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Apple’s AI Advantage

~ The Prepared Expat ~ Leave a comment

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There are few who would challenge that one of Apple’s significant competitive advantages is its ability to design and manufacture physical products. Even fewer, perhaps, would challenge that Google’s significant competitive advantages are it’s access to data and algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) which process that data. As a upcoming frontier in technology appears to be AI, many have assumed that Google’s advantages are so superior to Apple’s that the AI frontier is Google’s battle to lose, and Apple’s to struggle to win. It is my contention, though, that while Google has significant advantages in AI, Apple has advantages critical for competing in the AI frontier.

To argue for my position, I will identify the critical competencies necessary for competing in AI, then argue that Apple’s advantages in some competencies give them, at minimum, an equal fighting chance with Google’s advantages in different competencies. Continue reading →

iPad Pro and the toaster-fridge

~ The Prepared Expat ~ 6 Comments

In 2012 Tim Cook answered a question about merging OS X and iOS by saying:

“You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those aren’t going to be pleasing to the user.”

This year, at the BoxWorks conference, Cook was again questioned about whether OS X and iOS would merge. His response was similar:

“We don’t believe in having one operating system for PC and mobile…We think it subtracts from both, and you don’t get the best experience from either. We’re very much focused on two.”

The philosophy behind these statements is, of course, that the best user experience comes when the software is perfectly suited for the form of the device it will be running on. Devices intended to be put in one hand or two hands or on a lap or on a desk are radically different. Cook’s argument is that this requires that the OS itself be suited to the form of the device. Apple has consistently refused to make toaster-fridges. With one glaring exception: iPad. Continue reading →

The Irreducible Reality of Form

~ The Prepared Expat ~ 2 Comments

In the second to fourth centuries, the philosophy of Gnosticism became popular. Though it had many variants, a key tenet was that matter was a lesser emanation of a kind of divine spirit. Human spirits were thus spiritual and good, but human bodies and matter were physical and evil, a limitation that had to be escaped in order to achieve true gnosis or enlightenment.

Why on earth do I start an article about technology–and this is an article about technology–with an ancient philosophy?1 Because good design of technology has to be based on an anti-gnostic notion that humans, fundamentally and irreducibly, are physical creatures and use physical products in a physical world. Those physical products, just as fundamentally and irreducibly, have a specific physical form that can be well or poorly suited to a human’s physical body or to the physical world.2 These forms both limit and enable functionality that is unique to that form. This interplay between a form’s function, it’s suitability to the human body and it’s appropriateness for the physical world is what design considers–and it is the interaction of these elements that has led to the success and failure of many technological products.3

Continue reading →