One thing about Apple is things can make sense for them to explore that don't make sense for others to. They have a big enough ecosystem, enough cash to do R&D on an idea for decades, and a culture of killing things that aren't good enough that make them an ideal place to determine whether ideas are a conceptual dead end versus just haven't been executed well enough (or tied to the right ecosystem to make them work).

Foldables make sense for Apple to explore because even if it's ~5% likely to be able to be productized, the return is measured in the tens of billions.

Smart speakers were comparatively cheap and are probably profitable, so even if they're not a huge market they made sense.

AR/VR remains to be seen. Meta's still learning how to build hardware and operating systems and still learning how to sell actual products, so they're probably not the right ones to test concept risk when they already have so much execution risk. They also don't have the leverage or insertion point that Apple does if e.g. AR/VR turns into an alternative to computers & iPhones instead of an alternative to consoles. It may also be that Vision Pro is just a prelude to AR that ship in ~2035 but lays so much groundwork that nobody stands a chance at competing by the time the tech is ready, letting Apple secure the next trillion dollar product.

Cars were expensive and cancelled, that's the one that required Apple to stretch the most in terms of both brand and execution.

In your Google example, remember they invented transformers and yet did nothing with them. Any failure in Google's robotics efforts are likely due to Google having an absolutely horrible record of shipping and standing behind products. I wouldn't trust a Google robot because I wouldn't trust a Google product.

Not playing everywhere is an existential risk. Because IT is so integrative, if anyone gets a huge leg up in any sector, Apple risks getting shut out in a lot of other sectors.

Spatial Computing/iVision is, for example, a claim in vr. It gives them some exposure to the market, some ability to extend & integrate their existing application/computing ecosystem into this medium. Ditto for all the other pieces; they're all integrative. Smart speakers work with airplay. iWatch works with iPhone works with iOS. The close integration lets them rebuff innovation in any other field: no one small can come along and build the next VR headset or the best watch to compete with Apple in any of these sectors, because no one can integrate like Apple. No one else has all the products. You have to have complete over the horizon horizontal control to keep your intense market power, and Apple is invested above all in there never being a chink in that armor, in making sure they can completely dictate the shape of all products by producing & owning all the products themselves. This is Apple.

Hence, Apple has to dabble everywhere. It maintains the most, it prevents real competition from forming, and it earns them a couple % revenue here and there to boot.

Expressing an entirely different brand of cynicism, I'd also ask: where else could Apple look to expand into? None of these sectors has been a runaway success. But it's not like Apple's missing the boat on some massive new tech that a huge new Total Addressable Market. It's been absent from Crypto and AI but generally it's just expanding wherever there's any opportunity, and why not when you have the cash & when any sector could become huge?

For what it's worth, I don't know whether we'll ever know all of the Jobs-era skunkworks projects that were shut down before they ever saw the limelight. The lid on the rumors was much tighter back then.

Because they Need to do R&D and spend some money on this category. They also have way too much cash with Execs having very little idea of where Apple should be heading. Tim Cook has zero product understanding. That means he has to rely on engineers. Most of the original product people that were with Apple ( the design team ) has all left Apple. So what makes a successful company more successful? The sales and marketing people.

A substantial fraction of households that can afford Apple devices likely owns several of them. So if Apple wants to multiply their revenue, they need to create products with wide appeal with margins (in raw numbers -- not just percentages) comparable to their current offerings i.e. margins of $1000+ per household. That might help understand the kind of products they are pursuing.

Apple is uniquely situated (cash surplus, deep tech + manufacturing expertise, consumer product + marketing expertise) to take on such multi-year product-oriented R&D. Even if one out of N (serious) attempts pays off, the scale of success will justify the amortized ROI.

I also can't imagine a home robotics use case that I would get excited over. Can anyone think of anything? I would guess any new product would be more complex, less efficient, and a security risk. It'll be cool and trendy for a few months and then die off. Just like the Alexa and Google speakers that can tell you the weather or adjust your lights...is it REALLY that useful outside of entertaining your nieces and nephews? My guess is that they'll make some revenue from collecting user data and selling it to data brokers or something.

Edit: someone below said laundry folding robot. I'd see that as useful.

I like that Apple is taking on big hard futuristic problems, like AR/VR, AI, and home robotics.

But from a business perspective it seems unlikely to be successful. Apple could "easily" sell a luxury car and TVs and print many billions of dollars right away. They wouldn't need unproven tech -- they could just use their design skills along with vertical integration to have very nice products that people would want to buy. Apple should eschew some of Silicon Valley's obsessions, like self-driving cars, which most people do not care about at all, and instead focus on their strengths.

that failure is much more a leadership issue than a talent issue. Google was founded by PhD students and it shows. (I am one.) It's like a giant lab where things get prototyped and innovations are pushed, but where product ends up sidelined by bloated admin (how many levels are there and why does it feel like an MMORPG i.e World of Warcraft) and lack of clear capitalist vision (I'm actually anti-capitalist but even I can admit to this LOL). Honestly, it sounds exactly like a university. I used to think Google was slated to be the king of AI back when I starting out because they had ALL the talent (even OpenAI is its offshoot if you consider early employees and Ilya himself). I feel like it was so lateral that it was a loose federation of small tribes of smart people that live under the same banner, but not a tight organization where each team had its purpose within a giant mechanism. But as the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth.

Apple is WAY different internally. For all its dreariness and corpo atmosphere (not allowed to talk to each other, teams siloed and laser focused on shipping a specific product) they have much clearer vision of what will sell and what not, usual company missteps (AR glasses) notwithstanding.

Good luck to them. Xiaomi has been already doing it for years at approachable prices. They now also have a car, the Su 7, a project which Apple gave up on. Of course, it possibly comes with th CCP/PLA embedded spyware.

> Why does every store have self opening doors, but no houses do?

This is easy to answer: I don't want a door that opens by itself (except in my dreams) because it's potentially dangerous, might open when I don't want (and let my cat out) and it's likely an energy sieve.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze - even not counting maintenance.

It's also just laziness. Even in homes with very few things to do maintenance on, things still go unmaintained.

> fans and pumps to move heat in or out of the house or water around the garden, they're a pain because they break, it's only worth it if you're running a commercial operation.

Um, what? AC and sprinklers? Those are common in homes.

Pretty sure you can get a domestic service to pop by at much lower than that. Biologics are still king.

I just want a machine that will produce a cup of something that is almost, but not completely, unlike tea.

Automated lawn mowing is relatively mature at this point and works well, assuming you have a relatively flat lawn.

A one time purchase price of 20k would be acceptable. $20-30k per year is ridiculous. For that price you can hire a person to come and clean your toilet for 5 hours a day, every single day.

I would pay like $5000 for a laundry folding robot. I just want a big washing-machine sized box where I dump my laundry at the top and slowly everything gets folded. That's 1 hour / week freed up.

If you replace enough of your cabinets with dishwashers you never need to put dishes away again.

> Japan makes incredible bidet toilets that got some traction during the pandemic.

But Google actually got rid of theirs because they can't be used with recycled water/greywater, since it isn't clean enough.

> Urban gardening pods that allow anyone to grow healthy food at home.

Pretty much anything involving urban gardening is a fake hippie pastoralist idea. Centralization and professionalization is good.

UL has, or had, a whole house in Fremont (maybe Milpitas) associated with their Fremont lab location for testing Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/etc interoperability in a "real-world" setting. They're not the only test lab to do something like that, either.

It would not surprise me at all if Apple had a similar facility for themselves, especially for internal demos, user testing, and sanity checks.

They even have a small medical facility.

WWDC21

Ok. Now you’re just reading the script from the hit Disney channel movie Smart House

apple already sells a device for taking care of kids, just get them an ipad and it'll keep them entertained all day long! /s

Whisper >>>> Siri

Yeah, in retrospect, it was silly to think the company responsible for Siri was going to succeed in the self-driving car business... or the robot business.

They need some actual management talent, evidently.

I was about to say the same thing, Apple have too much capital and they do not know what to do with it. It would be better to give it back to their investors instead of...this.

I used to have a dozen or so Google Home devices for all sort of automation, but have mostly given up on it. I feel like Google is going to kill these any day now, the Google Assistant on them has been getting dumber and dumber. Where in the past, it would do its best to provide an answer, now for 99% of queries it just says "idk how to help with that."

So the only thing these devices are used for these days in my household are setting alarms and turning lights on/off. In the next home, probably won't even bother.

There's also profiteering and security issues. Thermostat that wants to connect to "cloud" and needs to know my street address, my name etc.? -- Not happening. Companies selling "smart" devices instantly overcomplicated relatively simple appliances making them beyond DIY repair level, and, on top of it, wanted to sell service of supporting these overly complicated devices. It's just very hard to see the benefit, when all that eg. the thermostat does is turning the boiler on and off, saving a few seconds to someone who'd otherwise have to do it manually.

There also aren't that many areas where automation could possibly accomplish much. I think, the main directions are:

* Optimize energy usage (the same thermostat thing). It doesn't really amount to much. It could be useful in industrial setting, but for households it just doesn't save that much money, even if it works well.

* Cleaning. Making roombas deal with furniture or large objects left on the floor seems like mission impossible without a significant change in approach. Similarly for surfaces that are above the floor (desk, shelves etc.) Cleaning the exterior could be its own an quite an interesting thing though. Stuff like removing dead foliage from the roof for instance, or repainting the walls.

* Cooking. This could be potentially interesting, but will probably require a complete redesign of the tools used for cooking today to be reasonably priced. Eg. there would be no need for knives with handles for humans, because it's easier to make a slicing / chopping machine that has a very different configuration. Stoves and ovens would need to have some way of moving pots in and out automatically. Also, they'd probably have to be connected to the fridge and other kitchen storage... Which, in the end, means that it's not going to be an incremental upgrade. It will be also probably difficult to make the automated system coexist with human cooks...

This is why it’s requirement that all “smart” devices in my house can fall back to “dumb” use. Smart switches are the way forward here. They work just the same as existing switches, but I can also control them via automation, voice, or an app.

I normally recommend people start their home automation journey with smart bulbs, ideally in their bedroom so they can speak their lights off and on while in bed, but long-term, switches are the best.

> I think the issue is that smart home devices didn't do anything I couldn't already do, but a physical switch is faster than arguing with the computer.

Exactly this.

I've had so many "aw fuck it I'll do it myself" moments with tech.

I no longer use any smart home devices. It was a passing fad as far as my experience goes.

Seemed cool, didn't really change my life.

> Robotics… seem like a miss to me. Very few tasks at home are as simple as vacuuming, but maybe I just lack the creativity and vision.

SwitchBot is working on something I haven't seen elsewhere yet: Making robot vacuums double as mops is becoming common, and and a few have modifications to hook into the water/waste lines so you don't have to refill it, but SwitchBot made that as part of its primary design because they got the idea to use the robot to ferry water around other places: it can automatically refill their humidifier and empty their dehumidifier.

I could imagine further enhancements for watering plants, or maybe if it's a success a future one that cleans rugs may become feasible.

> Robotics… seem like a miss to me. Very few tasks at home are as simple as vacuuming

Even vacuuming was pretty hard. Most vacuum robots were a disappointment until maybe 2 or 3 years.

I'm curious about the coffee maker bit. I drink espresso and I can't really imagine a benefit in turning something a device on if someone isn't there to also put coffee in it, pour it etc.

How much time does it save you having your coffee maker or before you go to get coffee?

The thing with a fish feeder is that it can be completely analog and still work fine.

That exists today. Apple's Homekit is the only real solution for a smart home that doesn't send everything to/from the cloud.

> Or maybe I need to dive deeper into HomeAssistant...

This is the answer.

HomeAssistant is fantastic and has unified everything of mine into a single platform. Control mostly happens through Google and Apple/Homekit devices (other than hardware switches), and everything works pretty seamlessly.

In terms of mental development Siri, is at best, a 5 year kid. It has never been useful to me.

I'm not holding my breath after seeing their stock price.