I miss more on iOS because if that. The eight things I cared about are mixed in with the 94 that I don’t.

I feel like this would result in so many broken phones that most companies would not want to enter this market. Wouldn’t be surprised if you could find something on Alibaba or Amazon, but I doubt it’s much of a market.

That all depends on Apple’s ability to run it effectively, and they have basically no demonstrated ability to do that.

App Review is an absolute joke. Listen to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts is developing an IMDB competitor app, and he’s been rejected three times as of that episode. One rejection was for playing copyrighted video without permission – in an app that doesn’t have any code that can play a video. One was for not having a link to his T&Cs in a field in the app store that can’t render links. And the third was for displaying copyrighted media in his screenshots (maybe? no one really knows), and that media was the cover art for movie and TV shows. None of those even pass the sniff test. We all know that you’re allowed to show the cover art for a movie in an app that has information about movies. We all know that’s Fair Use, but beyond that, a third grader knows that literally everything in the world that presents information about movies does it. At the exact same time that all this is happening, Apple happily published some scammer’s app called “Threads” and let it collect 300,000 people’s information who thought they were downloading the actual Threads app from Meta.

It’s always been this way. I personally wrote the original iPhone app for a large US retailer in 2008 – the first year the App Store existed. App Review’s only purpose then was to detect your use of private APIs, usually because that would let you build things Apple didn’t want you to build. That’s the only purpose it serves today, 15 years later. Everything else is random noise that just punishes you unpredictably for no reason. I had an update of that app rejected once for using our own company logo as the icon. They don’t catch obvious scams. They never have. The people doing these reviews know nothing or are given so little time that the way to game their metrics is to just randomly reject sometimes without analysis. Unless they change something, it’ll just be a thing that scammers fill out however they want with no consequence to them at all, and a random 5% of legitimate developers will waste a few weeks arguing over when it’s applied to them with no logical basis in reality.

I think there are probably some ways to cross over a bit, but really, LLMs aren’t necessarily aimed at the kind of things we want a virtual assistant to do today. Siri falls down mostly on its ability to correctly do things quickly and reliably. Generating 5000 words of convincingly human sounding explanations isn’t what I want from a thing I quickly trigger on my phone. What I want is very short or no reply accompanying the action I wanted to take. Call this person. Start navigation to an address. Turn on the lights. Play the version of a song I like from this specific live album. Some of those things are things Siri really sucks at today, and none of them are likely to get a lot better with an LLM in place. Maybe playing music benefits from a more robust understanding of the language of my query, but the rest of it are things where the suckage is more that Siri takes 8 seconds for the server to respond or just inexplicably decides that today it doesn’t know how to turn on a light.

At this point it feels like a great LLM would let Siri fail to respond to a much more varied set of ways for me to ask my question in English, but that’s not really the target we’re shooting for here.

You could do it with custom development work – write your own iOS and/or Mac app that uses Apple’s Maps API, but this becomes a fairly substantial software project that you need a programmer to create. It’s not doable just using the Maps app on your device as a user.

I don’t think the current product can sell “boatloads” at almost any reasonable price. I don’t think the current device has enough “floor” to make it possible unless they just want to sell each unit for four-figure losses to subsidize a market for it. Lots of people have tried to figure out how Apple would make a cheaper version, but just the component costs seem like anything under like $2000 would lose money. Obviously hardware gets cheaper to make over time, but it’s hard to see how they find a $999 product in this thing.

And even at $999, I’m not sure what the volume looks like.

It’s incredibly cool, and they’ll sell what I think of as “a lot” of them for $3500 to rich tech dudes, but “rich tech dudes” is a tiny fraction of Apple-scale volumes. And once you start dealing with the more wider and more price-conscious public, you probably have to have a better sales pitch than “cool”. What can this thing do that an iPad can’t do at half the price and 10x the battery life? It’s potentially a great monitor for a Macbook, but again, if you’re price conscious and you already had to buy a Macbook, do you need another thousand bucks to have a cooler way of looking at the screen that’s sitting right in front of you for free? And again, those comparisons are to a $999 product that doesn’t exist. A more realistic “cheap” Vision Pro is probably $2500 instead of $3500, and I just don’t know who buys that after “rich tech dudes”.