The announcements of the iPhone SE and the 9.7” iPad keyboard on March 21st were met with fairly ho-hum responses. The two devices announced last week in and of themselves are fine, but they are not new or revolutionary, they are iterations on themes from previous devices, so it’s what wasn’t announced that is of more interest.
These clearly are not bold new efforts from Apple like the original iMac, or the iPod, and didn’t require a lot of heavy-lifting from the design team, which begs the question, if they weren’t working on the iPhone SE and the 9.7″ iPad “Pro”, what do they have the A team at Apple working on? What are Apple lead designer Jony Ive and his team focusing their time on?
Let’s look at some possibilities:
But before we begin, a clarification: As much as I like Microsoft, and get a kick out of poking fun at the Apple aura, I recognize and respect the beautiful job Apple does. Bottom line Apple, in general, does beautiful industrial design and, in general, focuses on the key user scenarios for a given product, and optimizes around implementing those fewer things really, really well*.
So, with that said, what might Jony and his team be working on if it wasn’t the SE and a keyboard for the iPad?
The iCar?
There have been lots of rumors recently about Apple being interested in autonomous, self-driving cars. To be fair, every leading technology company, and every auto manufacturer, are looking at this space, but I don’t see this as a major focus of Ive currenlty, and maybe never.
Apple is smart about sticking to their core areas of competency and evolving success in one area into other, closely related segment as they have done leveraging customers from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad. While one could argue that autonomous cars are really just big, self-propelled computers, the barriers to entry for building automobiles and establishing the global distribution, sales and service network required to support them is pretty daunting.
Might Apple be dabbling in this area? Might Jony toss out a few concept drawings that might get pulled into some “Apple Looks at the Future” presentation? Sure, but I don’t feel that’s where they’re spending a ton of time right now.
Virtual Reality?
There’s huge investment and movement underway in the area of virtual and augmented reality with devices from Microsoft (HoloLens) , Facebook (Oculus Rift), HTC (Vive) and others already being available to developers and consumers. Apple knows they need to catch up here and in January they acquired FlyBy, a VR company and also recently hired Doug Bowman from Virginia Tech, who ran VT’s virtual reality research efforts, so they are clearly investing in this.
Given Apple is in the early stages of investment in VR/AR, and their history of letting others pave new markets or product categories then refining and delivering break-through implementations, and, assuming a lot of early adoption of VR/AR will be driven by gaming, where Apple has little to no presence, I don’t see them getting into this market in the near term.
So again, I see some involvement with Ivy’s team right now, but not a majority of their focus.
MacBook Touch?
Touch-enabled laptops and PCs are a growing segment of the PC market and are arguably the bright-spot in an otherwise tepid industry. There are a myriad of touch enabled “PCs” on the market including Microsoft’s Surface line, the Surface Book introduced last year, as well as convertibles, laptops and desktops from Dell, HP, Sony and others.
Google has also recently jumped into the touch screen convertible/laptop market with the Android based Pixel C which means Apple is the only major OS player to not have a touch based laptop. And while the iPad Maxi (aka “Pro”) might make a nice large-screen consumption device, or illustration tablet for artists, there’s growing market feedback that says it’s really not a device than can replace the average professionals laptop.
To me it’s clear that people increasingly want, and expect, all their devices to be touch enabled, and that presents a problem for an OS provider that has multiple, overlapping operating systems.
Microsoft bit the bullet, and caused no small amount of pain, when they introduced Windows 8 to span both touch and keyboard devices, but with the evolution to Windows 10, they now have a single OS than can span phones, tablets, laptops and desktops, and with Pixel C, Google has made it clear that their future direction for phones, tablets and laptop type devices is a single OS, Android, not Android plus Chrome.
While Tim Cook has said Apple won’t “merge” iOS and OS X, I’d argue this may be more a case of semantics in how Apple will approach the challenge of evolving two separate OS code bases, and secondly, much like Apple once said “nobody will buy big phones”, I think market pressures, and the pure economic cost of managing increasingly redundant code bases between iOS and OS X, will eventually result in a single OS from Apple.
So that means whether it is Apple adding touch to OS X, or them unifying iOS and OS X over time, it’s probable that Apple will have touch-enabled MacBooks, and this represents a perfect opportunity for a new design. I think Jony and team are probably spending a reasonable amount of time on this, along with the OS X development team.
Home Automation and Control?
(Spoiler alert; this is where I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jony and his team spending a significant portion of their time.)
Between Siri, OK Google, Cortana and Alexa, virtual assistants are becoming ever present in our lives. And with the Amazon Echo, the new Echo Dot, Fire TV, Apple TV, Windows 10 devices, most smartphones and soon Xbox One, we have an increasing number of devices in our homes through which we can access those assistants, and increasingly these devices are able to interact with all kinds of lights, outlets, devices and appliances in our homes.
Currently this type of voice/home automation is being implemented by Geeks and early tech-enthusiasts and there are competing and overlapping standards that make this overly complex, but the potential for home automation is huge, and Apple has a strong base to build from here. Plus, this early adoption tends to be happening in more affluent households, where Apple already has deep penetration.
And it’s clear there’s huge opportunity here as Google has spent over $4 Billion to acquire smart thermostat maker Nest, and web-cam company Dropcam.
As noted above, Apple excels at evolving their customer base along a continuum of technology, while delivering comfort and consistency to ease their customers transitions to each of these new experiences, and they are maniacal about focusing on fewer, more valuable features, and nailing both the ease of use, as well as the (mostly) flawless execution.
You know how to use an iPod? then you know how to use an iPhone. You know how to use an iPhone? then you know how to use an iPad. You use iTunes (shudder) to get music for your iPod? then you already know how to do music on your iPhone or iPad.
And as these millions of customers increasingly use, love and trust Siri, the step from phone/tablet to home assistance and control is fairly painless.
Imagine a set of beautifully designed devices that sit at various points in your house; you kitchen, family room, bedroom, that listen and perform an increasing number of commands that you give them, from reminding you to do something, to turning the lights in any room of the house on or off. And let’s give this set of devices a friendly and familiar name, like, I don’t know, how about Siri?
Siri is both a hardware device, and a smart digital assistant that fits beautifully into your home and just works. Siri’s design is elegant, simple, a nice compliment to your home, and takes advantage of the digital assistant you already know and use on your smartphone or tablet.
To me this is a perfect triangulation for Apple to extend and evolve their customer base into a whole new set of products and services.
So those are some of the areas Jony and team may be working on, and some of the future opportunities for Apple. And I wouldn’t be surprised if touch MacBooks and Home Automation are two of the areas getting a great deal of their attention, but then again, I could be wrong.
* When I say “in general” I mean, except for things like “hey, let’s stick the Pencil straight out the side of the iPad to charge it” or bricking people’s iPads with the iOS 9.3 upgrade.
clarkb... 