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Don't Panic, But We've Passed Peak Apple (and Google, and Facebook)
waderoush writes "Over the last decade, just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing. (Add in Amazon, if you're feeling generous.) But it's been a long time since any of these companies introduced anything indisputably new — and there are good reasons to think they never will again. This Xconomy essay argues that the innovation engines at Google, Apple, and Facebook are out of gas (the most surprising thing about OS X Mavericks is that it's not named after a cat) and that other players will have to come up with the underpinnings for the next big cycle of advances in computing. Granted, it's not as if any of these companies will disappear. But the idea that they'll go on generating ideas as groundbreaking as the ones that landed them in the spotlight defies common sense, statistics, and the lessons of history, which show that real innovation almost always comes from small companies. Apple, Google, and Facebook aren't too big to fail — but they may be too big to keep succeeding."
When all your in-house innovation leads to outhouse fabrication, you can easily switch gears. Buy everyone who innovates and shut out any possible competition. It's been the premier business road map for centuries.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
But I won't believe it till Netcraft confirms it.
To be fair, once Google gets their cars that drive themselves, glasses that give me information at all times, and provide TV/phone services through a high speed fiber connection for cheaper than anyone else, I'm ok if they take a break for a bit and coast, just improving what they've already done. THEN they can start on the jetpacks, holograms, and teleportation.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
These companies cannot easily or quickly go way beyond their current expertise, like for example investigating human genome related innovations, but that does not mean that they cannot be transformative again. Apple as an example has released a lot of transformative products in a short time frame: iPod, iphone, ipad, macbook air have all been hugely influential. It is perhaps too high an expactations to expect them to keep up the current pace. However I think that the smartwatch, once it get released, can be another transformative step towards a world of in essence invisible, wearable computing. Google glass falls also in this category. I can also imagine that these companies will continue to buy up small companies with really good new ideas. Didn't Apple and Google each buy home automation companies? That is another area where I expect transformative products.
They can absolutely fail, that they have not yet proves nothing. Nokia is barely hanging on, yet 10 years ago we would easily have believed that label on them.
... whatever
Amazon is cloud computing. The retailer part is just left overs from the 90's
I guess this isn't happening then? http://www.google.com/loon/
Maybe whoever wrote this article isn't impressed by interesting things that these companies create. Do they believe that because they are big and their innovations should also be "big"? This article is stupid.
Can you see the government bailing them out (as they did wall street and the car makers?
Thats what 'too big to fail means
Without pioneering folks like Jack Kilby, you think we have electronic computers ?
Without hardware providers such as Intel which transformed CPU into affordable commodity items, you think we get $399 iPhone/iPad ?
And by the way, what kind of "innovation" FB has brought to the world ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When all your in-house innovation leads to outhouse fabrication
How much innovation is needed to fabricate a tiny room?
Buy everyone who innovates and shut out any possible competition
In this case, I believe you mean shit out any possible competition.
Facebook was the result of some epic timing, but I can't necessarily call them innovative. Before Facebook, there were some pretty well populated social networks, Myspace being the one whose problems they solved, but Geocities, AIM, and IRC before it also helped break ground. Facebook brought very few foundational ideas to the table.
Apple is a victim of its own success. No matter what they release, it will be compared to the iPhone (which brought smartphones and data plans to the masses), or the iPad (which all but started the tablet PC market). Very few companies have ever had products that successful, and the fact of the matter is that it's nearly impossible to maintain that momentum consistently.
Google might have a handful of good ideas left in it, but they have a different problem. When they started, it was basically a haven for geeks where they could throw Jell-O at the wall and see what stuck. I'm certain that there were projects that spent a week being added to the drawing board and were never pursued, to say nothing of the projects that have ultimately been scrapped over time. The problem is that Google has financial expectations on it now, which means that the geeks who could come up with some innovative ideas need to allocate their time pursuant to whether they can meet their deadlines. This kind of thinking leaves a lot of the gambling on the table.
Amazon doesn't need much innovation. They're the Wal-Mart of the internet, and this isn't a bad thing. They all but 'personify' the term "economies of scale". .If it's a good idea, Amazon can throw resources at it, whether it be servers, distribution, money, or audience. They have all of these things in great abundance, and generally keep their customers happy with cheap prices and (unlike wal-mart) generally very good customer service, and do so extremely efficiently. As long as they keep doing this, and do it as well as they have been for nearly 20 years, then they will continue to be profitable.
The problem with innovation in this context is that it doesn't seem to count, except when it does. The Newton was innovative. The PocketPC was, at some level, innovative. "Innovation" isn't what's being looked for. What is being looked for is "Innovation that immediately captures the public's attention and makes a substantial amount of money, market share, and mindshare in a very short period of time".
Innovation does NOT occur just in "big pieces" in hardware and software. Arguably, the major innovations done today affecting the 'big pieces' are logistical and nano-structure components. Jounalists often see only the forest, not the trees, so they can't see what has just popped out of the soil.
These innovations are leading to miniaturization at a fast rate, parts with new properties, electronics with new functions, multi-functions, faster performance and software that knows how to integrate functions across devices and time.
The innovations inside the new MacBook Air don't excite a journalist as he has "seen that before", but to an innovator there is a lot to see both in hardware, ICs, battery and software. People forget that the MacBook Air is about 1/4th of the weight of the old PowerBooks of a half dozen years back and are faster and work longer hours on a charge.
Improved software systems are easy for journalists to ignore because that requires testing and journalists are basically lazy on doing actual testing and comparisons and retrospective analysis as software systems improve.
This article must be flamebait. Google didnt invent much, there were dozens of search engines when it came around
There were, but they sucked. And I say this as someone who was at Carnegie Mellon when they came up with Lycos (and had been through webcrawler, and archie and veronica in the pre-http days), and suffered through altavista when it was still at digital.com and plenty of other early efforts.
The idea of using the number of links to a page as an indication of its importance was huge, and it and the rest of PageRank were truly innovative--you went from normally going through 5-10 pages of results and sometimes more to almost always having the thing you were looking for on the first page. Simply the concept of having an "I'm feeling lucky" button was unthinkable in the earlier days.
They were also among the earlier places to recognize that XMLHTTP/XmlHttpRequest wasn't just an Outlook plugin, bringing AJAX into the mainstream (which was hugely significant, and one of the reasons we're not saddled with shitty Flash sites anymore).
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
It's part of the Ayn Rand mentality where all credit is given to the appropriate tyrant whether or not that guy is actually an "entrepenuer" or not. No one considers the little guy whether that's current upstart startups or just the cogs in the tyrant's company.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"By way of an example, I suggest wearing that device in a public urinal. Bring someone along with you to count the number of seconds before the big guy at the next stall gets the wrong idea and beats the living crap out of you."
First what kind of moron would wear it in the urinal? Normal people stand outside of the urinal and pee into it.... I think your momma did not teach you how to use the bathroom right.
And second, I have several times. Nobody even notices, but then people that have an IQ above 40 knows it has a big bright light on it when the camera is active, and it has to be pointed at what you are recording.... Are you the type that stands there staring at other mens junk? That is probably what will get your ass beat.
But then you don't know anything at all about Google Glass and are just talking out your uneducated butt.
In reality, I have people asking what they are and asking how they work, cant they see through them, etc... 100% of the people that see me with them are curious and really want to know more about it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can definitely see Facebook disappearing. I've reached the point where the vast majority of my facebook friends aren't people I even remotely know. I've unsubscribed from everyone's newsfeed. Only thing I use it for is to RSVP for events and say "Happy birthday!" on people's birthdays.
— Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing."
Stopped reading right there.
"The trash can would make a great high end consumer Mac."
That is, in fact, what it is, or at least would be if they'd offer even a single drive bay.
By any traditional definition of "workstation" it is not one. It is no more a workstation than the Mini is. Both need additional products to make them functional as such.
Google Glass is too nerd for common people.
I remember when the name "iPad" would provoke giggles.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Thankfully, if you Google for me, you come up with nothing.
Oh? About 3,410,000 results (0.19 seconds)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The period from 1950s to the 1980s was the age of invention.
People haven gotten stupider since then. They have wisened up. Why spend hard work on invention when you can buy a patent. And these smart people have created an ecosystem which nurtures MBA, Law and other non contributing disciplines. Its the culture of "Manage" rather than do. And when everybody just goes ahead and wants a pie from the big machine, what happens, slowly but steadily, invention, innovation starts dying. Over every invention lies the sword of patent. Invent a new touch screen? Give it to XYZ for free because you are stepping on some tiny patent somewhere.
And this will continue. Very soon the engineers will vanish, and the world will be doomed, as deserved.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
google bought android, like they bought most other technologies they recently "innovated"
like apple bought mac os, and microsoft stole it.
the real innovators seldom get credit.
I wonder why no one wants to go into engineering or computers in college. Anyone who can, rather do business and own the ideas the engineers and computer people make, and then laugh when they kick them to the curb when they have nothing left to give.
GPL your code, and throw it on github, if your not business savy enough. Its that much more for the public tha parasites can't use leverage.
You understand that there is a huge gulf between "hundreds of man-hours to cram square stuff into fun shapes" and bringing to market a mass-produced product? I have no idea what the price of the Mac Pro will be, but I'm fairly sure it will be more commercially viable than a hand-build one-off.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Apple has always been more about taking the technology available and packaging it into something easy to use and accessible.
Hear, hear!
Apple's real strength is industrial design. Their engineering is competent, but nothing terribly inventive (certainly not relative to the stature of the company). People whose only understanding of technology is going "ooh, ahh" over the latest consumer product don't seem to understand the difference. In terms of engineering and innovation the real McCoy has been the work done by others to create the latest gen fab process, OLED displays, or wireless standards and chip level implementation. Apple puts them together into nice packages. There is nothing wrong with that as a business, but the real technological innovation comes from their suppliers and other companies.
Facebook is even less of a tech company. Obviously they use computers and networks, but so do banks. Does anybody call banks tech companies because of that? Facebook is about marketing an idea, not any great technological innovation.
And to extend your point...
Before Nokia, it was Motorola that made the best phones on the market.
But, they stagnated and Nokia took it over with their innovation.
After building their market, Nokia stagnated and others started taking over from them (Samsung comes to mind).
One can't always be the market leader because of the load of work on the company.
Being the biggest/best producer of something requires a company to supply a lot of product to meet that demand. So, a lot of resource is spent just on maintaining supply required by being in 1st place.
That doesn't leave as much resource or insight into "what to develop next." The leader in a market doesn't have someone else to look at to see what they need to develop... they can only look to themselves.
Competitors behind/outside of the market leader have the opportunity to see what directions that leader is trying out and to follow in step... focusing on how to take those concepts that seem to work and build upon them.
Innovate or replicate... two main strategies of product growth and success for a business.
If you're the leader, you have to innovate to keep your lead. Replicating a competitors innovation means "you're falling behind" and appear to be "failing" (whether that is true or not... it tends to be the perspective of the market).
As a competitor, you can innovate and/or replicate (and improve) to capture some of that market away from the leader.
Constant correct innovation is impossible to maintain forever for a single business.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
What you fail to realize is that there are now hundreds of thousands of pros who daily use a laptop in place of the workstation they had just 3 years ago.
It may look like a consumer grade Mac to you but what Apple is doing is to redefine the workstation. Consumers no longer buy desktops. They buy laptops or tablets. The desktop market has been shrinking for the last few years. Apple doesn't even make a desktop any more. The iMac and Mini are the closest you get.
So this is Apples Workstation/Desktop. It is what you make of it like anything else. I'm betting that the industry will start to follow Apples lead here though and you'll see similar offerings from HP, Sony, Samsung etc in the near future just as you see iMac type systems and AirBook "Ultrabook".
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Not to be pedantic, but the "Ayn Rand mentality" is pretty much the opposite of what you think it is. The tyrants stealing credit (and everything else) are the *villains* and the "little guy (and gal)" entrepreneurs are the *heroes*. The current status quo would be considered a dystopia according to the Ayn Rand mentality.
What may be confusing you is that some of the protagonists were successful industrialists who admittedly aren't "the little guy" at that point in their careers, but they were in the minority compared to those that acted as you say. They didn't rise to the top by stealing from underlings but earned it by actually being the best. Rand's ideal world would be a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy. That last bit is what usually rubs people the wrong way, causing them to reject Rand in knee-jerk fashion without really understanding what she was saying.
Lots of businesses refuse to open cases to upgrade. They just scrap the old machine (or sell it, or give it to someone less important), and buy a new one. This is businesses, with professional IT staff.
Consumers are mostly even worse.
So the number of people who'll bother opening their cases is very small. The number of people who'll do so, and buy Macs is even smaller.
With thunderbolt, you can do a lot of upgrades just by plugging in a box. This makes upgrading a lot easier for most customers. And since that will be the only upgrade path, there'll be more (and cheaper) components than there are today. Plus, the resale of these components should be higher, since they won't just be sold to geeks.
So I'd say that the new MacPro will be *more* upgradable, to most people, even most professionals. Especially the ones who buy Macs.
By any traditional definition of "workstation" it is not one.
I will agree with this. The bet is that we are moving out of the "traditional" workflow. It's meant to be a fast powerful workstation with just enough space to hold the OS, programs, and project that one is currently working on. Everything else will be stored on the local SAN which every business place will now have as data will be stored and managed on servers with huge amounts of space that interact with everybody else's work. The days of a workstation keeping everything locally and hoping the person works on it uploads their work when done or risking that their drive fails are nearing their end. As IT, I've been pushing for this for over ten years. Your workstation is a faceless clone and all your personal stuff is in your folders on the servers. If something happens to your workstation, you move to another one or I just drop another one in and worry about fixing the broken one later with as little downtime to the worker as possible.
Even the home usage is heading that way. Mac Airs are selling and it's near the same concept. Fast computer for doing work and if you need lots of media or storage, everything just gets plugged in by USB, now thunderbolt. Not saying that's the best way or that I even like it, but that's the way they're heading and going by how users are dealing with their Mac Airs for years now, at least reasonably large fractions of the users are not rejecting that workflow.
The problem isn't a **current** lack of innovation...
The problem is non-techies do not understand the difference between a true 'innovation' and a new product that sells alot and gets media hype.
iPod sells alot, has good ads, and gets alot of press. iPod then becomes, in retrospect to the mind of a non-techie, an 'innovation'...and the marketer who brought it to completion...well he's the 'innovator'...
wrong. iPod wasn't an 'innovation' and Steve Jobs was a marketer/salesman.
however, that's not the end at all! The **click wheel** was the 'innovation' and it wasn't designed by Jobs. But ask any young kid to name an 'innovator' and they'll say Jobs, the salesman.
Not 'knocking' Steve Jobs (getting major lables to put their music on iTunes IMHO required true innovative salesmanship)...
The greater point is that a grand misunderstanding of why tech is awesome and the nature of 'innovation' in practice...that misunderstanding creates the context where this errant article could be developed.
Don't look at what sells to find innovation...that's a lagging indicator...look at what busy people in high stress jobs do to get things done...it's the pressure of necessity that mother's innovation ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
Mind blowing, industry disruptive invention is not going to stop. It's just that it doesn't happen rapidly and never has! Apple first built iPad prototypes internally and decided to take the technology to the iPhone and release it first. So in 2007 before the iPhone was announced there was an early iPad prototype. The iPad didn't get announced until 2010! So for three more years the iPad was refined and improved, while the iPhone was also improved. Only when Apple was satisfied enough with the iPad was it released to the public. The App Store wasn't announced until 2008. The MacPro hasn't changed much since 2010, but the new cylindrical MacPro was announced via sneak peak at WWDC 2013. I would bet money it's been in design for years! A new design starts after the last one shipped. There may be a bit of a break after a stressful launch but they always go right back to the drawing board when they return. One of the reasons the 2010 MacPro wasn't updated were Xeon delays at Intel. The Xeon E5 Ivy Bridge / E3 Haswell design hasn't really started shipping till now. The E5 Xeon is the processor of choice used in workstations and smaller servers. So the new MacPro cylindrical design will have dual E5 Xeon's with up to 12 cores (6 cores each).
Apple's pace hasn't changed, they have always been about releasing when it's ready and not before. The media forgets how long it took for these products to ship. I guess there was this long period of customer awe in between that's dissipated lately as new products are not as stunning. That doesn't mean there are not things in the R&D pipeline that will change the world! There has always been an attention to detail with Apple designs that exceed that of the rest of the industry. The secrecy is what drives articles like this. But it's also what allows Apple to compete. If they announce products early, the competition will have a "Me Too" product ready. Even though a "Me Too" doesn't come close, it will be cheaper and not as good but will still sell fairly well.
Apple is working on changing television as we know it. I have already built a home solution that far exceeds what the industry has available. However, it's extremely geeky and not ready for general consumer use. But I can watch the TV shows and movies I want, how I want, when I want, and where I want. I have complete freedom to beam it around the house from iPhone, iPad, and multiple TV's. I have a server that manages the content like a TiVo would but much much better. It's the media delivery mechanism and the content itself that has to adapt. Apple is no doubt struggling to get the media companies to play ball. Movies studios, TV networks, Sports distribution channels, etc. They all have to radically change the way they do business. It's not about Prime Time any more. I don't consume media on a schedule any more. I rarely watch live TV. I don't see commercials. I can pause a show in the living room and resume it in the bedroom or on an iPad (No, it's not AT&T Uverse either and it's not streamed from a data center). I can even have new shows transcoded and sync'd to the iPad so when I take a long train commute, I can watch my show on an iPad offline. Apple's competitors know they are working on TV and they are trying to produce new TV's that innovate. Samsung has voice and motion controls, Sony has PS4, Microsoft XBox One, etc. They all think they know what Apple is doing but I would bet they aren't even close. Apple cannot announce their new TV solution until they can get the content providers in line. They did it first with the music industry and they did it with the book industry now it's time to do it with the TV/Movie/Video industries.
Google is not a tech company, they are an advertising company that uses technology. Facebook is not a tech company, they are a social media advertising company that uses cheesy technology. Apple is not a technology company either but a design company that mixes technology and the liberal arts. HP, Samsung, etc., etc. these are electron
You are wielding a blunt club. I can use your same argument to claim that no one ever invented anything, since all inventions rest on some other invention.
It is easy to look at Google and say that anything they do bears some resemblance to something else. This is especially true if you think Google is a search company, or an ad company. It's not.
Google is a huge AI research lab. Search is one application of AI, and displaying ads pays the bills. Most of the work that goes on at Google involves pattern matching of some sort. Google is innovating all of the time (data center efficiency, green energy use, more efficient web information transfer, AI algorithms that form knowledge graphs, control systems that treat the entire datacenter as a single computer, and on and on). And those innovation are presented to the public in the form of research papers.
Those innovations are not immediately obvious to people who think Google is just a search engine and/or advertising company.
Google, Apple, and Facebook were never "groundbreaking". They were well executed implementations of largely known technologies and ideas. And much of the innovation that came out of these companies actually was acquired, when they bought up startups and academics, thereby also spreading the wealth.
And that's not going to stop either: people are going to continue to come up with innovative ideas, form small startups, and then the Googles and Apples of this world are going to buy them and stick their name on it.
I'll tell you what Facebook innovated. (You're not going to like it, though, because we tend to think of innovation as synonymous with "progress" and progress is usually measured in terms of end user utility. And what I'm about to say is totally not that.)
Facebook somehow had a website that was popular (that's not a part of the innovation, but it's an extremely important prerequisite) and then got a million other websites to embed references to Facebook resources into theirs, like Google did with Google Analytics. Since most browsers, by default, are happy to load any embedded resource referenced on a page, that gave Facebook an incredible number of "hits" from diverse sources.
Most classical (i.e. naive) 1990s-thinking web people would see these "hits" as totally valueless, because they're not pageloads, they aren't showing ads that you got paid to run, or whatever. The clever people, though, saw that you use this sort of thing with a cookie and combined with referer[sic], to build marketing profiles.
The mid-late 1990s clever people knew that too, but their references were ads themselves (e.g. doubleclick). They had to pay to get other webmasters to embed this crap. Nobody is going to embed a doubleclick image (i.e. an ad for something) unless you give them money.
You don't get paid to embed Google Analytics javascript, though. You don't get paid to embed a Facebook "like" button. So Facebook can do all the same "spying" that doubleclick.net could do a decade earlier, but without paying for it.
And webmasters embed these things for free, because they feel they get something out of it. With Google Analytics, you get the reports and analysis. Sure, you could get a lot of that from your own logs, but not all of it (Google knows some things about your visitors, that you might not, and this is their business, they're able to "keep up") and GA is easy and there and waiting for you. With Facebook like buttons, discussions, etc, webmasters are counting on the popularity of Facebook, to make it so that people who use their own site, will generate events on their Facebook profiles which will be seen by other Facebook users who don't use their own site, and maybe someone will curiously click through and you get a new visitor.
You gotta give Facebook some credit for that. I get how Google turns their spying into money, but I still don't really understand how Facebook does. (Apparently Wall Street doesn't understand it either, judging from the ever-falling stock price.) But there's probably an angle, and however it can be used, Facebook has very successfully put into place at least half of it already. Getting so much of the web to embed your script or iframe (and without having to pay them for it) -- holy crap, I totally can't imagine that happening fifteen years ago.
So it's innovation. Just not the kind users like to see happen.
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By any traditional definition of "workstation" it is not one. It is no more a workstation than the Mini is. Both need additional products to make them functional as such.
I don't think that this change is different, in spirit, from some of the changes that Apple has pushed in the past. Apple tends to jettison things that it thinks are no longer relevant to the future, e.g. SCSI, ADB, Serial ports, etc. When Apple went USB-only on the original iMac, it was a controversial move, because there wasn't much in the way of a USB device market at that point in time. Fast forward a year or so, and there were more USB devices than you could shake a mouse at. I see the Mac Pro "sneak peek" as a warning shot across the bow of the peripheral manufacturers. If manufacturers get on board with Thunderbolt, it's a pretty interesting future, I think.
My workflow already uses a combination of a fast boot/swap drive, FW800 and NAS for storage, so that won't change much with a new Mac Pro, other than needing a TB->FW adaptor somewhere (at a cost of $29 from Apple.) I'm a firm believer in the concept of storage living outside of my "compute core." I've changed computers with barely a hitch because my data lived somewhere else.
Many PCIe cards will already work in an expansion chassis. Many will not. I believe this is mostly a driver issue, other than the rare card that needs more bandwidth than Thunderbolt provides. If you are someone who needs that third (or fifth) high speed graphics card, the new Mac Pro is not for you. But realistically, what percentage of the potential market for this sort of machine is in that segment? I imagine that most PCIe cards will be made to work in an expansion chassis, or a Thunderbolt alternative will appear.
That said, I'm stuck waiting for MOTU to come up with a Thunderbolt solution for their PCI line (e.g. 2408mk3, HD192). Their adaptor card, the PCIe-424, does NOT work in an expansion chassis. If MOTU doesn't come up with a solution for using their PCI line, the ripple effect of me moving to a new Mac Pro would involve replacing audio interfaces, and my digital mixer. The follow-on costs would probably end up being more than the MacPro. I'm optimistic that MOTU, like most manufacturers will get its act together regarding Thunderbolt.
Summing up, if Apple & Intel are successful in their gamble to push the world towards Thunderbolt, in a year or so, we'll think that compute cores like the Mac Pro are the natural order. We'll wonder what all the fuss was about. Isn't this the way computers have always been?
*sigh* Yes, but people with an IQ above 60 know that you can't ever trust someone else's computer.
I don't have Glass (nor do I think that particular product lies in my future) but I bet I'll have some kind of wearable within a decade. And rest assured, any light it ever shines, is going to be for my purposes, not other people's purposes. If I'm not in control of the machine, then: no sale. My wearable most certainly will have what most people consider to be a "perv mode."
I'm not at all interested in looking at other dudes' junk, but I also don't expect any random dude to know that about me. The real reason I won't get punched (I predict) is that 1) people won't know the camera is there at all 2) people won't give a fuck, because they'll have had a few years acclimating to it, thanks to the social pioneers who walk around with Glass and things like it which are inevitably coming.
Cameras are ubiquitous. People will eventually accept it, whether they want to or not. Those who around with Glass opening displaying their cameras, are teaching the public about something that is already there. They're paving the way for the social acceptance of .. 1990s(?) .. camera technology.
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I agree with the first part! That's why Apple still hasn't figured out how to break into the living room. Everyone keeps rumoring that they will build an actual "Apple TV" (not just a $99 box you plug into one) but the problem is people don't want to buy a new $2000 television with built-in software obsolescence every couple of years (ie. Apple's primary business model), and the profit margin on most "normal" TVs way too low for an Apple product...
Don't agree with the iPad, though. To make it truly a "peripheral" the phone would run the software, and BT (or any practical medium range wireless solution, really) just isn't enough to drive a 3-4MP display. So throw in the battery, capacitive touchscreen, CPU/GPU etc, and there just isn't a point to *requiring* you own two devices just to get a bigger screen.
One of these things is not like the other...