At Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference this week, Apple overwhelmed developers with over 4,000 new APIs, a new programming lanuguage, and updated versions of OS X and iOS to play with. But it also showed a new commitement to cloud services, an area Apple has traditionally lagged in. According to analyst Benedict Evans, this shift helps reveal the true character of Apple and how it differs from Google.
As he puts it, “For Google, devices are dumb glass and the intelligence is in the cloud, but for Apple the cloud is just dumb storage and the device is the place for intelligence.”
He points out that as smartphone platforms have matured and as the most important smartphone features have been added to both iOS and Google, Apple and Google have begun innovating in ways that are uniquely Apple and uniquely Google. For example, iBeacons take advantage of the hardware Apple sells. Apple has been adding Bluetooth Low Energy support to its hardware for a few years, and now iBeacons can take advantage of this in clever ways.
Google can’t do this because they don’t control the hardware Anroid runs on. But Google has Google Now, a differentiating feature on Android that blows Siri out of the water. What makes it so great is that Google can integrate what it knows about you from all of its cloud services to provide you with extraordinarily useful information.
“Apple is moving innovation down the stack into hardware/software integration, where it’s hard for Google to follow, and Google is moving innovation up the stack into cloud-based AI & machine learning services, where it’s hard for Apple to follow,” Evans writes.
Definitely check out the rest of his piece in the source below.
