Yeah, Apple is typically late to the party, but they usually come out with something well laid out. I personally don’t care to be at the edge of technology anymore. There are too many companies having the users be the beta testers. It’s true in hardware as much as software, all the way down to GPU 12V connectors. That’s one thing that made Apples jump to ARM so impressive, as you really didn’t give up much to gain a lot in return. It’s taken MS a lot of attempts to do the same, and it still remains to be seen if Snapdragon X is going to be well-received. MS completely bungling one of the exclusive launch features might have sunk whatever excitement it did have going for it. I mean, I heard local radio jocks talking about how concerned they were about Recall.
Apple has their own reasons for the timing of their feature rollouts. As you say, they are often late to the party but certainly not exclusively so.
I'm not convinced that in ten years time Windows on Arm will be such a revolutionary moment.
The big reason is that the world of computing has changed. Smartphones are the primary computing modality for consumers in 2024. When Apple launched the iPhone is 2007, Steve Jobs famously described it as "the computer for the rest of us." He was prescient yet spot on.
Five years later in 2013 Apple had their hardware mic drop moment when they announced the Apple A7, the first 64-bit SoC to be deployed in a consumer phone, the iPhone 5s. The rest of the semiconductor industry was speechless and dumbfounded. It was evident to many pundits that the possibility of an Arm processor in a Mac was conceivable.
Today
smartphones drive major advances in consumer technology not PCs. And not just CPUs. Display technology, battery technology, user interface, biometric identification, camera modules, photo/video post-processing, OCR, and more. Everyone walking on the street use wireless earbuds in 2024, no one uses wires.
Microsoft -- by the bungling of two CEOs (Ballmer and Nadella) -- no longer have a physical presence in mobile.
All of the great success Apple has enjoyed with M-series SoCs in their Macs was laid out by 15+ years of iPhone and iOS engineering. Apple thinks of itself as primarily a software company whose software (and services) run best on their proprietary hardware. So while Apple books most of their revenue from hardware sales, in their hearts they are software people.
Their features are typically well thought out from a software perspective, they would never consider this half-baked Copilot+ Recall approach.
Still it's good to see Microsoft make a go at it. AI is already being welcomed with open arms by Fortune 100 companies, some of them have embraced it for nearly a decade. Eventually useful consumer-focused features of generative AI will make it to the consumer marketplace but as always, the initial rollouts are squarely biased towards programmers and forward-thinking enterprise customers.
My guess is that next week's Apple WWDC will appear to be underwhelming to many and some people online (including a few here) will point and jeer at Apple. It's not a race, there is no finish line.
Apple has a long history of holding sensitive things close before eventually letting others get access. They did this with geolocation APIs, Apple Pay APIs. There are probably doing the same with Spatial Computing APIs and they will definitely do it with GenAI APIs. They will keep the most sensitive APIs for their own exclusive use before they allow third-party developers access to these, maybe in 2025, maybe later.
Being early out of the gate with a thoughtless offering is not a great way to nurture trust and confidence, either in your developer partners, your big enterprise customers, or Joe Consumer.
