A Necessary Sacrifice

For most tech enthusiasts, understanding the Steve Jobs quote Luo Yonghao invoked at the Bird’s Nest stadium launch isn’t hard: Siri-type smart assistants have progressed slowly because the millions of possibilities in voice recognition create an immense computational burden. Add touch — which can define a spatial context — and the machine’s interpretative threshold drops dramatically. This is the right direction.

If I want to tell you there’s a stain on your shirt, I’m not going to describe it linguistically: “There’s a stain on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and 3 centimeters to the left of the button.” If there’s a stain on your shirt, I’m going to point to it and say, “There.” Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster in all functions, such as using a mouse for copy and paste. So it’s not only easier for people to use, it’s more efficient.

—Steve Jobs, Playboy interview, February 1985

The Weight of “Professional”

One thing I personally disagree with is calling this touchscreen all-in-one “PC” a “Workstation.” There’s simply no way this thing can bear the weight of that label. Before we argue about whether Microsoft’s Surface Studio or Apple’s iMac Pro is the industry benchmark, let’s consult Wikipedia’s definition: A workstation is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer. It is designed to serve a single user and deliver significantly greater performance than a personal computer, particularly in graphics processing power and parallel task capability.

As you can see, beyond flawless hardware, the essence of a workstation lies in performance and compatibility. No wonder, then, that a large screen driven by an Android phone (even one packing the best mobile chip on the market today) not only evokes a karaoke song-selection kiosk but also falls embarrassingly short on raw horsepower: running AAA titles like GTA 5 or The Witcher 3, or rendering a 20-minute 4K video clip — all impossible tasks.

“Professional” is synonymous with “niche” and “extreme.” Hiring a top-tier Hollywood VFX team means you need to deliver the absolute limits of human hardware capability. Coincidentally, on the same day as the Bird’s Nest launch event, Microsoft unveiled its giant conference-room device, the Surface Hub 2 — the kind of massive interactive touchscreen that astronauts in sci-fi films huddle around is getting close to reality. And from a product standpoint, it makes perfect sense: you want extreme? Fine. Here’s a 50.5-inch super-tablet for you.

Voice in the Office

TNT — Touch & Talk. As I said at the beginning, the direction is correct. You can certainly counter with “offices aren’t suited for voice” or “conference rooms aren’t suited for voice,” but that doesn’t invalidate TNT’s core product logic: by layering in touch, you make the machine understand you better.

In practice, a noisy office environment can be largely mitigated with a directional mic or bone-conduction headset. And that’s before we even factor in future advances in voice recognition accuracy, soundproofing materials, or even a fundamental revolution in how we work — when privacy and human-centric design become paramount, do we really still need to be physically present at a desk? Yes, this is what makes me think of the love-letter typist in the sci-fi film Her.

At the event, Luo Yonghao demoed a suite of office productivity interactions. Beyond the widely panned “TNT,” there were also “Crystal Ball” and “Dealer.”

Personally, I think the broad strokes of all three interactions are on the right track — but in terms of actual execution, they’re painfully half-baked. Take PowerPoint as an example: a polished slide deck can involve issuing thousands of commands. “Change the font to Avenir, size 24, add a shadow, color red.” So here come the questions: what direction is the shadow? What kind of red? Rose red? Pink? Crimson? Burgundy?

And that’s not even the worst of it. How many PowerPoint wizards can remember every single command? Uttering “gray shadow, transparency 26%, blur 38, distance 8” is unlikely to spare you from staring at the screen and immediately tweaking: “transparency 30%,” “blur 42.” Real-world results demand constant iteration — especially with a perfectionist boss breathing down your neck. After all, none of Rodin’s sculptures were completed in a single stroke. If there were one, it’d be called 3D printing.

Bosses always talk about boosting office productivity, but the point is optimizing your thinking process and workflow — not reflexively reaching for the office software itself as the first thing to fix. In the future, word processing won’t be the exclusive domain of Word or Pages, data analysis won’t belong solely to Excel or Numbers, and presentation design won’t be limited to PowerPoint or Keynote. The best software companies will design hardware optimized for their own vision — and I’m pinning my hopes on Apple and Microsoft.

The Direction of AI

There have been no shortage of AI-focused launch events over the past two years: Adobe Sensei, Google I/O, Microsoft Build, Toutiao’s big data industry report — not to mention the relentless moves by tech giants (Facebook has even set up an AI ethics team, aiming to imbue machines with morality and humanity). And after Apple unveiled Face ID, phone makers across the board have been falling over themselves to pay homage to AI.

That said, our imagination can certainly draw from serious, thought-provoking sci-fi like Black Mirror, Counterpart, or Westworld. As a portable terminal device, the phone will one day inevitably be replaced by a new kind of terminal — whether wearable or implantable doesn’t really matter.

The crucial question is this: once we’ve solved the basics of the terminal itself, artificial intelligence is the real game — and its decisive factors will always be just two things: good algorithms and big data, especially the latter.

When BAT and TMD already command vast swaths of user attention, and when the dominant internet use cases — news, social, food delivery, online shopping, gaming, navigation, ride-hailing, streaming — are monopolized by a handful of giants, small companies simply cannot access the user-level big data that matters.

There Isn’t That Much New Left to Create

No hardware lasts forever. Many years ago, the mouse and keyboard were invented to help machines better interpret human commands. Many years later, they too will inevitably be replaced by something more advanced and forward-thinking — or something more radically simple and intuitive.

Six years ago, when Smartisan phones were nothing but idealism and hot air, I scoffed at them. But over the last few years, I’ve grown to appreciate Luo Yonghao more and more. I’m not a Smartisan fanboy, but every time Lao Luo makes another outrageous claim at a launch event or on Weibo, my anticipation still outweighs my disdain. China needs people bold enough to talk big — especially someone this hardworking and relentless.

Looking across the world, there are only two countries where internet companies have been allowed to grow unchecked into monopolies: China and the United States.

As Luo Yonghao himself put it: in this era, it’s incredibly hard for a small company to innovate. Facebook literally has a dedicated department that monitors innovative projects and startups in the market every single day. The moment one is deemed valuable, those small companies either get acquired, or Facebook leverages its enormous R&D muscle to quickly ship a competing product, then uses its massive distribution advantage to give the cloned app daily active users literally thousands of times higher than the original. Wasn’t that exactly what Tencent did back in the day?

But does that mean small companies can’t innovate at all? Of course not. Quoting Otto Lilienthal — the “father of gliding” — Luo Yonghao delivered a line with a haunting sense of tragedy: sacrifices must be made. Lao Luo, your ambition may well be as big as Steve Jobs’s. But this era… maybe it’s just not the best of times.