Apple Worldview? Everyone's Fit & Creative, But Jobless: Page 2 of 2

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Siri Shortcuts

Natural language processing is the most important technical area in which Apple has fallen seriously behind. To be clear, Siri is no match for Alexa or the rest of the competition -- even if it's the "most used" digital assistant, as software engineering VP Federighi, noted during his keynote presentation. (I'm not sure he took into account the fact that you have to ask Siri the same thing six times to get an answer!) iOS 12 will add a Shortcuts app to Siri that will allow you to program regular activities Siri can help with. Sounds like Apple's solution for making Siri better is to make users work harder to overcome its shortcomings. "Hey Siri, get lost!"

Safari

Apple does take personal information security seriously, and it announced an enhancement to its already formidable Web tracking deterrence. Safari will now limit the information it provides to the Web in an effort to thwart "fingerprinting" devices from identifying users.

MacOS: the Mojave Desert

Apple will be delivering MacOS 12, designated Mojave, later this year. The new OS will have an attractive Dark Mode display option, but the biggest announcement seemed to relegate MacOS to its continued subservient position to iOS. The sneak peek at the future of Mac was Apple's plan to have Mac run iOS apps. Apple is currently in phase one of this migration, testing how Apple-developed iOS apps translate to the Mac environment, with third-party apps to be added later.

What this says to me is that Apple is still struggling to come up with a rationale for having two completely independent (though integrated) platforms, one of which is a market driver (iOS) and one that's a perennial also-ran (MacOS). It's now kicked the can further down the road.

Odds & Ends

The Apple keynoters announced a bunch of other things, none of which seemed to amount to much. A quick recap:

• Car Play -- Apple is finally giving other apps access to Car Play, its in-vehicle extension of iOS. Now, rather than having to put up with Apple Maps for navigation, Car Play would allow drivers to use Waze and Google Maps.
• Personalized Animojis -- For the uninitiated, animojis are emojis that mimic your facial movements; added in iOS 11. Now, people with copious time on their hands can create their own personalized animojis that best resemble their actual appearance -- it's kind of like the composite drawing stuff the police use. I can see corporate productivity leaping as a result of this one.
• Group FaceTime -- With iOS 12, FaceTime will support group calls along with one-to-one connections. The screen organization is overlapping tiles, with speech recognition that brings the active speaker's tile to the fore. If all we did at a business meeting was talk, this might be useful.
• AppleTV -- Apple did something. Nobody cares.

Conclusion

As I described in my Apple in the Enterprise session at Enterprise Connect '18, Apple is still a shaping force in the tech industry, but cracks in its product strategy and execution are starting to show. The company has been enormously successful at delivering premium products with trend-setting user interface features that command premium prices. While competitors like Samsung are successfully copying all of Apple's individual features, they're still struggling to clone the total Apple experience.

The battle continues, but from what we can see from Apple's WWDC, it's still being fought on the consumer front.

Follow Michael Finneran on Twitter.
@dBrnWireless