I have to admit - outside of cost and core values differences - Adobe has been an early player and often overlooked - but the company smells so bad that I guess they're a little looking for it.
> there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod
That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.
Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:
> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,
That's actually very consistent for Apple. Apple doesn't generally claim to be the first to do something, but have always taken the line that they're the first to execute it well. Hence their fondness for words like 'reimagine', 'revolutionise', etc.
Yes, dominant smartphones before iPhone were BlackBerry inspired, full physical keyboard with small screen.
When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form.
I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.
Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging).
While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter.
Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1]
Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition.
Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.
While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.
Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products.
Excessive greed obliterates goodwill.
You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark.
Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.
Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?
Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.
Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.
That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.
Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.
Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.
Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.
Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money.
They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity???
They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?
They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.
Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that.
Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.
Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
Great news, but entirely lost on commercial hyperscalers and much of the PC market. Apple's recalcitrance towards supporting Nvidia drivers basically killed their last shot at real-world rackmount deployment of Apple Silicon. Now you can go buy an ARM Grace CPU that does the same thing, but cheaper and with better software support.
You really can’t. NVIDIA’s arm chip still looks nerfed compared to apple’s offering, and…I can run 40GB sized LLMs on the plane with no internet…it’s not something that you can do with any other platform.
> Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one?
Doesn't somebody (not named Nvidia) need to make a serious profit on AI before we can say that Tim Cook failed?
OpenAI and Anthropic aren't anywhere close. Meta? Google? The only one I can think of might be Microsoft but they still refuse to break out AI revenue and expenses in the earnings reports. That isn't a good sign.
I certainly don't think that profit would be required. Many of the massive tech companies that exist today went through long periods of time were they focused on growth and brand no profits for many years even post IPO.
I won't pretend to know exactly how the AI landscape will look in the future, but at this point it's pretty clear that there's going to be massive revenue going to the sector, and Moore's law will continue to crank.
I see what you're saying though. In particular is first generation gigs data centers might be black holes of an investment, considering in the not too distant future AI compute will be fully commoditized and 10x cheaper.
Some problems cannot be fixed with more money (unless to buy a stake , as Microsoft did with open ai). See Microsoft's endless failed efforts to compete with Google search or iPhone. Although looking at the recent stock price since 2020, MSFT stock was the winner anyway.
https://archive.is/iBtcQ
What other companies have successfully integrated LLM tech in their mainstream products?
To be clear, just having a chatbot website/app does not count.
Adobe
Nvidia
I have to admit - outside of cost and core values differences - Adobe has been an early player and often overlooked - but the company smells so bad that I guess they're a little looking for it.
> there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod
That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.
Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:
> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,
It's pretty on brand for Apple, I'm surprised they hadn't pushed this narrative harder earlier.
There were smartphones before the iPhone. Consider the IPAQ and Windows Mobile 6.0.
And of course plenty of MP3 players before iPod.
That's actually very consistent for Apple. Apple doesn't generally claim to be the first to do something, but have always taken the line that they're the first to execute it well. Hence their fondness for words like 'reimagine', 'revolutionise', etc.
Yes, dominant smartphones before iPhone were BlackBerry inspired, full physical keyboard with small screen.
When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form.
And what exactly in your iPhone announcement quote was untrue?
I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.
They announced this at wwdc this year in “Foundation Models”. Developers have access to an on-device llm (not sure how good it is yet).
Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging).
While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter.
Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1]
Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-322149... [2] https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smar... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...
Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.
While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.
Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products.
Excessive greed obliterates goodwill.
You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark.
Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
Misinformed take IMO.
M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.
Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?
Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.
Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.
That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.
Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.
Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.
Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
Vertically-integrated modems are not cool. I mean, they are to me and likely other geeks, but to the general public? Their eyes would glaze over.
Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.
Teen iPhone ownership is up to 88% (!) in the US.
I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
Except the little issue teens don't appear on the same rate as iPhones hit the store shelves.
I mean, they’ve released a framework to access the on device model https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels
Apple Intelligence? Or Artificial Intelligence?
Apple Intelligence™ is most definitely "theirs to grab"
Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.
Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?
Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.
> Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money
It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall
The difference is it’s a move. Actually doing something rather than putting out internal PR.
Zuck tried and flailed with the metaverse. That was a huge waste, but he can afford it and fortune favours the brave.
You don’t think Apple makes moves?
Not everyone has to make the same move at the same time.
Undercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.
They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.
Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that.
Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.
Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
Great news, but entirely lost on commercial hyperscalers and much of the PC market. Apple's recalcitrance towards supporting Nvidia drivers basically killed their last shot at real-world rackmount deployment of Apple Silicon. Now you can go buy an ARM Grace CPU that does the same thing, but cheaper and with better software support.
You really can’t. NVIDIA’s arm chip still looks nerfed compared to apple’s offering, and…I can run 40GB sized LLMs on the plane with no internet…it’s not something that you can do with any other platform.
> Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one?
Doesn't somebody (not named Nvidia) need to make a serious profit on AI before we can say that Tim Cook failed?
OpenAI and Anthropic aren't anywhere close. Meta? Google? The only one I can think of might be Microsoft but they still refuse to break out AI revenue and expenses in the earnings reports. That isn't a good sign.
I certainly don't think that profit would be required. Many of the massive tech companies that exist today went through long periods of time were they focused on growth and brand no profits for many years even post IPO.
I won't pretend to know exactly how the AI landscape will look in the future, but at this point it's pretty clear that there's going to be massive revenue going to the sector, and Moore's law will continue to crank.
I see what you're saying though. In particular is first generation gigs data centers might be black holes of an investment, considering in the not too distant future AI compute will be fully commoditized and 10x cheaper.
Their X/OpenGL support has also been in stasis for 10 years or more. There’s not enough money taking over for SGI to move their needle.
Macs are basically a dead business. The key is somehow creating the AI equivalent of an App Store or something
Don't abandon Intel Macs, then and call them Mac AI systems with NVIDIA chips. Sell them for more than the Apple Silicon Macs.
Some problems cannot be fixed with more money (unless to buy a stake , as Microsoft did with open ai). See Microsoft's endless failed efforts to compete with Google search or iPhone. Although looking at the recent stock price since 2020, MSFT stock was the winner anyway.
Because of Azure, Office, Game Pass, Github,....
To detriment of Windows, XBox hardware, .NET team shooting into all directions.
Very sad results; the end of America's once greatest company?