Apple is in a tough spot. While the company is painfully behind the competition when it comes to getting a solid handle on AI development, it seems to be speeding up the timeline to release its first AI-powered smart glasses. That’s… quite a gamble.
The way here
You already know the story. After releasing the Apple Watch and adjusting its course to turn it into what it is, Apple went on to make a series of bad bets that didn’t pay off.
It swung and missed with the first Apple Vision Pro, it swung and really missed with Project Titan, and by the time it realized the AI race was worth running, it was already a few laps behind.
Is it true that the people working on each project wouldn’t have been the same? Of course. However, focus and attention are shared and finite assets, no matter how big a company is.
Meanwhile, Meta got the break of a lifetime. It completely missed mobile and went on to gamble a fortune on immersive initiatives. One of which was its partnership with Ray-Ban for “smart” glasses, for a rather pointless clone of Snap’s Spectacles.
Then, the generative AI boom fell right into its lap, at a time when (thanks to Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist) the company already had been developing the underlying technology that allowed it to put two and two together.
To be clear, Meta was caught off guard by ChatGPT as much as anyone. But LeCun grasped the situation and quickly turned things around with the Llama models.
The way out
Apple, of course, did the opposite. It watched from the sidelines, painfully slow to act. But perhaps, this years-long miss on AI (and its newfound clarity on the smart glasses) might have put them exactly where they like to be. As a longtime executive told Bloomberg recently:
In the world of AI, you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment. (…) That’s not how Apple is wired. Apple sits down to build a product knowing what the endgame is.
As it turns out, Apple might have stumbled into a perfect storm of a clear product vision, a defined technological path, and an ambitious deadline.
What remains to be seen is whether they truly grasp that they can’t afford to swing and miss again.
What do you think? Would you have use for an assistant who can see what you see? Can Apple catch up? Let us know in the comments.
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