Listen, there currently is no “next big thing.”
- Internet of shit.
- The “cloud” of no server admin.
- Ai. Yes, no capital “i” there.
- Voice Assistants.
- Text Assistants.
Seriously?
Everybody is busy crunching numbers, to analyse the present and predict the future, in an industry made by geeks to pleasure simpletons. The iPhone, with all its qualities, was a social statement. So was the iPod and so was the MacBook. Any tech which is not a social statement is not going to be the next big thing.
Apple has a great company culture for taking what’s currently out there, but broken, and making it the right way.
Yet what’s currently out there?
Companies that copy iPhones.
Companies that copy MacBooks.
Companies that fail to build a market.
Companies that fail to build a product.
What is Apple competing against? I mean maybe the iPhone camera has a bulge but the Galaxy explodes in your face …
Everybody is so disappointed with Apple TV, yet we miss that the TV is done, there is nothing left to do here. 3D tv with “3D” glasses was the last gasp of this tech.
Ohh, the home pod is so not cool, yet we glance over the fact that the best selling virtual assistant (Alexa) is basically a cart and the other, the far second place, is a poor excuse for even more advertising through surveillance.
Yikes the MacBook is so not innovative. But guys, we’ve reached maximum laptop a long time ago. There is nothing left to do there but to “educate the market”, which means sell gimmicks as if they’re useful.
People don’t love spending money or seeing ads. People love their loved ones and themselves.
You know what’s big and done poorly? VR and AR. That’s it. That’s the best bet on consumer mass market exponential growth. It’s helpful and immediate. It facilitates.
It currently doesn’t work.
AR and VR are today what the bulky smartphones by Nokia and Blackberry were back in the day. People wanted them but they sucked, so Apple stepped in and they did it right.
I am no Apple guru making predictions. Maybe I am clueless, but really … “pods”? Pods are the unimaginative artifacts of B rated 70’s SciFi movies.
Curved edge phones? A giant car touchscreen? Integrated batteries in peripherals? …
Everyone, please, stop trying to make switching things on and off easier.
People do just fine with knobs. We have opposable thumbs. We can flip switches.
Also, context awareness is a nice gimmick for voice commands, but really, for now at least, voice activated Ai is not prime time ready. Why? Because it won’t get most humans anywhere socially, emotionally, hell, not even professionally.
But AR and VR do. They help, they connect, they empower, they are in a natural synergy with humans.
Even Microsoft knows this.
I mean even the future of tech indicator we all know, porn, is all over AR and VR. I see no xxx rated interest in voice commanded sexy time, and, if it is any sign, porn tried the internet of things but people apparently still chose the same old plain things.
Hey Apple, thanks for the AR Kit, now give us the VR Kit and make that Apple TV a VR docking station. You’ll win. Let hordes of devs fill your shelves again with meaningful AR and VR apps and sell the only hardware those hot, helpful and fun things will run on, and bam! you’ll hit that trillion.
Done.