Whoops!
Oh-oh!
Apple suppliers just announced today that they are “pausing” the development of Apple Vision 2. I haven't read the full news announcements, but they mentioned something about coming out with a cheaper version in late 2025.
All of this was predictable.
Last week, when I was at the Apple Store in Leawood, Kansas, a suburb south of Kansas City in an upscale neighborhood, I was in that store for about an hour. In that entire time, I never saw even one person go over to the single Apple Vision table and have a look. The store was packed as usual, but that table sat there like an empty island in the middle of the Pacific. I left the store and texted friends that I was seeing the end.
When we worked on the iPhone and were the Bluetooth supplier back between 2005 and the phone’s release in 2007, Apple was a very different company. It was almost frantic. The people involved were not particularly pleasant, and everyone was working long hours to get the thing into the hands of consumers. I remember the pace because Apple was driving very hard while other handset makers were relatively comfortable with their market share and were not at all worried…until the phone was announced in early January 2007. It was like someone kicked a bees' nest!
You can tell when something is a giant hit by how the public reacts, both positively and negatively, and the buzz around the iPhone was everywhere. Not so with Apple Vision. After its announcement, the chatter died like it was yesterday’s news. Nobody I know has one, and certainly nobody is thinking about getting one, at least that I know. We were all burned with Google Glass.
I can’t imagine what meetings are like at Apple right now. On one hand, you have this feckless committee development of the world’s most useless device, while in parallel, you have LLMs chasing AGI and moving at the speed Apple once ran at under Steve Jobs and his team. Apple was forced to use ChatGPT in its next OS, in spite of the yelling from those concerned about privacy. I can’t recall a time when Apple has ever had to rely on that much of an outsider to have a viable product. This screams to me that Apple is in some internal turmoil. This is the direct result of over a decade of a CEO who was never a visionary, but a fairly decent tactician.
It could be that I have it all wrong and Apple is on track for something great, but when I see a product come out like Apple Vision, I can’t help but think about the operational disasters within Apple, and I suspect the roots are in DEI and not merit-based internal structures. The best can’t rise to lead. Only the most political get ahead.
Watch this!
As a little test, line up these six companies: Apple, Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, Tesla, and OpenAI. Of the six, rank them in the order of the most exciting places to work. If you’re like me, the three at the bottom would be Apple, Microsoft, and Google, who have all made major missteps because of politics, with a disastrous release of Google’s Gemini. Then we have Apple’s disaster with Vision and Microsoft’s stodgy management. Who's everyone chasing?
I asked GPT-4 to rank the companies. Here is how it ranked all six. I didn’t include Meta or any social media on purpose.
“Of course! Here is the revised ranking including OpenAI:
SpaceX
OpenAI
Tesla
Google
Apple
Microsoft”
I think they got it right. Stay tuned!