I historically have proudly identified as an Apple fanboy. Love the design, love the products, and love being a part of the developer ecosystem.
However, I feel my fanboyism waning.
As a developer
From a developer perspective, in March 2024 — damn… they feel slow. Having been building almost exclusively on VSCode for the past ~9 months, my workflow has transformed significantly to be humbly reliant on copilots for help along the way. Building products for Apple devices typically requires you to build/test/ship in Apple’s Xcode, which has no native AI Copilot available.
Since my fanboyism began, Apple has had a traditional yearly release and update cycle of hardware and software. This includes its annual developer conference WWDC in early June, primarily a software release vehicle that includes beta releases of the new Xcode and OSs get released. I feel this coming June is a rather pregnant moment for Apple, and am certain Xcode will release with integrated copilots; or perhaps they’ll have some creative sidecar solution to enable devs to be as productive on other products as they are building products for Apple. Or maybe they’ll have prompt-to-SwiftUI using no-code tools. I just… can’t. see. it. not. happening. And likely, they will have to make some beachhead moves to have more rapid releases in the future.
When I step into Apple development tasks now, I often pull up VSCode alongside to make use of AI… but whether it’s the training or the lack of flow, it feels damn clunky. I have tried a 3rd party Xcode plugin and found it clunky and jarring. I really like Xcode as an IDE, I derive a lot of comfort and nostalgia from it. But it sure feels like the dark ages right now, and makes you question the efforts of your keystrokes.
As a mouth breather
Oh, and then there is Siri. Talk about missed opportunities! Can you believe Siri is a teenager, at almost 13 years old. A blazing poster child for the innovator's dilemma, it will be super interesting to see the changes coming to Siri in June as well. Again; can’t. see. it. not. happening.
Will they announce a similar “chat and walk” mode like ChatGPT has? From a productivity, learning, and passing the time perspective, there is so much capability available. Kids the age of Siri can pretty simply wire up via no-code tools to LLMs to achieve the same functionality — not to say doing it at Apple scale is a trivial problem, but it’s Apple, _that’s_ what they do.
Then there is of course the ankle biting competition of tools like Rabbit, Humane AI Pin, and the super interesting Open Interpreter. For Apple to release something that isn’t profoundly more incredible than many/most existing offerings would be a huge about face for them. But at this rate I believe they would see this and would partner with a big fish (like Gemini) to ensure they capture the market demand while building out there own service offering (as is their pattern).
So what?
Fanboy or otherwise, I’m not sad about any of this, big tech doesn’t need my tears and I’m so bullish on all the new great things that are coming, Apple or otherwise. But I do love a nice integrated ecosystem, I love my iPhone, and the integration it provides has been a great benefit to my life. Fragmentation threatens that, and if they can’t get their act together… changes will need to occur! And it will all be fine, just different.
Anyways, super keen to see what happens.
