Apple-style AI philosophy: Don't say a word, make mistakes everywhere

Vision Pro is not an iPhone

Special author丨Jingyu cupl

Cover source丨Apple official website

This article only represents the author’s own opinion

The first year of the head-mounted display has not yet come

Vision Pro, Apple’s most expensive product in history, had its sales target cut by 95% in its first year of release.

On June 8, according to Korean media Pulse News, Apple has lowered its Vision Pro sales target for this year to 150,000 units. Earlier news from Bloomberg showed that Apple’s original sales target for Vision Pro in the first year was 3 million units.

This new product, which seems not to be favored by the market, has a very typical Apple-style appearance.

A latecomer, it is not the "first" in the industry, but it relies on stronger technology and product capabilities, unique interactive design, and complete ecosystem to redefine products and even the industry. iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, you name it.

In my opinion, Vision Pro is not a better Meta Quest or PICO, but a new computing platform based on spatial interaction, a new species in the XR field. The reasons are as follows:

1. Vision Pro is a completely independent computing platform. The hardware is driven by M2 and R1 chips, and the software includes Vision OS. Although it does not look like a computer, its performance is enough to beat most computers on the market.
2. It has absolute overwhelming advantages in the field of core hardware and technology. It is far ahead in the core aspects of head-mounted display equipment - image acquisition, image display, spatial perception, and various hardware stacks.
3. It is not equipped with a handle and relies entirely on new minimalist interaction methods such as eye tracking, voice, and gestures.
4. Relying on the content advantages of Apple’s ecosystem, including tens of thousands of applications and AppleTV.
5. It has the functions and forms of AR (Augmented Reality, augmented reality), VR (Virtual Reality, virtual reality) and MR (Mixed Reality, mixed reality) at the same time. It is the field of XR (Extended Reality, extended reality) so far. The master of all things.

In any of the above points, Vision Pro performs better than its peers. Taken together, it is not too much to say "new species".

But today’s Vision Pro may not be the original iPhone.

Even if it is as powerful as Apple, it has made full use of its absolute advantages in products, technology and ecology to create new species based on approaching the limits of existing technology, but it has not been able to solve the core problem of this head-mounted device. --scenes to be used.

Why do we need an independent spatial computing device when we already have iPhone, iPad and Mac?

Audio and video entertainment is naturally the primary scene. The extension of space can indeed bring a completely different experience. More than half of the demonstration video is devoted to introducing how the effect of watching a movie is explosive. Apple also invited Disney CEO Bob Iger to be the platform for the press conference. One of the largest content platforms in the world combined with the immersive experience of Vision Pro is exciting to think about.

However, does Apple just want to build a “space version of PlayStation”? of course not!

Apple has given some very vague demonstrations. For example, Vision Pro can be used to better see the structure of organs in the medical field, such as learning. But it just passed by in a flash, and there was no "confirmation" at all. Instead, it was more like a man-made "pseudo demand", just like Apple has always insisted that the iPad Pro is a productivity tool.

The limited and single use scenario, coupled with the starting price of US$3,499, destined that the Vision Pro was not enough to start the first year of head-mounted computing devices - it was just a toy for a few people.

In contrast, what I am more optimistic about is that as technology continues to advance, this set of spatial computing capabilities can escape the limitations of the Vision Pro product form and be applied to more devices and wider fields. As the current carrier, Vision Pro itself is not so important.

Is Apple conservative?

Some voices believe that Apple has fallen behind in this round of AI competition. After the release of Vision Pro, some people even criticized: Apple clicked on the wrong technology tree. While everyone was playing with AI, Cook developed a helmet, which went against the trend of the entire technology world.

Is Apple being conservative on AIGC?

Quite the opposite. Apple may be one of the companies on the planet with the earliest deployment in the field of AI, the largest accumulation of technology, and the widest range of product applications.

Cook made it clear in an interview that he is also using AI chatbots and is excited about them. He also revealed that Apple is paying close attention to this technology and has some unique application scenarios.

In fact, Apple has begun exploring the field of AI for many years, even earlier than most people imagined.

The iPhone 4S released in 2011 was already equipped with the amazing intelligent assistant Siri at the time. The core driving technology behind it is "NLP (Natural Language Processing)", which is the basic technology of today's generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT. One - Let machines understand the intentions of people when they speak.

Zhou Hongyi said in an interview: NLP is the crown jewel of artificial intelligence. Whoever has a thorough understanding of language will truly understand the world and become the foundation for other artificial intelligence tasks in the future.

In the following ten years, Apple used the iPhone as its core carrier to continuously iterate its hardware and software capabilities in the field of AI.

At the just past WWDC 2023, we were able to see a new level of challenge from Apple in the matter of "machine learning". In the field of hardware, Apple has gradually shifted to M-series chips. The M2 Ultra chip can bear the performance requirements of large-scale machine learning, and can even partially replace independent graphics processors in certain scenarios and needs. In the software field, the new generation of iOS, iPad OS, MacOS, WatchOS and even Vision OS all apply machine learning on a large scale to improve user experience.

For example, the iOS 17 input method improvements that Cook spent a lot of space on introduced use the Transformer language model to accurately learn the user's input habits, predict the input content, and greatly improve the input accuracy. There are many similar cases.

In short, Apple WWDC 2023 did not mention artificial intelligence in one sentence, but artificial intelligence was everywhere.

Why do outsiders think Apple is very conservative and backward in this wave of AI? reasons may be:

1. Apple is a consumer electronics company. Although it has applied machine learning-related technologies on a large scale behind its products, it has not specifically released a product with AI as its core as a carrier.
2. Apple’s path is: use leading technology reserves to create extremely elegant products and redefine categories and industries. Looking at the field of AI technology, the product form that can be implemented in consumer electronics has not yet been completely clear.
3. Apple does not like to use the term "artificial intelligence", but prefers to use "machine learning", a more technical and neutral expression.
4. Apple has always had almost perverted requirements in terms of interactive experience and user privacy, and existing AI products cannot meet them.

In summary, Apple is not only not conservative in AIGC, but has sufficient long-term investment, deep enough technology accumulation, and wide enough applications. Not only that, Apple also has more or less mature products in the potential areas of AI implementation.

Microsoft has Microsoft 365 Copilot, Apple has the iWork three-piece suite; Tesla has FSD, and Apple has accumulated experience in the field of autonomous driving for many years.

Waiting for the ultimate carrier

I summarize Apple’s layout in the field of AI as “AI is not mentioned everywhere, but AI is used everywhere.” The same is true in the field of XR, or what Apple calls "spatial computing".

As early as the 3D Touch era, Apple has been exploring the possibility of realizing more dimensional interactions on mobile phones. Later, many people complained that seemingly "mundane" functions such as Face ID and lidar cameras were unusable. But today, they all become the cornerstone of Vision Pro.

This is very Apple.

The essence of the development of the information technology industry is to continuously improve the efficiency of information production, consumption and transmission. From a more macro perspective, we can already see two obvious propositions: one is the ultimate in information acquisition efficiency, and the other is the boundary of the digital world.

On the first proposition, Apple firmly occupies the mobile computing platform with the iPhone. Vision Pro is the prototype of Apple’s answer to the second proposition. These two propositions do not develop independently, but blend with each other and spiral forward.

With the decline of the mobile Internet, the development of smartphones has entered a relatively stable period. There are fewer and fewer products that can bring innovative experiences, and even the appearance has rarely changed. All major giants are looking for new computing platforms, and "spatial computing" is a new battlefield opened by Apple.

But I have to say that this is still an Apple-style gamble in the Cook era.

In the past, every time Apple seized a new opportunity to reshape the industry, it was almost always led by Jobs. With his keen insight and genius product sense, he created one myth after another. Today's Apple seems to lack a soul. Can it still reproduce the "reality distortion power" of the Steve Jobs era? no one knows.

But today’s Apple has long been reborn: with a market value of trillions of dollars, cash reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars, years of technology accumulation and resource investment far beyond the Steve Jobs era. In fact, the birth of Vision Pro is the product of investment in technology regardless of cost.

For Apple, behind any product-level competition is ecological competition. What users buy is not an iPhone, but a carrier carrying Apple software and content services. Apple launched Vision Pro also out of long-term ecological competition considerations.

In the short term, Apple launches Vision Pro to attract more developers, reserve enough applications and services for Apple to open up a new battlefield, and continue to conduct technical verification and iteration to build a complete ecological framework based on spatial computing. .

Therefore, the more essential significance of Vision Pro is that through products like Vision Pro, we continue to expand the boundaries of the digital world, further integrate the physical world and the digital world better, and bring a new interactive experience. This is what Apple really wants to do - accumulate technology and ecology related to spatial computing platforms.

Sound familiar? This is exactly the same idea as the iPhone and iPad, and it is a fully proven method of play.

In the long term, the core technologies of the spatial computing platform, including but not limited to spatial information collection, spatial information presentation, spatial perception capabilities, and spatial interaction capabilities based on various sensors, are very similar to the core capabilities required for autonomous driving.

The “Apple Car” that Apple has always kept secret may be the real carrier of spatial computing.

Don’t forget, Apple has always been a consumer electronics company, and all its technology accumulation will eventually be turned into products for users. In the next 10 years, will there be any more sexy consumer electronics than cars?

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