Vs. when you're in the Top 10 of the Fortune Global 500, "steady as she goes" business vision is the far safer strategy.
Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping.
Seen against this background, the Vision Pro is a strategic content failure. Very few 3D games work on it. Very little new 3D content is developed for it. Apple's insistence on our way or the highway continues to have developers preferring the highway. There are a few decades worth of back catalog of VR games, 3D movies, etc. Most of which flat out won't work on the Vision Pro or aren't licensed for it. They could fix that but that would require investing in content/licensing deals, compatibility/emulation, etc. And by making the core product so expensive, it basically became a niche product. And without content that remains a hard sell. It does not make sense for productions with hundreds of millions of budget (i.e. most 3D games and movies) to be targeting such a niche platform. And it does not make sense for end users to buy the product if there is no good content and if most of the good content is never released for it.
It's a very fixable problem. Valve is leading the way with Proton currently. That strategy is very portable to macs and the Vision pro. There is very little technical reason to stop that from working. And Apple has been chipping away at their own portability kit. But they are so far not really committing to it fully. They should be filling the Apple store with decades worth of great content from that just works on Apple HW. As it is there is only a relatively small collection of old content that has been ported.
Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.
I love their SciFi material but two seasons of severance in three years won’t keep people subscribed. The only reason I have Apple TV for more than a month or two out of the year is due to the bundle plan math working out with family sharing.
Silo For All Mankind Tehran Foundation (“meh-ish, but watchable”) Slow Horses Murderbot Shrinking …
But my point wasn’t that they don’t make good television because they do, it’s that their shows aren’t talked about nearly as much in the mainstream because people don’t have Apple tv. I think Ted lasso and to a lesser degree severance are really their only major popular hits. Most people I talk to haven’t seen slow horses. If it were on Netflix they would have.
And I’m just left to wonder where Apple TV would be now if Ted lasso hadn’t been a massive breakout success for the platform, which i think largely only happened because it was a decent feel good show that came out right when the entire world was miserable and cooped up inside looking for new content.
Apple religiously defends its walled gardens. Stuff like this is the exact symptom. They don't allow third parties to "fix" this either. They don't really document their own hardware and treat it as a control point. They also don't support independent efforts to port other operating systems on mac hardware.
Software support is vital here, you can't just say that if the hardware is good then people would buy it. What good is it if you can't use it?
Gosh I just read a really hellish thread on what frontier LLMs will become as they're infected with advertising, I hope apple manages to break locsl LLMs (and training?) Into the public discourse
Now I think we need to see Apple remake categories the way they did under Steve. If that can happen again, the future is bright.
I like Tim, but I don’t think the Tim we see is the real Tim. He must be an absolute elite sniper ninja cyborg internally, which is also cool.
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.