Apple entering the Home Assistant Fray

[tomsem]

Apple historically takes ideas implemented by other companies, re-packages them, doubles the price, and declares them new and innovative. The iPod wasn't the first 'mp3' player, iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, the iPad wasn't the first tablet, Apple Watch wasn't the first smart watch, etc.

But it seems to me they are having less and less market impact with their new products. I have yet to see an Apple Watch in the wild, for example, even though about half the people I see around have iPhones. Part of that is that there are many companies now that put out great electronic products and it is harder to stand out.

But HomeKit is going nowhere without some sort of device like this.

[wodin]

It's widely acknowledged that Steve Jobs genius was in marketing rather than technology, it just that the products he marketed happened to be technology but it could have been in any number of medium to high ticket arenas.

Tim Cook on the other hand is no Steve Jobs, and Apple has been sliding ever since losing Jobs' magic. I wouldn't expect Siri to make much of a splash in this market, if anything only to legitimize Alexa and more recently Google Home.

Spoiler:

Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Apple historically takes ideas implemented by other companies, re-packages them, doubles the price, and declares them new and innovative. The iPod wasn't the first 'mp3' player, iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, the iPad wasn't the first tablet, Apple Watch wasn't the first smart watch, etc.

But it seems to me they are having less and less market impact with their new products. I have yet to see an Apple Watch in the wild, for example, even though about half the people I see around have iPhones. Part of that is that there are many companies now that put out great electronic products and it is harder to stand out.

But HomeKit is going nowhere without some sort of device like this.

I've seen a fair few in the wild. The obvious limitation of the current generation Apple Watch is that it requires you to have an iPhone to get the most out of it.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by tomsem

But it seems to me they are having less and less market impact with their new products. I have yet to see an Apple Watch in the wild, for example, even though about half the people I see around have iPhones. Part of that is that there are many companies now that put out great electronic products and it is harder to stand out.

But HomeKit is going nowhere without some sort of device like this.

It's not just an Apple thing.

It's an ecosystem/brand loyalty kind of thing.
Once a company ecosystem grows big enough and brand loyalty strong enough, any halfway decent product will sell to the faithful, no matter how buggy or half-baked. So telling the successes from the thuds becomes much harder.

There's what? 200Million iPhones out there? 300Million?
And maybe 30 million of those bought iWatches?
12milion bought Apple TVs?
Are those successes or failures?
It is the same ecosystem but is the value proposition comparable?
Not clear.

Two very clear cases:

The original PS3 was a gold-plated over-priced disaster for Sony. It took years for them to strip out features to finally get its build costs in line with market pricing. Fans griped about losing features, about buggy games, about the higher price...
...and it still sold well enough that Sony survived (unlike Sega). Some of it was their home market which simply refuses to buy foreign products as long as a native alternative exists, but most of it was the loyalty of the people who grew up with Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 and couldn't conceive of switching to a different ecosystem. A similar dynamic is playing out right now with XBOX where a significant portion of the market shrugs off the graphics power differential between XB1 and PS4; they're not about to jump ship just because of slightly prettier pictures.

In contrast...

B&N's Nook zoomed from zero to 26% market share in early 2010 on the back of their brand loyalty. The reader was buggy, heavy, had a cumbersome interface, but the faithful bought it anyway and kept it alive while the fixes trickled out. Unfortunately for B&N they misread this loyalty and assumed product sales were drawing from the broader pool of mainstream buyers and not just their established customer base. Once that customer base bought all the ereaders it was going to buy and they had to reach the boader market, sales fell short of projections. A death spiral followed because the ecosystem wasn't strong enough to survive their missteps solely on brand loyalty.

There is a threshold beyond which brand loyalty trumps missteps, at least for a while. Apple has it. Google has it. Sony has it. Xbox has it. Nintendo had it but the missteps have been piling up...

Amazon looks like it's getting there. They didn't have it when the Fire Phone launched but their brand has gotten a lot stronger in the past two years.

The thing about brand loyalty, though, is that measuring success or failure by raw numbers isn't enough. You have to measure against the size of the brand's customer base.

Playstation loyalists continually pointed out that PS3 was selling at the same rate as most other consoles at that same point in their lifecycle so how could it be a failure? Except that it launched as a followup to the PS2, which had racked up a 90% market share so, regardless of the raw numbers, PS3 had failed to capitalize on that penetration and had driven a good portion of customers to the competition. For Sony's s bottom line that was a failure and the culprit was fired, japanese-style.

A product that might be a great success for one company might be deemed a failure at another. For perfectly valid reasons. As always, in these matters, context matters.

James Patterson selling a hundred thousand copies of a new book would be a dismal failure, whereas that same number would be a roaring success for 99% of writers.

You see it in movies and TV where shows get cancelled at CBS and ABC that would be tops at Fox or CW, to say nothing of the cable networks.

Raw number alone say nothing.

Homekit alone will get deployed to millions just off the Apple name.
Will a two years late me-too speaker help? Maybe. Maybe not.

But with Apple's installed base and brand loyalty it would have to be an eVilla level disaster not to sell.

[Jessica Lares]

They are probably building it both as a standalone speaker and iOS/Apple Watch/Mac integrated, and yeah, I don't doubt it'll be $399+ for the speaker. They're going to make it with the Beats audio stuff because they know people will want to use it for listening to stuff, especially music.

And maybe using your iPhone as a second device isn't 100% great. But when it can talk to your Apple TV, your existing AirPlay/Bluetooth speakers, HomeKit, your apps, car with CarPlay, etc without the separate device, and you already have a dock you stick it in, then a lot of people would rather that.

[fjtorres]

Cnet is reporting the Apple Echo will be like XBOX Kinect and have cameras to re ognize people, just like Kinect:

http://www.cnet.com/news/apples-echo...l-recognition/

Suddenly, $399 sounds quite plausible.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by wodin

Tim Cook on the other hand is no Steve Jobs, and Apple has been sliding ever since losing Jobs' magic.

This is because Steve Jobs just said: "This is what we offer. If you don't want THIS, we don't want YOU." The people buying Apple while Steve Jobs ran the company weren't so much Apple fans as Steve Jobs fans. (One of my ex-colleagues actually once said: "Why should I think when using a device? Steve Jobs has done that for me already.")

The problem Apple now has is the same as in the beginning of the 90's, when 'they' (the director's board) forced Jobs out of his own company because they thought they could do it better: they went building a bazillion products, and many different versions. Apple sales crashed, and eventually it went almost bankrupt... Apple was saved, ironically, by Microsoft, who invested something like 150 million. This allowed Microsoft to claim that they *didn't* have a monopoly on the computing market. (If they had, they would need to adhere to some very strict rules and laws.)

When Jobs came back in the late 90's, he immediately axed most of the products, putting down a simple line of products with one, or maybe two versions. Now, after Jobs died, Apple is on the 'many-versions' road again, and you immediately see that it's not working for them.

Apple is the Leica of the computing world (and vice versa: Leica is the Apple of the photography world). They have status, and are seen as very expensive and perfect by their users. To maintain that status, their products must be high-end, with NO low-end counterparts (do one thing, and do it very well), expensive, and well designed. If not, their users will run away. Apple is seeing this now, as they saw it in the 90's; and Leica saw the same in the 70's and 80's when it tried to diversify its product lines.

In my eyes, things such as these "home assistants" are just fads; unnecessary products. I'll have a look again when they are up to the standards of the Enterprise D's computer.

[kennyc]

I agree except for this:

Originally Posted by Katsunami

...

In my eyes, things such as these "home assistants" are just fads; unnecessary products. I'll have a look again when they are up to the standards of the Enterprise D's computer.

This is real, this is the future.
Git on Board.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I agree except for this:
This is real, this is the future.
Git on Board.

I won't. Ever. I'm not connecting my house to the internet in any way, full time, and especially not if the device depends on a company... whatever that company may be.

Even though I'm into technology, I want my devices to be disconnected from the internet, except when I choose otherwise. I don't have to be connected to everything and everyone all the time.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I won't. Ever. I'm not connecting my house to the internet in any way, full time, and especially not if the device depends on a company... whatever that company may be.

Even though I'm into technology, I want my devices to be disconnected from the internet, except when I choose otherwise. I don't have to be connected to everything and everyone all the time.

And that's fine, it's a choice, your individual choice, but regardless of that this is the direction the world is going. It is not 'a fad,' it is not 'unnecessary' as you claimed.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by kennyc

And that's fine, it's a choice, your individual choice, but regardless of that this is the direction the world is going. It is not 'a fad,' it is not 'unnecessary' as you claimed.

What can such a home assistant do that I cannot already do now, in one way or another? I can find information on the internet using one of several devices I have (switching internet access on at the time I need it), and I can control anything in my home, should I wish to, using home automation and/or remote controls.

[tubemonkey]

I use my voice to turn music and audiobooks on and off. For everything else, I use my hands.

All hail the mighty Echo

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

What can such a home assistant do that I cannot already do now, in one way or another? I can find information on the internet using one of several devices I have (switching internet access on at the time I need it), and I can control anything in my home, should I wish to, using home automation and/or remote controls.

Some folks prefer to use their voices for such tasks. To each his own.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

What can such a home assistant do that I cannot already do now, in one way or another? I can find information on the internet using one of several devices I have (switching internet access on at the time I need it), and I can control anything in my home, should I wish to, using home automation and/or remote controls.

Your choice. Your circumstances.
That does not necessarily apply to others.

I don't have an Echo myself and I don't see myself getting one in the immediate future. But I do understand why some people (a lot of people, in fact) can and do derive value from internet-connected devices.

At a minimum, connected devices extend a person's presence beyond their physical reach. Not just when they're in the house but also when they are outside.

As for the cloud-based connectivity, well, a lot of the "magic" in these devices *requires* computing power beyond what any reasonably priced computer can deliver today or might deliver any time soon. Natural language processing requires massive amounts of data and massive computing power; until a new electronics breakthrough increases the power of consumer-grade computers this technology requires a data center at the back end. (Think of it as Revenge of the Mainframe)

That is the real reason Amazon was first and why Google followed and why Apple lags and likely will continue to lag: these are by nature cloud-based services and cloud services is one of Amazon's core strengths. It is also where Apple is weakest because of their focus on consumer electronics. They have a lot of work to do to catch up to the leaders on cloud capabilities.

Interestingly, one of the leaders in cloud computing, Microsoft, doesn't seem interested in consumer level cloud services beyond the entertainment arena (where they are already a giant: $15B a year in revenue, 100M+ devices sold) because, according to a recent interview with THE NIKKEI, they are focusing on selling their cloud tools and services to other companies looking to build their own cloud data centers and services. (Key word in this discussion: data. These are *not* old school "data" centers. These new services use BIG DATA as fuel.)

http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Comp...transformation

It's not that they don't see the value of connected devices and cloud services but rather they see *more* money in helping other companies get into the business.

So, yes, cloud services are the future and advanced gadgets will require internet connectivity to operate. That is the paradigm that will dominate, moving forward, at least until IBM and HP's (and maybe others') efforts in molecular circuit (or quantum) computers become affordable commercial products and we can start buying Personal DataCenters. (PDCs?) And that is not soon.

The kinds of computing services headed our way: so-called AI, conversational interfaces, vision-based systems (super-Kinects), robotics, etc, will all be cloud-based.

Echo is the Altair of the new age.
The harbinger of a true new paradigm for consumer electronics.
Things are about to go crazy. Yet again.

It's enough to make one start yelling at the kids to get off the lawn...

[Cinisajoy]

For the record, I don't want my home "on" all the time either. But, I would guess there are thousands if not a million that would love that.
So yes, this will sell and not be a fad.
I may be losing my mind but I seem to recall people saying the Echo wouldn't sell. IIRC, people were begging to get invites to buy it.