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Apple loves to stealth test new tech in full public view by sneaking it into relatively mundane places, so debuting agentic AI via accessibility is very on bran
by JeremyHerrman 4mo ago
Apple loves to stealth test new tech in full public view by sneaking it into relatively mundane places, so debuting agentic AI via accessibility is very on brand.
A few other examples:
- The Touch Bar was much more than an OLED strip, it was Apple’s first move in the transition to Apple Silicon on macs. The Apple T1 chip in the 2016 Touch Bar MacBooks was the first solely Apple-designed processor to appear in a Mac and took over several responsibilities away from intel chipsets like power management, fans, sleep/wake, access to the camera & mic, and the secure enclave powering touch ID. Then the T2 added encryption of the SSD, audio management, image processing for the camera, and prevented tampering with the boot process
- The iPhone 3G shipped with a Liquidmetal SIM eject tool, which is made from a strong custom metal alloy which is "practically unbendable by hand unless you want to hurt or cut your fingers." Although Apple hasn’t released anything with the alloy since then, now nearly 20 years later Apple is rumored to be using liquid metal in their upcoming foldable iPhone.
- RealityKit had 3D scanning and a lot of other cool AR capabilities for years which didn’t make sense until the Apple Vision Pro was released.
- paul7986 4mo agoAnd their upcoming smart glasses are the best UX for almost everything they showed the user holding up her phone for. I read their glasses when taking video or pics the lense will light up and or flash more prominently then Metas. Maybe that will help the whole privacy issue and also it's not Meta (do love my Meta or smart glasses as a whole will ditch Metas for Apple quickly as both pair of Metas broke & there's no store for support).
- bookofjoe 4mo agoSame for me! Both pairs of Metas are now inoperative because I can't get them back to factory reset. Once you pull that little blue tab out of them when they're new, it's GAME OVER.
- diseasedyak 4mo agoDang, really? Why would that be? I mean, I believe you, I'm just shocked. I'm glad I read this, as I was thinking of getting some but not now.
- RobMurray 4mo agoThere is a factory reset procedure, I think you hold the shutter button while switching them off and on again.
- bookofjoe 4mo agoDoesn't work for me, as I noted above.
- hawaiianbrah 4mo agoI’ve had excellent luck with their warranty process.
- paul7986 4mo agoWell do want to add more detail. First pair bought in Oct 2023 and used them up until March 2025 where a software update hosed them. Then in April 2025 bought a new pair that lasted til the end of June 2025 cause of water splashes. So i two pairs of dumb sunglasses until March 2026 when my pair with the water damage came back alive. Overall tho Meta doesn't make durable smart glasses and they only have two flagships store for support while Apple has tons of stores for tech support.
- jareds 4mo agoI also am looking forward to Apple smart glasses. I use Meta glasses because thre useful since I'm totally blind. I'd much rather have on device recognission though if possible. I also trust Apple more then Meta. At least I'm technically enclined enough to realize I shouldn't wear them in the bathroom or bedroom. At least when humans look at my AI prompts there maily seeing food boxes or computer bios screens.
- ibero 4mo ago[dead]
- SmirkingRevenge 4mo agoMan I miss the touch bar. Never got why people hated it so much
- mjamesaustin 4mo agoThe hate was because it replaced function keys many people use by tactile touch, without looking. Doing the same on a touch screen is very difficult. If the bar had been added on top of those, I don't think there would've been the same kind of hate for it.
- landr0id 4mo agoI didn't really mind the fn keys being there. I rarely use function keys unless I'm RDP'd to a Windows machine. What drove me crazy though was the escape key. They later added the physical escape key back but I think at that point it was a bit too late.
- SmirkingRevenge 4mo agoAh yea, I've only owned one with the physical escape key. That would be annoying.
- phatskat 4mo agoI’ve always been a “remap capslock to escape” kind of guy (vim), so I didn’t mind much. Access to the brightness (screen and keyboard) and volume slider was neat but superfluous with the OG fn keys. Context-driven controls were probably the best thing about the touch bar, and I don’t think it got enough love to make that stick.
- tokenscoper 4mo agoAdding to the list of grievances, the functionality and the options it presented differed from app to app. I understand that the function keys also change their function app to app, but the visual noise the Touch Bar (wow - the word even gets autocorrected to have the right capitalization!) added as you switched between apps was too distracting.
- JV00 4mo agoAlso their first own modem, shipped in their cheapest tier starting with the iPhone 16e.
- greggsy 4mo agoInteresting - I knew they’d been trying to get off Qualcomm for years, but didn’t realise that they actually managed to do it.
- Danox 4mo agoApple is on the three generation C chip I think the contract is up in the next two years with Qualcomm and within the next two generations that will it for Qualcomm modems next up Memory? The way things are currently going?
- gnatolf 4mo ago'liquid metal' sounds cool. It's probably a metallic glass. I super dislike that it seemingly will be synonymous with the brand name by Apple even though that stuff has been around for decades. Not that there are particularly many places where this is used - mostly because it really is just very expensive. In the awesome position that Apple is in, economic feasibility is so much easier to achieve, with like tens of millions of guaranteed parts to be preduced.
- bayindirh 4mo agoIt's not metallic glass. It's an injectable, super strong alloy. You can manufacture things like you're using injection molded plastic. To be honest, British also has an injectable stainless steel, but its application domain is much more different.
- s0rce 4mo agoAre you sure? Liquid metal was the name of a bulk metallic glass. There were usb flash drives using it as a case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal. Wikipedia lists apple licensing this technology. Metal injection molding is also a thing but I haven't heard it called liquid metal. Usually its MIM.
- bayindirh 4mo agoHonestly, I didn't know that "amorphous metal alloy" is also called metallic glass. I computed it to something else entirely. So you're right on that front. MIM is something else, that's right, but properties of Liquid Glass allows it to be injection molded AFAIK. MIM process is completely different from casting Liquid Metal. MIM generally starts as a powder and heated and molded, Liquid Metal can be just "melted and molded". I have a stainless steel razor built with MIM. Has no resemblence to SanDisk Titanium's feel (which I also have).
- s0rce 4mo agoglass is the general materials science term for an amorphous non-crystalline solid
- Melatonic 4mo agoWas "LiquidMetal" anything more than a good aluminum alloy ?
- bayindirh 4mo agoYes. I have a Sandisk Titanium flash drive which is the first practical application of the alloy, shortly before Apple snapped it. It's feels solid, not wearing down and pretty robust for what it is. It doesn't get scratches like aluminum alloys. It's entirely something else.
- Melatonic 4mo agoSo it's Titanium? That's cool - what's the name of the flash drive and or do you have more info ? Always loved titanium stuff
- s0rce 4mo agoI think most of the commercial liquid metal like the sandisk drive were zirconium based.
- bayindirh 4mo agoNope, it's called/branded "Titanium". The thing was built from Liquid Metal. Image of the thing: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,width=500,quality=95/https://www.bhphotovideo.com/images/images500x500/SanDisk_SDCZ7_4096_A11_Cruzer_Titanium_U3_1233059615_480936.jpg https://www.bhphotovideo.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,wi...
- Danox 4mo agoLQMT Liquidmetal Technologies, Inc. A penny stock at this time.
- s0rce 4mo agoYes, it was an amorphous metal alloy. I knew people from grad school that worked for the company. They have interesting properties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51frrQzCYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_51frrQzCYM
- jorvi 4mo agoYou're reading way too much into it. These are just failed attempts at commercializing something. - People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality. - Making the ejector out of an expensive alloy made no sense. - Realitykit (and the Vision, which is also crashing and burning) is a solution looking for a problem. - 3D touch had both discoverability and usability problems. - etc etc.
- taeric 4mo agoVision is hilarious as it is more than just a solution looking for a problem. It was also desperately avoiding the current market that exists for it. Anything but games, it seemed.
- JeremyHerrman 4mo agoYou're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era. Bad feature/UX or not, each one of those decisions was calculated. Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]: >Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at least two sources for parts, so that a supply problem from one supplier won’t halt manufacturing. Since Liquidmetal is only available from one source, Apple needed to make sure the company could deliver. For Apple Silicon, there was no way they'd make the switch in one go, so they had to figure out a way to hedge that bet. That's what the TouchBar really was, with all its warts and solutions for problems nobody had. And as someone else in this thread pointed out, the first custom cellular chip wasn't released with a flagship model - they exclusively paired it with the budget iPhone 16e. Apple is always calculating and hedging. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/08/apple-tested-liquidmetal-alloy-for-iphone-3g-sim-pin/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/08/apple-tested-liquidm...
- lern_too_spel 4mo agoThere's nothing agentic about these features. Live captions have existed on other platforms for more than 6 years now, before "agentic" had even been coined.
- ksec 4mo agoAnd they do it with products on relatively small volume. A lot of these used to happen on Apple Watch. And at one point I thought Apple Watch would be the place to do a lot of testing work. Until Apple Watch became so popular it is now back to volume manufacturing and operation efficiency mode. Liquid Metal never got anywhere because Apple couldn't figure out how to mass manufacture it at a cost they were willing to pay.
- rgovostes 4mo agoApple Vision Pro's hand tracking was first alluded to in a section of their first machine learning research publication. It was about using GANs to add realistic sensor noise to synthetic datasets. The bulk of the article is about eye tracking.