A few weeks ago Om posted a piece on Apple's new laptop based on their M1 chip. It's one of those huge transitions that gives Apple a much higher starting point for desktop and laptop machines - machines that are still very important to many of us. They've been working on this for at least ten years as part of their smartphone silicon effort. People like Horace Dediu and Om (and even a non-technologist like me) have noted the progression of Apple silicon and wondered if it would be deadly to Intel. For me the biggest surprise has been the software effort - writing was all over the place for on the silicon side.
Zoom's emergence represents a pot that had been slowly warming for decades coming to a sudden boil with pandemic-fueled heat. It's frustrating with a terrible UX and UI, can be iffy on highly asymmetrical Internet connections that are slow upstream (cable modems for example), causes enormous frustration for many, but it's better than other tools and works well enough. Last week I described it as the modern equivalent of the <blink> markup in html during the early days of web browsers like Mosaic. People think it's cool at the time, but it will be laughably primitive down the road.
Remote video tools will get better and may change some habits. At the same time others are recognizing the importance of face to face. One university I work with just completed a survey that found 0% of 1600 students said they'd prefer in-class instruction to remote leaning when the pandemic quiets down. Already there's a lot of experimentation on campuses and in some businesses. An animation company saw productivity crater and is working on a better than Zoom suite of tools for internal use. The university I mentioned has found messaging apps like Discord excel in spaces that Zoom handles poorly. And perhaps we'll get better Internet connectivity. Price to performance in the US is abysmal, 5G is a largely marketing joke, cable modems are too asymmetrical (upstream is slow) to support serious video conferencing, and the digital divide has widened the already huge education gap. There's a lot to fix. It's like cycling - you need to sort out infrastructure and culture along with adding bikes.
I'm confident tool improvements will come but serious leaps need to be taken and I don't have great confidence in the major players. What I'm more worried about, at least in the US and Canada, is infrastructure. A friend is moving from Colorado to North Carolina and needs a very solid Internet connection. The only advice I could give was to find cities that offered good fiber connections that we're from telcos. That mostly narrowed it down to Ting, which left only a few cities. The movement of people from cities to rural and suburban areas is constrained by many forces - this is one.
On to something else..
I've argued that virtual reality wasn't very important and augmented reality meant much more than projecting information in your field of view - and that Apple had just introduced their first AR product.
In a way glasses are AR devices - they help you see more than you normally would. The same for microscopes, telescopes, stethoscopes, I have built bat detectors that let me augment my world by adding a bit of theirs, ... the list is long. But back to my comment about Apple. I have to admit I was wrong. Apple's first AR product was the Apple watch, although they didn't know it at the time. At first it was more of a fashion statement with a weird assortment of apps. After a few years they learned what it was for. People saw it as something for improving their health and fitness. Exercise, heart monitoring, and even the state of your body. Jutta has an app that interfaces with other hardware for diabetes management. We're talking about life altering AR. The area is growing rapidly and we won't even think of it as AR because we're used to its Hollywood manifestation. Of course Alexa, Siri and other voice driven interfaces are AR. They augment our local information space. Apple's EarPods are just a portal you wear. There's still a place to visual AR, but the pot's already boiling. AR is here now.
Of course we should think about how these things fit into our lives. That's a serious area I'm not terribly confident about - at least if tech is making the design choices.
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