Horace Dediu on how Apple does beta testing

Horace Dediu on how Apple seems to beta test new technologies:

One of the curiosities that I noticed was the inclusion of a 3D LiDAR.

What is it doing in an iPad?

Well, short-distance LiDAR might become one of the core technologies in AR. So they’re putting it into an iPad almost as a beta test. Let’s see how it works in real world. Let’s use some of the data from it to calibrate our own other systems.

Again, the M Series, the chips that detect motion, were first shipped on an iPhone. Using an iPhone you could detect steps, but nobody’s thinking of that anymore. We’re using the watch for that. But I think that the development of the core silicon for the Apple Watch was started with the iPhone.

The M Series was sort of planted in there for getting some early data and then using it to deploy future technologies. Because the roadmap is so far ahead, I think there’s a lot of foreshadowing going on there.

That’s what I would be looking at is if there are acquisitions in enterprise or acquisitions in AR or acquisitions in AI that are leading us to kind of put together this elephant by touching a piece of it.

And sometimes it goes nowhere. There’s possibly dead-ends all around. That’s the game.