I haven’t posted much about much lately (at least not in the form of blog entries), but given my interest in all things new technology and also, Apple, it feels like a good time to break that pattern.
I’m continuing to podcast…
My experience of the WWDC keynote
I should get to writing my own full post on this, but some thoughts I’m borrowing back from my past self yesterday when I was live commenting on the event on Mastodon… (we also did a deep dive on the last minute rumours on our podcast which dropped right before the presentation, and will revisit the actual outcome this week)
First of all, my view is that this is Tim Cook’s Legacy product as CEO. He’s been bigging up XR/AR for a long time, and this is really the product he has seemingly pushed towards throughout his tenure at the top. The WWDC presentation needed to be slick, polished, and have wow factor. It did. In spite of myself, I’m curious to try this thing out.
There’s a lot of folks reacting against the headset – price, aesthetics, experience, use cases, social awkwardness etc – which is not surprising. I’ll be watching to see how quickly or virally the presentation affects the rest of the industry / how far other companies instantly pivot to this same sort of direction. That was the impact of the iPhone, remember – suddenly every phone had to have a touch screen, camera, a similar-to-iOS experience. Let’s see what comes from this: that’s the real test for Tim Cook’s Legacy
I think that the WWDC preview “did what it needed to do” in terms of sprinkling the Apple magic, but I want to see and hear how well this actually works, and it is nowhere near a widespread adoption price point (though, nor was the first iPhone, or Watch, etc). This could be the start of a technology wave, but I think the current form factor will be off-putting for many many people for a long time, in ways that other personal devices like tablets and phones have succeeded in avoiding. I maintain some skepticism. Tellingly, I noted that no Apple presenter wore one…
The number of features and technologies that have shown up in the phone, watch and elsewhere over the past number of years, that flow together into the capabiities of the new device – think room-scale LiDAR, hand tracking, Siri (ok eh maybe Siri is a stretch…), handoff, etc etc – they have been building this in the open for some time.
