Apple suffers from hardware anthropomorphism

Apple has long been known as the company that perfected being a fast follower. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the smart phone, he entered the market with a vastly superior product after learning from the mistakes made by Apple’s competition. The same is true for the Apple Watch, the iPod, and arguably many other Apple products and services.

The problem with that approach is that in areas of emerging technology, it’s often not immediately clear whether something is a failure or a success story. That’s especially true in that vast field of post-phone hardware: smart speakers and displays, VR headsets and AR glasses, as well as an emerging crop of AI gadgets. Being a fast follower is tough if you don’t know which of these many paths to follow.

But with the iPhone now being old enough to vote, Apple doesn’t really have the luxury of waiting until the market shakes out. That’s why the company launched the Vision Pro, and it’s also why it is now reportedly developing a bunch of new products, including a smart display that is mounted on a robotic arm. The idea, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman: 

“The tabletop robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room. Like a human head, it can turn toward a person who is speaking or summoning it, and even seek to draw the attention of someone not facing it.”

A display that swivels back and forth, perhaps wiggling around impatiently when you don’t pay attention to it: That sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Sure, if you live in a big house with a massive kitchen island, you may find that a traditional smart display isn’t viewable from every angle. 

But most people don’t live like that, and even those who do don’t seem to have much of a need for a motorized smart display that always follows them around.

How do I know that? Amazon actually built a version of this with its Echo Show 10 smart display. That device didn’t have a robotic arm, but it could swivel around its own axis to change its orientation. That seemed like a fun idea when the Echo Show 10 launched in 2021, but apparently has fallen out of fashion since: The device appears to be discontinued, and is not available on Amazon’s website anymore.

Amazon does continue to sell other motion-free versions of the Echo Show, and customers with kitchen islands seem to be happy to just spend a few extra bucks for a manually swivel-able stand.

The reason Apple nonetheless is building a robotics arm for its smart display hints at the bigger problem behind the company’s embrace of post-phone technologies. Afraid to alienate consumers with new device factors, the company is trying to make these devices appear as human-like as possible. Here’s more from Gurman:

“The idea is for the device to act like a person in a room. It could interrupt a conversation between friends about dinner plans, say, and suggest nearby restaurants or relevant recipes. [...] Apple is planning to put Siri at the center of the device operating system and give it a visual personality to make it feel lifelike.”

Frankly, this sounds terrible, and not only because of the interruptions. Spending an arm and a leg – even if it’s just a robot arm – just to make hardware look and feel more human invariably brings you to the wrong side of the uncanny valley.

Case in point: EyeSight. The Apple Vision Pro’s outward-facing display, included solely to show the wearer’s eyes, was heralded as a breakthrough to make headsets less isolating, and more inclusive to bystanders. In reality, it’s been just a weird, costly distraction. There’s a reason Tim Cook’s very first photo donning a Vision Pro has him far away from the camera, at an angle that makes it all but impossible to see his eyes …

If Apple had learned its lesson from that, it would give up on hardware anthropomorphism. Don’t try to make your hardware human-like. Instead, do what you do best: Take inspiration from the things that work for others, and then build the best possible version of that product — even if you don’t know yet whether that specific device category is going to succeed in the long run.

This article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Apple Vision Pro photo by My name is Yanick on Unsplash