I would love to know if Ives was truly foundation to the iPhone, or if he was more given the overall idea and polished it with the final look/feel (which is also important).
Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).
Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good visionaries in the company.
I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project. If it's something lame, then I will assume his impact at Apple was overrated. If it's a jaw-dropper, then maybe he really is the cat's meow.
> Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).
Like almost all new products later thought of as 'visionary' innovations, the first iPhone built on pre-existing ideas but integrated them particularly well and added some excellent new refinements. It's easy to forget that the prior five years had been a crucible of in-market experimentation between companies like Nokia, Palm, HP, Sony, Ericsson and Blackberry with platforms like Pocket PC, Palm OS, Windows CE and Windows Mobile.
The iPhone was announced in Jan 2007 at MacWorld (and shipped in July), I was there and played with it extensively in the Apple booth. I remember thinking it had some especially clever ideas and was a very nice implementation. It advanced the "premium pocket phone" bar up to a new level but I didn't see it as unusually visionary. It was definitely significant but still a (large) step in an ongoing progression of refinement, integration and search for product/market fit. There were already large color touchscreen devices which integrated a phone, messaging, camera, music player, Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS. Here's an article looking at a few pre-iPhone devices: https://www.phonearena.com/news/6-great-smartphones-from-10-....
The iPhone 1's design was uniquely simple and svelte but I was immediately concerned about it having enough battery to support that screen. The choice to go with just "One Big Button" and no physical keyboard or navigation keys was bold, weird and also a bit concerning. The on-screen keyboard-only and gesture nav-only choices did feel a bit like two steps forward, one back in iOS 1. It felt like they made a 'purist' design decision and had to make it work as well as it could. That worked out to be "well enough" but sometimes similarly bold but risky choices can fail when they sacrifice too much. However, the battery life did become a very serious issue for active users when the first iPhone shipped and limited the success of the device. It's also worth remembering the usability of iOS 1 was pretty clunky. I played with most of these early phone devices and owned several but didn't adopt an iPhone as my primary device until the iPhone 3G shipped 18 months after the iPhone launch. The 3G was significantly better, different and more refined than the iPhone 1.
The iPhone was the first really well done general purpose computing phone. It had a real web browser, a real music player, apps that didn't suck. Adoption was huge because the design was great, but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created.
I know a lot of people basically who were basically saying "finally"
> but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created.
Maybe, but I’m not certain we would have converged on a single form factor. Only Apple had the retail, marketing, software, hardware capabilities, discipline, and incentives to throw everything behind the minimalistic design and single form factor and turn it into a hit.
Everyone else was splitting their efforts across multiple form factors and relying on carrier stores to sell their phones, and I don’t think that was going to revolutionize anything.
Advanced capabilities were truly depressing. Better hardware would have helped a lot, but given how poor Android trundled(s?) along, I'm inclined to agree that only someone with a strong vision was going to execute it as well as Steve did.
It's strange to think it was only 4 years after the initial release that he died.
Nokia had a touch-screen based phone, with a real browser and a real music player in 2005. They didn't make an effort to sell it around here, though, but I don't think it's that either.
I remember the first application that people were hyped about was Google Maps. The Nokia phone couldn't run that, and any map available there was much harder to use. But the iPhone only really took off after people could install any kind of application there.
Yeah, not totally surprised. As in the other thread, this feature set was a pretty obvious outcome. But you have to implement it well. It doesn't look particularly well done. Probably slow, no pinch, etc...
I'm not sure what model you are talking about, maybe the S60, third edition. It is hard to get any background on it.
I'd like to say that companies missed out on the fact that a web browser would be really sellable, but it's clearly all about tying everyone to their platform, and more importantly their store.
I'm not comfortable with the word 'visionary' because it's ill-defined and unscoped. So I don't use that word because I don't think in those terms. This may be because most of my later career was spent leading teams conceiving and shipping cutting-edge tech products in new categories - sometimes launching those categories - occasionally with historically notable success, usually with middling success and sometimes with abject failure. After a couple decades this track-record resulted in several years leading innovation globally at a top ten valley tech giant.
So I've thought a lot about new tech product innovation including speaking, writing and teaching about it. When people have been kind enough to use 'visionary' in relation to a product I led, I thank them but reject the term and then try to turn it into a teachable moment about the thought processes, systems and relentless execution necessary to create results someone might someday describe as 'visionary'. I'm generally opposed to the trend in media and pop-biz-lit to deify outstanding new product development as somehow ineffably mystical. At best, it helps no one get better at doing this hard thing, and at worst, it's pulling up the ladder after we've climbed it.
The novel insights and intuitions which some people call 'visionary', in my experience, always seem to come after intensive research, deep study of prior work in the field and constant hands-on, practical experimentation. So I credit them as the indirect (but expected) result of the rigorous process of making and shipping cool new stuff. That said, I do think of Steve Jobs himself as one of the best natural tech product innovators I've ever met. Another example I cite as a significantly notable step change was SpaceX's understanding that the way to engineer exponentially more mass to orbit per dollar was pioneering a substantially different process of rocket development. That's more a process than a product - but that's kind of my whole meta-point.
If your question was basically to try to call out "guy who didn't think iPhone 1 was unusually visionary at the 2007 launch, doesn't think anything is visionary". Well... you win. But it's more because I think most new products in new categories are 'visionary' in some ways. It's just that the majority of new visions fail commercially. Semantically, 'visionary' probably best parses to a synonym for novelty and 'newly different' doesn't necessarily equate to good, so it's not useful as a threshold metric for product success. However, I do think the iPhone business overall is certainly one of the ten most innovative and successful new product businesses our industry has ever seen. But that doesn't change the fact that many knowledgeable observers at the original launch didn't see it that way - because it wasn't that yet. Twenty years of incredible success and constant iteration tends to obscure that the original product - as innovative as it was - wasn't what its descendants became. And the victors tend to rewrite history and our collective memories obscuring the context the 1.0 was created in. Standing there in the Apple booth, I DID think it was really good, bold and different. I told someone that night I expected it would probably be my personal "product of the year" - and recall this was in early January. My comment above was because just being a fanboy exclaiming how visionary a product is informs nothing and helps no one.
Although not many people use the word 'visionary' for business model innovation, I agree it was a crucial element in the iPhone's viability. It's clear the earlier 2005 collaboration with Motorola on the ROKR (aka the "iTunes Phone") is where Apple learned a lot about the broader ecosystem gaps which would need to be addressed for a phone to succeed.
I think he could have been instrumental to the iphone (not saying he was or wasn't) and whatever he tries next is a complete flop. The ability to be successful is contextual, and great artists can produce mediocre art.
Excellent point. I think most great creative work is due to a uniquely 'right' combination of people, problem, experience and environment being together at an opportune moment.
Jobs and Ive were at the core of all the product design.
There were multiple articles about Jobs spending most of his day with Jony looking at prototypes Jony's team had devised and giving critiques and feedback. Then they would iterate on what Jobs said.
Of course the engineering team had to figure out how to make Jobs suggestions real within the physical and technological constraints they were working with.
> I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project.
I think Ive's lack of high profile success since Jobs passed away shows Jobs true talent. He was a taste savant. A genius for figuring out what people would like and building a team capable of building those things at scale.
Ive could take Jobs ideas and come up with a concrete design for making them real. But he doesn't have that instinct for figuring out what kinds of products people want in the first place.
I would love to know what Jobs would have done with AI to make it into something people want to use, instead of being terrified it's just going to put them out of work.
Maybe Altman will serve that taste savant role, and they will be a good combo. I'm optimistic they will produce something that:
* doesn't have ads, (we are the customer, not the product)
* makes our lives more fluid and easy
* delivers on the vision for what computers always could be
This won't only be in the free tier. Altman says they don't even break even on the paid tiers. They will use whatever money is available to fill that gap, and advertising money is available. https://x.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813
Soon we will live in a world where people don't make purchasing decisions for themselves, they ask an AI which will suggest the product that pays the most for ads. Payola World.
I dont think jobs was necessary a taste savant as he was notorious for claiming other peoples ideas as his own. But he was willing to walk over anyone if he thought it would make a better product be they another company, his board, or subordinates. Nothing was sacred.
Back in 2006 I saw this demo video from Jeff Han https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKqyn-gUbY so when the iPhone came out I really wasn't surprised by the multi-touch part.
And, as others have pointed out, scroll inertia wasn't a new concept - I also remember a Flash website (or demo) from yugop (Yugo Nakamura) or Tokyo Flash (I really don't remember whom) that had it in the interface, all very fluid.
Was the iPhone revolutionary? Absolutely!
But, imho, it was built on evolutionary advancements.
Touchscreen scrolling has been in consumer products since at least the early 1980s and inertial scrolling on a touchscreen has been around since at least the early 1990s with Sun's Star7[1].
(And I wouldn't be surprised if there are academic papers that predate the consumer products by a decade or more.)
I love the delightfully 90's/global village icons they used in the UI here. So few pixels but they still incorporated popular aesthetics from the time.
Practically, though, the UX in that demo was terrible. The frame rate was entirely insufficient. The latency between tapping and action taking place was too long. The idea was absolutely great and way ahead of its time, but it was also way ahead of the hardware's capabilities.
We saw a lot of great ideas in the 90s, but either the hardware performance wasn't ready, or the software effort fell short of the polish needed for mass adoption. We had to wait for the iPhone to be one of those rare products where they used capable hardware AND actually finished the software.
The breakthrough aspect of the iPhone was enabling gestures and a very usable UI without having to use a stylus. This is despite the much lower precision of the capacitive touchscreen tech available in that era.
Other smartphones and PDAs back then used more precise resistive touchscreens that required an annoying pressure stylus because it was a way to get more usability out of the very small screens that devices were limited to.
Not necessarily the first, but the earliest that I can remember:
Decades ago (before they were sold/bought/sold), Opera (web browser/suite) used gestures as a navigation tool with your mouse. I never could figure out how to get it to work, but it was a thing.
I know mouse gestures existed previously because I remember someone on /. talking about them circa 2000 and I had to look up what they were. But I don't remember what they were being used for.
Is this the same control system that is used on the first style Segway by Dean Kamen, or is it different since there is a mass at the top of the pendulum?
The same author who wrote some other famous biographies. I know some people prefer other DaVinci's biographies. I didn't read others to be able to compare, but I really enjoyed this one.
Nitpick: "da Vinci" wasn't our homeboy's name. That just means "from Vinci". He was "Leonardo", like many other people, so we added "da Vinci" to clarify which Leonardo we meant, just like you might say, "Jessica from church came by," to clarify that you didn't mean Jessica the ex-girlfriend. Surnames weren't very widely used in Italy then.
It's like "Jesus of Nazareth"; you wouldn't talk about "other OfNazareth's biographies". Ain't grammatical.
It's fine. John Smith once meant the John who works as a blacksmith etc. Whatever the original meaning we now widely take da Vinci to be the last name if we don't speak Italian.
> John Smith once meant the John who works as a blacksmith etc.
Yes, modern surnames largely evolved from descriptive epithets added to distinguish different people of the same given name, but that doesn't retroactively transform the descriptive epithets of commonly applied to people who lived in the past into surnames for those people.
Does this also apply to DiCaprio? His name seems to translate as "the deer's Leonardo", or maybe "the goat's Leonardo". Possibly "son of a goat".
Wikipedia says that Leonardo da Vinci was properly Leonardo son of Piero from Vinci son of Antonio son of another Piero son of Guido. I'm not sure that moving to surnames was a mistake, you know.
But at some point back in time, when an ancestral DiCaprio was first referred to as just "DiCaprio", that was an error, right? He should properly be called Quello Figlio di Caprio, that son of a goat. It's not too late.
Descriptive linguistics, how stuff is actually used, is a lot more useful in practical real-life communication vs prescriptive.
Da Vinci is a shorthand that everyone will understand vs just calling him Leonardo. Writing Leonardo da Vinci will be more explicit but will come off much more formal and stilted.
Nobody who knew Leonardo called him "da Vinci", any more than you would call Jessica "from church" ("Hey, is From Church coming over tonight?") or Venezuelans would call Hugo Chávez Frias "Mr. Frias". "Descriptive linguistics" is not a magic trump password that makes all erroneous utterances correct. If you haven't studied 16th-century Italian, you're going to make errors when you name 16th-century Italians.
> any more than you would call Jessica "from church" ("Hey, is From Church coming over tonight?")
That's not in common use, so wouldn't fall under descriptive linguistics. No English speaker was puzzled at whether Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was about someone else from Vinci's code. It's an established convention at this point.
The established convention is to use the given name "Leonardo", just as with Raphael, Michelangelo, and little Donato ("Donatello"). Dan Brown is also not an authority on the descriptive linguistics of 16th-century Italian.
Walking through TSA scanners, I always get that unnerving feeling I will get pulled aside. 50% of the time they flag my cargo pants because of the zipper pockets - There is nothing in them but the scanner doesn't like them.
Now we get the privilege of walking by AI security cameras placed in random locations, hoping they don't flag us.
There's a ton of money to be made with this kind of global frisking, so lots of pressure to roll out more and more systems.
To be fair, at least you can choose not to wear the cargo pants.
A friend of mine once got pulled aside for extra checks and questioning after he had already gone through the scanners, because he was waiting for me on the other side to walk to the gates together and the agent didn't like that he was "loitering" – guess his ethnicity...
I have shoes that I know always beep on the airport scanners, so if I choose to wear them I know it might take longer or I might have to embarrassingly take them off and put them on the tray. Or I can not wear them.
Yes, in an ideal world we should all travel without all the security theatre, but that's not the world we live in, I can't change the way airports work, but I can wear clothes that make it faster, I can put my liquids in a clear bag, I can have bags that make it easy to take out electronics, etc. Those things I can control.
But people can't change their skin color, name, or passport (well, not easily), and those are also all things you can get held up in airports for.
Not sure, but I bet they were looking at their feet kinda dusting off the bottoms, making awkward eye contact with the security guard on the other side of the one way door.
Email the state congressman and tell them what you think.
Since (pretty much) nobody does this, if a few hundred people do it, they will sit up and take notice. It takes less people than you might think.
Since coordinating this with a bunch of strangers (I.e. the public) is difficult, the most effective way is to normalise speaking up in our culture. Of course normalising it will increase the incoming comm rate, which will slowly decrease the effectiveness but even post that state, it’s better than where we are, which is silent public apathy
If that's the case, why do people in Congress keep voting for things their constituents don't like? When they get booed at town halls they just dismiss it as being the work of paid activists.
Get Precheck or global entry. I only do a scanner every 5 years or so when I get pulled at random for it. Otherwise it's metal detector only. Unless your zippers have such chunky metal that they set that off you'll be fine. My belt and watch don't.
Note: Precheck is incredibly quick and easy to get; and GE is time consuming and annoying, but has its benefits if you travel internationallly. Both give the same benefits at TSA.
Second note: let's pretend someone replied "I shouldn't have to do that just to be treated...blah blah" and that I replied, "maybe not, but a few bucks could still solve this problem, if it bothers you enough that's worth it to you."
...maybe not, but a few bucks could still solve this problem
Sure, can't argue with that. But doesn't it bug you just a little that (paying a fee to avoid harassment) doesn't look all that disimilar from a protection racket? As to whether it's a few bucks or many, now you're just a mark negotiating the price.
It actually doesn't! Plenty of people never fly at all and many fly incredibly rarely. The Precheck and GE programs cost money to administer as they have to do background checks and conduct interviews. This actually accomplishes actual security goals, since it allows them to flag risky behavior and examine it.
Who benefits from these programs? Primarily heavy travelers (and optimizers like me who value their time saved more than the $24 a year). These programs also actually make everything better for everyone since I'm no longer taking up a space in the slower-moving, shoes-off line, and TSA/CBP get an actual background check done on me.
The way it is now, heavy travelers who can easily afford it, pay the full costs of the program.
Would you rather:
1. Precheck is free and paid for by all taxpayers even though a lot of people will never bother to enroll (you have to assume -- the cost is so low today that it can't be a barrier for almost anyone who can afford to fly, so it seems a ton of people can't be bothered to follow simple instructions and go get fingerprinted at Staples)
2. Precheck is eliminated and everyone has to go back to the dumb liquids-out, shoes-off thing
3. Precheck is eliminated and we just treat everyone like the Precheck people today, without doing any background checks. Basically like pre-9/11.
I don't often fly, but back when I went to germany on a school trip, on the return flight I got pulled aside into a small room by whatever the german equivalent of TSA is and they swabbed the skin of my belly, and the inside of my bag. I'm guessing it was a drugs check and I must have just looked shifty because I get nervous in situations like that, but I do find it funny that they pulled me aside instead of the guys with me who almost certainly had something on them.
Also my partner has told me that apparently my armpits sometimes smell of weed or beer, despite me not coming in contact with either of those for a very long time, and now I definitely don't want to get taken into a small room by a TSA person (After some googling, apparently those smells can be associated with high stress)
I already adjust my clothing choices when flying to account for TSA's security theater make-work bullshit. Wonder how long before I'm doing that when preparing to go to other public places.
(I suppose if I attended pro sports games or large concerts, I'd be doing it for those, too)
I was getting pulled out of line in the 90’s for having long hair. I don’t dress in shitty clothes or fancy ones, I didn’t look funny, just the hair, which got regular compliments from women.
I started looking at people trying to decide who looked juicy to the security folks and getting in line behind them. They can’t harass two people in rapid succession. Or at least not back then.
The one I felt most guilty about, much later, was a filipino woman with a Philippine passport. Traveling alone. Flying to Asia (super suspect!). I don’t know why I thought they would tag her, but they did. I don’t fly well and more stress just escalates things, so anything that makes my day tiny bit less shitty and isn’t rude I’m going to do. But probably her day would have been better for not getting searched than mine was.
Getting pulled aside by TSA for secondary screening is nowhere in the ball park of being rushed at gunpoint as a teenager and told to lay down on the ground where one false move will get you shot by a trigger happy cop that probably won’t face any consequences - especially if the innocent victim is a Black male.
In fact, they will probably demonize the victim to find sn excuse why he deserved to get shot.
I wasn't implying TSA-cargo-pant-groping is comparable. My point is to show escalation in public facing systems. We have been dealing with TSA. Now we get AI Scanners. What's next?
You have no evidence to suggest this, just bias. Unless you are aware of the AI algorithm, then it's a pointless discussion that only causes strife and conjecturing.
How many audit the police videos have you seen on Youtube? There are an insufferable amount of "white" people getting destroyed by the cops. If you replace the "white" people in these videos with "black" then 99% of viewers would assume the cops are hardcore racist, when in fact, they are just bad cops - very bad cops, that have some deep psychological issues - probably rooted from a traumatic childhood.
I'm sure CLEAR is already having giddy discussion on how they can charge you to get pre-verified access to walk around in public. We can all wear CLEAR certified dog tags so the cops can hastle the non-dog-tagged people.
I got pulled aside because I absentmindedly showed them my concealed carry permit, not my driver's license. I told them I was a consultant working for their local government and was going back to Austin. No harm no foul.
If the system used any kind of logic whatsoever a CCW permit would not only allow you to bypass airport security but also carry in the airport (Speaking as both a pilot and a permit holder)
Would probably eliminate the need for the TSA security theater so that will probably never happen.
You can carry in the airport in AZ without a permit, in the unsecured areas. I think there was only one broo-ha-ha because some particularly bold guy did it openly with a rifle (can't remember if there's more to the story).
The point of the security theater is to assuage the 95th percentile scared-of-everything crowd, they're the same people who want no guns signs in public parks.
Right from the beginning it was a handout to groups who built the scanning equipment, who were basically personal friends with people in the admin. We paid absurd prices for niche equipment, a lot of which was never even deployed and just sat in storage.
Several of the hijackers were literally given extended searches by security that day.
A reminder that what actually stopped hijackings (like, nearly entirely) was locking the cabin door, which was always doable, and has not ever been breached. Not only did this stop terrorist hijackings, it stopped more casual hijackings that used to be normal, it could also stop "inside man" style hijackings like that one with a disgruntled FedEx pilot, it was nearly free to implement, always available, harms no one's rights, doesn't turn airport security into a juicy bombing target, doesn't slow down an important part of the economy, doesn't invent a massive bureaucracy and LEO in the arms of a new american agency that has the goal of suppressing domestic problems and has never done anything useful. Keep in mind, shutting the cockpit door is literally how the terrorists themselves protected themselves from being stopped and is the reason Flight 93 couldn't be recovered.
TSA is utterly ineffective. They have never stopped an attack, regularly fail their internal audits, the jobs suck, and they pay poorly and provide minimal training.
You're right not a lot of people objected to TSA ending the no shoes safety rule, and it's a shame. I certainly objected and tried to make my objections known, but apparently 23 or 24 years of the iconic custom of taking shoes off went to waste because the TSA decided to slack off
It's sad to see so much effort being put into a product that is utterly uncool. Maybe start with the design (cool) and then integrate the mechanics. This is how companies design cool cars.
You are making things up out of thin air. These are recalls from JAN 2024- MAR 2025
Ford Motor Company, 94 (7%)
Chrysler (FCA US, LLC), 78 (6%)
Forest River, Inc., 67 (5%)
General Motors, LLC, 41 (3%)
BMW of North America, LLC, 39 (3%)
Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC, 33 (3%)
Hyundai Motor America, 28 (2%)
Jaguar Land Rover North America, LLC, 26 (2%)
Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., 25 (2%)
Daimler Trucks North America, LLC, 24 (2%)
Honda (American Honda Motor Co.), 24 (2%)
Kia America, Inc., 24 (2%)
Jayco, Inc., 22 (2%)
International Motors, LLC, 21 (2%)
Nova Bus (US) Inc., 21 (2%)
Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing, 21 (2%)
Nissan North America, Inc., 20 (2%)
Tesla, Inc., 20 (2%)
Mack Trucks, Inc., 17 (1%)
Winnebago Industries, Inc., 16 (1%)
Ratio of U.S. vehicles recalled in 2024 → 2024 U.S. sales
Tesla: 5,135,991 → 516,597 ≈ 9.94.
Ford: 4,777,161 → 2,078,832 ≈ 2.30.
GM: 1,872,567 → 2,700,000 ≈ 0.69.
Toyota: 1,221,666 → 2,330,000 ≈ 0.52.
Honda: 3,794,113 → 1,291,490 ≈ 2.94.
A Tesla sold in 2024 was roughly 4 times more likely than a Ford to be involved in a recall campaign that year.
Despite selling far fewer vehicles, Tesla’s recalls affected nearly ten times its annual U.S. sales volume.
This reflects a structural difference, not media bias. Tesla initiates fewer recall campaigns overall, but those campaigns routinely involve millions of vehicles. When normalized for sales volume, Tesla’s recall exposure is the highest of any major automaker. “Innovation risk” cuts both ways.
Not OP but not really. Recalls are pretty rare in most cars.
I own lots of cars and I've only had two recalls in the last 33 years. One for a Mazda minivan to replace a rear hatch shock (i.e. nothing safety related) and one for a Dodge truck (I don't remember what it was).
Great to see someone trying to innovate. It's surprising humans haven't come up with a better input method than an old school keyboard. Who would have thought that a typewriter from 1874 would still be so visible on a modern Macbook!
I think it is a momentum problem. You learn to use a keyboard when you are young/inexperienced, because you need to learn something, and then learning something new is hard and slows you down, so you stick with what you know. It's doubly hard to both create a new layout and learn it.
I would offer ‘swipe’ keyboards as one example of something new. “better” is subjective, they are certainly not faster than normal typing, but offer much more flexibility for typing with one hand. But even then they still rely on the old qwerty layout. Not sure how widely adopted they are but they come standard on IOS and Android keyboards
It depends on the battery life. If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense. Creating a removable battery pack adds extra weight and gives the designers less freedom to place the battery pack exactly where it needs to be in the robot frame, or distribute the cells across the frame in strategic locations.
Also, the charge rate matters. If robot can charge to 80% in say 30 minutes, then it can take small charging breaks during the day between critical tasks.
Also, if the feet have inductive chargers, it's possible to place the robot on a large charging mat that allows it to run indefinitely, like in a factory environment. If your robot takes 30 minutes to fold the laundry or do dishes, why not place a charging mat at these locations so it can work and charge at the same time.
In the future, new homes might include charging coils embedded in the floor every 12 inches so that your robots can work all day.
Almost all of those points are applicable for the battery pack as well. There should be virtually no weight difference, other than the design limitation which is a valid concern.
I suppose an external battery pack adds the bonus of doing a hard shutdown, in the case it decides to go rogue. Though getting to the battery pack might be hard if it resists you.
Yeah so in 2-4 years you can throw out your whole expensive robot because battery wears out? I hate this argument that just to be a bit thinner, the whole device has to be be made throwaway.
Humanoid "maid" robots will never be popular in the home until they can effectively simulate the appearance and form factor of a woman or teenage girl. It is what it is.
That seems like more of a reversal of causation. Women are more likely to be maids or home care workers because "domestic" work is perceived as women's work. Maids are often young women, "teenage girls" as you say, or older women because they either haven't started a family yet or have already raised their children to adulthood. This is because many women are expected to take on the majority of unpaid domestic labor while men take on the traditional wage-earning paid labor.
The sexualization of young women working domestic labor is the result of the general sexualization of most young women in most contexts. It isn't that domestic labor is some sort of pretext to get a young woman into the home. It is that once they are there, men sexualize them.
I'm not saying everyone, everywhere, wants to fuck their robot maid, I'm saying thousands of years of patriarchy, hundreds of years of popular culture, fetishization of domestic labor roles and simple human nature will have an influence on the adoption of humanoid domestic robots that companies ignore at their peril.
Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression. The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people. It doesn't even have a face, it doesn't look pleasant, it doesn't invite an emotional bond, it isn't friend shaped, and that isn't what most people will want, or would spend money on, regardless of how efficient it is.
Humanoid robots will have a context within the same gender and cultural dynamics as human beings, by virtue of looking and acting human enough. People already have relationships with AI, and that will only become more normalized over time. Most people will personify and anthropomorphize humanoid robots just as much as they do AI, and this will be necessary for their popular acceptance and adoption. And yes, many people will want to fuck them, or at the very least, want them to look fuckable.
> Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression.
They sell a ton of Civics, and even more of the kind of boring-ass SUV like a Nissan Muranos and Ford Escapes. None of these are the 'sexy' cars you describe. True, individual Lamborghinis sell for an order of magnitude more than a Murano and are sexy cars, but your original comment suggests that only an aesthetically sexy robot maid would be "popular." Would a sexy robot maid be a sensation? I bet it would, but I just don't think adoption is waiting on that necessarily. Rather, usefulness and 'right price' are the current barriers.
> The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people.
Hard agree, it's for sure gross looking. They could do a lot better by literally just letting an animator design a cute cartoon face to put on a cheap screen. If anybody wants the weirdo look pictured there they can just turn the screen off.
People already buy robot vacuums to do a decent job of vacuuming a decent amount of their floors. It is a $4.48 billion industry. Roombas don't look like people. They don't even look like pets or animals. They look like big hockey pucks. I have one and I have it run as soon as I leave for work because I don't want to interact with it, I want to have clean floors. If there was a robot that could fold clothes, load and unload the dishwasher, dust, and general purpose clean, I would have it run when I wasn't home too and would prefer if it folded up into a little box in the corner when I was home.
Roomba uses AI in some of their models, but people aren't trying to have a relationship with them. Because it is AI to serve a utilitarian purpose that does not involve imitating human behavior. People have relationships with chatbots because they are specifically imitating human behavior. Putting googly eyes on your Roomba isn’t the same as falling in love with a chatbot.
Cars are very very publicly visible, so they are used to project some sort of image to others; like the clothes people wear. Most people don't wear clothes or drive cars for purely utilitarian purposes. Often people will buy clothes or cars that look utilitarian to project an image about themselves. People buy furniture and decorate their homes to project an image. People do not buy their water heater to project a certain image about themselves. Robot vacuums are frustrating to watch. They get the job done in the end (most of the time) but their random zig zags or difficulty navigating around objects is something most people don’t want to see. They just want the result. Huminoid robots will be like that for a significant amount of time, where they can empty the dishwasher, but it will be painfully slow, odd looking, and very unhuman-like. People won’t want to see this but they will want the job done so they don’t have to do it. A robot that can perform utilitarian household chores would be a huge industry and would be used by most people like a dishwasher or water heater, primarily for its utility.
A robot that reaches the level that it could be a companion, operating visibly with/around people (bringing you and your guests refreshments rather than slowly, awkwardly folding clothes alone in a bedroom while you are at work or downstairs watching a movie) would very likely have a huge pressure to fit cultural and gender dynamics.
Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).
Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good visionaries in the company.
I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project. If it's something lame, then I will assume his impact at Apple was overrated. If it's a jaw-dropper, then maybe he really is the cat's meow.