Comment by hnlmorg
2 days ago
That’s some politician-grade logic you’ve got there:
A company can be forced into a decision because they’re scared of losing market share, but that doesn’t count as them being forced because they chose they wanted to stay in business.
The crux of the problem is that people use Gemini on Android. In fact Google have been doubling down on the AI features for years. And in a range of guise’s from camera enhancing vision models to smart personal assistants via Gemini.
Just as Apple heavily promoted Siri back when it was pioneering.
But Siri has stagnated for years. It’s basically the Internet Explorer 5 of the assistant domain. And the competition is so far ahead in capabilities that people are going to start questioning the innovation happening at Apple. In fact people already are.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
The fact is, Siri sucks. I almost never use it now. Apple knows this. We know it. Consumers know it. Apple know that they have to urgently fix it.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
Liquid Glass is part of an ongoing strategy to get developers to target all the platforms equally - not to come out with a native iOS version, then poop out an electron app for the Mac and let it run in a zoomed window on iPad.
This is an initiative that started with MacOS 11:
1. Make the Mac feel closer to an iPad; strip away arbitrary differences like app icons.
2. Catalyst to make porting an iOS codebase easier
3. Swift UI to make native targeting of platforms easier with their differing UX/capabilities
4. Create iPad variants of MacOS UX features like mouse pointers, menus, and so on. Create API (typically under Swift UI) to support both variants with the same code
I don't think the designers had a goal with Liquid Glass to make everything feel more like AVP. Instead, I think thats what they had touched last, and they used that recent experience to revamp all the platforms.
But their goal is that everything works like an iPad. An iPhone is a mini iPad (which maybe in the future folds out to have a similar size and aspect ratio to the iPad Mini). AVP is the iPad you strap to your face. And a build targeting Mac now has icons and menus and controls which don't look out of place.
That could be a big differentiator, when for many companies iOS and Android are the _only_ platforms that currently get native experiences and integration, with everything else being web or electron based.