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Apple’s Future is Health

Posted on January 17, 2019 by admin Posted in Hardware, Medical Leave a comment

What it is: Apple’s hiring of health related talent has increased 400% since 2017.

At one time, Apple relied on the Macintosh computer for all its revenue, but the world had already standardized on Windows so Apple had little room for growth focusing on personal computers.

Then Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes, and suddenly portable music players and music downloads gave Apple a huge boost in revenue while helping it rely less on the Macintosh.

When smartphones threatened to kill the iPod market, Apple reduced their dependence on the iPod by releasing the iPhone. The iPhone proved so popular that it defined the current smartphone market.

However, the smartphone market is slowing down. People aren’t upgrading their smartphones as often because each new model offers minor improvements over the current models. That means people are holding on to their smartphones longer, which means slowing smartphone sales.

Not only is Apple reducing their future revenue guidance due to slowing iPhone sales, but Samsung is also forecasting a downturn in smartphone sales as well. The problem isn’t just Apple but the overall smartphone market.

That’s why Apple has been diversifying recently with services such as Apple Music, Apple Books, and Apple Pay. the idea is to reduce dependence on hardware and make money whether people are using older products or not.

With iPhone sales slowing and showing no signs of suddenly picking up ever again, Apple needs a new market to target and that new market will likely be health, led by wearable computers such as the Apple Watch.

Like the iPhone, the Apple Watch has gone through major improvements with each generation although there’s little reason to upgrade each year with the Apple Watch.

However what will keep people pinned to the Apple Watch will be its improving health sensors. Since everyone (especially older people) are concerned about their health, it’s easy to see how wearable computers such as the Apple Watch and future Apple smart glasses product can use health as their primary focus, targeting the world’s aging population.

Far more people care about their health than care about using the latest smartphone. For that reason, health will be Apple’s new focus. Unlike smartphones, health-related products take more time to develop, which means it will be harder to take off-the-shelf components and slap them together to mimic an Apple Watch.

The iPhone is fine, but it will no longer be the primary driving force of Apple any more just like Apple no longer depends on the iPod or the Macintosh for the bulk of its revenue.

Health is the new focus because everyone is a potential customer, even people who don’t like Apple. Such people will have to decide if their health is more important than their irrational dislike of Apple because their lives literally depend on their decision.

Project Marzipan

Posted on January 13, 2019 by admin Posted in Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Project Marzipan is Apple’s framework to allow iOS apps to run on the Macintosh.

Last year during their Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced Project Marzipan, which is a framework designed to make it easy to convert iOS apps to run on the Macintosh. Apple used their own framework to port several of their iOS apps to the Macintosh such as the Stocks app.

With iOS and mobile computing becoming far more important than desktop/laptop computing, it only makes sense for developers to focus exclusively on iOS programming because then they’ll be able to write apps for iOS and port them to the Macintosh.

Otherwise you’ll haver to write apps for iOS and macOS. That’s not too much of a problem since iOS and macOS are so similar but it does require you to write slightly different code. With Project Marzipan, the goal is to let you write an iOS app and let Apple’s framework convert it to run on the Macintosh with little work on your part. That way you’ll have two apps capable of running on the Macintosh and iOS.

For ordinary users, this simply means the Macintosh will soon get more apps. This can make the Macintosh more attractive but it will likely give developers an incentive to focus exclusively on iOS and then use Project Marzipan to create Macintosh apps that may not be optimized completely for the Macintosh.

So developers will likely need to tweak their code to make their app better for the keyboard/mouse interface of the Macintosh from the touch screen interface of iOS.

The Macintosh will likely never take over the desktop/laptop market with Windows PCs so entrenched in the corporate world. Then again, it doesn’t really matter since the world is moving towards mobile computing anyway.

The Macintosh has been around since 1984 and it likely won’t get any more innovative. So look at Project Marzipan as a way to keep iOS developers happy by giving them a larger market for their existing apps. Project Marzipan is not likely to attract more people to the Macintosh just for the ability to run iOS apps. Project Marzipan is interesting and will likely appear during 2019’s WWDC, but it’s just a short-term solution to help transition the world towards mobile computing so they can leave the world of desktop/laptops behind.

To learn more about Project Marzipan, click here.

Another Technology Company Bites the Dust

Posted on January 10, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Osterhout Design Group (ODG), an augmented reality smart glasses company, fails.

Osterhout Design Group (ODG), an augmented reality smart glasses company, is failed after twenty years. While it’s sad that the company didn’t succeed in bringing augmented reality smart glasses to the masses, the reason for their failure is obvious.

Ignore any technical obstacles they overcame. Just look at their web site and their press releases that describe what their smart glasses can do. Isn after reading their press releases and their web site information, you still don’t know what you can do with their smart glasses, you’ll suddenly understand why the company failed.

Technology by itself will always fail if there isn’t a clear, compelling problem that this new technology solves.

What problem do ODG’s augmented reality smart glasses solve? If you have to think for more than a fraction of a second, then you probably won’t want to buy these smart glasses. If the company itself can’t explain why anyone would want their smart glasses, it’s no surprise that they’re going out of business.

What all these augmented reality smart glasses companies are missing is that they need to enhance vision. That alone is the key to augmented reality because ordinary eyeglasses create a simple form of augmented reality by correcting someone’s vision with a physical lens.

Replace the physical lens with a computational photography lens such as the camera found in a smartphone and you have smart glasses that could zoom in and out to make it easy for someone to see objects close and far away. The real use for augmented reality smart glasses is replacing ordinary eyeglasses and correcting vision.

The reason the Apple Watch is gaining popularity is because it offers real-time health monitoring. Since everyone can understand its purpose, and everyone wants to improve their health, it’s no surprise that the Apple Watch can be easily understood.

Augmented reality smart glasses that remain vague will never sell. As soon as companies market augmented reality smart glasses as eyeglass replacements that are more versatile, that will be the time the augmented reality smart glasses market will truly take off.

Until technology companies can define what problems their products solve, they’ll keep going bankrupt over and over again. Osterhout Design Group (ODG) won’t be the first technology company to fail, but if they simply took five seconds to decide what problem their product could solve, they could have stayed in business long enough to actually make some money.

Technology in Search of a Problem

Posted on January 9, 2019 by admin Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) a few years ago, virtual reality (VR) was heavily hyped. At this year’s CES, it’s barely being mentioned.

The biggest problem with technology is that the people and companies crating it often hype the features and abilities without stopping to think about what problem the technology solves. Inevitably, that means the technology looks good but has little practical purpose, which means it gets ignored and forgotten soon after.

That’s what happened to virtual reality. Big companies like Microsoft and Facebook heavily hyped virtual reality as the next big technological market. Then virtual reality faded until it’s hardly mentioned at all.

That doesn’t mean VR won’t be useful eventually, much like artificial intelligence spent decades in purgatory until finally finding practical use. Virtual reality is just one example of technology without a problem to solve.

The whole purpose of new technology is to solve problems that are difficult or impossible to solve with today’s technology. When Apple introduced the Macintosh and its graphical user interface, they also demonstrated MacPaint and MacWrite.

MacPaint showed how to draw pictures on a computer screen, which was impossible to do with MS-DOS computers, and MacWrite showed how to display and print fonts on a computer screen, which was also impossible to do with MS-DOS computers. Just those two demonstrations alone showed the value of graphical user interfaces so it’s no surprise that Microsoft developed their own version called Windows.

With virtual reality, the big question is what problem does it solve that can’t be solved by today’s technology? And the answer is…I don’t know. It’s hard to believe companies would invest millions of dollars to pursue a technology without a clear idea what to use that technology for, but that’s exactly what company and investors are doing.

Similar to virtual reality is augmented reality (AR). At the CES, several companies also demonstrated their AR smart glasses, but once again they don’t solve any particular problem. As a result, AR has been floundering much like VR did earlier.

The real key to AR is enhanced vision, and the current technology for doing this is eyeglasses with individually ground lenses that solves only one person’s eye problems. As soon as that person’s eyes change, they need to buy a new pair of eyeglasses.

AR smart glasses can solve this problem by simply letting users adjust the magnification of their lenses on their own. Now a pair of AR smart glasses can help millions of people who need better vision while keeping them from buying and tossing eyeglasses every few years.

Just stroll through CES and you can see that most products fail to solve any particular problem bye offering a simpler and more effective solution. Technology is always meant to solve problems. Technology is never meant to be purchased solely for advanced features if those advanced features don’t translate into practical use.

When evaluating any technology, ask yourself what problem it solves and how it solves this problem easier or faster than existing technology can do. If you can’t answer those two simple questions, it’s a safe bet that the new technology serves no purpose and will wind up a dead end after taking millions of dollars of investors’ money down the drain with it.

To read about the flop of virtual reality, click here.

The Wrong Way to Introduce a New Product

Posted on January 4, 2019 by admin Posted in Business, Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Vuzix plans to sell augmented reality glasses for $999.

Augmented reality lets you overlay cartoon items over reality when seen through a camera lens such as an iPhone. The popular Pokemon GO game let you hunt for Pokemon characters and see them on the sidewalk or grass right in front of your eyes.

While such uses for augmented reality can be entertaining, it misses the true potential of augmented reality. First, holding up a device such as a smartphone or tablet to view augmented reality can be fine for occasional use, but it’s not practical for constant use. That’s why smart glasses are custom designed for exploiting augmented reality.

The huge problem with smart glasses and augmented reality is that companies are promoting a product without demonstrating a clear use for what problems it solves or what capabilities it gives users.

Think back to the early hype about virtual reality headsets where people could strap a device to their face and immerse themselves in another world. This offered entertainment value, but no practical, compelling need for long-term use. Besides playing games, why would someone want to spend hundreds of dollars for a VR headset? Not surprisingly, sales of VR headsets never took off.

Now a company called Vuzix is offering smart glasses that offer augmented reality for $999. The huge problem is that the company isn’t defining what their smart glasses are good for. Instead, they’re showing what their smart glasses can do, such as display an image on the lens for users to see.

That essentially mimics holding up a smartphone screen to your face, but is that a compelling need? Especially at the steep price of $999?

The answer is simple. No. Few people will want smart glasses that cost so much and offer minimal advantages over holding a smartphone to your face. Even worse, wearing smart glasses will be extremely distracting for drivers if they can view screen images on their smart glasses lenses.

Google Glass was an early pioneer of smart glasses, and it flopped because it failed to offer a compelling advantage for using one. Before selling a product, companies must show what advantages their product offers that people can’t do easily (or at all) using current technology.

When Apple first introduced the Macintosh, they also demonstrated MacPaint and MacWrite. MacPaint showed how to draw on a computer, which was impossible with MS-DOS programs. MacWrite showed how to use fonts in a word processor document, which was also impossible with MS-DOS word processors. Just those two demonstrations alone showed the compelling and obvious advantages of the Macintosh over MS-DOS PCs.

With so many companies like Vuzix rushing smart glasses to market, they’re all destined to flop like early VR headsets because they’re totally missing the point of showing compelling use for their product. Yet with smart glasses, the advantage is right in front of their eyes.

Think of the millions of people who wear eyeglasses to correct their vision. They need to replace their glasses periodically as their vision changes, which means tossing out perfectly good eyeglasses and buying newer ones.

If someone has trouble seeing up close and far away, they may wear clumsy bifocals with two different lenses, which is another clumsy solution.

The real purpose of smart glasses and augmented reality is to replace prescription lenses with computational photography technology. With smartphone cameras, they don’t have the size that physical cameras can use to capture more light, so they must compensate for this through computational photography that takes what little light a tiny lens can capture and enhances the image using algorithms. That’s exactly the same technology that smart glasses can use.

Forget about displaying your smart screen image on the lens of smart glasses. That’s distracting and unnecessary. Add computational photography with smart glasses and you essentially have a pair of smart glasses where users can adjust the strength of the lenses through a computer.

Unlike the silly demonstrations of smart glasses displaying an iPhone screen on the lens (and distracting the wearer, especially when driving), smart glasses that simply improve the user’s vision will offer immediate advantages to millions of people.

No longer will they need to buy new glasses. Instead, they can simply adjust their smart glass lenses through computational photography, allowing them to save money buying new eyeglasses.

For people who don’t need glasses, smart glasses can offer enhanced vision such as night vision to aid in driving or walking around in the dark. Smart glasses need to enhance and improve vision, not distract vision with smartphone screen images displayed on the lens.

Until smart glasses makers realize the real benefit of smart glasses and augmented reality lies with enhanced vision, they’ll waste time and money promoting pointless technologies that have no compelling or practical use. Displaying the screen of your smartphone on your smart glasses lens might be a technological challenge and marvel, but it serves zero practical use.

Rather than promote technical features, companies need to promote problems their technology solves. Augmented reality and smart glasses really solves the problem of limited vision for both people with eye problems and those without eye problems.

Everyone can use night vision to aid in driving or walking around in the dark. Few people want or need to see their iPhone screen displayed on a lens right in front of their eyes.

The future of smart glasses and augmented reality lies with enhanced vision. Until companies see that obvious fact, they’ll risk following the VR headset companies into promoting different technologies with no practical application or need behind them. Then they’ll fail just like Google Glass.

Getting Health Care From a Virtual Assistant

Posted on January 2, 2019 by admin Posted in Medical, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: With the rising cost for health care, virtual assistants can help save money.

Health care is expensive because it relies on people. Imagine how expensive books would be if instead of relying on printing presses, we had to rely on scriveners who manually copied books word by word?

So to reduce the cost of health care, many companies are looking at virtual assistants. The goal is to let virtual assistants handle common cases and then let specialists handle specific cases if the virtual assistant can’t answer a person’s questions.

Already virtual assistants answer phone calls and route your call to the proper person after trying to help you robotically. So using virtual assistants makes sense in health care as a way to lower costs and provide basic health care to people at the same time.

This brings up an interesting question. The main benefit of the Apple Watch and other wearable computers is to offer real-time health monitoring. Perhaps the benefit of virtual assistants controlled solely by voice (such as Siri on HomePod) could be answering common questions.

Right now, people use smart speakers for asking questions about the weather or traffic, but that’s not necessarily a crucial task. That explains why many people often use a smart speaker initially then get bored and leave it alone without ever using it again.

So virtual health assistants offer the potential of giving smart speakers a definite purpose, targeting people with health issues. At the very least, a smart speaker could act like an emergency device for senior citizens. If someone falls and can’t reach a phone, they can call the smart speaker for help.

Right now, smart speakers are an interesting concept but generally little practical value. By focusing on niches like health care, smart speakers could become more useful to people who regularly need to chat with doctors.

The smart speaker market currently lacks a compelling need. What problem does it solve that makes it worth buying and using? Virtual health assistants offer one way to make smart speakers useful. Another might be foreign language training by letting you practice talking to a smart speaker before you risk looking foolish trying to talk to a native speaker in another country.

The smart speaker market needs virtual assistants in the health field (or any field) to become more popular and commonplace. Voice-controlled interfaces are a growing field and as virtual assistants like Siri gain more knowledge about medical conditions and health problems, they can be more useful for that particular health-oriented market.