How high is the bar? Sure, most of this stuff is just improvement on existing things, and it's true that if you are not interested in AI then there wasn't something for you there, but are we expecting them to announce a revolutionary product each I/O conference?
And smart glasses are something that every other company has been toying with for a long time. Google Glass, Meta Smart Glasses, Snapchat Spectacles, etc. Maybe they nail it this time around, but you've heard that announcement a dozen times before, so it's hard to go "OMG THIS IS BIG".
The rest kind of already exists, died and is reborn multiple times already. Like the smart glasses.
And a lot of it is not even wanted by consumers. It is more Google trying to shove his ai to try to have user adopt it. Like Microsoft with Copilot.
Views got deprecated, GC improvements, R8 improvements, AI Studio can generate apps and integrate with Android Studio (back to my agents and IDEs remark from a few days ago), OpenXR improvements including Godot and Unreal, new CLI tooling for AI integrations, Android apps can expose AI tools, some OpenJDK related improvements....
And I am not even following the actual talks.
The crazy thing to me is that so many of the things Google is doing would seem to be a slam-dunk obvious thing for Apple to lead on. For example, the context aware cursor. What an amazing idea -- a computer that understands your intents intuitively, at such a basic level. That's the core idea that fueled Apple decades ago, but apparently not so much anymore.
I did find that this was a pretty big struggle of a presentation. It's hard for me to get excited about a lot of AI tech stuff. It's unclear what it does and I'd rather do it in an open source harness where there is control and observability, not some far off product I don't own running in some else's data center.
Amateurs. Apple would never allow something like this to happen.
Google I/O
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196020
Gemini Omni
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196609
Google changes its search box
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
Gemini 3.5 Flash
It'll be funny when WWDC happens and Apple has even less of substance to say.
