For some reason, a number of people read this blog entry of mine from September 2013 in the last few weeks: “Explaining Apple's Incremental Approach.” My thesis was that general observers of Apple tended at that time to expect Apple would have something revolutionary at least with each annual announcements. Disappointment would follow in media coverage, on social media, and in blog posts and podcasts when they didn’t.

But I argued that Apple’s trick is continuous incremental improvement. The revolutions are far apart. I think I nailed it over the last decade. What has Apple’s single memorable launch been? The M-series Apple silicon chips that forced an industry and reluctant reviewers to consider that Apple could achieve super-fast performance with chips they designed. You could argue the Apple Watch was revolutionary, but its first iteration wasn’t that exciting, unlike the original iPhone. The Watch has been all incremental improvement as it captured the vast majority of marketshare. Apple hasn’t introduced any new product in the last decade that abruptly changed the face of the market besides the M-series chips.

And yet—people still expect them to blow their minds with something they’ve never thought could be real. That explains to me the obsessive focus on augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) glasses or headsets. AR has more potential to my mind, as it’s a passthrough overlay on reality. I see massive opportunities for accessibility, safety, communication across languages, and much more. VR is meh. Years of what seem to be relatively well made options for VR haven’t led to anything compelling to bring people in at the numbers required to lower hardware costs (nor have hardware costs lowered enough in an attempt to bring more people in). Some gamers like VR. Meta-née-Facebook’s Metaverse and the whole “web3 is decentralized ownership of crypto assets in VR” hype have imploded like a soufflé when you slam the oven door. Sad!

We have gotten many reports over the year about Apple’s work on potential AR and VR systems, and then most recently that the AR project is on hold. I am sure Apple has 100 projects in the lab that they’re working on to figure out the next big thing that lets them expand their ecosystem—most importantly, increase their recurring service revenue to continue to uncouple their sustained growth from hardware sales as they grow a vastly larger mature base that upgrades devices less frequently, particularly into murky economic waters ahead.

That frisson of the new only comes every so often. I remember hearing about the Apple silicon Macs, figuring that they were probably faster but couldn’t be quite as good as advertised in daily use. Then I bought one, started using it, and—like I did with the iPad in 2010—felt like I had fallen forward into the future.