I'm a bit skeptical about the performance to be honest: Great tracking for AR requires careful selection and tuning of cameras and IMUs (inertial measurement units -- essentially MEMS gyro + accelerometer).
Apple has very tight control over their components so they can do this but managing this across a million OEMs and device models (as it is with the Android ecosystem) is close to impossible.
Tango tried to solve the problem by specifying out a software and hardware stack for OEMs to use but now it looks like Google is just too jealous to let have Apple have a good time with ARkit, therefore the "me too".
Hence why it is available only for Pixel (which Google controls) and the Samsung Galaxy 8 (a large partner) because it can be precisely calibrated.
Why is it Google "me too"? Tango was released in 2014.The basic plane detection functionality that's in Tango is derived from the same mechanism that Apple uses. Facebook released an ARKit-like library at their conference before ARKit was even announced.
When Apple is late to the party, it seems people say "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'", but when Apple is perceived to have done something first, suddenly everyone accuses Apple's competitors of being thieves and copying.
That's mostly in reaction to Apple's history of claiming copying and its litigious look and feel lawsuits.
Remember "Redmond Start Your Copiers!" That was an official WWDC banner hung from the rafters by Apple, not some fanboys. Steve Jobs frequently gave interviews accusing rivals of copying, and then copying with the excuse "Good artists copy; great artists steal". All of those years of going on the offensive against everyone, has created a tendency of the other side to look for hypocrisy now.
There's something pretentious, and deeply hubristic and lacking in humility in Apple's marketing that I think has fanned the flames of these fanboy wars. In a way, their marketing reminds of the way Trump talks, only with a larger vocabulary. Replace "Great!", "Bigly!", "SAD!", with "Beautiful", "Amazing", "Breakthrough". It's just continuous repetitive of superlatives, even for minor features.
The point of this quotation is that "good artists" merely copy other people, which is what Apple is talking about when they hang banners like "Redmond Start Your Copiers", but "great artists" 'steal', which means they take the good idea and transform it to make it better. And this is very much how Apple works, and this comes back to your original pseudo-quotation, "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'". Apple doesn't just blindly copy what other people are doing. They 'steal' the ideas and turn them into something great before releasing them.
Apple has done both, as had Microsoft. Microsoft didn't just blindly copy everything Apple did. As much as I hate Microsoft of the 90s, they did innovate too.
Apple doesn't blindly copy? What do you call Apple Music then? Ping? What did Apple do to innovate in that space above and beyond Spotify? That's a long list of UI features Apple cribbed from Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone that ended up (IMHO), inferior copies, where the copy didn't actually improve on (make great) the original.
In what way does Apple Photos improve on the quality of Google Photo's deep learning based categorization that is user-visible and noticeable?
> Microsoft didn't just blindly copy everything Apple did.
Not everything. "Redmond Start Your Copiers" was in response to some very specific copying over the previous year, though I don't remember the details anymore.
> What do you call Apple Music then?
I call it a subscription model to the iTunes store. Subscription models have been around for a long time, even though Spotify is the poster child for applying them to Music I don't think it makes sense to say Apple is copying Spotify (or anyone else) by having a subscription music service, it's the logical evolution of paid music services. You could certainly argue that Spotify proved the customer demand was there (as well as the ability to convince the labels to go along with this), but it's not like Spotify invented the concept.
> Ping?
An unmitigated disaster. But I'm not sure who you think that was copying. I can't think of any pre-existing service like Ping.
> What did Apple do to innovate in that space above and beyond Spotify?
Provide a seamless "it just works" experience across all Apple devices, including integration into their customers' existing iTunes libraries, and into Siri, including the forthcoming Homepod. And I think it's fair to give Apple Music credit for iCloud Music Library as well, which is great.
> That's a long list of UI features Apple cribbed from Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone that ended up (IMHO), inferior copies, where the copy didn't actually improve on (make great) the original.
Can you elaborate?
> In what way does Apple Photos improve on the quality of Google Photo's deep learning based categorization that is user-visible and noticeable?
Apple Photos does it all on-device.
Also, I really don't think you can claim that using machine learning to classify photos is something that Google owns. It's been an obvious idea for literally decades, it's just taken until now before it was feasible to do.
So when Apple merely copies instead of "stealing", it was an obvious idea that had been around for a long time. It's the logical evolution to what they already had. It just wasn't feasible to do until the moment Apple copied it. Got it.
Your sarcasm is not appreciated nor warranted. If you disagree with any of the specific cases I talked about, feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, but merely being sarcastic about it isn't helpful.
> If something wasn't feasible to do until the moment Apple copied it from others, why didn't Apple do it first?
I really don't know what you mean by this.
> Have there been innovations by companies that compete with Apple?
Where is this line of questioning going? I feel like you're trying to accuse me of saying that nobody but Apple is capable of innovation, which is nonsense.
> Have they ever taken an idea from Apple and made it better?
I'm sure someone has. I don't really keep track of that sort of thing though, so I don't have any examples off the top of my head.
> > If something wasn't feasible to do until the moment Apple copied it from others, why didn't Apple do it first?
> I really don't know what you mean by this.
You've answered to Apple copying others with "it was an obvious step forward, just infeasible before". Which fails to explain why was it infeasible for Apple until after it became feasible for others.
> I feel like you're trying to accuse me of saying that nobody but Apple is capable of innovation, which is nonsense.
It is a strong predictor of how you responded to the examples that were raised. The obvious question after seeing that is "is there a counterexample?"
I said automatically classifying users' photos to search was only feasible to do recently. It didn't become feasible for others first, it became feasible for everyone at about the same time (well, I suppose it was feasible for Google slightly earlier because Google's doing it in the cloud where they have more computing power available, versus Apple being limited by the computing power of the iPhone, but this appears to be such a relatively small difference that it doesn't really matter).
It was only feasible to do recently, in the sense that only recently did Google develop (and publish) the ML techniques that made it feasible. It wasn't some inevitability brought to us by Moore's law.
This isn't my area of expertise, but I thought the recent ML boom was kicked off by ImageNet, which came from the CS department at Princeton, and the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge? Google's been a big player in ML recently, but they're not the only ones researching this.
ImageNet is a manually-annotated database to train models. Google had the Image Search corpus internally too.
The advances in image and speech recognition of these times are due to innovations in deep learning by Google, Microsoft, NVidia, Stanford, U. Toronto, CMU, and many others. I didn't mean to imply it was all Google's doing. Rather that Apple wasn't there, which is why "just waiting for it to become feasible" sounds like apologetics.
Then there's also innovation in making a product out of the new capabilities, or integrating them into an existing product. I think dismissing that as "everybody was just waiting for the technology" is not realizing that, in hindsight, all products look obvious.
Take a step back and look at how you explain away everyone else's innovations as if they're nothing. "Subscription models have been around for a long time" Really? That's like saying "Online shopping has been around forever". Amazon clearly did something much better than everyone else, just as Spotify's (and Pandora's radio) subscription music service was a clear innovation on all of the services that came before it and that's why they exploded. Apple essentially adopted their proven business model by leveraging their control of the OS to pre-install and promote their service over a third party, while trying to undercut them because they can avoid their own App Store fee. "but it's not like Spotify invented the concept" Right, they didn't invent "subscriptions", but like Apple, they took a well known idea, and make a very user friendly service out of it.
There's plenty more. The chrome tab switcher one is the most obvious ripoff.
Then you can add phablets, mini-tablets, big screen phones. Apple for years attacked these devices. They put out an actual television commercial saying any phone where your thumb couldn't reach the whole screen was a bad design. Steve Jobs famously said mini-tablets "should come with sandpaper, so users can file down their fingers"
Then they got up on stage and gave a ludicrous political talking point excuse as to why they had not produced a big screen phone prior to the iPhone 6+ by saying that "big screen display tech wasn't ready yet", absurd because Android devices had been shipping high-DPI Retina-quality displays 2 years prior, displays that when evaluated by DisplayMate often ranked as good or better than the small iPhone display.
The reality is, they had an institutional bias against larger and heavier devices, and got caught with their pants down when they found out that many people, especially in Asia, loved giant phones. Prior to that, Apple fan forums were full of people saying racist things like Asian hands are too small for big phones.
Or how about multi-tasking windows? They criticized that, and then copied Windows Mobile's split-screen snapping identically for the iPad Pro, it was so obvious that Walt Mossberg instantly gasped and called it out during their presentation.
>Apple Photos does it all on-device.
Does it worse, costs more, and the majority of users aren't aware, and don't care. "It's been an obvious idea for literally decades, it's just taken until now before it was feasible to do." Right, everyone else's idea is either obvious, or the innovation to implement it doesn't matter at all. Leaving aside that what you call "feasibility" wasn't just about compute power, but also required conceptual leaps to improve quality as well as ImageNet. It wasn't until CNNs and ImageNet, that the leap was made and quality started to get dramatically better to the point that it was worth shipping to users. And it wasn't until Google shipped it at scale and got industry applause for making photo management dramatically easier and hassle free, that suddenly they had to fast follow.
This is the problem with arguing with Apple loyalists. The constant hagiography. I work for Google, and I criticize the hell out of the failures and missteps Google makes. It is not perfect and I have no problem pointing out it out.
But it seems arguing with Apple fanboys is like arguing with a political pundit on a Cable news network. Their goal is to defend the image of their target no matter what.
Apple copies stuff. Sometimes they innovate, sometimes they just copy what is already proven to be a success without anything but superficial changes.
Going back to my original point, the constant minimization of other people's innovation and achievements, and the boosting of every Apple announced feature as if it's a breakthrough innovation, rubs people the wrong way, and that's why you see people pointing out hypocrisy.
I've been in this industry since the 80s. The marvelous iPhone you hold in your hand today is also the result of a long litany of achievements of others, Apple stands on the shoulders of giants.
Spotify was certainly well-executed. But I don't see how that claim leads to saying that anyone else doing a music subscription service is copying Spotify. You're conflating "doing something well" with "inventing something".
In addition, Apple Music is not just a clone of Spotify. Besides the integration I talked about before, there's also the focus on human curation along with Beats 1. AIUI Spotify relies on algorithms to put together playlists (I'm not a Spotify customer). Apple took the core concept, of a music subscription service, and produced their own unique take on it. Even if you think making a music subscription service is copying (and I stand by my claim that it's an obvious evolution of the music store concept), you have to admit that this falls in the "great artists steal" side of things.
> Multitasking / Task Switcher – Copied from WebOS
Apple's task switcher looks like CoverFlow, which is something they invented many years ago. Unless you're arguing that WebOS owns the concept of seeing the apps that you can switch to, but I don't buy that (besides the fact that seeing the apps you're switching to is a reasonably obvious thing to do once you have the computing resources for it, didn't Windows Vista introduce basically this exact same thing many years ago?).
> Calendar – Copied from Sunrise
I literally can't understand what the description for this one is trying to describe.
> iTunes Radio
iTunes has had radio support since forever, so I don't understand this claim.
> Back Navigation – Copied from BlackBerry OS 10
I've never used a BlackBerry, but after some searching around, it appears that BlackBerry's horizontal swipe gesture is not a back navigation gesture, so this claim is bogus.
> Notification Center / Toggles – Copied from Android, Samsung TouchWhiz
My recollection is that notification / control center was actually based on stuff people were doing with jailbreak.
> Lock Screen – Copied form Android, WP8
Haha what, are you serious? iPhone invented the slide-to-unlock (Apple even had a patent on it!), it's the other OS's that copied Apple here.
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> Then you can add phablets, mini-tablets, big screen phones. Apple for years attacked these devices.
What does that have to do with this conversation? Apple's pretty famous for saying they'll never do something right up until they do it. Remember the iPod Video?
But the point is, customer preferences changed over time. It used to be that everybody loved small devices (and many people still do). If Apple had introduced a 5.5" device back in, say, 2008, it would have been a humongous flop. So I don't understand what you're trying to say here, beyond acknowledging the fact that Apple recognized that customer demand for larger devices increased to the point where it made sense for Apple to expand their product line to meet that demand.
> Or how about multi-tasking windows? They criticized that, and then copied Windows Mobile's split-screen snapping identically for the iPad Pro
I am not very familiar with Windows Mobile (or even aware that it had split-screen snapping) so I can't comment here, except to question your "they criticized that" comment. When did Apple publicly comment about split-screen multitasking prior to adding support for it?
> Does it worse, costs more, and the majority of users aren't aware, and don't care.
Apple Photos is free.
As for "don't care", this is nonsense. Not only are you underestimating the number of people who go with Apple because they know Apple respects their privacy, you're also implying "it's ok to violate user privacy as long as they don't know you're doing it", which is a pretty shocking attitude.
> Right, everyone else's idea is either obvious
Oh give me a break. It's not my fault if you're picking obvious ideas to try and argue are unique. Or are you really going to try and argue that classifying and searching images isn't something people have wanted to do for decades?
Besides, most core ideas are obvious, and it's the details and execution that matters.
> And it wasn't until Google shipped it at scale and got industry applause for making photo management dramatically easier and hassle free, that suddenly they had to fast follow.
You really don't think Apple was looking into doing image classification and searching before Google released theirs? Just because Apple doesn't talk about upcoming plans doesn't mean they weren't already working on this. I'm very skeptical that this was a "fast follow" to copy Google, especially because Apple Photos gained this capability at the same time that the entire OS was upgraded with machine learning in all sorts of places. This is most assuredly just a case of it became feasible to do, so both Google and Apple did it at the same time.
> This is the problem with arguing with Apple loyalists. The constant hagiography.
This is the problem with arguing with Apple haters. Their insistence on retreating into accusing Apple users of cult-like or religious behavior to avoid having to actually construct good arguments.
> But it seems arguing with Apple fanboys is like arguing with a political pundit on a Cable news network. Their goal is to defend the image of their target no matter what.
Insulting the people you're arguing with is a terrible idea. Accusing people of being fanboys because they disagree with you is incredibly close-minded and offensive, and demonstrates that you're not arguing in good faith.
> Apple copies stuff.
Uh, yes, they copy things and make them better. That's was the foundation of this entire thread. You even quoted Steve Jobs saying "good artists copy, great artists steal". The argument here is that you're accusing them of "blindly copy[ing]", as well as implying that the companies they've "copied" are the sole inventors of the concept without any recognition that most of these core ideas have been around for a long time. Apple is literally famous for taking things that other companies have demonstrated the viability of and doing it better.
If you really want to accuse Apple of blindly copying, I'm surprised you haven't mentioned Watson/Sherlock. That's by far the most famous case of Apple directly cloning someone else (and is notable in part because this isn't a case where Apple improved on the original, they merely copied it).
Free for 5Gb, $120/yr for 2TB. Google Photos offers unlimited storage for up to 16 Mpix.
As to your other stuff, I don't see the point in continuing since it's so subjective. On any feature which Apple clearly copied and improved, your answer is "whataboutism" to trace the lineage and claim long long ago, the seeds of it came from somewhere else. History for you is a long line of incremental, but uninteresting improvements, punctuated by Apple's adoption, which somehow defines a clearly new thing. When Apple makes an improvement, it is not diminished by the fact that other people had worked on something similar and that it's lineage can be traced as accumulated incremental improvements.
But somehow, for everyone else, history diminishes their achievement.
For me, the history of product development is one of hundreds or thousands of actors, researchers, and scientists making publishing incremental improvements that stack. People who diminish the work of others, try to hog all the credit by rebranding the achievements of others, and fail to give back are parasites.
And for the record, I am not an Apple hater. I have a maxed out Mac Pro on my desk, I've owned every Apple product you can think of, including standing in line for one of the very first iPhones sold. I have carried almost nothing but iPhones, and my primary mobile computer is a Macbook pro with touch bar.
CRITICIZING a company's magical reality marketing and the inability of its cult-like fans to admit criticism of it, does not amount to hate.
I love Apple products. I hate the way they are marketed.
> Free for 5Gb, $120/yr for 2TB. Google Photos offers unlimited storage for up to 16 Mpix.
No, Apple Photos is free. It's an app that's bundled with macOS and iOS. You don't pay for it. The prices you just listed appear to be iCloud storage. But you don't need iCloud Photo Library to take advantage of searching your images (because, remember, it's all local).
> As to your other stuff, I don't see the point in continuing since it's so subjective. On any feature which Apple clearly copied and improved, your answer is "whataboutism" to trace the lineage and claim long long ago, the seeds of it came from somewhere else. History for you is a long line of incremental, but uninteresting improvements, punctuated by Apple's adoption, which somehow defines a clearly new thing. When Apple makes an improvement, it is not diminished by the fact that other people had worked on something similar and that it's lineage can be traced as accumulated incremental improvements.
Is that really how you're reading this? No wonder your comments have been so off base.
I never claimed that Apple's improvements were somehow creating a "clearly new thing". You've made that up out of whole cloth. I said Apple improves stuff when they copy, yes, but that just means it's an improved version. By and large, Apple's versions of things are just improvements over previous iterations of the thing. Sometimes Apple does create uniquely brand new stuff, but those times aren't what we've been talking about.
But no, you have this narrative of Apple users being cult-like and as a result you're putting words into my mouth.
> People who diminish the work of others, try to hog all the credit by rebranding the achievements of others, and fail to give back are parasites.
You mean like people who try to claim that Apple isn't doing anything other than "blindly copy[ing]", dismissing the improvements Apple made to their implementations and trying to give all the credit to previous iterations, while meanwhile dismissing the idea that the previous iterations themselves didn't have a long history to draw from (such as the decades of machine learning research that happened before both Google and Apple were able to introduce photo library search)?
> And for the record, I am not an Apple hater
Then why did you reach for the cult metaphor and the "fanboy" label?
>No, Apple Photos is free. It's an app that's bundled with macOS and iOS. You don't pay for it. The prices you just listed appear to be iCloud storage. But you don't need iCloud Photo Library to take advantage of searching your images (because, remember, it's all local).
The whole point of Google Photos is that it is a a cloud backup service that indexes a lifetime of photos and manages them for you. Google Photos without the free, unlimited storage misses the whole point of liberating you from having to ever worry about managing photos again.
Saying Apple Photos, the app, is free is like saying email clients are free. Sure, you could store a lifetime of email on your phone, but the original value proposition of Gmail was that they gave you so much free storage at a time when services like Yahoo and Hotmail! charged you for more than 25mb. Most of the value is managing the storage for you, worry free.
Don't give you users shitwork, and having to manage your phone's storage, sweat over metered storage, and delete stuff to free up space, is needless, janitorial, shitwork. That's why the web is so amazing, because I don't care about what websites I visit, since I don't have to manage what's in my browser's cache, it is purged automatically if unused, and anything important I do online is persisted in the cloud.
Storage management is annoying and anti-user, and Google Photos is about peace of mind.
The whole point of Google Photos is that it convinces everybody to give all of their photos to Google, so Google can data-mine them.
Saying Google Photos is free is like saying that Gmail is free. Sure, you're not paying for the service itself, but you're paying with your privacy and access to the most intimate details of your personal life.
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In any case, discussions about online storage of photos isn't relevant at all to this thread, especially when the context of Photos was in searching them, which has nothing to do with how they're stored or whether they're synced.
Apple tried to ban other companies from using GUI, claiming ownership of the concept. Of course, they themselves got the idea from Xerox, which got the idea from SRI/Englebart, which got the idea from Sketchpad (Ian Sutherland), which got the idea from Memex/Vannevar Bush all the way back from 1945. There's a continuous lineage of which Apple was a part of and clearly pushed the field further from military and corporate R&D to consumer, but did they deserve to own a monopoly on it?
Apple has very tight control over their components so they can do this but managing this across a million OEMs and device models (as it is with the Android ecosystem) is close to impossible.
Tango tried to solve the problem by specifying out a software and hardware stack for OEMs to use but now it looks like Google is just too jealous to let have Apple have a good time with ARkit, therefore the "me too".