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Taking a bite out of Apple: Contemporary tech trends, Apple’s weaknesses, and untapped market opportunities. A frivolous presentation of iA for Nothing. London. Late 2024.

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On Today’s Menu: About Us A Word on Technology What’s up with AI? Risks and Opportunities What’s Up with Apple? Taking a Bite out of Apple

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Konnichiwa, iA desu.

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iA Was founded 2005 in Japan with the curious idea of connecting usability and beauty, which lead to the surprisingly resilient idea that “web design is 95% typography.”

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Among others we worked for DIE ZEIT, The Guardian, Monotype, WIPO, Vogue, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NHK.

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We launched iA Writer in 2010, sold over 3 Million apps and has 500,000 active users. Which is both the blessing and the curse of a solid paid app.

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iA Presenter (2023). Which, as Fat Boy Slim would say, you are witnessing right here, right now.

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iA Notebook. Sold out in two weeks. We’re selling it like Glühwein on a Christmasmarket, and we are already preparing the third batch right now.

🙈🙉🙊

In Japan, we are the main digital agency for some major Japanese companies. Among we design the digital products of Nikkei. Our clients prefer to keep our work confidential.

TECHNOLOGY

Now, let’s talk about technology and how, at the same time it can be both exciting and dangerous.

FASTRUN

A bicycle, a car a, a rocket. Technology can at the same time accelerate and excite…

ARMKNIFE

…or compromise and endanger us. Think knife, gun, bomb.

🔨STRONG

Technology can both extend human capabilities…

🔨SWITZERLAND

…and at the same, time it “amputates”.

“Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension[…]" — Marshall McLuhan

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Cell phones perfectly illustrate the strengths and the weaknesses of technology. It’s amazing what cellphones can do. They replace cameras, alarm clocks, stereos and book shelves… And at the same time…

NET

“We are all addicted to our phones. We now spend more time on our phones in the day than we do not on our phones. The average person picks up and starts tapping on their phone 110 times every day: they are chasing the dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin of a like or a follow. People are desperately trying to fill the void in their lives.” –Simon Lancaster

FAKE

So what is the deal with AI?

BRAIN

A lot has been said about how cool AI is and a lot has been said about what it isn’t and what it could be. AI is technology.

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The hype cycle may have peaked. Or not.

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Even Goldman Sachs finds it difficult to monetize.

🤔

People are getting skeptical of products with the AI tag.

NOFUTURE

Generally speaking, no one knows the future. So let’s look at what we know for sure.

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a) AI can be helpful, but it’s not the miracle it was hyped as. And it’s not the end of the world either. It’s technology, with its classic pluses and minuses, ups and downs. But it’s powerful, so it needs to be used carefully.

BRAIN

b) AI allows us to do things that previously required thought. It comes with the risk of making us lazy and replacing thought with carelessness.

🎭

c) Applied, AI seems to be not something else entirely, but another layer on the UI on top of the GUI. It’s often faster, but with less granular control.

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What are the dangers, what are the opportunities?

SAME

Risk: One of the main effects of AI seems to be that it levels everything.

🐣🐣

a) It makes all startups the same. Within minths, Product Hunt has become a ChatGPT extensions graveyard. Btw, does Product Hunt still exist or has it been eaten by AI?

GOOGLEAPPLEFACEBOOKAMAZONMICROSOFT

b) It has made all tech companies, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft the same, overnight. The all do the same, AI, more or less, some do it well, some do it badly. Apple Intelligence has been nothing short of tragic.

THEYTHEYTHEY

c) It has made everyone who uses it produce the same thing. It’s works like the Borg.

🐣CHICK

That all tech companies are the same now, opens a huge opportunities for companies that want to shake up things.

SELF

AI is as good as its use. We have to be better than AI to get the best out of it.

SPECIAL

Done right, AI may boild the world to death, it may eat our last brain cell, or it may help make some of us get smarter.

WARM

Like all technology, knife, chainsaw and bicycles, it needs technique, aka skills, that, if mastered, can make us smarter, stronger, and better at what we do.

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Let’s look at how AI could help a phone maker take a bite out of Apple. Let’s look at what it has lost becoming the most powerful company in the world.

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Apple is incredibly powerful. It owns every private person and every business that makes a lot of money (including its competitors like Google, Netflix, or Spotify). Every strength is a weakness.

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a) Apple is big, but large entities move slowly and can’t easily adapt to change. Their slow reaction to AI is proof of that.

MONEY

b) Apple is increasingly perceived as greedy: Overpriced accessories, exaggerated commission fees, frequent product iterations with minor upgrades, lack of compatibility and ecosystem lock-in, overreach in market segments, expensive repairs and limited right to repair, tax evasion, subscription services push.

LOST

c) Apple traditionally executes well, but it looks like it ran out of ideas. Cars, VR goggles, robots, folding phones… None of these things are new ideas or in any form needed devices.

TRASH

d) Apple is neglecting its former core audience: families, education, creatives, developers, and people that indeed think different.

FAMILY

Apple is neglecting Families. Screen time is a half finished product that doesn’t work. Even the advertising company Google does Parental Controls better than Apple. When these days the global UX train crash Google (look at what they did to search, maps, anything with their desperate need to monetize ads) beats you at usefulness, you know that you failed.

UNIVERSITY

Compared to even the 80ties, Apple is neglecting the education sector. It leaves Google (Chromebooks) and Microsoft (Office) free reign.

ARTMUSICDANCE

Apple is increasingly neglecting creatives and developers. It still uses us as an ad token: “Look, creative people use Apple products! Indie devs get rich! Look at the diversity in outr ads!” But it doesn’t really care about anything than making a buck. This is why Tim Cook calls Trump when he sees a chance that that Trump may win the election. Trump will help him dealing with the difficult Europeans. Apple’s AI desaster is a testament to the arrogance that reigns within.

NO

Apple doesn’t support thinking different, it antagonizes people that think different, especially when they are creatives and developers. Their new philosophy is not think different, it’s “My way or high way.”.

ROOM📱

Apple has also caged and trampled on its original vision: “Humans should control computers and not the other way around.” We are prisoners of our phones.

👄🍏

Taking a bite out of Apple. This means learning from Apple and, eventually, doing what they cannot do anymore.

💻🚲

Steve Jobs’ vision of the computer as a “bicycle for the mind” is still as powerful as it was. It’s just that Apple no longer follows it. The iPhone is the opposite of a bicycle for the mind.

☮CASH

There was a lot of hippie in the old Apple. These days Apple focuses on making money.

JESUS

Steve Jobs made fun of the ‘smart Phone’. Jobs: “let me talk about ‘smart phones’, so they say. And they typically combine a phone, plus some email capability, and the baby internet. But the trouble is they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy to use. So we’re going to reinvent the phone.”

PHONE

Smart: Phones are pretty smart these days. In fact…

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Smart phones are are smarter phones. They are smarter than us. Today, our phones are arguably much smarter than us. Long before AI, phones sort of figured us out. They know better who we are than we know. They know what we want before we realized it. If we keep moving in the same direction, with AI they may not be Gods, but they may just as well seem to be. They already are, when you look what a cultish submission to a piece of shining glass they have caused.

BRAIN

And, if you believe the hype, phone are not stopping at “smarter”, they go for “smartest”. But maybe…

IMAGINE

Maybe it’s time for phones that make US smarter (instead of the other way around). Imagine that… How would that work?

FAKE

You probably guessed it.

AI?

And dowhat everybody else does. Not really. Like Costanza said, “If everything I ever did was wrong, maybe I should do the opposite.”

TURN

You need to turn the tables on it. Let it ask YOU questions. Let it make YOU think, write and learn. Maybe making us smarter is in fact what AI would be good at and could be good for?

TEACH

Imagine: Devices that make us smarter and not dumber.

📈BRAIN

a) Imagine phones that use AI to train and improve our intelligence, not to make us lazy and get us more addicted, wasting our money, energy and time.

BodyMind

b) Reimagine the ancient ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body. Nothing doesn’t stop at physical and mental health but it widens the perspective on our mental performance.

📏Mind

c) Picture yourself using AI as an assistant that assesses and improves writing, grammar, rhetoric, orthography, calculation, logic, ethics, our knowledge in different sectors, it proposes articles, exercises and…

BRAIN↔BRAIN

d) Try to visualize how AI points out our recurring flaws in communication with others, and it helps us getting more intelligent together.

HEART↔HEART

Real intelligence is not a solitary talent or experience.

COUPLE

Just as any form of beauty, meaning and happiness, real intelligence is shared.

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Building devices that make us intelligent sounds like a lot of work. It is a lot of work. So, don’t do it alone. Take a page out of the Apple playbook. Pretty much all Apple devs are all upset with Apple. We all feel trapped.

WELCOME

Start taking care of your own developer community. You don’t need one Million devs. At first, you need 10 really good ones. Let them build exclusive apps (or special editions) that make people (and not phones) smarter on your phones than on the usual devices.

THANK

Thank you.