On a modern laptop, the keyboard is on the top half of the lower case these days, not the bottom.
My palms are hovering over or resting on the chassis, and I sit high enough that my wrists do not come in contact with the edge of the case or desk. The majority of the weight of my arms is supported by my shoulders. For me, the ideal height happens to be pretty close to a neutral wrist position.
All three of those products launched with custom hardware made by partnered manufacturers.
At iPhone launch, I seem to remember Apple still having quite a bit of the flash ram market tied up from their exclusive iPod contracts - Apple basically helped finance new factories to be spun up in return for exclusive access to their production.
The Apple Watch had the S1 system on package, which included an Apple custom CPU. There were a number of miniaturization techniques and custom parts Apple used which I remember competitors lagging on being able to replicate due to the broader market tendency to integrate off the shelf products (but I don't have more part examples or timelines).
Since they try to stay secretive about upcoming products, competitors may only get hints about what Apple is doing through your typical industrial espionage channels until the product comes out. That creates quite a bit of lag then you are starting a new product design cycle based on a product your competitor just hit the market with.
I think we can’t overestimate how lucky Apple got with the success of the iPhone. It really wasn’t a guaranteed hit by any means, and despite the success of the iPod it was launched by a much more modest company than today’s Apple.
Samsung literally makes flash memory and was one of the primary competitors of the iPhone along with its Microsoft Windows Mobile/Phone and/or Android products of that era.
Are you saying that iPhone competitors couldn’t have made similar investments in factories and couldn’t have secured flash chips? These were all mega-corporations like Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Nokia.
Android had been in negotiations with companies like Samsung and LG in 2005 before Google acquired them. In a very slightly alternate universe, Android could have been acquired by a powerhouse phone OEM like Samsung rather than Google, who I would argue squandered Android’s potential. To this very day Google struggles to make competitive hardware with their platform.
The iPhone launched as one of the most expensive smartphones on the market. The iPhone launched from a company with zero experience in selling cellular devices and a very small list of cellular networks who would even work with them.
Their competitors had ample opportunity to respond, but simply could not execute. In a very very slightly alternate universe, something like the Nokia/Microsoft partnership would have obliterated Apple.
The Apple Watch had no hardware advantage in the sense that it had no special capabilities above competitors. Yes, Apple custom-designed the SoC, but it wasn’t considered ahead of its competition. The LG G Watch and Moto 360 were available contemporaneous or earlier than the Apple Watch and the Apple Watch had no specific advantage in terms of performance, battery life, etc.
What made the Apple Watch a lot different from the iPhone was the ecosystem that Apple had built up to this point, Apple’s focus on watches as a fashion purchase and failure of competitors to recognize the same, and Apple’s arguably-illegal restriction of competing smartwatch devices on their dominant mobile platform (which the EU is forcing them to open up on now).
I wouldn't describe it as 'rushed'. Its integrated pretty much exactly the way they said it would be, as a fall-back from Siri when you ask world knowledge questions.
The part that doesn't work is having Siri locally smart enough to use it as a tool.
I used "rushed" because they decided to add it while everyone was still figuring out what it was for. That behaviour goes against the OP's claim that Apple "waits to understand what the thing is capable of doing" before acting.
It feels like we're rewriting history. There was a lot of blowback at the time.
Yes. Apple put custom hardware support in the M series chips based on the needs of Rosetta 2. The x86_64 performance on Rosetta 2 was often higher at launch than the prior generation of Intel chips running those same binaries natively.
Microsoft and Qualcomm already knew the performance of x86 app emulation on windows was killing the ARM machine lineup, so Qualcomm was working on extensions to their chips and Microsoft on having Windows support them already, but ARM64EC and Prism didn't launch for two years after the M1 shipped.
Their focus is investing in areas where they see something being a competitive differentiator, or where the market has failed to create a competitive environment.
They do not make their own screens because they can source screens from multiple sources and work with those manufacturers to create screens with the properties they want. Same thing with them relying on others for electric batteries - there are plenty of manufacturers to provide batteries to Apple's spec.
They created their own wireless modems because there's only one company they were able to purchase modems from, and those modems did not necessarily have the features Apple wanted.
Apple hasn't announced any interest in selling electric cars, solar cell technology, or quantum computing platforms. I wouldn't expect them to do so until they had a consumer product ready for sale. I doubt they are planning to come out with products in any of these categories soon.
Knowing the building heights around Chicago is not an OS feature. Even if Siri was perfect, they still aren't going to ship a wikipedia object graph on every phone.
Likewise, the phone does not understand removing people from a photo. It is a feature specific to the photo app, and Siri allows you to wire in commands for the features in your app just fine and has for years. If Google decided for competitive reasons to not ship this feature to non-Pixel or non-Android users, thats not a Siri fault. That Apple did not integrate this as a voice command into their Photos app is also not a Siri fault (is it really common to remove all people from a photo, vs specific people?)
> Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone
Is what I was referring to, Siri often fails at even opening apps which is an OS feature. Regardless, even for your examples at a certain point an AI assistant not being able to do certain things while others can does become the fault of that AI.
I would absolutely count blackberry and palm pilot, along with windows ce-based phones. Just because Apple leap-frogged them (and they all eventually folded those lines of business) doesn't mean they weren't existing products in the market.
The difference, if any, was focus. The premium on smartphones before Apple hit the market was on business/professional users who could afford the high premium. Apple instead targeted making a premium consumer product - that professionals then started to jump to over time, depending on how addicted they were to their blackberry keyboard.
The text from images feature launched as a Pixel 2 series-only feature.
There's a lot clearer message to consumers on iPhone, since so many features are available on "every phone made in the last five years, once you update the software."
On Android, that feature might be bound to an OS version, or might be rolled out in a Play Store update, it might be specific to just Google or Samsung, or even just to one of their phones. There's much less word of mouth "have you tried this new thing?"
My palms are hovering over or resting on the chassis, and I sit high enough that my wrists do not come in contact with the edge of the case or desk. The majority of the weight of my arms is supported by my shoulders. For me, the ideal height happens to be pretty close to a neutral wrist position.
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