could be that profound, and it’s not going to be profound overnight…”
To be successful, Apple’s rumored AR project needs to perform a near miracle of engineering: multiple processors, batteries, sensors, cameras, sitting on your head without being too heavy or becoming too hot to wear. Then there’s the new operating system software that makes everything work smoothly.
Then we have developer relations: What are the compelling use cases that will compel third party developers to spend time and money building new AR-ready apps?
From the marketing point of view, the challenges are just as great. How do you convince users to wear their magic goggles as persistently as they glance at their phones? And how do you get them to open their wallets? The engineering complexity outlined above won’t come cheap. We’ve heard rumors of an initial $3K price tag.
If there is a June 2023 AR introduction, I hope we’ll see a slow roll-out of a broad, ambitious concept. Start with a moderately expensive (see the $3K just mentioned) reference platform device that’s reserved for a hand-selected cadre of developers who will provide app muscle for the consumer product. Follow that with a conservative calendar for the slimmed-down and more affordable end-user device. All presented with the usual cortège of demo videos and industry visionaries’ testimonials, of course.
In my fantasy, this would just be warmup for the main act: “The years of Apple’s historic investment in AI technologies are now paying off. Started long ago in conjunction with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) technology — the organization that gave birth and its name to Siri — Apple’s AI development got a new boost when, in 2018, former Google AI leader John Giannandrea came to Cupertino to take our work to world-leading heights. Starting right now, Apple gives its developers and above all its customers access to a higher level of machine intelligence, for today we are unveiling…”
Back in reality, Apple has wisely avoided the kind of grand AI statements we’ve heard from other industry grandees from Redmond, Mountain View, and Menlo Park. Wise because the truth is that the company’s position in the Fifth Revolution isn’t flattering, it has little to show for the ambition displayed five years ago when the high-visibility Google alumnus moved to Cupertino. To be sure, there has been modest progress in Siri’s broadened reach, but nothing put Apple at the forefront of AI developments, nothing that users could enthuse about.
On a humbler but related level, many users have continued to experience less than stellar performance from iCloud offerings. The latter might help explain a bit of house-cleaning at the VP level. One wonders if more is needed…
This leaves us with six weeks until the big event in Cupertino and the answers to some questions — and probably a few new ones.
— jlg@gassee.com
