Apple-style AI philosophy: not a word, everywhere

Source: Snow Leopard Finance and Economics, Author: Jingyu cupl

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool

The first year of the headset is not here yet

The most expensive product in Apple's history, the Vision Pro, had its first-year sales target cut by 95%.

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

This new product, which seems to be underestimated by the market, has a very typical Apple appearance.

It is not the industry's "first launch", but relies on stronger technology and product capabilities, combined with unique interaction design and a complete ecosystem to redefine products and even industries. 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 has Vision OS. Although it does not look like a computer, its performance is enough to beat most computers on the market.
2. It has an absolute advantage in the core hardware and technology fields, and is far ahead in the most core links of head-mounted display equipment - image acquisition, image display, space perception, and various hardware stacking.
3. It is not equipped with a handle, and completely relies on new minimalist interaction methods such as eye tracking, voice, and gestures.
4. Relying on the content advantages of the Apple ecosystem, including tens of thousands of applications and AppleTV+, etc.
5. At the same time, it has the functions and forms of AR (Augmented Reality, Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality, Mixed Reality). Synthesizer.

In any of the above points, Vision Pro outperforms its peers. Together, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a "new species".

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

Even if it is as strong as Apple, making full use of its absolute advantages in products, technology and ecology, and creating new species on the basis of approaching the limits of existing technologies, it has not been able to solve the core problem of this head-mounted device - use Scenes.

Why do we need a standalone spatial computing device when there are already iPhones, iPads, and Macs?

Audio-visual entertainment is naturally the primary scene, and the extension of the space can indeed bring a completely different experience. More than half of the demo video is about how the effect of watching a movie explodes. Apple also invited Disney CEO Bob Iger (Bob Iger) as the platform for the press conference. One of the largest content platforms in the world cooperates with the immersive experience of Vision Pro. It is exciting to think about it.

But is Apple just trying to build a "space PlayStation"? of course not!

Apple gave some very vague demonstrations, such as the use of Vision Pro in the medical field to better see the structure of organs, such as learning. But it just passed by in a flash, and there is no "confirmation" at all. Instead, it is more like a "pseudo demand" created artificially, just like Apple has always insisted that the iPad Pro is a productivity tool.

Restricted and single usage scenarios, coupled with a starting price of $3,499, doom the Vision Pro to not be enough to start the first year of head-mounted computing devices—it is just a toy for a few people.

In contrast, I am more optimistic that with the continuous advancement of technology, this set of spatial computing capabilities can break out of the limitations of Vision Pro's 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 the wrong technology tree. When everyone was playing AI, Cook made a helmet, which ran counter to the wave of the entire technology world.

Is Apple conservative on AIGC?

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

Cook has 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 been exploring in the field of AI for many years, even earlier than most people imagined.

The iPhone 4S released in 2011 was already equipped with Siri, an amazing intelligent assistant at the time. The core driving technology behind it is "NLP (Natural Language Processing)", which is one of the basic technologies of generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT today— — Let the machine understand the intention of people speaking.

Zhou Hongyi said in an interview: NLP is the jewel in the crown of artificial intelligence. Whoever participates in the 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 took the iPhone as the core carrier and continuously iterated its hardware and software capabilities in the AI field.

At WWDC 2023 that just passed, we were able to see a new level of Apple's challenge in the matter of "machine learning". In the field of hardware, Apple has gradually shifted to M-series chips. The M2 Ultra chip can afford 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, Cook spent a lot of time introducing the improvement of the iOS 17 input method, which uses the Transformer language model to accurately learn the user's input habits, predict the input content, and greatly improve the correctness of the input. There are many other similar cases.

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

Why do the outside world think that 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.
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 applied to consumer electronics has not yet been fully clarified.
3. Apple does not like to use the term "artificial intelligence", but prefers to use "machine learning", which is closer to technology and more neutral.
4. Apple has always had almost abnormal requirements in terms of interactive experience and user privacy, which cannot be met by existing AI products.

To sum up, Apple is not only not conservative in AIGC, but has enough long-term investment, enough deep technology accumulation, and enough wide-ranging applications. Not only that, Apple also has more or less mature products in the potential field of AI.

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

Waiting for the ultimate carrier

Apple's layout in the field of AI, I summed it up as "do not mention AI everywhere, but place AI everywhere". The same is true in XR, or what Apple calls "spatial computing."

As early as the 3D Touch era, Apple has explored the possibility of more dimensional interaction on mobile phones. Later, Face ID, LiDAR camera and other functions that seemed "ordinary" were not used by many people. But today, they all form the cornerstone of Vision Pro.

It's very appley.

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, two obvious propositions can already be seen: 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 advance in a spiral.

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 up by Apple.

But it has to be said 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 reproduce the "reality distortion" of the Jobs era? no one knows.

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

For Apple, any competition at the product level is an ecological competition. What users buy is not an iPhone, but a carrier that carries Apple's software and content services. Apple's launch of Vision Pro is also out of long-term ecological competition considerations.

In the short term, Apple launched 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 set of ecological frameworks based on spatial computing.

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

Sound familiar? This is exactly the same idea as the iPhone and iPad, and it is a well-proven way of playing.

In the long run, the core technology 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, is very similar to the core capabilities required for autonomous driving.

Apple's "Apple Car", which Apple has been keeping secret, may be the real carrier of spatial computing.

Don't forget, Apple has always been a consumer electronics company, and all technology accumulation will eventually become products for users. Will there be a sexier consumer electronics product than a car in the next 10 years?