Apple is in a tough spot. While the company is painfully behind the competition when it comes to getting a solid handle on AI development, it seems to be speeding up the timeline to release its first AI-powered smart glasses. That’s… quite a gamble.
The way here
You already know the story. After releasing the Apple Watch and adjusting its course to turn it into what it is, Apple went on to make a series of bad bets that didn’t pay off.
It swung and missed with the first Apple Vision Pro, it swung and really missed with Project Titan, and by the time it realized the AI race was worth running, it was already a few laps behind.
Is it true that the people working on each project wouldn’t have been the same? Of course. However, focus and attention are shared and finite assets, no matter how big a company is.
Meanwhile, Meta got the break of a lifetime. It completely missed mobile and went on to gamble a fortune on immersive initiatives. One of which was its partnership with Ray-Ban for “smart” glasses, for a rather pointless clone of Snap’s Spectacles.
Then, the generative AI boom fell right into its lap, at a time when (thanks to Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist) the company already had been developing the underlying technology that allowed it to put two and two together.
To be clear, Meta was caught off guard by ChatGPT as much as anyone. But LeCun grasped the situation and quickly turned things around with the Llama models.
The way out
Top comment by Apple76
Apple isn’t, and has never been, a first mover. They iterate ad nauseam and they typically land in a place that meets the needs and desires of most people, while aiming to provide a superior experience. Everything they’re learning from v1 of Apple Vision will undoubtedly matriculate into these AR glasses; that said, first-mover advantages don’t exist for personal technology because it takes time for the corresponding behaviors to become normative.
That Meta commercial with all of the Chrises in the museum—c’mon, comedy aside, it was the most uppity and hyperbolic use case scenario: Hardly an elegant execution. Meta is more excited that they have a product that performs relatively well with a mainstream look, but I don’t believe that’s enough to influence social norms for a broader adoption.
Apple, of course, did the opposite. It watched from the sidelines, painfully slow to act. But perhaps, this years-long miss on AI (and its newfound clarity on the smart glasses) might have put them exactly where they like to be. As a longtime executive told Bloomberg recently:
In the world of AI, you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment. (…) That’s not how Apple is wired. Apple sits down to build a product knowing what the endgame is.
As it turns out, Apple might have stumbled into a perfect storm of a clear product vision, a defined technological path, and an ambitious deadline.
What remains to be seen is whether they truly grasp that they can’t afford to swing and miss again.
What do you think? Would you have use for an assistant who can see what you see? Can Apple catch up? Let us know in the comments.
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