Also, even putting aside the fact that first-party apps necessarily have certain advantages third-party apps do not (otherwise, there’d be no distinction), apps from the same developer have broad permission to share data and resources via app groups. Gmail can talk to Google Calendar, and Google Calendar has full access to Gmail’s address book. It’s no more “fundamentally anticompetitive” for Messages and Apple Mail to have full access to your Contacts address book than it was for Meta to launch Threads by piggybacking on the existing accounts and social graph of Instagram. If it’s unfair, it’s only unfair in the way that life in general is unfair.

the most advanced generalist AI models often outperform specialized models, even in the specific domains those specialized models were designed for. That means that if you want a model that can do a lot - reason over massive amounts of text, help you generate ideas, write in a non-robotic way — you want to use one of the three frontier models: GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, or Claude 3 Opus.

Working with advanced models is more like working with a human being, a smart one that makes mistakes and has weird moods sometimes. Frontier models are more likely to do extraordinary things but are also more frustrating and often unnerving to use. Contrast this with Apple’s narrow focus on making AI get stuff done for you.

Every major AI company argues the technology will evolve further and has teased mysterious future additions to their systems. In contrast, what we are seeing from Apple is a clear and practical vision of how AI can help most users, without a lot of effort, today. In doing so, they are hiding much of the power, and quirks, of LLMs from their users. Having companies take many approaches to AI is likely to lead to faster adoption in the long term. And, as companies experiment, we will learn more about which sets of models are correct.

As for a Hall of Shame thing? That would be the slow but steady encroachment of single-window applications in MacOS, especially via Catalyst and Electron. The reason I gravitated toward MacOS in the first place is the same reason I continue to use it: it fits my mental model of how an operating system ought to work.

In recent years Sketch’s Mac-ness has become a liability. Requiring every person in a large design organization to use a Mac is not an easy sell. Plus, a new generation of “internet native” users expect different things from their software than old-school Mac connoisseurs: Multiplayer editing, inline commenting, and cloud sync are now table-stakes for any successful creative app.

At the time of Sketch’s launch most UX designers were using Photoshop or Illustrator. Both were expensive and overwrought, and neither were actually created for UX design. Sketch’s innovation wasn’t any particular feature — if anything it was the lack of features. It did a few things really well, and those were exactly the things UX designers wanted. In that way it really embodied the Mac ethos: simple, single-purpose, and fun to use.

Apple pushed hard to attract artists, filmmakers, musicians, and other creative professionals. It started a virtuous cycle. More creatives using Macs meant more potential customers for creative Mac software, which meant more developers started building that software, which in turn attracted even more customers to the platform.And so the Mac ended up with an abundance of improbably-good creative tools. Usually these apps weren’t as feature-rich or powerful as their PC counterparts, but were faster and easier and cheaper and just overall more conducive to the creative process.

Apple is still very interested in selling Macs — precision-milled aluminum computers with custom-designed chips and “XDR” screens. But they no longer care much about The Mac: The operating system, the software platform, its design sensibilities, its unique features, its vibes.

The term-of-art for this style is “skeuomorphism”: modern designs inspired by their antecedents — calculator apps that look like calculators, password-entry fields that look like bank vaults, reminders that look like sticky notes, etc.This skeuomorphic playfulness made downloading a new Mac app delightful. The discomfort of opening a new unfamiliar piece of software was totally offset by the joy of seeing a glossy pixel-perfect rendition of a bookshelf or a bodega or a poker table, complete with surprising little animations.

There are literally dozens of ways to develop cross-platform apps, including Apple’s own Catalyst — but so far, none of these tools can create anything quite as polished as native implementations.So it comes down to user preference: Would you rather have the absolute best app experience, or do you want the ability to use an acceptably-functional app from any of your devices? It seems that users have shifted to prefer the latter.

Unfortunately the appeal of native Mac software was, at its core, driven by brand strategy. Mac users were sold on the idea that they were buying not just a device but an ecosystem, an experience. Apple extended this branding for third-party developers with its yearly Apple Design Awards.

for the first time since the introduction of the original Mac, they’re just computers. Yes, they were technically always “just computers”, but they used to feel like something bigger. Now Macs have become just another way, perhaps the best way, to use Slack or VSCode or Figma or Chrome or Excel.

visionOS’s story diverges from that of the Mac. Apple is no longer a scrappy upstart. Rather, they’re the largest company in the world by market cap. It’s not so much that Apple doesn’t care about indie developers anymore, it’s just that indie developers often end up as the ants crushed beneath Apple’s giant corporate feet.

I think we’ll see a lot of cool indie software for visionOS, but also I think most of it will be small utilities or toys. It takes a lot of effort to build and support apps that people rely on for their productivity or creativity. If even the wildly-popular Mac platform can’t support those kinds of projects anymore, what chance does a luxury headset have?

When I started my career 3G was the hot topic, and every investor kept asking ‘what’s the killer app for 3G?’ It turned out that the killer app for having the internet in your pocket was, well, having the internet in your pocket. But with each of those, we knew what to build next, and with VR we don’t. That tells me that VR has a place in the future. It just doesn’t tell me what kind of place.

The successor to the smartphone will be something that doesn’t just merge AR and VR but make the distinction irrelevant - something that you can wear all day every day, and that can seamlessly both occlude and supplement the real world and generate indistinguishable volumetric space.

Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware - Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price.

one of the things I wondered before the event was how Apple would show a 3D experience in 2D. Meta shows either screenshots from within the system (with the low visual quality inherent in the spec you can make and sell for $500) or shots of someone wearing the headset and grinning - neither are satisfactory. Apple shows the person in the room, with the virtual stuff as though it was really there, because it looks as though it is.

For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. This iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.

A lot of what Apple shows is possibility and experiment - it could be this, this or that, just as when Apple launched the watch it suggested it as fitness, social or fashion, and it turn out to work best for fitness (and is now a huge business).

Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to a Meta all-hands after Apple’s event, made the perfectly reasonable point that Apple hasn’t shown much that no-one had thought of before - there’s no ‘magic’ invention. Everyone already knows we need better screens, eye-tracking and hand-tracking, in a thin and light device.

It’s worth remembering that Meta isn’t in this to make a games device, nor really to sell devices per se - rather, the thesis is that if VR is the next platform, Meta has to make sure it isn’t controlled by a platform owner who can screw them, as Apple did with IDFA in 2021.

On the other hand, the Vision Pro is an argument that current devices just aren’t good enough to break out of the enthusiast and gaming market, incremental improvement isn’t good enough either, and you need a step change in capability.

Apple’s privacy positioning, of course, has new strategic value now that it’s selling a device you wear that’s covered in cameras

the genesis of the current wave of VR was the realisation a decade ago that the VR concepts of the 1990s would work now, and with nothing more than off-the-shelf smartphone components and gaming PCs, plus a bit more work. But ‘a bit more work’ turned out to be thirty or forty billion dollars from Meta and God only knows how much more from Apple - something over $100bn combined, almost certainly.

So it might be that a wearable screen of any kind, no matter how good, is just a staging post - the summit of a foothill on the way to the top of Everest. Maybe the real Reality device is glasses, or contact lenses projecting onto your retina, or some kind of neural connection, all of which might be a decade or decades away again, and the piece of glass in our pocket remains the right device all the way through.

I think the price and the challenge of category creation are tightly connected. Apple has decided that the capabilities of the Vision Pro are the minimum viable product - that it just isn’t worth making or selling a device without a screen so good you can’t see the pixels, pass-through where you can’t see any lag, perfect eye-tracking and perfect hand-tracking. Of course the rest of the industry would like to do that, and will in due course, but Apple has decided you must do that.

For VR, better screens are merely better, but for AR Apple thinks this this level of display system is a base below which you don’t have a product at all.

For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. The iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.

This reminds me a little of when Meta tried to make a phone, and then a Home Screen for a phone, and Mark Zuckerberg said “your phone should be about people.” I thought “no, this is a computer, and there are many apps, some of which are about people and some of which are not.” Indeed there’s also an echo of telco thinking: on a feature phone, ‘internet stuff’ was one or two icons on your portable telephone, but on the iPhone the entire telephone was just one icon on your computer. On a Vision Pro, the ‘Meta Metaverse’ is one app amongst many. You have many apps and panels, which could be 2D or 3D, or could be spaces.

The products that we build contain complex flows and highly interactive elements. As a result, there's so many important decisions that we need to make. SwiftUI helps by quickly surfacing all of those important details that need your attention, for example, how an image should look when it's loading or how a button appears when it's pressed. These are the types of things that make a product feel complete. They're easily hidden in static design tools but are quickly surfaced when working in a dynamic tool like SwiftUI.That's because SwiftUI makes it easy to build your designs on device. In doing this, you gain a more complete understanding of what you're making. Separate parts now interact together, and you can begin to evaluate the experience as a whole. This process quickly reveals what's working in your design and what still needs attention or polish. On Maps, we've found this to be tremendously helpful.

What can you do with this thing? There’s a good chance that, whatever killer apps may emerge, they don’t need the entire complement of sensors and widgets to deliver a great experience. As that’s discovered, Apple will be able to open a second tier in this category and sell you a simplified model at a lower cost. Meanwhile, the more they manufacture the essentials—high density displays, for example—the higher their yields will become, the more their margins will increase. It takes time to perfect manufacturing processes and build up capacity. Vision Pro isn’t just about 2024’s model. It’s setting up the conditions for Apple to build the next five years of augmented reality wearable technology.

VR/AR doesn’t have to suck ass. It doesn’t have to give you motion sickness. It doesn’t have to use these awkward, stupid controllers you accidentally swap into the wrong hand. It doesn’t have to be fundamentally isolating. If this paradigm shift could have been kicked off by cheap shit, we’d be there already. May as well pursue the other end of the market.

what starts as clunky needn’t remain so. As the technology for augmented reality becomes more affordable, more lightweight, more energy efficient, more stylish, it will be more feasible for more people to use. In the bargain, we’ll get a display technology entirely unshackled from the constraints of a monitor stand. We’ll have much broader canvases subject to the flexibility of digital creativity, collaboration and expression. What this unlocks, we can’t say.

Some Nerds are blind and only care about the technical specs of software and hardware, no room for feelings. This Porsche Taycan review from MKBHD — a known Tesla aficionado — captures this very well: the Tesla may be better on paper in every way possible, but when it comes to the drive and the feel of the car, the Taycan is on another level, and Marques appreciates this. True Nerds will say that both cars take you from point A to point B, and that their performance is similar at best. But car lovers will see a world of difference. It isn’t about the destination and the time it takes to get there, it’s about the journey itself.

Outside of Google’s own apps and others from big tech companies, apps on Android are generally terrible. Feature-wise they do the job, they are stable enough, not too buggy, decently integrated with the OS, but they are either ugly, weird, or both. “Stable enough, not too buggy, decently integrated” is not how you’d want to describe an app you have to use every day, but it is what it is.

One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus they chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being hypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.

Those who see and value the artistic value in software and interface design have overwhelmingly wound up on iOS; those who don’t have wound up on Android. Of course there are exceptions. Of course there are iOS users and developers who are envious of Android’s more open nature. Of course there are Android users and developers who do see how crude the UIs are for that platform’s best-of-breed apps. But we’re left with two entirely different ecosystems with entirely different cultural values — nothing like (to re-use my example from yesterday) the Coke-vs.-Pepsi state of affairs in console gaming platforms.

The impact is particularly noticeable among Generation Z and millennials, the first generations to come of age with the possibility of knowing where their peers are at all times. It has changed how friends communicate with one another and blurred lines of privacy. Friends now, sometimes unwittingly yet obsessively, check one another’s locations and bypass whole conversations — about where somebody is, what they are doing or how their days are going — when socializing. All of that information can be gleaned from Find My.

Although Find My is not marketed as a social experience, sharing locations has become a test of sorts, much like being included on a close friends list on Instagram or on a private story on Snapchat can signal closer friendships.

With Find My, “you aren’t actively choosing to do something as you reach a certain location because you’re constantly sharing your location,” said Michael Saker, a senior lecturer in digital sociology at City, University of London. As a result, “there’s an intimacy that’s intertwined with that act,” he added. “There’s a verification of being friends.”

Mainframes were followed by PCs, and then the web, and then smartphones. Each of these new models started out looking limited and insignificant, but each of them unlocked a new market that was so much bigger that it pulled in all of the investment, innovation and company creation and so grew to overtake the old one. Meanwhile, the old models didn’t go away, and neither, mostly, did the companies that had been created by them. Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.