Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing' (opens in new tab)

One thing about Apple is things can make sense for them to explore that don't make sense for others to. They have a big enough ecosystem, enough cash to do R&D on an idea for decades, and a culture of killing things that aren't good enough that make them an ideal place to determine whether ideas are a conceptual dead end versus just haven't been executed well enough (or tied to the right ecosystem to make them work).

Foldables make sense for Apple to explore because even if it's ~5% likely to be able to be productized, the return is measured in the tens of billions.

Smart speakers were comparatively cheap and are probably profitable, so even if they're not a huge market they made sense.

AR/VR remains to be seen. Meta's still learning how to build hardware and operating systems and still learning how to sell actual products, so they're probably not the right ones to test concept risk when they already have so much execution risk. They also don't have the leverage or insertion point that Apple does if e.g. AR/VR turns into an alternative to computers & iPhones instead of an alternative to consoles. It may also be that Vision Pro is just a prelude to AR that ship in ~2035 but lays so much groundwork that nobody stands a chance at competing by the time the tech is ready, letting Apple secure the next trillion dollar product.

Cars were expensive and cancelled, that's the one that required Apple to stretch the most in terms of both brand and execution.

In your Google example, remember they invented transformers and yet did nothing with them. Any failure in Google's robotics efforts are likely due to Google having an absolutely horrible record of shipping and standing behind products. I wouldn't trust a Google robot because I wouldn't trust a Google product.

Not playing everywhere is an existential risk. Because IT is so integrative, if anyone gets a huge leg up in any sector, Apple risks getting shut out in a lot of other sectors.

Spatial Computing/iVision is, for example, a claim in vr. It gives them some exposure to the market, some ability to extend & integrate their existing application/computing ecosystem into this medium. Ditto for all the other pieces; they're all integrative. Smart speakers work with airplay. iWatch works with iPhone works with iOS. The close integration lets them rebuff innovation in any other field: no one small can come along and build the next VR headset or the best watch to compete with Apple in any of these sectors, because no one can integrate like Apple. No one else has all the products. You have to have complete over the horizon horizontal control to keep your intense market power, and Apple is invested above all in there never being a chink in that armor, in making sure they can completely dictate the shape of all products by producing & owning all the products themselves. This is Apple.

Hence, Apple has to dabble everywhere. It maintains the most, it prevents real competition from forming, and it earns them a couple % revenue here and there to boot.

Expressing an entirely different brand of cynicism, I'd also ask: where else could Apple look to expand into? None of these sectors has been a runaway success. But it's not like Apple's missing the boat on some massive new tech that a huge new Total Addressable Market. It's been absent from Crypto and AI but generally it's just expanding wherever there's any opportunity, and why not when you have the cash & when any sector could become huge?

For what it's worth, I don't know whether we'll ever know all of the Jobs-era skunkworks projects that were shut down before they ever saw the limelight. The lid on the rumors was much tighter back then.

Because they Need to do R&D and spend some money on this category. They also have way too much cash with Execs having very little idea of where Apple should be heading. Tim Cook has zero product understanding. That means he has to rely on engineers. Most of the original product people that were with Apple ( the design team ) has all left Apple. So what makes a successful company more successful? The sales and marketing people.

A substantial fraction of households that can afford Apple devices likely owns several of them. So if Apple wants to multiply their revenue, they need to create products with wide appeal with margins (in raw numbers -- not just percentages) comparable to their current offerings i.e. margins of $1000+ per household. That might help understand the kind of products they are pursuing.

Apple is uniquely situated (cash surplus, deep tech + manufacturing expertise, consumer product + marketing expertise) to take on such multi-year product-oriented R&D. Even if one out of N (serious) attempts pays off, the scale of success will justify the amortized ROI.

I also can't imagine a home robotics use case that I would get excited over. Can anyone think of anything? I would guess any new product would be more complex, less efficient, and a security risk. It'll be cool and trendy for a few months and then die off. Just like the Alexa and Google speakers that can tell you the weather or adjust your lights...is it REALLY that useful outside of entertaining your nieces and nephews? My guess is that they'll make some revenue from collecting user data and selling it to data brokers or something.

Edit: someone below said laundry folding robot. I'd see that as useful.

I like that Apple is taking on big hard futuristic problems, like AR/VR, AI, and home robotics.

But from a business perspective it seems unlikely to be successful. Apple could "easily" sell a luxury car and TVs and print many billions of dollars right away. They wouldn't need unproven tech -- they could just use their design skills along with vertical integration to have very nice products that people would want to buy. Apple should eschew some of Silicon Valley's obsessions, like self-driving cars, which most people do not care about at all, and instead focus on their strengths.

that failure is much more a leadership issue than a talent issue. Google was founded by PhD students and it shows. (I am one.) It's like a giant lab where things get prototyped and innovations are pushed, but where product ends up sidelined by bloated admin (how many levels are there and why does it feel like an MMORPG i.e World of Warcraft) and lack of clear capitalist vision (I'm actually anti-capitalist but even I can admit to this LOL). Honestly, it sounds exactly like a university. I used to think Google was slated to be the king of AI back when I starting out because they had ALL the talent (even OpenAI is its offshoot if you consider early employees and Ilya himself). I feel like it was so lateral that it was a loose federation of small tribes of smart people that live under the same banner, but not a tight organization where each team had its purpose within a giant mechanism. But as the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth.

Apple is WAY different internally. For all its dreariness and corpo atmosphere (not allowed to talk to each other, teams siloed and laser focused on shipping a specific product) they have much clearer vision of what will sell and what not, usual company missteps (AR glasses) notwithstanding.

Good luck to them. Xiaomi has been already doing it for years at approachable prices. They now also have a car, the Su 7, a project which Apple gave up on. Of course, it possibly comes with th CCP/PLA embedded spyware.

> Why does every store have self opening doors, but no houses do?

This is easy to answer: I don't want a door that opens by itself (except in my dreams) because it's potentially dangerous, might open when I don't want (and let my cat out) and it's likely an energy sieve.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze - even not counting maintenance.

It's also just laziness. Even in homes with very few things to do maintenance on, things still go unmaintained.

> fans and pumps to move heat in or out of the house or water around the garden, they're a pain because they break, it's only worth it if you're running a commercial operation.

Um, what? AC and sprinklers? Those are common in homes.

I think the issue is that smart home devices didn't do anything I couldn't already do, but a physical switch is faster than arguing with the computer.

Hey Google, can you turn off the baby bedroom light?

I'm sorry, I don't know that device.

As another commenter alluded to, good Smarthome tech becomes an appliance, which isn’t a desirable high margin business, and bad tech becomes a nuisance which is also not a desirable business.

That’s why Google is slowly getting out of it and shifting their focus from Nest. That’s why Apple never did much beyond a few speakers, and it’s why Amazon is right at home in that business (but even they’re getting out of the money-losing voice assistant aspect).

Robotics… seem like a miss to me. Very few tasks at home are as simple as vacuuming, but maybe I just lack the creativity and vision. Apple surely has some great tech left over from the car R&D so who knows. Apple is unfortunately not great at a “communal” perspective when making things.

I think a big issue no one talks about will be robot storage/garages. It’s already an issue for Roomba and anything bigger will be a no-go for many households. That is probably apples best chance - make it pleasant to look at and a status symbol.

I like smart devices for their automation potential. I use smart plugs to turn on and off lights, coffee makers, grow lights, heating mats. The ability to quickly program a plug to turn on every morning at 10am and turn off again at 10pm is valuable to me. It's even more valuable if you get into hobbies like aquarium keeping where you can automate lights and fish feeders.

Yes, you can do all of these things manually, but are you good at keeping a flawless schedule? It may not matter if you forget to turn on the coffee maker but it matters a lot if you forget to feed the fish. And you won't always be available to handle these things every single day, unless you work from home and follow an extremely rigid schedule.

I have a Roomba, it works pretty well for doing 'maintenance level' vacuuming--keeping the level of cat hair to a manageable level, etc. For the most part, robot vacuums have succeeded in becoming boring, which is what I really want in an appliance.

I want a smart home, but I also do not want to send my data to anyone else and I don't really have the time to cobble something together.

If apple can refrain from sending the data to icloud or any other servers, then I would be very interested.

> ”“Smart home" has really fallen flat across the board,… I just don't think people really want smart home devices all that much.”

Or are these devices just so common, unremarkable, and ubiquitous now that you just aren’t noticing them anymore? I can’t think of any of my friends and family who don’t at least have some smart speakers and smart lighting devices in their home.

Smart door locks that you can open with your phone, and smart door bells and security cameras that you can monitor remotely are becoming pretty common too.

I think it's that most actually useful smart home stuff was very quickly saturated. It is great to be able to adjust my lights easily. It is great to turn my TV off in the other room. It is great to have a robot vacuum.

But a smart coffee maker? A smart clock? A smart dishwasher? All this garbage ended up being gimmicks and it ran out of steam so quickly.

I hope the things that are useful continue to get support as the big players abandon smart home expansion.

I really do want smart home devices! My biggest issue so far has been stability and interoperability issues between each vendor and system. Those things have gotten better, but are still a headache. Apple is in a pretty good position to solve those pain points (at the cost of buying new devices (Apple brand or Apple Certified maybe?). Or maybe I need to dive deeper into HomeAssistant...

I thought I would be into smart home devices, but the companies fucked up by turning them into privacy and security liabilities, with poor interoperability and likelihood of turning into junk when the company goes under.

From what I hear, it's a nightmare to get Siri to know what light you want to turn on. Unfortunately it seems like apple is trailing the pack in the smart home area.

HomeKit and HomePods are such a mess, I don’t think Apple has it in them.

I have the feeling that basically all current smart home products are either a disappointment in their limitations or useful but really time consuming.

The only smart appliances I got are Philips hue lights which are nice but well, after the initial discovery, I use them as classical light bulbs 99% of the time. I’ve found zero useful automation (not saying they don’t exists) and I can’t see why I would control lighting from my phone (at least not enough to justify spending hundreds into smart bulbs and smart switches).

Ultimately, I’m not against smart home but since each home is unique, by definition, those objects are only useful if the user is willing to invest enough time to tailor the configuration to be useful in his own unique house.

Oh I thought about ranting about my experience with Sonos speakers which are really nice speakers with great audio quality for the money and size and everything you’d want except the "smart" part you are forced to use with their terrible (and closed) software.

Sonos would like a word.

Pretty sure you can get a domestic service to pop by at much lower than that. Biologics are still king.

I just want a machine that will produce a cup of something that is almost, but not completely, unlike tea.

Automated lawn mowing is relatively mature at this point and works well, assuming you have a relatively flat lawn.

A one time purchase price of 20k would be acceptable. $20-30k per year is ridiculous. For that price you can hire a person to come and clean your toilet for 5 hours a day, every single day.

I would pay like $5000 for a laundry folding robot. I just want a big washing-machine sized box where I dump my laundry at the top and slowly everything gets folded. That's 1 hour / week freed up.

If you replace enough of your cabinets with dishwashers you never need to put dishes away again.

Tech companies: best we can do is an AI that reads your kids bedtime stories. You know, the moments we actually cherish. The manual labor is all we'll humans have left to do.

Make your bathroom entirely waterproof and add a drain and high pressure sprinklers. Done.

> Japan makes incredible bidet toilets that got some traction during the pandemic.

But Google actually got rid of theirs because they can't be used with recycled water/greywater, since it isn't clean enough.

> Urban gardening pods that allow anyone to grow healthy food at home.

Pretty much anything involving urban gardening is a fake hippie pastoralist idea. Centralization and professionalization is good.

UL has, or had, a whole house in Fremont (maybe Milpitas) associated with their Fremont lab location for testing Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/etc interoperability in a "real-world" setting. They're not the only test lab to do something like that, either.

It would not surprise me at all if Apple had a similar facility for themselves, especially for internal demos, user testing, and sanity checks.

They even have a small medical facility.

WWDC21

Ok. Now you’re just reading the script from the hit Disney channel movie Smart House

apple already sells a device for taking care of kids, just get them an ipad and it'll keep them entertained all day long! /s

Whisper >>>> Siri

Yeah, in retrospect, it was silly to think the company responsible for Siri was going to succeed in the self-driving car business... or the robot business.

They need some actual management talent, evidently.

I was about to say the same thing, Apple have too much capital and they do not know what to do with it. It would be better to give it back to their investors instead of...this.