Apple innovation and execution – Benedict Evans
It ships MVPs that get better later, sure, and the original iPhone and Watch were MVPs, but the original iPhone also was the best phone I’d ever owned even with no 3G and no App Store. It wasn’t a concept. it wasn’t a vision of the future- it was the future. The Vision Pro is a concept, or a demo, and Apple doesn’t ship demos. Why did it ship the Vision Pro? What did it achieve? It didn’t sell in meaningful volume, because it couldn’t, and it didn’t lead to much developer activity ether, because no-one bought it. A lot of people even at Apple are puzzled.
The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. Last summer Apple told a very clear, coherent, compelling story of how it would combine the software frameworks it’s already built with the personal data in apps spread across your phones and the capabilities of LLMs to produce a new kind of personal assistant. This was the eats of Apple – taking a new primary technology and proposing way to make it useful for everyone else The hero demo at WWDC was ‘when is mom’s flight landing? / what’s our lunch plan? / how long will it take us to get there from the airport?” with your iPhone synthesising data from across apps and services to answer real-world questions posed in ways that computers could not answer before. This is your iPhone knowing who your mother is, finding the flight in all the various threads of comms in the last few weeks, knowing that it need to find a flight in the near future, and showing you what you need.
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