Category: Apple

Is the iPad really a computer? Or is it a computing accessory?

That’s a question that’s triggered enormous amounts of debate and discussion for many years now, and regardless of where you stand on the issue, it’s one that has never really been definitively answered. At yesterday’s WWDC, however, Apple certainly took some big steps towards an affirmative answer with the launch of iPadOS and all the latest enhancements it entails.

Most importantly, the introduction of a true file system and the Files app to access it puts the iPad in a similar class to other “full” computers. Though Steve Jobs may be rolling in his grave because of it (he was notoriously averse to anything like a visible file system for the iPad), it’s something that the iPad has desperately needed for those who want to run computer-esque productivity apps and do enterprise-like work on the device. It turns out storing, finding, and organizing files on local storage—and having easy access to external storage (like USB sticks!)—is an absolutely essential part of those types of efforts. Without it, the iPad was severely handicapped; with it, it’s time to give a fresh look to the concept of tablet computing.

In addition, though Apple didn’t talk about it, the forthcoming version of iPadOS (expected this fall along with iOS13, tvOS13, WatchOS 6 and MacOS Catalina) also includes support for Bluetooth mice. The feature is currently hidden in some accessibility settings, but it’s hard to imagine Apple keeping it there for too long, as the lack of mouse and true cursor support has been a lingering concern around iPad computing for some time as well. Now that the secret’s out, serious iPad users will be clamoring for it.

But Apple’s blurring of device lines wasn’t limited to iPads becoming more computer-like. There were also several introductions that highlighted how the iPad can become a more useful computer accessory. Most notable of these was the debut of the new Sidecar feature in MacOS Catalina that will let you use an iPad as a secondary monitor for your Mac. While there are certainly cheaper options for dedicated monitors, the ability to let you use your iPad as a secondary display on an occasional (or even regular) basis is something that many Mac users will undoubtedly find very useful. In an age of increased multitasking, there’s never enough screen real estate, so options to extend your desktop and apps across multiple screens make a great deal of sense.

Interestingly, because Sidecar also supports Apple Pencil on the connected iPad, it’s almost like bringing some level of touch-screen support to the Mac. To be clear, it only works with Mac apps that currently support stylus input (think graphics apps), but it can add a Touch Bar, even to Macs that currently don’t have them, and will likely lead to other touch-enabled features.

Another critical iPad to Mac benefit is that the company’s new Project Catalyst, which allows developers to easily move some of the 1 million apps designed for iPads over to the Mac. Apple said it used the technology to move some of its own apps, such as Apple News, Stocks, Home, etc., over to MacOS, and with Project Catalyst, they’re opening up the same capability to developers who use the company’s Xcode development tools. Given the relative dearth of new Mac applications, this is a critical step for the ongoing life of the Mac platform.

What’s interesting about all these developments is that Apple is taking a new approach to its various product categories that seems less concerned with potential overlap and more concerned with providing the best advances possible for each. In other words, in the past, Apple appeared to be very conscious of the potential confusion that could be created in understanding what an iPad could do (and how it could be done) versus what a Mac could do. Hence, there was much more separation between the iPad and the Mac in terms of capability and functionality.

As device usage trends, product category sales trends, the impact of the cloud, and several other realities of the modern digital world have evolved, however, Apple seems to be much less worried about defining the categories (and limits) of each of its devices. Instead, these new announcements suggest that they want to leverage whatever resources they can to make the iPad experience as good as it can be and the Mac experience as good as it can be. This new approach towards the realities of our multi-device world may create some confusion among some people about what device to buy, or which one to use for certain applications or in certain situations. In the long run, however, it seems to be a much healthier perspective that allows people to get the most out of whatever individual devices, or combination of devices, they happen to have access to.

From an overall perspective, these developments are particularly important for the Mac, which has certainly seemed to be Apple’s abandoned stepchild for quite some time now. In conjunction with the impressive-looking new Intel and AMD-powered Mac Pro also introduced at WWDC, however, it’s clear that Apple is providing some much-needed love to its first platform device.

If Apple really wants to get serious about letting people use their products and services across the reality of today’s complex multi-device world, they’re going to have to do a lot more work in getting some of their devices (like Apple Watch), applications, and services to work across other non-Apple platforms (as I’m sure they’ll eventually do). In the meantime, however, these new announcements show that Apple is becoming the kind of company that’s perfectly comfortable with embracing the uncertainty and blurriness of today’s digital product categories.

Well, that was a surprise…not in terms of what Apple announced at their big services event—which frankly had few, if any surprises—but about what I was most excited about afterwards.

In part because there were so few details about the pricing and extent of their highly expected streaming TV service, the thing I walked away from the Steve Jobs Theater being the most impressed with was—wait for it—Apple Card.

Yes, a physical credit card, but more importantly, the virtual credit card services that are the latest extension to Apple Pay. In multiple ways, Apple Card is a great expression of what Apple does best. They find things that create pain points in our lives and make them much simpler by essentially reinventing them and how we interact with them.

Of course, there was hope that they would do the same with TV content and services too. But, while it’s too early to say for sure, my initial take is that they weren’t quite as successful there. Sure, the new Apple TV+ app looks nice and integration with a number of partners looks good, but there are several TV content aggregators already out there. Plus, to get the kind of comprehensive package Apple promised, you have to get local news and sports from one source, movies from iTunes and/or other streaming services, and then Apple’s content as well. Oh, and if you’re a fan of content from Netflix or if you like to watch TV content on Android devices or Windows PCs, you’re out of luck. That’s a lot of work and compromises for what’s supposed to be a complete service that works across “all your screens.”

On top of that, though it went by very quickly, I could’ve sworn I briefly saw a $10.99 monthly price for the ShowTime service that was added during the demo—not the $9.99 that had been expected. So, lots of pricing questions still remain—not the least of which is how much Apple will charge for their own original content.

In the case of Apple Card, however, the value proposition was much more straightforward, and the end product much more appealing as a result. Not only did Apple promise to rid people of dreaded fees associated with credit cards—late fees, international charge fees, etc.—they also completely rethought the experience of using a credit card. The software-based app experiences enabled via Apple Card range from leveraging on-device machine learning to easily label charges, to providing practical insights on how to reduce interest charges, to logical organization of charges and trends in spending. They also integrated strong privacy and security by requiring biometric recognition for all charges (via face or fingerprint recognition), tying transactions to the secure ID inside the iPhone, and keeping everything anonymized to prevent tracking of purchases. All told, it was the best example of the old Think Different Apple philosophy that I’ve seen in some time.

Not only that, but Apple even managed to sneak in a tiny bit of hardware into Apple Card via the titanium physical credit cards that they’re making part of the offering for those locations that don’t take Apple Pay. While you can argue it was a bit over the top, it was classic Apple in the best way, with even the tiniest details done right. (Or, as I joked with others, more proof that Apple still does hardware best….) The cards have no number or expiration date—just your named etched into them. Frankly, if I was part of another credit card company, I’d be nervous, because Apple completely reset the bar on what people are going to start expecting from a credit card.

In that regard, the Apple Card launch was also a great example of another broader phenomenon that we’re starting to see play out, something I’ll call “reverse transformation.” As big companies in other non-tech industries are going through what many like to call “digital transformation” and morphing into tech-driven organizations, tech companies are starting to look the other direction. They’re observing these trends in traditional industries and recognizing that those industries are now even more ripe for disruption than ever. By applying their “digital” expertise towards problems that have plagued or limited those traditional industries, and applying a fresh perspective to those issues, tech companies are becoming very real threats in industries that, just a few years back, seemed very far removed from tech. In effect, they’re taking advantage of an opportunity that didn’t exist until these other industries started to digitize themselves.

To be clear, not all industries are necessarily subject to this reverse transformation, nor are all tech companies equipped to take advantage of these new potential opportunities. But as Apple is starting to demonstrate with Apple Card, the possibility of digital transformations creating more risks for traditional industries and companies than many originally thought are very real. These types of changes won’t happen overnight, nor will Apple Card immediately disrupt the entire credit card industry, but the possibility of dramatically new tech industry-inspired services are clearly an interesting new possibility for us all to consider.

To my mind, the most intriguing announcements from this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) was the introduction of Siri Shortcuts. Available across iOS devices with iOS12 and Apple Watches with WatchOS 5, Siri Shortcuts essentially adds a new type of voice-based user interface to Apple devices.

It works by building macro-like shortcuts for basic functions across a wide variety of applications and then gets them to execute by simply saying the name of your custom-labelled function to Siri. Critically, they can be used not just with Apple apps and iPhone or iPad settings, but across applications from other vendors as well.

Early on, most digital assistant platforms, such as Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant, focused on big picture issues like answering web-based queries, scheduling meetings, getting updates on quick data nuggets like traffic, weather, sports scores, etc. Most assistant platforms, however, didn’t really make your smart devices seem “smarter” or, for that matter, make them any easier to use.

With the introduction of Samsung’s Bixby, we saw the first real effort to make a device easier to use through a voice-based interaction model. Bixby’s adoption (and impact) has been limited, but arguably that’s primarily because of the execution of the concept, not because of any fundamental flaw in the idea. In fact, the idea behind a voice-based interface is a solid one, and that’s exactly what Apple is trying to do with Siri Shortcuts.

At first glance, it may seem that there’s little difference between a voice-based UI and traditional assistant, but there really is. First, at a conceptual level, voice-based interfaces are more basic than an assistant. While assistants need to do much of the effort on their own, a voice-based UI simply acts as a trigger to start actions or to allow more easy discovery or usage of features that often get buried under the increasing complexity of today’s software platforms and applications. It’s a well-known fact that most people use less than 10% of the capabilities of their tech products. Much of that limit is because people don’t know where to find certain features or how to use them. Voice-based interfaces can solve that problem by allowing people to simply say what they want the device to do and have it respond appropriately.

Given the challenges that many people have had with the accuracy of Siri’s recognition, this more simplistic approach is actually a good fit for Apple. Essentially, you’ll be able to do a lot of cool “smart” things with a much smaller vocabulary, which improves the likelihood of positive outcomes.

Another potentially interesting development is the possibility of its use with multiple digital assistants for different purposes. While I highly doubt that Apple will walk away from the ongoing digital assistant battle, they might realize that there could be a time and a place for, say, using Cortana to organize work-related activities, using Google Assistant for general data queries and using Siri for a variety of phone-specific functions—at least in the near term. Of course, a lot questions would need to be answered and API’s opened up before that could occur, but it’s certainly an intriguing possibility. Don’t forget, as well, that Apple has already created a connection between IBM’s Watson voice assistant and iOS, so the idea isn’t as crazy as it may first sound.

Even within the realm of a voice UI, it makes sense to add some AI-type functions. In fact, Apple’s approach to doing on-device machine learning to help maintain data privacy makes perfect sense, with a function/application that lets you use the specific apps installed on your device and provides suggestions based on the contacts and/or other personalized data stored in your phone. This is where the line between assistant and voice UI admittedly starts to blur, but the Apple offering still makes for a more straightforward type of interaction model that its millions of users will likely find to be very useful.

As interesting as the IFTTT (If This Then That)-like macro workflows that Siri Shortcuts can bring to more advanced users, however, I am a bit concerned that mainstream users could be a bit confused and overwhelmed by the capabilities that Shortcuts offers. Yes, you can achieve a lot, but even from the brief demo onstage, it’s clear that you also have to do a lot to make it work well. By the time it’s officially released as part of iOS12 this fall (as a free upgrade, BTW), I’m hoping Apple will create a whole series of predefined Siri Shortcuts that regular users can quickly access or easily customize.

The world of voice-based interactions continues to evolve, and I expect to see a number of advancements in both full-fledged assistant models, voice-based UIs, and combinations of the two. Long-term, I believe Siri Shortcuts has the opportunity to make the biggest impact on how iOS users interact with and leverage their devices of anything announced with iOS12, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

Even though it wasn’t the first time that Apple and IBM have announced partnerships in the enterprise space, as a long-time tech industry observer, there’s still part of me that finds it surprising to see an Apple executive speak at an IBM event.

Such was the case at last week’s IBM Think conference in Las Vegas, where the two announced that IBM’s Watson Services was going to be offered as an extension to Apple’s CoreML machine learning software. Essentially, for companies who are creating custom mobile applications for iPhones (and iPads), the new development means that enterprises can get access to IBM’s Watson AI tools in their iOS business applications.

On the surface, it’s easy to say that this is just an extension of some of the work IBM and Apple announced several years back to bring some of IBM’s industry-specific vertical applications to the iPad. In some ways, it is.

But in many other ways, this announcement is arguably more important and will generate more long-term impact than whatever new products, software and/or services that Apple announces later today at their education event in Chicago.

The reasons are several. First, the likely focus of much of this work will be on the iPhone, which has a larger and more important presence in businesses throughout the world than iPads. Depending on who you ask, iPhones have nearly 50% share in US smartphones in business, for example, which is several points higher than their share of smartphones in the overall US market.

More important than that, however, is the new dynamic between Apple’s machine learning software and the capabilities offered by IBM. At a basic level, you could argue that there may be future battles between Siri and Watson. Given all the difficulties Apple has had with Siri, versus the generally much more positive reaction to Watson, that could prove to be a significant challenge for Apple.

The details of the agreement specify that Watson Services for CoreML will allow applications created for iOS to leverage pre-trained machine learning models/algorithms created with IBM’s tools as a new option. As part of CoreML, Apple already offers machine learning models and capabilities of its own, as well as tools to convert models from popular neural network/machine learning frameworks, such as Caffe and TensorFlow, into CoreML format. The connection with IBM brings a higher level of integration with external machine learning tools than Apple has offered in the past.

Initially, the effort is being focused on the visual recognition tools that IBM has made available through its Watson services. Specifically, developers will be able to use Watson Visual Recognition to add computer vision-style capabilities to their existing apps. So, for example, you could point your iPhone’s camera at an object and have the application recognize it and provide exact details about specific characteristics, such as determining a part number, recognizing whether a piece of fruit is ripe, etc. What’s interesting about this is that Apple already has a Vision framework for letting you do similar types of things, but this new agreement essentially lets you swap in the IBM version to leverage their capabilities instead.

IBM also has voice-based recognition tools as part of Watson Services that could theoretically substitute for Apple’s Foundation Natural Language Processing tools that sit at the heart of Siri. That’s how we could end up with some situations of Siri vs. Watson in future commercial business apps. (To be clear, these efforts are only for custom business applications and are not at all a general replacement for Apple’s own services, which will continue to focus on Siri for voice-driven interactions in consumer applications.) The current announcement specifically avoids mentioning voice-based applications, but knowing that ongoing machine learning efforts between Apple and IBM are expected to grow, it’s not too hard to speculate.

If you’re wondering why Apple would agree to creating this potential internal software rivalry, the answer is simple: legacy. Despite earlier efforts between the two companies to drive the creation and adoption of custom iOS business applications, the process has moved along slowly, in large part because so much of the software that enterprises already have is in older “legacy” formats that is difficult to port to new environments. By working with IBM more closely, Apple is counting on making the process of moving from these older applications or data sets to newer AI-style machine learning apps significantly easier.

Another interesting aspect about the new Apple IBM announcement is the IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple, which is a simple, web-based interface that lets Apple developers start experimenting with the Watson services and other cloud-based services offered by IBM. Using these tools, for example, lets you build and train your own models in Watson, and even create an ongoing training loop that lets the on-phone models get smarter over time. In fact, what’s unique about the arrangement is that it lets companies bridge between Apple’s privacy-focused policies of doing on-device inferencing—meaning any incoming data is processed on the phone without sending data to the cloud—and IBM’s focus on enterprise data security in the cloud.

Another potentially interesting side note is that, because IBM just announced a deal with Nvidia to extend the amount of GPU-driven AI training and inferencing that IBM is doing in their cloud, we could see future iOS business apps benefitting directly from Nvidia chips, as those apps connect to IBM’s Nvidia GPU-equipped cloud servers.

More than anything, what the news highlights is that in the evolution of more sophisticated tools for enterprise applications, it’s going to take many different partners to create successful mobile business applications. Gone are the days of individual companies being able to do everything on their own. Even companies as large as Apple and IBM need to leverage various skill sets, work through the legacy of existing business applications, and provide access to programming and other support services from multiple partners in order to really succeed in business—even if it does make for some friendly competition.

As dynamic and exciting as the smartphone market has been for many years, it’s hard to imagine a time when it just won’t matter that much to most people. Kind of like how many people now feel about the PC market.

Don’t get me wrong, the smartphone market will still be very large and extremely important to some people for quite a while (just as the PC market still is for many—myself included). But the truth is, we’re rapidly approaching the era of smartphone market maturation, and quite possibly, the end of smartphone market growth. Along with those changes are likely to come a shift in attention and focus away from smartphones, and towards other more “interesting” product categories—in the press, on people’s minds, and, most importantly, in critical industry technologies and developments.

The signs of this impending change are all around. In fact, you could argue that this is already starting to occur. While total 2017 worldwide smartphone shipment data may end up showing a modest increase over 2016 (final numbers have yet to be released), the fact that China—the world’s largest smartphone market—showed a 4% decline in Q4 2017 is a very telling and concerning indication of where the market is headed.

Essentially, what that data point tells us is that even in rapidly-growing markets, we’ve started to hit saturation. In other words, pretty much everyone who wants a smartphone now has one, and future market growth will be nearly completely dependent on the length of replacement cycles. Adding insult to injury, we’ve also started to see the extension of smartphone lifetimes from around 2 years to around 3 years in many parts of the world.

The reasons for these extended lifetimes are several, but there can be little doubt that many people are simply content with their current phones and don’t feel a pressing need to upgrade as frequently as they used to. Now that most people have large-screen smartphones, it’s easy to understand why.

But the implications from this shift are dramatic. Individual vendors who have been benefiting from overall industry growth are starting to see a much more challenging competitive environment in many regions around the world. From India to China to the US and beyond, major smartphone vendors are finding it much harder to enjoy the kind of comfortable growth to which they’ve become accustomed.

More specifically, for a company like Apple, the widely discussed topic of another “super cycle,” where a large group of existing customers upgrade to the newest phones, may prove to be a phantom phenomenon. It’s not inconceivable to think that the previous iPhone 6-driven growth spurt was really just a single point in history inspired by the initial transition to large screen phones. Recent reports of 50% reductions in iPhone X production certainly suggest that could be the case. (To be fair, many supply chain-related rumors turn out to be nothing more than that—rumors, with little connection to reality. So, we’ll need to wait until at least the calendar Q1 and maybe even Q2 shipments are released to know for sure.)

Challenges for the iPhone X and other high-end smartphones go well beyond just the appearance (or not) of a replacement “super cycle.” Smartphone maturation has also extended to product design and innovation, with new models from almost all vendors offering little more than incremental changes versus previous generations. Plus, even with new phones that have designs or capabilities that do take an arguably larger leap versus previous generations—such as with the iPhone X—it’s not clear everyone really wants those changes. Again, it seems many consumers are relatively content with their phones as they are.

Even more concerning longer term is the question of more advanced innovations. While there is no doubt that smartphone companies will keep working to improve their products—just as PC makers continue to do, even in an era of declining sales—as product categories mature, those advancements do tend to slow down. Most of the really exciting core technology developments tend to show up in newer product categories that are perceived as having a greater opportunity for future growth.

Smartphones are obviously not going away anytime soon—just as PCs continue to play a critical role for many. But whether it’s some futuristic AR glasses, nearly invisible “ambient” computing wearables, or some other types of devices we’ve yet to even imagine—there’s no doubt that at some point in the relatively near future, smartphones maturity and stability will make them seem like “old technology.” It isn’t a question of if, but only a question of when.