If there’s one thing you should take away from today’s WWDC keynote, it’s that Apple has heard the mob of developers darkly warning that it’s been four years since the Mac Pro and that Apple isn’t committed to its professional market. This murdered-out hot-rod iMac Pro may be the replacement for the 2013 trashcan, or it may just be a desperate placeholder until a new pro tower can be conceived and birthed. Either way, it’s hard not to hear the subtext of today’s keynote as “Baby! I’ve changed! I swear! Don’t leave! I’ll give you anything you want! I’ll give you APIs for machine learning and augmented reality! Just stay!”
Oh yeah, about that. It looks like Apple is finally arriving for the Great Virtual Reality Fight – and where there are only a handful of phones supporting Google’s Project Tango, it looks like Apple’s plan is to make their solution run on any of their 64-bit hardware back to the iPhone 5s.* Some better than others, certainly, and almost certainly optimized for some notional 2017 iPhone (7s? 8? 10th Anniversary?), but for developers, there will be APIs and a pre-existing installed base. Where Apple hasn’t been first to the fight, they’ve generally arrived with a finished solution requiring only some polish once it’s made contact with reality (iTunes, iPod, iPhone…) so it’s not hard to imagine that within a year, Apple will be punching at equal weight with the likes of the Oculus Rift or the Hololens or Tango.
Except, of course, where the Apple Watch is concerned. We have yet another UI coming for this watch, the third major iteration in as many years, and this one looks like it might stick. When Google was coming up with their watch, I hypothesized that the goal was basically Google Now on the wrist, and that seems to be where watchOS 4 is heading, using Siri and machine learning to mine your device – more on that in a minute – and put the sort of “Your Day Today” stuff on your arm in order. Here a meeting, there a ticket, there driving time home, here tomorrow’s weather forecast, with reminders and notifications slid in as required to alert you to email or advise you to walk that last four minutes you need. There have been God only knows how many attempts at this on iOS – Donna, ARO Saga, Osito, Google Now itself – but they all relied on you giving the app access and mostly depended on you using Google services for mail and calendar. Four years on, this is built in at the OS level, and the key thing will be whether you have to use Apple’s primary apps and services or whether it can work with your Outlook calendar or your Gmail or the like.
And of course whether that data resides on your phone. Apple is all-in on personal privacy, or at least enough to make it a deliberate selling point. They went out of their way to assuage concerns about their always-listening speaker, to emphasize that their machine learning is searching your phone ON your phone, that your data stays your data. And as the only one of the Big Five tech firms in America whose business model relies purely on selling a physical product for cash on the barrelhead, they can get away with it in ways Google and Facebook simply aren’t and will never be capable of. As iMessage moves into the cloud, of course, this could get complicated, because now some of your data will be obligated to reside on Apple servers somewhere – but that’s why we download Signal, right?
There is a dividing line with this technology. I saw it to some extent when I was doing remote workstation support through ARD and would take over someone’s screen. About half the time the response was “ooh, cool!” and the other half it was “eww, creepy.” That nano-millimeter between cool and creepy is where Apple is trying to tiptoe, trying to offer you a magical experience without giving you reason to engage the suspicion module. Some of the split may be generational; the Snapchat kids are probably less bothered about the notion that a company could see all their stuff. Then again, when your experience with the Internet began as “they could be ax murderers” instead of “the app said it was OK to get in this guy’s car,” it’s not surprising that your reaction to some of this stuff is “ask questions first and upgrade later.” The goal for Siri – whether in your phone, your arm or the speaker you just parked under your TV – is to be JARVIS without becoming Big Brother.
About that TV…it takes about as much time to take a leak as Tim Cook spent talking about Apple TV. In fact, apart from the news that Amazon Prime Video, the last major streaming holdout, will be available by the end of the year, there wasn’t any news. Instead we got the HomePod, the Apple answer to Alexa and Google Home, and while it is pitched as a music device first and foremost, its Siri and HomeKit integration suggest that it will be the Apple hub for home in a way the Apple TV might have otherwise been. Which is interesting, given that the Apple TV has its own named operating system and App Store and the like.
Two possibilities here, both of which I suspect are true. One is that Apple is getting nowhere with its television plans. Rights-holders and broadband companies aren’t about to play along, especially with Ajit Pai ball-washing the cable companies with every decision, and without some sort of actual television service of its own, the Apple TV is a glorified and overpriced Chromecast. The other possibility is that Apple is really serious about Siri this time, and believes that by the beginning of 2018 it will be a sufficiently capable user interface to be the only interface in very strictly limited circumstances. Play this song, what’s the weather tomorrow, did the S&P 500 close up or down. Not a whole lot, and not appreciably more than you can get out of Siri now, but by using a very tightly-selected few “domains” and making them work well, Apple is betting that it can make voice a plausible UI mechanism which can then be expanded as needed.
It’s an interesting bet, and one that goes along with the emerging meme that the computer itself is being abstracted away. Google is more or less up front about this, saying that Google’s services are the real computer and that your watch or TV or speaker or phone or car or whatever is just your chosen portal through which you interact. Apple is doing something similar, trying to homogenize your phone and laptop and speaker and watch and tablet and desktop into one big lumpy pillow which you can fluff up into whatever configuration you presently require. (The addition of a dock and drag-and-drop and enhanced multitasking and a FILE SYSTEM BROWSER and the like to iOS 11 for iPad suggests that we’re not that far off from one OS to rule them all – “appleOS” maybe, but just as likely “siriOS” at this point. Are they siriOS? Possibly.
The pieces are all there. The voice recognition is finally approaching usability. The machine learning – if you can get past the suspicion – is starting to get better about surfacing the right information contextually. If you can go between watch and headphones and the larger phone in your pocket without pulling it out, maybe you do only need just the one 5-inch AMOLED-display VR-ready 2500-mAh-battery iPhone Superba that docks in your 4K display at the office instead of a phone and a tablet and a laptop.
In a lot of ways, then, Apple spent today asserting that they’re still here, and they’re still serious about everything, and that they want to build the future. It’s not time to sell the stock yet.
*ETA: according to Phil Michaels, the baseline is an A9 processor with iOS, so iPhone 6s and later. Jury is out on whether that includes the iPhone SE, which packs the A9 but not the 3DTouch components.