Do You Trust Apple?

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Listen to this post: On July 21, 1999, Steve Jobs did something remarkable at Macworld New York: first he went to Apple.com, then to “CNN Interactive”, then to Disney.com. That wasn’t the remarkable part: what blew the crowd away was when he picked up the just-introduced iBook and walked around while waiting for Disney.com to load. The crowd went wild at the lack of wires: I’m not going to quote this entire product introduction, but I’ve clipped the whole thing for your enjoyment; here are a few pertinent parts of Jobs’ introduction of what he called “AirPort”, and what the rest of the industry called “WiFi”: There is one more thing. The main point of this keynote was the aforementioned introduction of the original iBook: This meant that “one more thing” was in fact not just an extra unexpected product, but an explicit addition to the primary product’s feature set. No wire. What is going on here? We are really excited to announce, in addition to iBook, AirPort wireless networking…It’s a wireless LAN. It runs at 11 megabits per second, and it’s based on industry standards. This is 802.11 wireless networking, and everybody is jumping on board with this thing over the next six to nine months. So all sorts of devices are going to be able to interact with AirPorts. We’re just going to be there first and best, and the specification also incorporates quite a bit of privacy protection, so everything you send out is encrypted. A lot of privacy. We’ve worked with Lucent on this for the last 18 months, hand-in-hand to marry their wireless technology with our ease-of-use technology and to bring the cost of this down for people, because this stuff has been pretty pricey to date. Apple’s selling proposition has, in many respects, never changed: modern technology that is easy to use and private too. So AirPort, what is it? This is the first thing: this is the AirPort base station, and it looks like this, right like that, and so the AirPort base station is really cool… And, of course, industrial design: So what about the computer side of things? Well, iBook is the first computer ever designed right from the start to be optimized for wireless communications, and so right in every iBook are two built-in antennas…Then, we have an AirPort card, a small little card, and the iBook is designed to accept it. So let’s take a look at that. As you know, Apple pioneered this way of adding memory without taking your whole portable apart through simply lifting the keyboard. Well, we have enhanced that now to take an AirPort card, and as you see, there’s a space right there in every iBook ready for an AirPort card, and you can drop one in, just like that, and connect the cable that comes from the antenna. Right? You saw that? I’ll go back. Just connect that cable and push it in, and now your iBook is AirPort functioning. You are on the wireless network. All the software detects the AirPort card and automatically sets it up for wireless networking without going through hours of configuring your computer. It all happens automatically. This has been a major effort on the part of Apple’s hardware and software engineers and also Lucent. This paragraph is a bit extraneous, other than the fact it is personally meaningful: my first Apple computer was an iMac G4, the following all-white generation, with the same AirPort card installation. I remember being amazed at just how easy it was to add wireless. And now, here I am, 22 years later, still using an Apple laptop to write this Article. Apple HomeView Two weeks ago I wondered how long I was for the Apple ecosystem; one product I was definitely not interested in was the then-forthcoming Apple smarthome product: What struck me about Gurman’s article is just how unenthused I am by an Apple smarthome product. Some of this is fatigue from a decade of Siri disappointment and skepticism about the company’s ability to deliver on a voice-centric product. More than that, however, I bristle at the idea of introducing Apple’s constraints to more parts of my life. Those constraints aren’t just about things like full disk access. To the extent that Apple delivers on integration with things like thermostats and door locks is the extent to which they work with 3rd-party device makers; the problem is that third party device makers mostly suck, particularly from a software perspective. Even if Siri were perfect, Apple will have the challenge of delivering an experience that isn’t defined by the lowest common denominator. What I’m much more interested in is controlling the software layer myself. The fact of the matter is that with AI you can decompile almost all existing software — there is a revolution happening in gaming over the past few weeks, as game after game is decompiled to source and ported to any platform you wish — and you can write your own. That means my software that interacts with my agent in the way I want it to for everything; that’s way more exciting than praying Apple delivers the right API and that 3rd-party developers don’t suck. That product is called Apple HomeView, and some prominent Apple observers don’t get the point. John Gruber wrote on Daring Fireball: My skepticism boils down to the question of why anyone would want to add one (or more!) additional ever-present screens to our homes and lives. Phones can stay in our pockets until we need them. Watches remain on our wrists. HomePods can be tucked away unobtrusively in corners, and remain fully useful. HomeView needs to be in a prominent location for its display to serve any practical purpose. Apple’s initial pitch for it doesn’t earn that prominence for me. I understand Gruber’s skepticism, particularly given the product’s truly atrocious introductory video. Beyond the overall stress-inducing nature of the suburban family scene depicted, most of the use cases, as Gruber notes, are nonsensical: to take a particularly egregious example, why would the teenage daughter look at a message from her clandestine boyfriend on the HomeView instead of her iPhone (which has to be present on the network and unlocked in the past several hours for that functionality to even work)? Apple was, in this particular case, trying to show off HomeView’s multi-user capability, which is based on facial recognition, but my biggest takeaway is that maybe highly produced marketing videos sold as product keynotes aren’t the worst idea in the world. In fact, I think that HomeView is pretty compelling. Smarthome functionality is genuinely useful: - Years ago I set up a small monitor on the side of our condo’s living room for the kids to play video games; I happened to have a Raspberry Pi on hand, which I used to set up a service called DAKboard. DAKboard showed the time, the weather, the family calendar, and a rotating collection of photos. It has, in the intervening years, been one of our most-used and most-beloved pieces of technology, looked at multiple times a day every day. - Thermostats are finicky and hard to use; it’s much better to be able to program them from your phone, or from a touch device. The problem for me in my current home is that my thermostats seem to mysteriously lose their connection to my home automation system every few weeks. - Doorbells are critical in a world of e-commerce, especially when it comes to the dreaded “signature required”; incorporating them with your devices, along with a screen to see who is at the door, is a no-brainer. Unfortunately for me my doorbells also seem to get randomly disconnected, and I never notice until I miss a delivery. - Cameras are a useful security measure, but only if you can actually view them. The issue is — you guessed it — that they often become inaccessible or are non-intuitive to use, particularly the moment you need them. - Sometimes I want to access information without using my hands, like when I am cooking. You can prop up an iPhone or iPad in the kitchen, but what do you do when it goes to sleep in the middle of a recipe? I have, of course, just laid out five compelling use cases for the HomeView, but it wasn’t hard! These are all real, genuinely useful capabilities for a new home device. And notice what the limiting factor is for the middle three: actually getting different devices to work together reliably. Apple’s Trust Dividend That’s why the other exciting part about Apple’s HomeView announcement actually hearkened back to the original AirPort: Apple Home Collection. From Apple’s press release: Apple today announced Apple Home Collection, a new lineup of smart home accessories — including indoor and outdoor cameras, thermostats, temperature sensors, and a video doorbell and door lock — designed in collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. These new accessories are simple to set up starting with one tap with iPhone, and everything is managed through the Apple Home app — no separate app or account required. Each accessory is encrypted end-to-end in Apple Home, so only users and the people they choose can access their home data. Building on the thousands of Works with Apple Home and Matter accessories available today, Apple Home Collection offers customers a new array of recommended products to better understand what’s happening inside and outside their home, manage access, and keep the temperature just right throughout the day. Availability for all products begins in December, with select accessories available starting early 2027. “Apple Home Collection makes it easy to choose smart home accessories with confidence,” said Matthew Costello, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering. “Working closely with industry leaders LG Electronics and Schneider Electric, we designed every accessory to work seamlessly with Apple Home, so managing your home is simple, reliable, and private.” Apple doesn’t have to do everything itself in the home, just as they didn’t have to invent wireless networking in 1999; what they need to do is “marry [partner’s] technology with [their] ease-of-use technology”, and I’m optimistic they’ve done exactly that with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. The key detail is “no separate app or account required”; that points to deep integration with Apple products, from setup to day-to-day usage. Again, I’m not sure I’m the target customer for this (although the automatically unlocking door locks look awesome); my solution to incompatible or flakey integrations is to use AI to build my own customized software. I’m under no illusions, however, that I am a normal consumer who wants the benefits of technology without the headaches; I trust Apple, more than anyone else, to at least aspire to delivering on that vision, and these 2nd-party partnerships are a great start. The second part where you may trust Apple more than any other company is with privacy. Jobs was talking about privacy as a selling point 27 years ago, and Apple has only doubled down since then. In the case of HomeView specifically there is that facial recognition feature, tied to your own hardware; more broadly, if there is any company you might entrust with tracking your more private spaces it is Apple, both because of promises they make with their technology and also their consistent stance on not using customer data. Indeed, Apple’s privacy umbrella is strong enough that LG’s very sketchy privacy track record is likely to be a non-issue amongst potential customers. Apple’s Trust Deficit Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision hasn’t been publicly announced. Apple hasn’t refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn’t currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s plans. The official end of the line came in 2018, five years after the last product was released, leaving customers in limbo waiting for updates that never came. That right there is one reason to not trust Apple in the home: the company already decided once that products that didn’t move the needle relative to the iPhone weren’t worth their time, even if delivering an integrated home experience was still something Apple was uniquely positioned to provide. Yes, by the 2010s most people had WiFi access points from their ISPs, or mesh WiFi products from the likes of Eero, but Apple still could have done something useful. For example, one of the biggest challenges in designing a wireless network is that the iPhone aggressively holds onto access points; if Apple had continued to design its own access points it could, even today, provide a superior experience. Alas, the business was deemed to be not big enough to bother. One reason Apple might be more interested this time, however, is the possibility of subscription revenue. Specifically, the cameras in Apple Home Collection will require a paid iCloud+ plan for recorded event history — higher levels for more cameras — which fits in with the company’s focus on services. Apple Music is also natively supported on the HomeView, whereas you’ll need a recently unlocked iPhone to use Spotify. Of course to some this might be another betrayal of trust: Apple used to sell you products, now they want to sell you on-ramps to recurring revenue. Both of these issues of trust, however, pale in comparison to the single biggest question facing HomeView: do you trust Siri to actually work? In Siri We Trust (or Not) From Mark Gurman at Bloomberg: Apple Inc.’s new HomeView has been a long time coming — far longer than the company intended. I first reported on the device in January 2023, when Apple was aiming to bring it to market as early as the end of 2024. What should have been a relatively straightforward launch instead turned into a nearly two-year saga of delays. The culprit was Apple’s AI crisis, which left the company without the one piece of technology the HomeView absolutely needed: a working version of its revamped Siri assistant… From the beginning, the HomeView was built around a Siri that could retrieve personal content, distinguish between members of a household and show each person private information. It was also designed to be controlled primarily by voice, rather than through its touch screen. Without a serviceable version of the new assistant, Apple couldn’t deliver the experience it had envisioned. That left the hardware ready to go, but the software nowhere near finished. So Apple postponed the HomeView repeatedly — first until spring 2025, then summer, then fall, and then again throughout 2026 before finally unveiling it this past week. And the hardware betrays its age. With thick bezels, an A18 processor and 8 gigabytes of memory, this is clearly a product conceived years ago. Finished units have been sitting boxed up in warehouses for the better part of a year, waiting for the software to catch up. There is a world where Apple never gives up on AirPort, and instead uses it as a foundation to deliver the integrated smarthome in the late 2010s; in that world Siri’s performance is important but also less pressing given that some number of homes would already be locked in. The second world, which Gurman describes, is one where Apple delivers on the new Siri in 2024 like it planned, and the HomeView is its showpiece experience. This is still a compelling product in that scenario, where integrating information from your iPhone is close to the cutting edge of what AI is capable of. The world we are in in 2026, however, is a much different one. In this world Siri AI has shipped, and while it is more capable than what came before, it is much slower, and makes more mistakes with basic tasks that the deterministic old Siri handled reliably. Moreover, the competitive landscape is dramatically different: agents like Muse, Instinct, Dots, or Grok Bots not only integrate information but actually act on it; new Siri already feels long in the tooth. This is where a foray into the home is particularly challenging. One doesn’t replace one’s thermostat or cameras or doorbells every year; these are one-time purchases meant to last for a long time. Ditto cutting a hole in your wall to mount a HomeView, which certainly makes more sense for many of the product’s core use cases. Making such a commitment, however, means committing to Siri AI as the primary interface, and trusting that Apple will make it good. This is a costly choice, and not just monetarily. The real concern is opportunity cost: committing to a world controlled by Siri AI means forgoing a world controlled by any other AI. That’s too expensive for me; how many consumers, even those who trust Apple to make things work together, and who value the company’s commitment to privacy, will make a similar evaluation? Cook’s Costs The answer right now, in 2026, is probably not too many, which is to say Apple might have got this product out just in time. I think there is something here, even if Apple’s marketing team doesn’t seem to be able to explain it very well. At the same time, I think HomeView highlights some of the mistakes and shortcomings of former CEO Tim Cook’s tenure; earlier this year when Cook retired I wrote about his impeccable timing, both in terms of when he took over Apple, and also when he stepped down: To that end, it’s right that Cook is stepping down now. Jobs might have been responsible for taking Apple from 0 to 1, but it was Cook that took Apple from 1 to $436 billion in revenue and $118 billion in profit last year. It’s a testament to his capabilities and execution that Apple didn’t suffer any sort of post-founder hangover; only time will tell if, along the way, Cook created the conditions for a crash out, by virtue of he himself forgetting The Cook Doctrine and what makes Apple Apple. The Cook Doctrine states that Apple needs “to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make”, but Apple doesn’t own and control the models underlying Siri; meanwhile, one of the things that makes Apple Apple is focusing on making great products that customers love. How did Apple’s obsession with services revenue fit in that rubric, particularly when said obsession rose in conjunction with stripping out every part of the business that didn’t move the needle in terms of revenue, even if it made for a better user experience? Privacy, meanwhile, is great as a strategy credit; what happens when it gets in the way of making products that work? It is true that Apple’s AI approach has the benefit of not moving the needle in terms of costs, at least relative to its big tech peers. It’s possible that just as Apple is partnering with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric on home devices, the company will deliver compelling experiences through its partnership with Google (and surprising thawing with Meta via its Meta Superintelligence Lab). After all, Apple hasn’t always done everything — Lucent Technologies once featured in a Steve Jobs keynote! The difference is that that was an Apple that was eager to race ahead, not simply catch up; Jobs was planting seeds for the future, seeds that Cook harvested. Cook did make investments that matter, particularly in Apple Silicon (even if that effort started under Jobs), and in wearables; the job for Ternus will be ensuring that Apple’s “ease-of-use” technology is not just easy but actually useful.