I would bet significant money that, within two years, it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company.
I can explain more in-depth reasoning, but the most critical point: Apple builds the only platform where developers can construct a single distributable that works on mobile and desktop with standardized, easy access to a local LLM, and a quarter million people buy into this platform every year. The degree to which no one else on the planet is even close to this cannot be understated.
The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the companies that previously attempted to monetize data center based voice assistants lost massive amounts of money.
> Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year... “Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather.” Those questions aren’t monetizable.
Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google’s attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven’t worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division.
It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for ages and ages.
I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and turns it on.
Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no problem with the UI on my phone.
I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
> I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
I'm positive Google's voice commands worked better when Google Home initially released. No idea why it has gotten so bad. Recognition seemed better when it was internal and called "Majel" though on that one I'm sure that's just rose tinted glasses.
It's weird because Gemini is so impressive multimodally but even the Gemini powered assistant can't figure out which lights to turn out, telling the TV to "play" doesn't mean turning it on (it means unpausing it!), just an incredibly frustrating experience.
I had an annoying few weeks where, after years of working properly, Google assistant started misinterpreting "navigate home" as "navigate to the nearest Home Depot™".
QA is the spouses of engineers. Management is a revolving door of the "smartest people" who are thinking about what to eat or their next job. Voices of reason get lost in the noise.
I suspect most engineers at most companies, working behind the scenes to see the sausage being made, grow reservations about recommending it afterwards.
not really limited to their AI products; Android just sometimes randomly decides that pressing play on BT receiver in my car should totally start playing the song directly from my phone instead of the BT it connected to
I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction.
Almost every company today wants their primary business model to be as a service provider selling you some monthly or yearly subscription when most consumers just want to buy something and have it work. That has always been Apple's model. Sure, they'll sell you services if need be, iCloud, AppleCare, or the various pieces of Apple One, but those all serve as complements to their devices. There's no big push to get Android users to sign up for Apple Music for example.
Apple isn't in the market of collecting your data and selling it. They aren't in the market of pushing you to pick brand X toilet paper over brand Y. They are in the market of selling you devices and so they build AI systems to make the devices they sell more attractive products. It isn't that Apple has some ideologically or technically better approach, they just have a business model that happens to align more with the typical consumers' wants and needs.
> I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction.
Personally, Google lost me as a search customer (after 25 years) when they opted me into AI search features without my permission.
Not only am I not interested in free tier AI services, but forcing them on me is a good way to lose me as a customer.
The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for it.
> The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for it.
Not even only that, but the setup wizard literally asks if you'd like it or not. You don't even have to specifically opt-out of it, because it's opt-in.
Google is currently going full on Windows 10, for 'selected customers', with Gemini in Android. '(full screen popup) Do you want to try out Gemini? [Now] [Later]' 2 hours later... Do you want to...
Yes, there are always ways to deal with companies who make their experience shitty. The point is that you shouldn't have to, and that people will leave for an alternative that doesn't treat them like that.
I feel like this is 5 or so years out of date. The fact that they actually have an Apple Music app for Android is a pretty big push for them. Services is like 25% of their revenue these days, larger than anything except the iPhone.
As I said elsewhere, it really depends on the definition of "service". Subscriptions make up a relatively small minority of that service revenue. For example, 30 seconds of searching suggests that Apple Music's revenue in 2024 was approximately $10b compared to the company as a whole being around $400b. That's not nothing, but it doesn't shape the company in a way that it's competitors are shaped by their service businesses.
The biggest bucket in that "service" category is just Apple's 30% cut of stuff sold on their platform (which it also must be noted, both complements and is reliant on their device sales). That wouldn't really be considered a "service" from either the customer perspective or in the sense of traditional businesses. Operating a storefront digitally isn't a fundamentally different model than operating a brick and mortar store and no one would call Best Buy a "service business".
Call me a naïve fanboy, but I believe that Apple is still one of the very few companies that has an ideologically better approach that results in technically better products.
Where everyone else sells you stuff to make money, they make money to create great stuff.
I know you're saying that Apple's business model is selling devices but it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut.
Where I think you are ultimately correct is that some companies seem to just assume that 100% of interactions can be monetized, and they really can't.
You need to deliver value that matches the money paid or the ad viewed.
I think Apple has generally been decent at recognizing the overall sustainability of certain business models. They've been around long enough to know that most loss-leading businesses never work out. If you can't make a profit from day one what's the point of being in business?
It depends. I guess you can argue this is true purely from scale. However, we should also keep in mind there are a lot of different things that Apple and tech companies in general put under "services". So even when you see a big number under "Service Revenue" on some financial report, we should recognize that most of that was from taking a cut of some other transaction happening on their devices. Relative to the rest of their business, they don't make much from monthly/yearly subscriptions or monetizing their customers' searches/interactions. They instead serve as a middleman on purchase of apps, music, movies, TV, and now even financial transactions made with Apple Card/Pay/Cash. And in that way, they are a service company in the same way that any brick and mortar store is a service company.
I'm confused at what you're trying to say here. Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?
Apple's services revenue is larger than Macs and iPads combined, with a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40% for products (hardware).
Yeah, they serve as a middleman...an incredibly dominant middleman in a duopoly. 80% of teenagers in the US say they have an iPhone. Guess what, all that 15-30% app store revenue is going to Apple. That's pretty much the definition of a service juggernaut.
I also don't agree with you about the lack of selling Apple services to non-Apple users. TV+ is a top-tier streaming service with huge subscriber numbers, and their app is on every crappy off-brand smart TV and streaming stick out there. Yes, there really are Android users who subscribe to Apple Music - 100 million+ downloads on the Google Play store, #4 top grossing app in the music category.
>Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?
You seem to operating under the notion that anything that isn't a device sold is a service. I think that definition is too broad to have any real value and that we should look at the actual business model for a product to determine its categorization. I'm not sure what else to say if you're just going to dismiss that as "pedantic".
But either way, it should be obvious that "services" (however they are defined) are a smaller part of Apple's business than they are for Microsoft, Google, Meta, Twitter, Oracle, Open AI, Anthropic, and most other players in both the general tech and AI spaces.
It's really interesting to consider an area where they are being successful with their AI, the notification summaries work pretty well! It's an easy sell to the consumer bombarded with information/notifications all over the place that on-device processing can filter this and cut out clutter. Basically, don't be annoying. I think a lot of people don't really know how well things like their on-device image search works (it'll OCR an upside-down receipt sitting on a table successfully), I never see them market that strength ever judging by the number of people with iphones that are surprised when I show them this on their own phones.
HOWEVER, you would never know this though given the Apple Store experience! As I was dealing with the board swap in my phone last month, they would have these very loud/annoying 'presentations' every like half hour or so going over all the other apple intelligence features. Nobody watched, nobody in the store wanted to see this. In fact when you consider the history of how the stores have operated for years, the idea was to let customers play around with the device and figure shit out on their own. Store employee asks if they need anything explained but otherwise it's a 'discovery' thing, not this dictated dystopia.
The majority of people I heard around me in the store were bringing existing iphones in to get support with their devices because they either broke them or had issues logging into accounts (lost/compromised passwords or issues with passkeys). They do not want to be told every constantly about the same slop every other company is trying to feed them.
They’ve done loud, in-store presentations for longer than Apple Intelligence has been a thing, but you’re right that it’s a captive audience of mostly disinterested people.
That is exactly why Apple's on-device strategy is the only economically viable one. If every Siri request cost $0.01 for cloud inference, Apple would go bankrupt in a month. But if inference happens on the Neural Engine on the user's phone, the cost to Apple is zero (well, aside from R&D). This solves the problem of unmonetizable requests like "set a timer," which killed Alexa's economics
The greed to lock customers in early on for cheap or free, in hopes to force them on a subscription, absolutely ruined the previous era os assistants. It could have been great with offline inference and foster competition. Instead we got mediocre assistants, thst got worse each year.
The assistant thing really shows the lie behind most of the "big data" economy.
1) They thought an assistant would be able to operate as an "agent" (heh) that would make purchasing decisions to benefit the company. You'd say "Alexa, buy toilet paper" and it would buy it from Amazon. Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.
2) They thought that an assistant listening to everything would make for better targeted ads. But this doesn't seem to be the case, or the increased targeting doesn't result in enough value to justify the expense. A customer with the agent doesn't seem to be particularly more valuable than one without.
I think that this AI stuff and LLMs in particular is an excuse, to some extent, to justify the massive investment already made in big data architecture. At least they can say we needed all this data to train an LLM! I've noticed a similar pivot towards military/policing: if this data isn't sufficiently valuable for advertising maybe it's valuable to the police state.
> Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.
I think this also hits an interesting problem with confidence: if you could trust the service to buy what you’d buy and get a good price you’d probably use it more but it only saves a couple of seconds in the easy case (e.g. Amazon reorders are already easy) and for anything less clear cut people rightly worry about getting a mistake or rip-off. That puts the bar really high because a voice interface sucks for more complex product comparisons and they have a very short window to give a high-quality response before most people give up and use their phone/computer instead. That also constrains the most obvious revenue sources because any kind of pay for placement is going to inspire strong negative reactions.
> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make.
There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way:
I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor...
Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources.
What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help.
This type of response has been given by Alexa from an echo device in my house. I asked, “play x on y”, the response was something like “ok, but first check out this new…”. I immediately unplugged that device and all other Alexa enabled devices in the house. We have not used it since.
This is the monetization wall they have to figure out how to break through. The first inkling of advertising is immediate turn off and destroy, for me.
Even worse than ads, mine keeps trying to jam "News" down my throat. I keep disabling the news feeds on all my devices and they kept re-enabling against my wishes. Every now and then I'll say something to Alexa and she'll just start informing me about how awful everything is, or the echo show in the kitchen will stop displaying the weather in favor of some horrific news story.
Me: "Alexa, is cheese safe for dogs?"
Alexa: "Today, prominent politician Nosferatu was accused by the opposition of baby-cannibal sex trafficking. Nosferatu says that these charges are baseless as global warming will certainly kill everyone in painful ways by next Tuesday at exactly 3pm. In further news, Amazon has added more advertisements to this device for only a small additional charge..."
If I wanted to feel like crap every time I go to the kitchen I'd put a scale in there. /s
I find this a really interesting observation. I feel like 3-4 trivial ways of doing it come to mind, which is sort of my signal that I’m way out of my depth (and that anything I’ve thought of is dumb or wrong for various reasons). Is there anything you’d recommend reading to better understand why this is true?
You are asking why someone don't want to ship a tool that obviously doesn't work? Surely it's always better/more profitable to ship a tool that at least seems to work
GP means they aren't good at knowing when they are wrong and should spend more compute on the problem.
I would say the current generation of LLMs that "think harder" when you tell them their first response is wrong is a training grounds for knowing to think harder without being told, but I don't know the obstacles.
Are you suggesting that when you tell it "think harder" it does something like "pass a question to a bigger system"? I have doubts... It would be gated behind more expensive plan if so
In part because model performance is benchmarked using tests that favor giving partly correct answers as opposed to refusing to answer. If you make a model that doesn't go for part marks, your model will do poorly on all the benchmarks and no one will be interested in it.
Because people make them and people make them for profit. incentives make the product what it is.
an LLM just needs to return something that is good enough for average person confidently to make money. if an LLM said "I don't know" more often it would make less money. because for the user this is means the thing they pay for failed at its job.
> and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve
The person I responded to, who seems like someone who definitely knows his stuff, made a comment that implied it was a technically difficult thing to do, not a trivially easy thing that's completely explained by "welp, $$$", which is why I asked. Your comments may point to why ChatGPT doesn't do it, but they're not really answering the actual question, in context.
Especially where the original idea (not mine) was a lightweight LLM that can answer basic things, but knows when it doesn't know the answer and can go ask a heftier model for back-up.
I think that person should think that technically difficult thing that makes more money = gets solved and technically difficult thing that makes less money = doesn't get solved.
By the way model's don't "know". They autocomplete tokens.
> Your comments may point to why ChatGPT doesn't do it
I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers, telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole economy is mortgaged on this?
This is probably why there’s so much attention on LLM powered coding tools, as it’s one of the few use cases that seem like people would actually pay for it. Ironically mostly developers, who are being marketed as being replaced by AI.
It's also a use case where you already have a user of above-average intelligence who is there correcting hallucinations and mistakes, and is mostly using the technology to speed up boilerplate.
This just doesn't translate to other job types super well, at least, so far.
I'm extremely bearish on AI, but I'm not sure I agree with the framing "not even Amazon could..." All of the advertising around Alexa focused on the simple narrow use cases that people now use it for, and I'm inclined to assume that advertising is part of it. I think another part is probably that voice is really just not that fantastic of an interface for any other kind of interactions. I don't find it surprising that OpenAI's whole framing around ChatGPT, of it being a text-based chat window (as are the other LLMs), is where most of the use seems to happen. I like it best when Alexa acts as a terse butler ("turn on the lights" "done"), not a chatty engaging conversationalist.
Some features are not meant to be revenue sources. I'd lump assistive technology and AI assistants into the category of things that elevate the usefulness of one's ecosystem, even when not directly monetizable.
Edit: IMO Apple is under-investing in Siri for that role.
Steve Jobs famously said, "If you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow.”
Paraphrased: if you do things with the explicit goal to optimize revenue, it harms your business success. If you do things that optimize user experience and delight customers, it will provide more value long-term.
Voice assistants are in that latter camp, I believe. (And I think of this quote constantly as Tim Cook crams more ads into the ecosystem)
Voice assistants that were at the level of a fairly mediocre internet-connected human assistant might be vaguely useful. But they're not. So even if many of us have one or two in our houses or sometimes lean on them for navigation in our cars we mostly don't use them much.
Amazon at one point was going to have a big facility in Boston as I recall focused on Alexa. It's just an uninteresting product that, if it were to go away tomorrow I wouldn't much notice. And I certainly wouldn't pay an incremental subscription for.
This is the part that hasn't made much sense to me. Maybe just.. have a better product?
As you quoted above, "most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Why does any of this need to consume provider resources? Could a weather or music command not just be.. a direct API call from the device to a weather service / Spotify / whatever? Why does everything need to be shipped to Google/Amazon HQ?
From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to try doing any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)
So there's no way for them to do anything without sending it off to the datacenter.
> (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)
It was out of date 6 years ago.
"This breakthrough enabled us to create a next generation Assistant that processes speech on-device at nearly zero latency, with transcription that happens in real-time, even when you have no network connection." - Google, 2019
Alexa actually had the option to process all requests locally (on at least some hardware) for the first ~10 years, from launch until earlier this year. The stated reason for removing the feature was generative AI.
I had a group of students make a service like this in 2021, completely local, could work offline, did pretty much everything Alexa can do, and they made it connect to their student accounts so they could ask it information about their class schedules. If they can do it, Amazon certainly can. That they don't says they think they can extract more value from monitoring each and every request than they could from selling a better product.
My mother always enjoyed playing Jeopardy! on alexa, it was a novel format and everybody could participate while sitting around and chatting. She happily would have paid for it, even the dreaded monthly subscription, but it was neglected. The service started being buggy (lagging, repeatedly restarting the day's question series) and now they've moved on.
If anyone knows of an open-source alternative I could stitch together, I am all ears!
The difference is previous version of alexa wasn't good enough to pay for it. Now it is good enough that millions of users are paying $10-100 for these services.
Much of the cost of Alexa wasn't the data center costs, as Alexa was not, until recently, an AI. Amazon lost tons of money selling cheap Echo speakers at below cost expecting people would use Alexa on those to buy things. Turns out, people don't like to buy things by yelling at a speaker.
As a sibling poster has said, I don't know how much on-device AI is going to matter.
I have pretty strong views on privacy, and I've generally thrown them all out in light of using AIs, because the value I get out of them is just so huge.
If Apple actually had executed on their strategy (of running models in privacy-friendly sandboxes) I feel they would've hit it out of the park. But as it stands, these are all bleeding edge technologies and you have to have your best and brightest on them. And even with seemingly infinite money, Apple doesn't seem to have delivered yet.
I hope the "yet" is important here. But judging by the various executives leaving (especially rumors of Johnny Srouji leaving), that's a huge red flag that their problem is that they're bleeding talent, and not a lack of money.
I’m much more optimistic on device-side matmul. There’s just so much of it in aggregate and the marginal cost is so low especially since you need to drive fancy graphics to the screen anyway.
Somebody will figure out how to use it—complementing Cloud-side matmul, of course—and Apple will be one of the biggest suppliers.
You don't have to abandon privacy when using an eye - use a service that accesses enterprise APIs, which have good privacy policies. I use the service from the guys who create the This day in AI podcast called smithery.ai -we are access to all of the sota models so we can flip between any model including lots of open source ones within one chat or within multiple chats and compared the same query, using various MCPs and lots of other features. If you're interested have a look at the discord to simtheory.ai (I have no connection to the service or to the creators)
That’s huge. Hope they can continue to keep such people because it isn’t just about one person. It’s all the other smart people that want to work with them.
On-device moves all compute cost (incl. electricity) to the consumer. I.e., as of 2025 that means much less battery life, a much warmer device, and much higher electricity costs. Unless the M-series can do substantially more with less this is a dead end.
That's fair for brute force (running a model on the GPU), but that's exactly where NPUs come in - they are orders of magnitude more energy-efficient for matrix operations than GPUs. Apple has been putting NPUs in every chip for years for a reason. For short, bursty tasks (answer a question, generate an image), the battery impact will be minimal. It's not 24/7 crypto mining, it's impulse load
For the occasional local LLM query, running locally probably won't make much of a dent in the battery life, smaller models like mistral-7b can run at 258 tokens/s on an iPhone 17[0].
The reason why local LLMs are unlikely to displace cloud LLMs is memory footprint, and search.
The most capable models require hundreds of GB of memory, impractical for consumer devices.
I run Qwen 3 2507 locally using llama-cpp, it's not a bad model, but I still use cloud models more, mainly due to them having good search RAG.
There are local tools for this, but they don't work as well, this might continue to improve, but I don't think it's going to get better than the API integrations with google/bing that cloud models use.
What is the possible benefit of on device processing?
I envy your very simple, sedentary life where you are never outside of a high-speed wifi bubble.
Look at almost every Apple ad: It's people climbing rocks, surfing, skiing, enjoying majestic vistas, and all those things that very often come with reduced or zero connectivity.
Battery isn't relevant to plugged-in devices, and in the end, electricity costs roughly the same to generate and deliver to a data center as to a home. The real cost advantage that cloud has is better amortization of hardware since you can run powerful hardware at 100% 24/7 spread across multiple people. I wouldn't bet on that continuing indefinitely, consumer hardware tends to catch up to HPC-exclusive workloads eventually.
You could have an AppleTV with 48 GB VRAM backing the local requests, but... the trend is "real computers" disappearing from homes, replaced by tablets and phones. The advantage the cloud has is Real Compute Power for the few seconds you need to process the interaction. That's not coming home any time soon.
Interestingly, some of Apple’s devices do already serve a special purpose like this in their ecosystem. The HomePod, HomePod Mini, and Apple TV act as Home Hubs for your network, which proxy WAN Apple Home requests to your IoT devices. No other Apple devices can do this.
They also already practice a concept of computational offloading with the Apple Watch and iPhone; more complicated fitness calculations, like VO2Max, rely on watch-collected data, but evidence suggests they’re calculated on the phone (new VO2Max algorithms are implemented when you update iOS, not watchOS)
So yeah; I can imagine a future where Apple devices could offload substantial AI requests to other devices on your Apple account, to optimize for both power consumption (plugged in versus battery) and speed (if you have a more powerful Mac versus your iPhone). There’s good precedent in the Apple ecosystem for this. Then, of course, the highest tier of requests are processed in their private cloud.
If the cloud AI is ad or VC-supported, sure, but that doesn't seem like a sustainable way to provide good user experience.
And don't worry, I'm sure some enterprising electricity company is working out how to give you free electricity in exchange for beaming more ads into your home.
Apple runs all the heavy compute stuff overnight when your device is plugged in. The cost of the electricity is effectively nothing. And there is no impact on your battery life or device performance.
I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment.
From there, AI integration is enough of a different paradigm that the existing apple ecosystem is not a meaningful advantage.
Best case Apple is among the fast copies of whoever is actually innovative, but I don't see anything interesting coming from apple or apple devs anytime soon.
People said the same things about mobile gaming [1] and mainframes. Technology keeps pushing forward. Neural coprocessors will get more efficient. Small LLMs will get smarter. New use-cases will emerge that don't need 160IQ super-intellects (most use-cases even today do not)
The problem for other companies is not necessarily that data center-borne GPUs aren't technically better; its that the financials might never make sense, much like how the financials behind Stadia never did, or at least need Google-levels of scale to bring in advertising and ultra-enterprise revenue.
> All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment.
With "Apple Intelligence" it looks like Apple is setting themselves up (again) to be the gatekeeper for these kind of services, "allow" their users to participate and earn a revenue share for this, all while collecting data on what types of tasks are actually in high-demand, ready to in-source something whenever it makes economic sense for them...
Outside of fun stuff there is potential to just make chat another UI technology that is coupled with a specific API. Surely smaller models could do that, particularly as improvements happen. If that was good enough what would be the benefit of an app developer using an extra API? Particularly if Apple can offer an experience that can be familiar across apps.
Also why would you want it sucking your battery or heating your room when a data center is only 20 milliseconds away and it's nothing more than a few kilobytes of text. It makes no sense for the large majority of users' preferences which downweight privacy and the ability to tinker.
An LLM on your phone can know everything else that is on your phone. Even Signal chat plaintexts are visible on the phone itself.
People definitely will care that such private data stays safely on the phone. But it’s kind of a moot point since there is no way to share that kind of data with ChatGPT anyway.
I think Apple is not trying to compete with the big central “answer machine” LLMs like Google or ChatGPT. Apple is aiming at something more personal. Their AI goal may not be to know everything, but rather to know you better than any other piece of tech in the world.
And monetization is easy: just keep selling devices that are more capable than the last one.
Gemini can know everything in my Google account, which is basically synonymous with everything that's on my phone, except for text messages. And I use an iPhone. And then Gemini will work just as well on the web when I use my laptop.
So I don't see what unique advantage this gives Apple. These days people's data lives mostly in the cloud. What's on their phone is just a local cache.
I don't know, I feel like Apple shot themselves in the foot selling 8GB consumer laptops up until around 2024 while packing them with advanced AI inference, and usually had lower RAM on their mobile and ipads.
On the other hand all devs having to optimize for lower RAM will help with freeing it up for AI on newer devices with more.
I'd loved to see a strong on-device multi-modal Siri + flexibility with shortcuts.
Besides the "best consumer AI story" they could additionally create a strong offering to SMBs with FileMaker + strong foundation models support baked in. Actually rooting for both!
I agree with the assessment that Apple has by far the best platform to ship features.
That being said, if people spend all their time interacting with LLMs for nearly everything, which is the direction we seem to be going in, what locks them in the Apple ecosystem?
i'd have a lot more respect for apple's "cautious" approach to AI if they didn't keep promising and then failing to deliver siri upgrades (while still calling out to cloud backends, despite all the talk about local LLM), or if they hadn't shipped the absolute trash that is notification summaries.
i think at this point it's pretty clear that their AI products aren't bad because it's some clever strategy, it's bad because they're bad at it. I agree that their platform puts them in a good place to provide a local LLM experience to developers, but i remain skeptical that they will be able to execute on it.
it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company.
I love my Macbooks and think they can be great for local LLMs in the future. But the vast majority do not care and they do not want to setup complicated local LLMs. They want something that just works on the computer, tablets, and phones - ideally all synced together.
Local LLMs will never be better than cloud LLMs. They can close the gap if/when cloud LLM progress stalls.
Let's not conflate Apple's failure in cutting edge transformer models with good strategy.
I said "Consumer AI". Even Apple is likely beating Google in consumer AI DAUs, today. Google has the Pixel and gemini.google.com, and that's it; practically zero strategy.
You've never heard of google search (with AI), gmail (with ai), google maps (with ai). Not to mention that most android devices come with google-ified apps that are at worst a click away from Google AI being on the device, in many cases the AI search app is bundled.
No clue how many google smart speakers sold either, but not reason to think it's lower than homepods really, they're 1/3 the price.
Unfortunately, apple will never ditch its luxury brand, so like its memory, even if its good, their business model will never leverage wide spread adoption.
Local AI sounds nice but most of Apple’s PCs and other devices don’t come with enough RAM for a decent price needed for good model performance and macOS itself is incredibly bloated.
That's true for current LLMs, but Apple is playing the long game.
First, they are masters of quantization optimization (their 3-4 bit models perform surprisingly well).
Second, Unified Memory is a cheat code. Even 8GB on M1/M2 allows for things impossible on a discrete GPU with 8GB VRAM due to data transfer overhead. And for serious tasks, there's the Mac Studio with 192GB RAM, which is actually the cheapest way to run Llama-400B locally
Depends what you are actually doing. It's not enough to run a chatbot that can answer complex questions. But it's more than enough to index your data for easy searching, to prioritise notifications and hide spam ones, to create home automations from natural language, etc.
Apple has the ability and hardware to deeply integrate this stuff behind the scenes without buying in to the hype of a shiny glowing button that promises to do literally everything.
That might work well for Apple to be the consumer electronic manufacturer that people use to connect to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google for their powerful creative work.
FWIW, AI is not entirely locked down in the Apple ecosystem. Sure, they control it but they've already built the foundation of a major opportunity for developers.
There's an on device LLM that is packaged in iOS, iPadOS and macOS 26 (Tahoe) [1]. They even have a HIG on use of generative AI [2]
Something like half of all macs are running macOS 26 [3] already, so this could be the most widely distributed on-device LLM on the planet.
I think people are sleeping on this, partly because the model is seen as under powered. But I think we can presume it won't always be so.
I've just posted a Show HN of app for macOS 26 I created that uses Apple's local LLM to summarize conversations you've had with Claude Code and Codex. [3]
I've been somewhat surprised at the quality and reliability of Apple's built-in LLM and have only been limited by the logic I've built around it.
I think Apple's packaging of an LLM in its core operating systems is actually a fast move with AI and even has potential to act as an existential threat to Windows.
I can second this. I am nearing launch on an app that uses both the new SpeechAnalyzer and on device LLM and it has met or exceeded my expectations. A longer context would always be nice but then I remember its running on a phone.
Don’t a lot of Android devices come with Gemini Nano on the device?
Probably not as many out there as there are Apple devices because it is only the high end ones at the moment. I don’t think they are that far behind in numbers though.
I'd be curious to see an estimate on the google side.
Here are some real rough estimates in Apple's ecosystem:
For macos alone the install base is something like 110-130 million, and only Apple Silicon macs can run the new model, so maybe 45 million active macs are updated to macos 26 and can run their model.
There are a bunch of details but of the iPhones out there that are new enough to run Apple Intelligence and have iOS 26, something like 220 million can.
For iPad same conditions but for iPados its something like 60 million.
So, something like 325 million active devices are out there ready to run LLM completion requests.
I've tested almost every LLM which will work on a modern iPhone and Apples models are universally terrible in comparison to almost every open-weights model, they're so bad it's a joke amongst devs who work in this space.
The only thing it's useful is super basic tasks like sentiment classification, summarization (sort of), or stuff like, "Does this message contain toxic/bad language, answer yes or no only".
It might as well be the visualization of the two strategies:
- Everyone else: "We mainly build huge AI compute clusters to process large amount of data and create value, at high cost for ramp-up and operation."
- Apple: "We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and operational cost all paid by the consumer."
I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.
No matter what they do, they will sell hundreds of millions compute devices for the foreseeable future. They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers.
> We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and operational cost all paid by the consumer
I wish they did but they don't. They have been for decade so stingy on RAM for iPhone and iPad. There are at current point that only small percent of their userbase have iPhone or iPad with 8GB RAM that somehow can run any AI models even open source and be of any use. Not mentioning they don't compare to big Models.
They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger RAM. iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air also can have max 32 GB RAM.
And for the current price of cheap online AI where e.g. perplexity provides so many promo for PRO version for like less $10 per year and all ai providers give good free models with enough rate limit for many users I don't see apple hardware like particularly bought because of AI compute-chips - at least not non-pro users.
If the loose AI though and because of that won't have good AI integrations they will loose also eventually in hardware. e.g. Polish language in Siri still not supported so my mum cannot use it. OSS Whisper v3 turbo was available ages ago but apple still support only few languages. 3rd party keyboard cannot integrate so well with audio input and all sux in this case because platform limitation.
Some lot of good that's done them. The Neural Engine is dark silicon on most devices I've seen, and now we're getting another product segment with M5's matmul GPUs.
To me, it feels like Apple should have supported CUDA from the start. Sell the ARM-hungry datacenter some rackmount Macs with properly fast GPUs, and Apple can eventually bring the successful inference technology to cheaper devices. Apple's current all-or-nothing strategy has produced nothing but redundant hardware accelerators, while Nvidia's vertical integration only gets stronger.
I have a little rust script that uses the built in vision toolkit to do ocr of pdfs, it spins up the ANE to a full 1W compared to 0 as measured by the power profiler. So it is used!
IMO, It’s a very apple strategy, stuff just works and is slowly more accelerated/lower power.
Maybe. But Apple tried the server business and found that they can't compete there.
Not because of Engineering deficiencies, but because datacenters buy based on facts, not fluff.
Now their ARM silicon is top-notch, no doubt about that. But will they earn a higher margin if they put it in a datacenter instead of a consumer device which is then used to consume Apple Services? I don't think so.
> But will they earn a higher margin if they put it in a datacenter
Nvidia is a five trillion dollar business right now. The total sum of Apple's profits from services, hardware and servicing/repair costs all fail to crest Nvidia's total addressable market. We've been past the point of theorizing for almost two years now.
Apple has the means to break into that market, too. They don't need the silicon (iPhone/iPad are way overpowered, Vision Pro and Mac are low-volume), they have thousands of engineers with UNIX experience, and hundreds of billions of dollars in liquid cash waiting to be spent. If the China divestment and monopoly case happen, Apple needs a game plan that guarantees them protection from US politicians and secures an easy cash flow.
From the consumer perspective, it seems simple; stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone. Nobody uses it. They're not playing AAA-games or inferencing the latest AI models, and the efficiency gains haven't been noticable for a decade. You don't need TSMC 2nm to browse the App Store, or watch AppleTV. The only opportunity cost comes from selling consumers hardware they can't appreciate.
> From the consumer perspective, it seems simple; stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone. Nobody uses it.
From a vendor-perspective, ~200mn iPhones are sold each year, the end-user will pay for it. The scale of this is financing the entire development and supply-chain for the silicon itself, and it contributes not only to hardware but also service revenue of the entire company.
nVidia owns 94% of the GPU market and shipped 11.6mn GPU's in Q2/2025, let's say they ship 60mn GPUs in 2025 total.
--> Why should I stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone?
Even without stopping production, why should I enter and compete in a market that is currently dominated by a single player, has a total size of ~60mn units/year, with each product deprecating almost instantly as soon as a more efficient product is announced?
Apple's silicon is not magically more efficient than everything else, their products are efficient because they are vertically integrated.
I doubt that Apple Silicon is competitive to nVidia in a datacenter setting
The existential hope that all the other players have is that AI will drive adoption of a form factor that replaces the phone. Because if in 5 years the dominant device is still the phone, Apple wins.
Consumer hardware chips will be plenty powerful to run “good enough” models.
If I’m an application dev, do I want to develop something on top of OpenAI, or Apple’s on device model that I can use as much as a I want for free? On device is the future
In 5 years, the dominant form-factor will still be a phone. This is not the risk.
The existential FEAR of the smartphone ecosystem players (Apple, Google) is, that another ecosystem (!) may come along, one that is tighter integrated into the daily lives, is more predictive of the users' needs, requires less interaction and is not under THEIR control.
Because this is not about devices, it's about owning the total userbase of that OS-ecosystem.
Replacing the Smartphone has been attempted numerous times in the past decade, but no device was able to replace it as a consumption device. Now technology has reached a level of maturity that Smart Glasses may have a shot at this. AND they come along with their own ecosystem as well.
Whatever happens, they won't replace all phones within 5 years. But it's possible that such a device would become a companion to an iOS/Android phone and within 5 years gradually eases off users of their phones into that other ecosystem.
And that's scary for Apple and Google.
Because this is not a device-war, this is an ecosystem-war.
> How late do you think Apple can come to that party and still wind up winning in the end?
In my view Apple is positioning themselves (once more) to win without the need of competing on fair grounds. They are late to this party, but their biggest asset is the control over the data and spending of their users.
The users WANT to use those services, and Apple is not ready to offer anything. But as long as they can be the "broker" between the user and such services (and most of all the deciding party!), they can sell the consumption of their entire userbase for revenue-share to the service-providers.
Their biggest risk (beside of stock-market impacts) is, that Apple users start to engage directly with such services without Apple being an intermediary party (using a browser or another device).
So their highest priority will be to keep the user entertained so they can continue profiting from their consumption until they themselves have arrived at the party.
Once they have arrived, they will start diverting profitable AI-tasks from 3rd parties back to their own services, leaving unprofitable ones to the then-integrated 3rd party providers
...Nvidia? Did you just step out of a cryogenic chamber from 2008?
The datacenter business is booming right now, cutting-edge and efficient hardware is needed more than ever. Nvidia and Apple are the only two companies in the world with the design chops and TSMC inroads to address that market. Nvidia's fully committed and making money hand over fist; Apple is putting 2nm silicon in the iPad Pro and asking fucking consumers to pay $1,500 for it. Do you not see the issue with this business model?
People will say Apple can't crack the datacenter market, I say bullshit. Apple drafted OpenCL. Every dollar Nvidia makes is money Apple pissed away on trinkets like smartwatches and TikTok tablets.
Yes, as I said in another thread a few days ago: Apple's strength is in making personal computing endpoint devices for consumers. That's what's in their DNA. They have not done well at anything else.
While that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.
"Monopoly abuse"? Apple Pay was a huge leap forward in preventing credit card info theft, to the point that I only buy gas at stations that use Apple Pay to avoid having my bank account emptied by someone running a pump skimmer.
Yeah and part of that specifically came by sacrificing a personal computing endpoint product they used to sell, networked storage, at the sacrificial alter.
The funny thing is that Time Machine still works, and works better than any local backup solution for Windows that I'm aware of (let alone what comes with Windows itself).
Not to mention, they are generous enough to allow it to work with a non-apple NAS setup. I feel like that would be a different story if they were still in the NAS business.
I'm not sure how Apple is enabling anything interesting around AI right now.
That's what this bland article is not even touching on. Yes, having missed the boat is great if the boat ends up sinking. That doesn't make missing boats a great strategy.
Building huge models and huge data centers is not the only thing they could have done.
They had some interesting early ideas on letting AI tap app functionality client-side. But that has gone nowhere, and now everything of relevance is happening on servers.
Apple's devices are not even remotely the best dumb terminals to tap into that. Even that crown goes to Android.
Although I am an Android user, I am not enough of a narcissist to need to remove the crowds from my tourism photos. So, not all Android users have photos without crowds.
> They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers.
I'm not following. What infrastructure? Pre-paid how?
Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid.
And what infrastructure? The inference chips on iPhones aren't part of any Apple AI infrastructure. Apple's not using them as distributed computing for LLM training or anything, or for relaying web queries to a complete stranger's device -- nor would they.
> Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid.
The AI-capabilities of the devices will be pre-paid, as they will come with the product without delivering any significant value yet.
The end-user will bear the cost for that before he is getting anything meaningful in return, because Apple's production volume is at such a scale that they can offset those investments without risking to lose any meaningful sales volume.
Other players can't do that because they don't sell 200mn units per year. If they would add on-device inference chips, they would have to significantly increase the device-price, risking to not sell any product
That's not "prepaid", that's just normal building of hardware. And Apple's AI hardware is pretty general-purpose -- it's already widely used for things like dictation, image recognition, all sorts of stuff. Sure they've upgraded their "neural engine" into a "neural accelerator" to optimize it more for LLM's, but that's still incremental.
What Apple is also doing is investing server-side, just like everybody else, precisely because phones can't handle the serious stuff:
> Magic Cue - Magic Cue proactively surfaces relevant info and suggests actions, similar to how Apple's personalized Siri features were supposed to work. It can display flight information when you call an airline, or cue up a photo if a friend asks for an image.
Likewise Daily Hub didn't work but was shipped anyway.
> In our testing, Daily Hub rarely showed anything beyond the weather, suggested videos, and AI search prompts. When it did integrate calendar data, it seemed unable to differentiate between the user’s own calendar and data from shared calendars. This largely useless report was pushed to the At a Glance widget multiple times per day, making it more of a nuisance than helpful.
They roll out hardware to consumers they can use for AI once their service is ready, with users paying for that rollout until then.
Meanwhile they have started to deploy a marketplace ecosystem for AI tasks on iOS, where Apple has the first right-to-refuse, allowing the user to select a (revenue-share-vetted) 3rd party provider to complete the task.
So until Apple is ready, the user can select OpenAI (or soon other providers) to fulfill an AI-task, and Apple will collect metrics on the demand of each type of task.
This will help them prioritize for development of own models, to finally make use of their own marketplace rules to direct the business away from third parties to themselves.
My guess is that they will offer a mixed on-device/cloud AI-service that will use the end-users hardware where possible, offloading compute from their clouds to the end-users hardware and energy-bill, with a "cheap" subscription price undercutting others on that AI-marketplace.
You are just making things up in this grand AI strategy you have imagined for Apple. I cannot "fulfill an AI-task" with my phone because the overpaid idiots building it in Cupertino have years ago bought into the trainwreck that is Siri. So now I cannot "select my favorite AI provider" from the "marketplace ecosystem for AI tasks" to "fulfill an AI-task" nor will a meddling middle manager in the Loop collect metrics on the demand for "my AI tasks".
And now they are converting Siri into an orchestrator to "broker" between the user and the AI-providers for a revenue-share, because they are not ready to compete in that space themselves...
It isn’t clear to me that Apple will ever pursue their own chatbot like Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. There’s lots of potential for on device AI functions without it ever being a general purpose agent that tries to do everything. AI and LLMs are not synonymous.
Assuming that Apple take 30% rev-share from other AI-service providers on their AI-marketplace, once they are ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone else and still retain a higher profit-margin.
But for this to make economic sense, the "AI-bubble" may need to burst first, forcing the competitors to actually provide their services for-profit.
Until then it might be more profitable to just forward AI-tasks to OpenAI and others and let them burn more money.
> once they are ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone else
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
> Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
Sorry, I didn't mean to state that Apple A/M-series will be competitive on inference performance compared to other solutions. There is no sufficient data for this at the moment. But this is not the competition I expect to happen.
I expect them to stiffle competition and setting themselves up as the primary player in the Apple ecosystem for AI services, simply because they are making "Apple Intelligence" an ecosystem orchestration layer (and thus themselves the gatekeeper).
1. They made a deal with OpenAI to close Apple's competitive gap on consumer AI, allowing users to upgrade to paid ChatGPT subscriptions from within the iOS menu. OpenAI has to pay at least (!) the usual revenue share for this, but considering that Apple integrated them directly into iOS I'm sure OpenAI has to pay MORE than that. (also supported by the fact that OpenAI doesn't allow users to upgrade to the 200USD PRO tier using this path, but only the 20USD Plus tier) [1]
2. Apple's integration is set up to collect data from this AI digital market they created: Their legal text for the initial release with OpenAI already states that all requests sent to ChatGPT are first evaluated by "Apple Intelligence & Siri" and "your request is analyzed to determine whether ChatGPT might have useful results" [2]. This architecture requires(!) them to not only collect and analyze data about the type of requests, but also gives them first-right-to-refuse for all tasks.
3. Developers are "encouraged" to integrate Apple Intelligence right into their apps [3]. This will have AI-tasks first evaluated by Apple
4. Apple has confirmed that they are interested to enable other AI-providers using the same path [4]
--> Apple will be the gatekeeper to decide whether they can fulfill a task by themselves or offer the user to hand it off to a 3rd party service provider.
--> Apple will be in control of the "Neural Engine" on the device, and I expect them to use it to run inference models they created based on statistics of step#2 above
--> I expect that AI orchestration, including training those models and distributing/maintaining them on the devices will be a significant part of Apple's AI strategy. This could cover alot of text and image processing and already significantly reduce their datacenter cost for cloud-based AI-services. For the remaining, more compute-intensive AI-services they will be able to closely monitor (via above step#2) when it will be most economic to in-source a service instead of "just" getting revenue-share for it (via above step#1).
> I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.
I'm not sure where you position Samsung or Xiaomi, Oppo etc. They're competitive on price with chipsets that can handle AI loads in the same ballpark, as attested by Google's features running on them.
They're not vertically integrated and don't have the same business structure, but does it matter regarding on-device AI ?
Vertical integration matters for sure, but people often underestimate the scale in which this market is already skewed.
- Apple owns more than 50% of this market-segment, the annual sales of iPhones is roughly 200 Million units. In comparison, Samsung Galaxy S-series sits at roughly 20-25 Millions.
- Apple's is alone in the iOS ecosystem, while Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo have to compete within the Android space every year. iOS is extremely sticky, which makes a certain volume of iPhones almost guaranteed to sell every year, at a lofty profit margin.
In comparison, Samsung always has to consider that the next BAD Galaxy-S might only sell a fraction of the previous one, because users might move horizontally to another Android brand (even to Pixel, a first-party product of their ecosystem provider). So Samsung cannot even make bets based on the sale of 20 million units, they are already at risk to make bets on the initial shipment-volume (~5 millions) because if the device doesn't sell they will have to PAY money to the carriers to get them into the market.
Apple has a much lower risk here. If the next iPhone is not catching on, Apple will likely still sell 200mn iPhones in that year, because the ecosystem lock-in is so strong that there is little risk of losing customers to anything else than ANOTHER (then more-profitable) iPhone.
So even when assuming a MASSIVE annual drop of 25% in Sales, Apple can still make development bets based on a production forecast of 150 MILLION units.
For their supply-chain that's still an average production output of ~400k units per DAY for each component. With that volume you can get entire factories to only produce for you.
That's why I can't think of any company in a comparable position. Apple can add hardware to their device and sell the resulting product to the consumer for profit before delivering any actual value with it.
If any competitor in the Android space attempts that, just the component costs alone will risk the device to be dead-on-arrival just because "some other Android device" delivers the same experience at lower cost.
I'm with you in that no other company is in the exact same position as Apple.
I read the original comment as positing no other company is positionned to forgot building their own AI platform and instead sell pricey terminals that can run second party local models.
From that POV, sur Samsung and others have competition, and theirargins won't be as large as Apple, but they also have a larger market and can work with less money (Samsung as a whole will never struggle to find more)
> 50% of this market-segment
If we're limiting the segment to phones that have enough RAM to run decent models, Apple users who haven't updated to the upper models (no SE, no 16e etc) recent years are all out of the picture. I didn't check the numbers, but wouldn't have expect them to be much ahead of Samsung and the beasties Android devices.
I agree that this is a reasonable perspective, but from my cursory understanding of the “shakeup” at Apple, I am not sure it is seen that way by the Board and Cook.
I don't want to imply that this is their only play or that it will even work out.
The EU (and others) already identified this general scheme of stiffling competition by "brokering" between the consumer and the free market, so outside of the US I'm not even sure how much Apple will be able to rely on such a strategy (again)...
I recently tried to figure out what their offerings currently are. I'm hoping for `efficent but performant AI compute-chips` by Apple ever since they kicked out Nvidia in 2015 (for the ML Models / Exploration parts bellow). It will be interesting to see how good their products will feel in this fast-paced environment and how much legroom (RAM + Compute) will be left non-platform offerings.
To my understanding, they market their ML stack as four layers [1]:
- Platform Intelligence: ready-made OS features (e.g., Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground) that apps can adopt with minimal customization.
- ML-powered APIs: higher-level frameworks for common tasks—on-device Foundation Models (LLM), plus Vision, Natural Language, Translation, Sound Analysis, and Speech; with optional customization via Create ML.
- ML Models (Core ML): ship your own models on-device in Core ML format; convert/optimize from PyTorch/TF via coremltools, and run efficiently across CPU/GPU/Neural Engine (optionally paired with Metal/Accelerate for more control).
- Exploration/Training: Metal-backed PyTorch/JAX for experimentation, plus Apple’s MLX for training/fine-tuning on Apple Silicon using unified memory, with multi-language bindings and models commonly sourced from Hugging Face.
I think one of Apple's strengths since Tim Cook took over is their ability to avoid "gimmicks". As much criticism as people have of apple for not innovating on the iPhone, I appreciate their ability to not screw products up.
I'm not saying AI is a gimmick, but the caution they show is a good quality I think
Apple could have avoid that by released it half arsed like all the AI stuff, claim that it does all those things and write somewhere "AI may make mistakes".
I work in UI in enterprise, where slight color shade differences between releases can cause uproar. I cannot imagine the thought process behind liquid glass in any sense.
OSX's Aqua was also an insanely bold UI with a lot of gimmicks, but was still usable for the most part. I'm so very curious about the internal discussions around this.
Several of his “lieutenants” are following, actually.
His successor Stephen Lemay has exactly the kind of pedigree a person who cares about UI could ask for. There's a lot to be optimistic about. https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
I have no idea what's going on but Apple is an extremely top down place. Its entirely possible that Apple pivots on a dime after the departure of the baffoon.
They haven't really updated Siri though? That's still in the pipeline. So not a very fair comparison. The article states that they are behind and I think everyone knows that
AI isn't a gimmick, but a huge portion of the way it's presented to consumers is, especially given the fact that it never really was meant for consumers. As an Apple user, I'm thrilled at how "behind" they are.
But also, their tendency to "not fall from gimmicks" sometimes makes it so we didn't get a 2nd mouse button for decades. Ultimately, the way they implemented this was super cool, but still.
The balancing act of figuring out what you can reasonably rely on from an LLM and what you need to be skeptical or dismissive of is not the type of experience an iPhone user should be expected to navigate.
I was going to link you the Apple Vision Pro as a counterpoint, but after clicking the link and being reminded of what that product actually looks like, I really don't know what to say any more. I'm literally dumbfounded anyone could make your comment at all
To their credit, they specifically decided not to make a big deal out of AR like Meta did and keep production small and expensive. They realized the tech wasn't ready for a mass adoption campaign. I'd say Apple, overall, has been pretty cautious with AR. I wouldn't be surprised if they even have the guts to cancel that project entirely like they did with self-driving cars
That's not credit at all. If your strongest defense of AVP is "at least they're not Meta" then you've stopped making grounded observations and gone straight to ad-hominem.
I'd also go as far as to say that Apple knew they could have made the Vision Pro better. It should be running a real computer operating system like the headset Valve is making, and Apple knows that. The arbitrary insistence on iPad-tier software in a $3,500 headset guaranteed it was unlovable and dead-on-arrival.
I ran into an AVP recently and it actually is a great piece of hardware. It only has two issues: price and software. The former is forgivable because it really is an amazing piece of hardware and the price is justified. The latter is not and is the original sin that has killed it.
There's an unfulfilled promise of spatial computing. I wish I could load up my preferred CAD program and have wide and deep menus quickly traversable with hand gestures. Barring that the least it could do is support games. Maybe if some combination of miracle shims (fex emu, asahi, w/e) were able to get onto the platform it might be savable. The input drivers alone would be a herculean task.
Seems that this is apples modus operandi since the app store, their last "thing" they've made really.
Hype about self driving cars -> apple chases it with apple car -> investors pleased they kept up with the joneses -> apple car is behind or not good enough or whatever -> quietly cancelled -> investors pleased they culled the deadweight.
You can replace apple car with vision pro or soon apple intelligence and it will play out the same formula. Luckily it allows investors to profit.
Google's headline new AI feature for this year's Pixel phone, Magic Cue, shipped despite not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
It actually popped up and was useful for me yesterday when I was calling a hotel I had booked. I was kind of surprised because I had forgotten about the feature, but it is there and does occasionally offer helpful info.
Because 8 people worldwide own one, and it will stop receiving support shortly, if it hasn't already.
OP doesn't literally mean they haven't made anything, he means that they've made nothing of real substance - which holds true when their biggest recent release is already completely forgotten by the public writ large.
Especially one bound to a future vision they have for computing. Companies are betting way more on a similar future vision with AI than Apple has with Vision.
You're being combative, but it's true. Yes, a new low-effort refresh came out recently. But the product is really going nowhere.
Apple's next Vision product is almost certainly going to be more of a Meta glasses clone leaning more into Apple's fashion pedigree where they've had massive success with the Apple Watch.
But even then, eyewear has the limitation that not everyone is interested in wearing eyewear at all.
We’ll see where it goes, and it may well end up being nowhere, but it’s not currently “dead in the water” when the company is actively refreshing hardware and supporting it.
I’m not being “combative,” I’m correcting obvious exaggerations about the state of the product.
They’ve made plenty of things. I liken them to the Lexus of consumer electronics; expensive for what they are, thoughtfully designed, and conservative in their approach to adopting new trends.
Iphone on your wrist. Most people I know with one have it for two years then once the battery goes they throw it in a drawer and don't buy another one. Most were actually gifted it.
> airpods
They just took the same old earpods they used to give you for free due to ewaste concerns and forced you to buy the disposable bluetooth version if you want to charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.
>homepod
I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
>ipad
No one knows why they need one. They get one because there's hype. They use it for three years to look at instagram then its put in a drawer forever. "ipad for education" is a scam/failure; just give kids macbook airs so I don't have to teach new hires what a file is anymore.
All of this is a farcry from the ipod and I feel like apologists like you understand that too.
This sounds like you need to do some homework before derailing the thread. You’re very confidently saying there’s no use for things which millions of people keep buying, so consider the possibility that you might have missed something.
> I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
Ahh, man! I'm a HomePod (mini) fan. I've got 4 of the little things scattered around my house. I use 2 as speakers for my TV, which sounds excellent compared to similarly-priced soundbars. Then, yea, it's got Siri for setting timers in the kitchen, can intercom to other rooms' HomePods, can recognize who's talking to do things like send / read text messages, set reminders, etc. For $99, they're actually incredible little devices.
Airpods are by far the best mass-market headphones in existence for apple device owners. The noise cancellation is unparalleled (which is huge if you use public transit or use them in the gym). The audio quality is also among the best you can get for a wireless headphone. This is true of both the Airpods Pros and the Max
Airpods are a joke. Apple killed the headphone jack for no reason, then sold the "solution", and people ate it up. Great business strategy for them to screw their customers for cash, but an abjectly terrible product. They are worse than wired headphones in every way except "they are wireless", which isn't actually a benefit.
> I don't knock it out of my head by having the wire catching on something
> Dealing with the cable and having to pack it back up when I'm done
> It auto connects to both my phone and laptop 99% of the time
> It easily swap between the 2 as I change the focus
Now they aren't perfect, charging can be a bit fiddly over time but they certainly are nicer than the normal headphones. Maybe you just aren't the target audience but clearly they are popular enough for most people.
Bit like marmite, some people love it some people hate it, my wife did not like hers so she got a new gpu instead.
> Airpods
I have used airpods almost every day since they came out including the 1st gen, the pros and the usb-c pros. I will continue to buy them as they are first class experience on iOS
> homepod
didn't even know this existed lol
> ipad
This one is a bit difficult for me. When I was in school I did two years of work using just an IPad, some text books and my Apple Pencil, all my notes were taken on notability and synced with my google cloud AND my iCloud. Any homeworks I could request a PDF copy and fill out easily and submit via email.
Now as a software engineer i really really really really wish that you could program on the IPad (Swift does NOT count) and it was more like a slightly smaller mac, it would crush the laptop market to shreds and nobody would buy a macbook air anymore if that was the case
It sounds like a lot of your opinions are formed within a very niche bubble.
Airpods for example - I see them everywhere, and every person I know that uses them, love them! Especially Airpods Pro 2.
iPad - I think the sales figures speak for themselves. It may not be popular among tech people, given they're used to a desktop environment, but I know many people that use iPads and love them.
Apple Watch, I admit is more of a mixed bag among the people I know and spoken to. But I'd say the majority like it, and have bought another one after their first one gave out/upgraded. Again, the sales figures speak for themselves.
The parent is living in a different reality. They are all hugely popular products, just because he doesn't like them doesn't make it not true. And their introduction made a massive impact. Maybe not on the level of the iPhone but pretty impressive. The vision pro thing is a major flop. Nobody wanted one before it came out and nobody wants or needs one now and it's too expensive. It's a shame, because like e readers they are massively underused as a technology.
TBF, The Vision Pro failed from a sales perspective, no doubt, but after getting a demo at an Apple Store last year, I can see how it is promising tech once they make it a smaller form factor and cheaper.
iPad: i have thousands of music scores on it running ForScore, which I can annotate with an Apple Pencil (the cheap $99 one), I flip pages using a foot controller I built with an ESP32, and I run multiple audio and music apps on it that are extremely useful.
And it just ...works. It sits on my music stand, doesn't call attention to itself, and does the job I ask it too.
Could I do all that with some Android thing? Probably most of it. Truly differentiated tech is rare in the consumer space. It's the experience that counts, and that's what the iPad has.
Hank Green mentioned in passing the other day how ungodly much money Apple is making off of airpods. I still have managed not to get one. But the watch and iPad definitely counts as something after the app store.
Which they didn't really invent the app store either. What they did was break the stranglehold cellphone carriers had on cellphone software, and we should kiss their butts every single week for that. Most people didn't work in mobile prior to the app store and holy shit.
They completely revolutionized laptop processors, were the first to put meaningful health data in watches, and created the first good bluetooth earbuds, but I guess they don't do things anymore.
> They completely revolutionized laptop processors
Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
Apple absolutely ran ahead of the industry technically, by a shocking amount. But in a commoditized field that isn't sensitive to quality metrics, that doesn't generate sales.
There's a reason why the iPhone remains the dominant product but macs are stuck at like 9% market share, and it's not the technlogy base that is basically the same between them.
Laptops are done, basically. It's like arguing about brands of kitchen ranges: sure, there are differences, but they all cook just fine.
> Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
This wildly, comically untrue in my experience: all of the normal people I know loooooove how fast it is and charging a few times a week. It was only the people who self-identify as PC users who said otherwise, much like the Ford guys who used to say Toyotas were junk rather than admit their preferred brand was facing tough competition.
Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users". You're measuring the 0.1%! (Which, fine, is probably more like 15% or whatever. Still not a representative sample.) You're likely also only sampling US consumers, or even Californians, and so missing an awful lot of the market.
Again, real normal people can't tell the difference. They don't care. And that's why they aren't buying macs. The clear ground truth is that Macintosh is a lagging brand with poor ROI and no market share growth over more than a decade. The challenge is explaining why this is true despite winning all the technical comparisons and being based on the same hardware stack as the world-beating iOS devices.
My answer is, again, "users don't care because the laptop market is commoditized so they'll pick the value product". You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Historically that analysis has tended to kill more companies than it saves.
> Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users”
No. Remember that Apple sells devices other than Macs: they were all non-IT people who liked their iPhones and figured they’d try a Mac for their next laptop and liked it. One thing to remember is that Windows is a lot less dominant when you’re looking at what people buy themselves as opposed to what an enterprise IT department picked out. There are a ton of kids who start with ChromeOS or iPads, got a console for gaming, and don’t feel any special attraction to Windows since everything they care about works on both.
> You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff".
Huh? Beyond being insulting, this is simply wrong. My position is that people actually do consider fast, silent, and multi-day battery life as desirable. That’s not the only factor in a buying decision, of course, but it seems really weird not to acknowledge it after the entire PC industry has spent years in a panic trying to catch up.
Best I can tell you're arguing that 9% market share by units sold is some kind of failure. Now go look at who has the highest market share by revenue. Hint: it's a fruit company.
This whole take might make sense if Apple didn’t double their laptop market share from like 10% to 20% when the M1 series came out, which actually happened.
That's kind of a weird one because the PC market has notably regressed there over the past few years. Other than the Surface Pro 12 there've been no fanless PC laptops released since 2022-ish, when there used to be dozens.
On a technical basis, fanless PC laptops released now would be better than the ones in 2022 just on the basis of 2022 lineup having a moribund lineup of CPUs (Snapdragon SQ1, Amber Lake, etc.) You could release a lineup now that would be broadly competitive with the M1 at least, but it doesn't seem to be a market segment that PC OEMs are interested in.
Right, so, a K-12 education-oriented PC with an Intel N-series chip, about 1/3 as fast as what you get with an M4 (or worse).
When I asked my snarky question I'm really talking about "fanless laptops that someone would actually want to use and get some serious use out of."
The regression of the PC market is because the PC market didn't see the ARM train coming from a million miles away and just sat there and did nothing. They saw smartphones performing many times more efficiently than PCs and shrugged their arms at it.
Meanwhile, Apple's laptop marketshare has purportedly doubled from 10% to 20% or perhaps even higher since the M1 lineup was released.
I say this as someone who actually moved away from Apple systems to a Linux laptop. Don't get me wrong, modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences, but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life).
Yeah, like we're in agreement about the current state of the market, I just don't think it has to be that way. The Surface Pro 12 is fanless, so presumably anyone else could make a fanless Snapdragon laptop if they wanted to. (My daily driver work laptop is Windows-on-ARM, and most everything works pretty well on it.)
I believe the whole Vivobook Go line is fanless, actually.
But again, the point isn't to get into a shouting match over whose proxied anatomy is largest. It's to try to explain why the market as a whole doesn't move the way you think it should. And it's clearly not about fans.
You know I would be happy to offer this service to investors for a mere tens of millions of dollars. I'll send you photos of our weekly money bonfire, built with your money, and when you're tired of pictures of your money on fire, I'll simply... stop.
Heck, in accordance with the several zeitgeists of our age, I'll even do you the solid of fraudulently generating the money-on-fire pictures with AI, so when you get tired of seeing your money on fire I'll even hand, say, 25% of it back to you, as the result of my tireless efforts to bring value to my shareholders. That's a better return than you'll get from most of these investments!
Your dismissive tone is really discouraging me from replying with a legitimate answer to your concerns.
So you only get: people have been predicting the imminent demise of Apple every year for the last 20 and they are still the most valuable non-bubble stock in existence by a country mile.
Keep whining, I'm going to retire early on your whining.
Once again. It's great you earned money. Does it not bother you that you could have earned TWICE as much if the company didn't make so many stupid bets?
To completely ignore this obvious and clear point from the outset to crow about your stock market gains is absolutely the type of irrationality I was describing.
I'm not dismissing you. You've just failed to address the actual point.
This is the thing I've found amazing about people's complaints about Apple and AI.
Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
People have been complaining for years that Apple isn't shipping fast enough in this area. But if anything I think that they have been shipping (or trying to ship) too fast. There are a lot of scenarios that AI is actually great at but the ones that move the needle for Apple just aren't there yet in terms of quality.
The stuff that is at a scale that it matters to them are integrations that just magically do what you want with iMessage/calendars/photos/etc. There are potentially interesting scenarios there but the fact is that any time you touch my intimate personal (and work) data and do something meaningful I want it to work pretty much all the time. And current models aren't really there yet in my view. There are lots of scenarios that do work incredibly well right now (coding most obviously). But I don't think the Apple mainline ones do yet.
>> Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
They dragged their feet on a host of technologies that other handset makers adopted, released and subsequently improved.
- USB C charging
- 90hz, 120Hz refresh rates
- wireless charging
- larger batteries (the iPhone 17 still lags behind Samsung and Google)
I'm not sure what happened, but the iPhone used to have the most fluid, responsive experience compared to Android. Now, both Google and Samsung have surpassed them in that regard.
I've used both Android and have owned several iPhones and it just seems like its not an issue of releasing something that isn't ready, but more about them not being capable enough to release phones to compete with other phones that are regularly beating them in the specs race.
This isn't necessarily a counterargument. Apple's always been conservative with their specs but their tight link between software and hardware has meant they've been able to do more with less. Batteries are a good example of that. Apple has always had a much smaller battery than flagship competitors but has had similar or better battery life than, say, Samsung
this night I got accidentially the update to the latest iOS with this liquid glass stuff - and its schockingly bad in any dimension. keyboard input lags, many thing ned MORE clicks/touches then before, weird contenxt menu popovers that don't even register taps 50% of the time, general lags and sluggishness and UI artifacts everywhere. Its really really a degradiation of UI/UX even though I personally am a fan of that glass-style design in itself
I feel like the only people who say that still are people that don't actively or daily use Apple products because macOS Tahoe is a joke. Jelly scrolling on the iPad mini was a noticeable issue that should never have shipped. Antenna-gate on the iPhone 4. iOS 7... etc etc
iOS 26.1 will regularly blur the "status line" (clock, signal strength, network, battery) while the rest of the phone functions correctly. Just sitting on the home page with the status blurred. Locking, unlocking, switching screen modes, doesn't fix it - just have to reboot the phone. :\
> Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
Tell that to almost anything they've shipped in the last 5-10 years. It's gotten so bad that I wait halfway through entire major OS version before upgrading. Every new thing they ship is almost guaranteed to be broken in some way, ranging from minor annoyance to fully unusable.
I buy Apple-everything, but I sure wish there were better options.
I wonder if a new tech company was founded with a quality-first and customer-service mentality, could they succeed? Especially if there are NO investors trying to make a quick buck.
Certainly the company would provide good jobs, good benefits, salary and bonuses.
they had to say something and show they're working on something even if it doesn't work to appease the market spirits so they didn't lose their best people (stock compensation, right?)
now the tides are turning, so they can go back to scheming behind the closed doors without risking their top people leaving for meta for a bazillion dollars.
What people hate about Apple is that they ship things other people couldn't get to capital-W Work, and they're seen as 'stealing' the idea instead of perfecting them.
Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
iOS26 is a shit show. Glass looks terrible on my old 12 Pro Max, and just recently it has started trying to connect phone calls to my child's iPad Pro. That is, the speaker button, which previously I pushed to enable the speaker, now pops up a menu with other nearby devices listed in an annoyingly small font. My wife finally asked me for an Android because all her friends get far better pictures. Something isn't right over there, and a lot of people are leaving.
The core of Apple's problem boils down to apathy towards their product quality. I just recently switched from using Siri to Google Gemini in my car. The experience is dramatically better.
And this is the case across the board.
My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
Third and final example is how bad Apple's native dictation engine is. I can run OpenAI Whisper models on my Mac and get dramatically better output.
As a long time Apple fan who's had everything since before the first iPhone, I feel this apathy towards product quality cannot be disguised as some strategic decision to fast follow with AI.
> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
My husband has a Fitbit and it's so buggy he left it sit on the shelf most of the time - the only times he'd wear it is for exercise.
Siri is bad though, but I have found Google Voice Assistant and Alexa both really have become bad over time, to the point of us just giving up on them completely. My husband is on Android and I'm really surprised how bad voice assistant is despite all the Gemini launches! (mind you he has an Australian accent)
>> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
That's odd because I've used both, along with a bunch other wearables (e.g. Whoop), and I wouldn't give up my Apple Watch for anything. Massively useful, can take calls, make payments, stream music from my Apple playlists, read and reply to messages, and a ton of other things.
The wearos devices can do all that stuff too, and fitbit is kind of getting blended into those devices piece by piece -- so after years of Fitbit use I can say that the best fitbit device i've had is ... a Pixel Watch 4.
I mention this because , at least for the functionalities that you mention, I think the pixel watches are catching up nicely.
... but they still haven't been able to make me feel less stupid talking into a watch for phone calls like some off-brand James Bond wannabe, even if it works great.
But for everything else, you literally just said, the handful of AI features are better on Google products... That seldom makes the product as a whole better.
You're arguing about product quality by using product availability examples.
Siri isn't competing with Gemini, yet.. Siri is old tech, Gemini is the new tech.
Same with dictation.
Siri hasn't been updated generationally with SOTA to compete with Gemini yet.. it simply hasn't been updated. This is part of the "slow pace" that the post is talking about (part of, not entirely the slowness though).
For example, Amazon updated my old Echo dots with Alexa+ beta, and it's pretty good. I have Grok in my Tesla, and though I don't like Grok or xAI, it's there and I use it occasionally.
Apple hasn't done their release of these things yet.
How so? Their brand new Siri _is_ available. I am using their Apple intelligence on my new iPhone. They even have half baked ChatGPT integrations everywhere. They got into lot of trouble last year for running ads for overselling what their new siri can do.
Overselling abilities is for sure a lack of quality.
The new Apple Intelligence version of Siri isn't out yet. It's scheduled to arrive with iOS 26.4 in early/mid 2026.
My assertion is that Apple hasn't yet released a generational complement to Gemini or ChatGPT voice modes. That's a problem, but one specifically of availability and release, which.. again (and despite the downvoters).. matches the assertion of the post ("slow AI pace").
If/when new Siri in 26.4 comes out and it sucks, then that'd be an issue of quality.
No, when I bought my first iphone, Siri could start a chronometer. Then it couldn’t for 5 years, and today it can again. It’s a big flaw for a product which can barely do anything else.
I only have Apple product because it’s good build quality. But it’s quite bad products.
I think Apple secretly doesn’t want more market share, to avoid anticompetitive accusations.
> Shares of Apple Inc. were battered earlier this year as the iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an artificial intelligence strategy.
Everyone’s shares were battered earlier this year, and it had nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with tariffs.
I think it was mostly Buffett's dumping. He's a smart guy and the world's best investor, but I think this was a mistake. The winning play is long on Apple, short on Microsoft.
Beyond Hacker News, I haven't seen anyone actively asking for AI features. People have been complaining about Siri for over a decade but it's not like users are turning against Apple because it isn't using an LLM (yet). Rather, it seems like users are increasingly wary of AI features being shoehorned into products they were already using.
Apple originally planned to power Siri with ChatGPT under the hood. They quickly saw that other models, including open-source ones, were closing the gap fast.
A few months ago, MCP-style tool calling seemed like the clear standard. Now even Anthropic is shifting toward "code-mode" and reusable skills.
For Apple, reliable tool calling is critical because their AI needs to control apps and the whole device. My bet: Apple's AI will be able to create its own Shortcuts on the fly and call them as needed, with OSA Script support on Mac.
One of the reasons I'm heavily biased towards actual Mac native apps is that supporting callback URLs and Shortcuts unlocks so much of what I might ask of an AI tool already. Ironically I often ask AI assistants for line by line steps to create Shortcuts when I need them because actual Shortcut naming and properties can be quite obtuse.
Sadly, much as I love AppleScript, I think Apple giving it any love at this point in time is likely to be a pipe dream. Much more likely they're just going to try to beef up Shortcuts support across the board.
Users aren't really asking for AI features, but they may be asking for features that require AI.
As Google integrates Gemini into their Google Assistant and Google Home products, if it starts to become leaps and bounds better than Siri, customers are going to start wondering why Apple is falling behind. If Apple can't achieve those things without AI and that could cause problems. Customers aren't saying "I want AI features", but they are indirectly asking for them because the features they want require AI to do what they expect.
(I realize Google and Apple have a deal happening to have Gemini integrated into Siri so this isn't the best example, but I think it illustrates the point I'm trying to make)
I'm in that boat - I'm basically fine without AI features. I can think of a couple of hypothetical things that would be nice though - a smart and functional Siri - I never use it at the moment, and maybe a locally hosted LLM that could look through my documents so I can ask where's that spreadsheet with the housing costs etc.
?? Both normies and tech people seem to have been clued in that AI is a shoehorned in feature that companies focus on instead of fixing existing functionality, and that comes with a siphon that exfiltrates all your data for AI companies to train on.
The people I know in real life, besides those that work in tech and use it for code assistance or for generating never-reviewed archival transcripts of meetings, mostly just laugh at AI foibles and faults and casually echo doomer-media worries about job replacement as a topic for small talk.
But admittedly, most of those people are established adults who've figured out an effective rhythm to their home and work life and aren't longing for some magic remedy or disruption. They're not necessarily weary, and they were curious at first, but it seems like they're mostly just waiting for either the buzz to burn off or for some "it just works" product to finally emerge.
I imagine there are younger people wowed by the apparent magic of what we have now and excited that they might use it punch up the homework assignments or emails or texts that make them anxious, or that might enjoy toying with it as a novel tool for entertainment and creative idling. Maybe these are some of the people in your "real life"
There are a lot of people out there in "real life", bringing different perspectives and needs.
Nah, LLMs and stable diffusion are being used everywhere by everyone hardcore.
I work at a coworking space. Most of the folks I've worked alongside had active chats in ChatGPT for all sorts of stuff. I've also seen devs use AI copilots, like Copilot and Codex. I feel big old when I drop into fullscreen vim on my Mac.
AI art is also used everywhere. Especially by bars and restaurants. So many AI happy hour/event promo posters now, complete with text (AI art font is kind-of samey for some reason). I've even seen (what look like) AI generated logos on work trucks.
People are getting use out of LLMs, 100%. Yet the anti-AI sentiment is through the roof. Maybe it's like social media where the most vocal opponents are secretly some of its most active users. Idk.
What I meant specifically was that I don't remember anyone complaining about AI features getting in the way or being shoehorned. That particular complaint seems popular only on Reddit or HN.
Most of the people I've talked IRL to aren't against AI as a rule, but have grown tired of poorly implemented AI features, especially if they're used as marketing fodder. In my experience, shoehorned AI features have landed themselves in a category similar to that of bundled crapware and useless single-app hotkeys on cheap laptops.
Those of this group who use AI mostly ignore poor rebadges and integrations like MS Copilot and just use ChatGPT and Claude directly. They prefer it to remain intentional and contained within a box that they control the bounds of.
I talk to tons of people in real life who are deeply troubled by the AI-pocalypse. I was at a dinner party just the other day where out of the blue (wasn't me, I swear!), the conversation turned to the horrors of genAI and its negative effect on our society.
Gmail search has been excellent for 20 years. Outlook search is still terrible even with copilot. LLM isn’t the killer feature, a search that works is.
Copilot can search even in PowerPoints. Being able to search your organisation's documents is kind of a killer feature, provided they make it work reliably.
I can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files. We have traditional search technology which would be excellent for that!
> can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files
Kati’s Research AI is genuinely great at search. It tries to answer your question, but also directly cites resources. This can help you when you’re not sure where the answer to a question lies, and it winds up being in multiple places.
Unless your query is super simple and of low consequence, you still need to open the files. But LLM-powered search is like the one domain (apart from coding) where these fuckers work.
Disagree. It's a win win. As an example, Windows and Microsoft would benefit users if they focused less on injecting useless Copilot everywhere, and more on maintenance and improvement of the core functionality of the OS while not squandering the human resource of their development teams by forcing them to work on these things; bad opportunity cost.
Not to say Apple isn't also degrading their OS with bad design changes, but "more AI" is not something users are clamoring for.
From a financial market perspective, AAPL is the second highest valuation for a publicly traded company and #1 is in first place because of the AI bubble.
I genuinely never understood why there was a narrative that Apple is "falling behind" when it comes to AI. They make phones, computers and an ecosystem of services to lock you in. None of this stuff is threatened by AI; with the right integration, it would enhance them!
I do think Siri is particularly behind, but they were behind long before the AI craze. I also understand you cannot simply make Siri “be smart” with an LLM without all kinds of consequences and edge cases to deal with.
It’s not the same, but PMs and VPs at my company think we can vibe code our way out of migrating a 1.6 million line codebase to a newer language / technology. Or that our problems can be solved by acquiring an AI startup, whose front end looks exactly the same as every other AI startup’s front page, and slapping a new CSS file that looks like that startup on top of our existing SPA because their product doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an absurd world out there.
What are some good quality AI integrations right now? The chat apps and the IDEs are sort of separate environments. A lot of "AI assistants" in other apps so far have been clunky/useless.
I don't even think Google has particularly good integration and they make Gemini. Although it was early when I was still using my Android phone, I went back to the old google assistant instead of letting Gemini take over because it didn't add anything of value for the basic functions that I need from a voice assistant. Hopefully that's changed and I'm simply uninformed, but I doubt it.
As someone who buys Apple-everything and has thought about switching to Android just so I can have Gemini as an assistant, my opinion is their selling of phones is threatened by AI.
I know it's fashionable to shit-talk AI and Google, and lord knows I dislike the latter, but Gemini works and is day-to-day useful.
You said you don't understand it while explaining it in the second sentence. They don't have a decent integration, hence the vulnerability. Devices that do have a good to great AI experience will win in the long run imho.
What integration features are they missing that people use/want? Genuinely not trying to be dismissive or stick my head in sand - I am out of the loop.
That's not all, my macbook (48 GM VRAM) can run better local LLMs at a workable speed than my RTX 5090 rig can, plus Apple has MLX and neural engines.
The reason there was such a narrative is because Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both narrative machines with little regard for veracity, and they are also not that smart (at least according to people who successfully beat their system, such as Buffett).
"Warren, if people weren't so often wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." – the late great Charlie Munger.
Let everyone else pay for the research and make the mistakes, find out what works and what doesn't. Apple already has the consumers, they might as well save a few (hundred?) bn in the process and later deploy something which doesn't tell you to glue your cheese to your pizza.
Or like with the M1 chip: wait until the incumbent alienates so many experts in the field that you can scoop them up and they will succeed partially fueled on spite against their old employer.
In theory yes, but a lot of the organizational reasons Siri is a flop are also similar to the reasons Apple Music loses to Spotify, Apple can't really get it together for ads.. I think Apple is a great company (disclosure : shareholder) but they have gotten so big and so stretched thin can't always take advantage of the opportunities in front of them.
Why would Apple care about “winning” at Apple Music when the labels get most of the money? Spotify’s first annual profit after years of losses was last year at 1.3 billion.
Thank you. All these people applauding Apple for not jumping on the bandwagon.
When in reality, they _wanted_ to but have become so dysfunctional organization wise, they weren't able to. Kind of funny how that worked out.
I still think they're really dropping the ball. They could have local models running on devices, interfacing with a big cloud partner (Google, OpenAI, etc.) Make Siri awesome. But no.
See Gemini Nano. It is available in custom apps, but the results are so bad; factual errors and hallucinations make it useless. I can see why Google did not roll it out to users.
Even if it was significantly better, inference is still slow. Adding a few milliseconds of network latency for contacting a server and getting a vastly superior result is going to be preferable in nearly all scenarios.
Arguments can be made for privacy or lack of connectivity, but it probably does not matter to most people.
I just want it to be able to control my apple home devices and trigger shortcuts, and maybe do a search into a few apps and find things. I know a local model can understand my intent for siri like operations because I literally have my own version of that on my laptop.
I am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a free API call is transparently made to a secure computed environment on Apple’s servers that are documented to preserve privacy.
A problem is that even though it is super simple to write Swift / SwiftOS apps to use the system model, I don’t see much evidence that many developers are using the model in their apps.
Hey Mark, I posted about this in another comment [1] but I also think the LLM is decent, and beyond its quality the scale of distribution is a big deal.
I had pondered practical implementations of the model since it was announced and have just released today a new native macos application that uses it to summarize Claude Code and Codex conversations as they occur. [2]
If you use either of these CLI agents and have time to try the app out and provide feedback, I'd appreciate it! I'm at rob@contextify.sh.
Good product idea! Nice feature keeping track of Claude Code and codex and doing some syncing. I don’t use Claude code and cancelled my OpenAI subscription a few months ago (I use local models and Gemini) so I am not a possible customer for your product. BTW, I have experimented with storing my own sync info long term for local models - difficult problem.
Apple doesn’t own a search engine either, and gets $20B per year from Google to direct search queries to them.
I hope they adopt the same model with AI - leverage whatever frontier model is best and provide their own privacy infrastructure in front.
At some point Apple will figure out a way to provide the right info from your calendar, messages, email etc as context and couple this with a bunch of secure tools for creating calendar entries, etc. Agentic AI will then be something I personally benefit from.
Apple's phones are responsible for most of their revenue. The phones are designed to pretty much exclusively interact with social media and take photos. AI doesn't really add anything to that experience since advertisement consumption by humans is the ultimate objective. That's why even though Apple's Siri has been about the most useless assistant in existence for years, Apple isn't in a rush to replace it. It simply doesn't have a big impact on their revenue.
Microsoft has been criticized for investing in AI heavily. But it actually makes sense for Microsoft if you consider the nature of their business. The problem is not with the investment per se but with what they got out of it. Unfortunately, Microsoft sucks at product management, so instead of creating useful stuff that users want and are ready to pay for, they created stuff that no one understands, no one can use, and no one wants to pay for. Github copilot is an exception of course. I'm talking more about their Office 365 AI.
I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone. Apple is famous for watching peanut butter and chocolate makers and swooping in with Reece's Peanut Butter cups while everyone scratches their head because they've had better chocolate and better peanut butter so what's the deal?
When and if Apple pulls the plug on AI, we can declare it dead for this cycle. See you all again in 2040.
Or, since the stock market is an emotional game (hear me out): Apple hasn't announced anything in the past year which caused comparable excitement and resulted in (further) overvaluation of their company like it happened on Microsoft, nVidia, etc.
Now, after a few months (!), reality sets in and those hyped-up investors realize that it's not as much of a short-term game as they told themselves it would be...
Apple has a p/e of 38, Nvidia is 46, Microsoft is 34. S&P has historically averaged around 20, so on that metric Apple and Nvidia are more similar than different.
Sooner or later, everyone will realize Apple isn't building another ChatGPT - they don't need to. They're working on the world's largest distributed inference network. With hundreds of millions of Apple Silicon devices, they are the only ones who can afford to run AI features at zero marginal cost to themselves - using the user's electricity and hardware.
While Google and Microsoft burn billions on data centers, Apple is simply offloading the compute to our pockets. In the long run, when AI becomes a commodity, the winner will be whoever has the lowest transaction cost - and in that game, Apple simply has no competition
Nah. Local LLMs won't be big until maybe 10-20 years later. Phone devices will never run a model better than what ChatGPT runs in the cloud. People want to use the best models.
By the time local LLMs are good enough, OpenAI will already have an iPhone competitor.
They resisted (most of the) LLM boosterism and kept decent focus on SLMs that can run on-device.
I think the decision is first a self-serving one that's in line with how they want their devices and services to operate, but it also happens to be (in my opinion) the future-proof way of integrating consumer AI.
For anyone thats been around for more than one hype cycle, this is not a surprise.
Apple clearly takes a 'Measure Twice, Cut Once' approach.
It seems to me that tech and business analysts mostly supply uninformed nonsense opinions around whatever the popular rhetoric of the day is to generate more clicks :-/
How many times do we have to listen to tech and business analysts talking about lacklustre iPhone releases and how Apple hasn't done anything interesting since the original iPhone? But yet the iPhone 17 is flying off the shelves in China.
> Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its shares tumbled 18% through the end of June. That has reversed since then, with the stock soaring 35%, while AI darlings like Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. slid into the red and even Nvidia Corp. underperformed. The S&P 500 Index rose 10% in that time, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index gained 13%.
Why do papers do this. I can achieve any numbers by cherry picking the date for the random brownian motion.
And I think we're all weary of the whining about Apple being "behind on AI."
Consumers of Apple's core businesses do not stand to gain much, if anything, from so-called "AI." The failure of pundits and "analysts" to recognize and call that out just testifies to their laziness. They can never say exactly WHY or HOW this "behindness" is hindering Apple or its user base.
It's sad that Apple has capitulated to them at all by even talking about "AI."
“AI” is a semi-meaningless misnomer, of course, but e.g. a natural language interface is something Apple had tried since forever (Siri) and always failed to get functional and useful. So this part of “not gaining much” is probably false.
Paired with every vendor’s love to tweak things at random - including Apple, a natural language (if done right) could be a meaningful solution to UI consistency (“Hey Siri, I dunno where the goddamn toggle is located this time but stop making music auto-play every other time phone connects to CarPlay” - real use case with real value). Yet, as usual, Siri lacks in intelligence and capabilities.
I’m pretty sure it’s not some genius wisdom of Tim, or whoever. Apple simply didn’t do any user-facing useful shit (they did some interesting stuff for developers, but that’s a different story), plastered some generative emojis to tick the “AI” checkbox, and now people praise them for that.
Well, I can't fault you for suggesting that "AI" could be a workaround for Apple's derelict "design" of late.
And, I can see value in an all-local language model ingesting everything on my computer so I can find things. But let's face it: People managing large amounts of stuff on their computers and wanting to search it are a shrinking minority now.
But I still think the real-life payoff is minimal. A better Siri? Maybe. But if you look at Google's "AI" search results, they suck ass. They don't even hold up to what could be accomplished with straight-up parsing and searching. Here's an example I just got today, when I searched for "how much is a DeLorean worth?"
(Wow, Google has now disabled copying from search results. What petty jagoffs, after THEY copy and regurgitate others' work)
"A DeLorean DMC-12's value varies widely, from around $18,000 for project cars to over $50,000 for excellent condition models, with the nationwide average being about $83,725."
The revenue from AI is growing at a much slower rate than recurring capex and depreciation is accumulating. This will create distress opportunities that cash-rich companies like APPL may seize. Might be a private equity deal, might be in the public markets as some of the players dip hard after IPO.
As this plays out, APPL's silicon has unified memory, power consumption and native acceleration that gives it an edge running SLMs and possibly LLMs at scale. Wouldn't shock me to see APPL introduce a data-center solution.
Wasn’t it the same with covid hiring? While others over hired, Apple was modest in this position. Then everyone needed to significantly downsize, when Apple didn’t.
Apple has missed the train, from high-end computing they ended up as a low-end ML company (the most expensive MacStudio is way cheaper than a proper Nvidia card), and now some analyst is seeing virtue in that? They completely missed out on making serious money from AI and now that opportunity might be gone forever if AI cools down.
Looking at how others stuff AI into everything they can, user experience be damned, I’m kind of glad Apple was perfunctory in its jump on the bandwagon.
Interestingly, their slow 2020 hiring pace became a strength as the 2022 post-ZIRP layoff bloodbath hit as well. Though I don't know if they've had layoffs since.
Companies with strong distribution have an option to be the "last" player in a market and simply force their way in. If Apply makes a "default" LLM which is as good or better than all premium LLM options... then you would obviously choose to use that over paying for a ChatGPT subscription. Apple could probably upcharge the phone by $200 for this privilege. Alternatively, they may do what they did with search and just get paid not to add an LLM chat functionality.
I assume they will produce their own AI once the dust settles, just like they produce their own chips now.
Apple has generally been a company that waits, gets criticized for being behind, and then produces a better version (more usable, better integrated, etc), claims it is new, and everybody buys it. Meanwhile a few people moan about how Apple wasn't actually the first to make it.
Old Apple wasn't run by ex-Microsoft and ex-consultancy MBAs... a serious cultural rot has set in and the much of the "bottom up" component powering much of the innovation is nothing but smoldering coals.
It's telling that one of the leaders in ai, Google, also can't seem to ship an assistant that is better than Siri. Maybe it's not the ai that's the problem.
Ah, the benefits of having a sober old CEO. And a business model that doesn't need to be buoyed nor stabilized by spinning and hyping a succession of hot new trends.
I'm bullish on Apple in the long term for AI. Don't get me wrong, they will always suck at it. But it seems obvious to me that we're sailing up to an enshittification cliff in the very near future. Every provider is going to start trying to prove they are making money from consumers and that means one thing: ads, ads ads. Or worse, invisible influence you can't even tell is there. There is going to be a trust crisis and that's going to send people flocking to on-device / local / trustworthy AI that will land right in Apple's lap.
My beloved boomer dad’s windows laptop died the other week. After being on the fence about buying him a macbook (which I have and love) because I know he will struggle to switch user interfaces, I ended up pulling the trigger after seeing yet another news article about more aggressive copilot integration. I’m not letting him anywhere near an agent which can control his laptop, not from Microsoft which has huge incentive to recover their ai bet in whatever way possible
I find a lot of the low-key things helpful: I use an app at the same time and place every day, and it’s nice to have a handy one-tap way to open it. It does a decent job organizing photos and letting me search text in screenshots.
Apple didn't over-hire like other big tech and it didn't have to do the huge layoffs unlike others. This has similar smell - It won't win big in any ways, but the damage of bubble burst can be much less significant to them than to the peers.
They are flat-out incompetent. Siri has somehow regressed over the years and visual intelligence only works in demos. They have the most abominable integration with ChatGPT imaginable.
At least the MLX team has been shipping an impressive product.
I'd take a better Siri if it can happen on-device (for speed and privacy). They've been over-promising on Siri's capabilities for a decade at this point.
Me: Nah, it doesn't. I get fine-grained app permissions but there's a certain absurdity in using voice control for your CarPlay app, where Apple Maps is currently navigating you home, and you say "Find me the nearest Panera" and the reply is "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
I would bet significant money that, within two years, it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company.
I can explain more in-depth reasoning, but the most critical point: Apple builds the only platform where developers can construct a single distributable that works on mobile and desktop with standardized, easy access to a local LLM, and a quarter million people buy into this platform every year. The degree to which no one else on the planet is even close to this cannot be understated.
The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the companies that previously attempted to monetize data center based voice assistants lost massive amounts of money.
> Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year... “Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather.” Those questions aren’t monetizable.
Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google’s attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven’t worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...
Moving to using much more resource intensive models is only going to jack up the datacenter costs.
It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for ages and ages.
I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and turns it on.
Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no problem with the UI on my phone.
I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
> I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
THIS!
Rename the name of the light to "the".
I'm positive Google's voice commands worked better when Google Home initially released. No idea why it has gotten so bad. Recognition seemed better when it was internal and called "Majel" though on that one I'm sure that's just rose tinted glasses.
It's weird because Gemini is so impressive multimodally but even the Gemini powered assistant can't figure out which lights to turn out, telling the TV to "play" doesn't mean turning it on (it means unpausing it!), just an incredibly frustrating experience.
I had an annoying few weeks where, after years of working properly, Google assistant started misinterpreting "navigate home" as "navigate to the nearest Home Depot™".
"Alexa Play SpongeBob on youtube" is met with a sabrina carpenter hit every time. no idea why
Alternative it is hit with
"Would you like Spongebob, Spongebob Sponge on the Run, the spongebob squarepants movie, or Bob Espanja Pantalones Cuadrados
I really wonder if Google has any reasonable QA people still working on this stuff.
QA is the spouses of engineers. Management is a revolving door of the "smartest people" who are thinking about what to eat or their next job. Voices of reason get lost in the noise.
> QA is the spouses of engineers
I'm starting to doubt they use their own product at home.
I'm a Google engineer. I often don't even recommend our products.
I suspect most engineers at most companies, working behind the scenes to see the sausage being made, grow reservations about recommending it afterwards.
in the “AI age” QA is automated :)
IMO the root cause has more to do with vendor lock-in, near monopolies, freemium/advertising models, etc.
The desperate wish to believe that AI is a silver bullet is fuel on a fire that was already going.
Siri decided "home" was some random place several miles from me that. Couldn't get it fixed other than by changing phones.
At least you didn't have to move...
not really limited to their AI products; Android just sometimes randomly decides that pressing play on BT receiver in my car should totally start playing the song directly from my phone instead of the BT it connected to
I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction.
Almost every company today wants their primary business model to be as a service provider selling you some monthly or yearly subscription when most consumers just want to buy something and have it work. That has always been Apple's model. Sure, they'll sell you services if need be, iCloud, AppleCare, or the various pieces of Apple One, but those all serve as complements to their devices. There's no big push to get Android users to sign up for Apple Music for example.
Apple isn't in the market of collecting your data and selling it. They aren't in the market of pushing you to pick brand X toilet paper over brand Y. They are in the market of selling you devices and so they build AI systems to make the devices they sell more attractive products. It isn't that Apple has some ideologically or technically better approach, they just have a business model that happens to align more with the typical consumers' wants and needs.
> I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction.
Personally, Google lost me as a search customer (after 25 years) when they opted me into AI search features without my permission.
Not only am I not interested in free tier AI services, but forcing them on me is a good way to lose me as a customer.
The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for it.
> The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for it.
Not even only that, but the setup wizard literally asks if you'd like it or not. You don't even have to specifically opt-out of it, because it's opt-in.
Google is currently going full on Windows 10, for 'selected customers', with Gemini in Android. '(full screen popup) Do you want to try out Gemini? [Now] [Later]' 2 hours later... Do you want to...
This sort of nagging and spam should be illegal.
You can ad block the AI summary and have the same experience
Yes, there are always ways to deal with companies who make their experience shitty. The point is that you shouldn't have to, and that people will leave for an alternative that doesn't treat them like that.
I feel like this is 5 or so years out of date. The fact that they actually have an Apple Music app for Android is a pretty big push for them. Services is like 25% of their revenue these days, larger than anything except the iPhone.
As I said elsewhere, it really depends on the definition of "service". Subscriptions make up a relatively small minority of that service revenue. For example, 30 seconds of searching suggests that Apple Music's revenue in 2024 was approximately $10b compared to the company as a whole being around $400b. That's not nothing, but it doesn't shape the company in a way that it's competitors are shaped by their service businesses.
The biggest bucket in that "service" category is just Apple's 30% cut of stuff sold on their platform (which it also must be noted, both complements and is reliant on their device sales). That wouldn't really be considered a "service" from either the customer perspective or in the sense of traditional businesses. Operating a storefront digitally isn't a fundamentally different model than operating a brick and mortar store and no one would call Best Buy a "service business".
Call me a naïve fanboy, but I believe that Apple is still one of the very few companies that has an ideologically better approach that results in technically better products.
Where everyone else sells you stuff to make money, they make money to create great stuff.
I know you're saying that Apple's business model is selling devices but it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut.
Where I think you are ultimately correct is that some companies seem to just assume that 100% of interactions can be monetized, and they really can't.
You need to deliver value that matches the money paid or the ad viewed.
I think Apple has generally been decent at recognizing the overall sustainability of certain business models. They've been around long enough to know that most loss-leading businesses never work out. If you can't make a profit from day one what's the point of being in business?
> it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut
Apple doesn't have a paid tier for Apple Intelligence.
It's a feature and a free API developers can utilize, not a service.
Right, but Apple sells a bunch of way more profitable services, to the tune of being more revenue than Macs and iPads combined.
Apple's services have a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40% for products (hardware).
>it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut.
It depends. I guess you can argue this is true purely from scale. However, we should also keep in mind there are a lot of different things that Apple and tech companies in general put under "services". So even when you see a big number under "Service Revenue" on some financial report, we should recognize that most of that was from taking a cut of some other transaction happening on their devices. Relative to the rest of their business, they don't make much from monthly/yearly subscriptions or monetizing their customers' searches/interactions. They instead serve as a middleman on purchase of apps, music, movies, TV, and now even financial transactions made with Apple Card/Pay/Cash. And in that way, they are a service company in the same way that any brick and mortar store is a service company.
I'm confused at what you're trying to say here. Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?
Apple's services revenue is larger than Macs and iPads combined, with a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40% for products (hardware).
Yeah, they serve as a middleman...an incredibly dominant middleman in a duopoly. 80% of teenagers in the US say they have an iPhone. Guess what, all that 15-30% app store revenue is going to Apple. That's pretty much the definition of a service juggernaut.
I also don't agree with you about the lack of selling Apple services to non-Apple users. TV+ is a top-tier streaming service with huge subscriber numbers, and their app is on every crappy off-brand smart TV and streaming stick out there. Yes, there really are Android users who subscribe to Apple Music - 100 million+ downloads on the Google Play store, #4 top grossing app in the music category.
>Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?
You seem to operating under the notion that anything that isn't a device sold is a service. I think that definition is too broad to have any real value and that we should look at the actual business model for a product to determine its categorization. I'm not sure what else to say if you're just going to dismiss that as "pedantic".
But either way, it should be obvious that "services" (however they are defined) are a smaller part of Apple's business than they are for Microsoft, Google, Meta, Twitter, Oracle, Open AI, Anthropic, and most other players in both the general tech and AI spaces.
It's really interesting to consider an area where they are being successful with their AI, the notification summaries work pretty well! It's an easy sell to the consumer bombarded with information/notifications all over the place that on-device processing can filter this and cut out clutter. Basically, don't be annoying. I think a lot of people don't really know how well things like their on-device image search works (it'll OCR an upside-down receipt sitting on a table successfully), I never see them market that strength ever judging by the number of people with iphones that are surprised when I show them this on their own phones.
HOWEVER, you would never know this though given the Apple Store experience! As I was dealing with the board swap in my phone last month, they would have these very loud/annoying 'presentations' every like half hour or so going over all the other apple intelligence features. Nobody watched, nobody in the store wanted to see this. In fact when you consider the history of how the stores have operated for years, the idea was to let customers play around with the device and figure shit out on their own. Store employee asks if they need anything explained but otherwise it's a 'discovery' thing, not this dictated dystopia.
The majority of people I heard around me in the store were bringing existing iphones in to get support with their devices because they either broke them or had issues logging into accounts (lost/compromised passwords or issues with passkeys). They do not want to be told every constantly about the same slop every other company is trying to feed them.
They’ve done loud, in-store presentations for longer than Apple Intelligence has been a thing, but you’re right that it’s a captive audience of mostly disinterested people.
That is exactly why Apple's on-device strategy is the only economically viable one. If every Siri request cost $0.01 for cloud inference, Apple would go bankrupt in a month. But if inference happens on the Neural Engine on the user's phone, the cost to Apple is zero (well, aside from R&D). This solves the problem of unmonetizable requests like "set a timer," which killed Alexa's economics
The greed to lock customers in early on for cheap or free, in hopes to force them on a subscription, absolutely ruined the previous era os assistants. It could have been great with offline inference and foster competition. Instead we got mediocre assistants, thst got worse each year.
On top of it, on-device models increase response times and can be really private if the developer decides.
The assistant thing really shows the lie behind most of the "big data" economy.
1) They thought an assistant would be able to operate as an "agent" (heh) that would make purchasing decisions to benefit the company. You'd say "Alexa, buy toilet paper" and it would buy it from Amazon. Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.
2) They thought that an assistant listening to everything would make for better targeted ads. But this doesn't seem to be the case, or the increased targeting doesn't result in enough value to justify the expense. A customer with the agent doesn't seem to be particularly more valuable than one without.
I think that this AI stuff and LLMs in particular is an excuse, to some extent, to justify the massive investment already made in big data architecture. At least they can say we needed all this data to train an LLM! I've noticed a similar pivot towards military/policing: if this data isn't sufficiently valuable for advertising maybe it's valuable to the police state.
> Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.
I think this also hits an interesting problem with confidence: if you could trust the service to buy what you’d buy and get a good price you’d probably use it more but it only saves a couple of seconds in the easy case (e.g. Amazon reorders are already easy) and for anything less clear cut people rightly worry about getting a mistake or rip-off. That puts the bar really high because a voice interface sucks for more complex product comparisons and they have a very short window to give a high-quality response before most people give up and use their phone/computer instead. That also constrains the most obvious revenue sources because any kind of pay for placement is going to inspire strong negative reactions.
[dead]
> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make.
There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way:
I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor...
Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources.
What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help.
Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1]
[1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135
This type of response has been given by Alexa from an echo device in my house. I asked, “play x on y”, the response was something like “ok, but first check out this new…”. I immediately unplugged that device and all other Alexa enabled devices in the house. We have not used it since.
This is the monetization wall they have to figure out how to break through. The first inkling of advertising is immediate turn off and destroy, for me.
Even worse than ads, mine keeps trying to jam "News" down my throat. I keep disabling the news feeds on all my devices and they kept re-enabling against my wishes. Every now and then I'll say something to Alexa and she'll just start informing me about how awful everything is, or the echo show in the kitchen will stop displaying the weather in favor of some horrific news story.
Me: "Alexa, is cheese safe for dogs?"
Alexa: "Today, prominent politician Nosferatu was accused by the opposition of baby-cannibal sex trafficking. Nosferatu says that these charges are baseless as global warming will certainly kill everyone in painful ways by next Tuesday at exactly 3pm. In further news, Amazon has added more advertisements to this device for only a small additional charge..."
If I wanted to feel like crap every time I go to the kitchen I'd put a scale in there. /s
> LLMs still aren't good at that
I find this a really interesting observation. I feel like 3-4 trivial ways of doing it come to mind, which is sort of my signal that I’m way out of my depth (and that anything I’ve thought of is dumb or wrong for various reasons). Is there anything you’d recommend reading to better understand why this is true?
You are asking why someone don't want to ship a tool that obviously doesn't work? Surely it's always better/more profitable to ship a tool that at least seems to work
GP means they aren't good at knowing when they are wrong and should spend more compute on the problem.
I would say the current generation of LLMs that "think harder" when you tell them their first response is wrong is a training grounds for knowing to think harder without being told, but I don't know the obstacles.
Are you suggesting that when you tell it "think harder" it does something like "pass a question to a bigger system"? I have doubts... It would be gated behind more expensive plan if so
No? I’m interested in why LLMs are bad at knowing when they don’t know the answer, and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve.
In part because model performance is benchmarked using tests that favor giving partly correct answers as opposed to refusing to answer. If you make a model that doesn't go for part marks, your model will do poorly on all the benchmarks and no one will be interested in it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664
Because people make them and people make them for profit. incentives make the product what it is.
an LLM just needs to return something that is good enough for average person confidently to make money. if an LLM said "I don't know" more often it would make less money. because for the user this is means the thing they pay for failed at its job.
> and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve
The person I responded to, who seems like someone who definitely knows his stuff, made a comment that implied it was a technically difficult thing to do, not a trivially easy thing that's completely explained by "welp, $$$", which is why I asked. Your comments may point to why ChatGPT doesn't do it, but they're not really answering the actual question, in context.
Especially where the original idea (not mine) was a lightweight LLM that can answer basic things, but knows when it doesn't know the answer and can go ask a heftier model for back-up.
I think that person should think that technically difficult thing that makes more money = gets solved and technically difficult thing that makes less money = doesn't get solved.
By the way model's don't "know". They autocomplete tokens.
> Your comments may point to why ChatGPT doesn't do it
Any commercial model which is most of them...
I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers, telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole economy is mortgaged on this?
This is probably why there’s so much attention on LLM powered coding tools, as it’s one of the few use cases that seem like people would actually pay for it. Ironically mostly developers, who are being marketed as being replaced by AI.
It's also a use case where you already have a user of above-average intelligence who is there correcting hallucinations and mistakes, and is mostly using the technology to speed up boilerplate.
This just doesn't translate to other job types super well, at least, so far.
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I'm extremely bearish on AI, but I'm not sure I agree with the framing "not even Amazon could..." All of the advertising around Alexa focused on the simple narrow use cases that people now use it for, and I'm inclined to assume that advertising is part of it. I think another part is probably that voice is really just not that fantastic of an interface for any other kind of interactions. I don't find it surprising that OpenAI's whole framing around ChatGPT, of it being a text-based chat window (as are the other LLMs), is where most of the use seems to happen. I like it best when Alexa acts as a terse butler ("turn on the lights" "done"), not a chatty engaging conversationalist.
Some features are not meant to be revenue sources. I'd lump assistive technology and AI assistants into the category of things that elevate the usefulness of one's ecosystem, even when not directly monetizable.
Edit: IMO Apple is under-investing in Siri for that role.
Steve Jobs famously said, "If you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow.”
Paraphrased: if you do things with the explicit goal to optimize revenue, it harms your business success. If you do things that optimize user experience and delight customers, it will provide more value long-term.
Voice assistants are in that latter camp, I believe. (And I think of this quote constantly as Tim Cook crams more ads into the ecosystem)
What ads did Cook cram in the ecosystem? The ones in app store?
Voice assistants that were at the level of a fairly mediocre internet-connected human assistant might be vaguely useful. But they're not. So even if many of us have one or two in our houses or sometimes lean on them for navigation in our cars we mostly don't use them much.
Amazon at one point was going to have a big facility in Boston as I recall focused on Alexa. It's just an uninteresting product that, if it were to go away tomorrow I wouldn't much notice. And I certainly wouldn't pay an incremental subscription for.
> With the product sucking up server time
This is the part that hasn't made much sense to me. Maybe just.. have a better product?
As you quoted above, "most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Why does any of this need to consume provider resources? Could a weather or music command not just be.. a direct API call from the device to a weather service / Spotify / whatever? Why does everything need to be shipped to Google/Amazon HQ?
From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to try doing any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)
So there's no way for them to do anything without sending it off to the datacenter.
> (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)
It was out of date 6 years ago.
"This breakthrough enabled us to create a next generation Assistant that processes speech on-device at nearly zero latency, with transcription that happens in real-time, even when you have no network connection." - Google, 2019
https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...
Alexa actually had the option to process all requests locally (on at least some hardware) for the first ~10 years, from launch until earlier this year. The stated reason for removing the feature was generative AI.
It's an obvious cost optimization. Make the consumer directly cover the cost of inference and idle inference hardware.
I had a group of students make a service like this in 2021, completely local, could work offline, did pretty much everything Alexa can do, and they made it connect to their student accounts so they could ask it information about their class schedules. If they can do it, Amazon certainly can. That they don't says they think they can extract more value from monitoring each and every request than they could from selling a better product.
My mother always enjoyed playing Jeopardy! on alexa, it was a novel format and everybody could participate while sitting around and chatting. She happily would have paid for it, even the dreaded monthly subscription, but it was neglected. The service started being buggy (lagging, repeatedly restarting the day's question series) and now they've moved on.
If anyone knows of an open-source alternative I could stitch together, I am all ears!
> There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make
In my experience none of these voice assistance are accurate enough to trust with my money
nuance seems to have done ok with datacenter based voice assistants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Acquisit...
The difference is previous version of alexa wasn't good enough to pay for it. Now it is good enough that millions of users are paying $10-100 for these services.
Much of the cost of Alexa wasn't the data center costs, as Alexa was not, until recently, an AI. Amazon lost tons of money selling cheap Echo speakers at below cost expecting people would use Alexa on those to buy things. Turns out, people don't like to buy things by yelling at a speaker.
It is amazing sometimes how executives can check common sense at the door, and act like consumers are some separate species from themselves.
As a sibling poster has said, I don't know how much on-device AI is going to matter.
I have pretty strong views on privacy, and I've generally thrown them all out in light of using AIs, because the value I get out of them is just so huge.
If Apple actually had executed on their strategy (of running models in privacy-friendly sandboxes) I feel they would've hit it out of the park. But as it stands, these are all bleeding edge technologies and you have to have your best and brightest on them. And even with seemingly infinite money, Apple doesn't seem to have delivered yet.
I hope the "yet" is important here. But judging by the various executives leaving (especially rumors of Johnny Srouji leaving), that's a huge red flag that their problem is that they're bleeding talent, and not a lack of money.
I’m much more optimistic on device-side matmul. There’s just so much of it in aggregate and the marginal cost is so low especially since you need to drive fancy graphics to the screen anyway.
Somebody will figure out how to use it—complementing Cloud-side matmul, of course—and Apple will be one of the biggest suppliers.
You don't have to abandon privacy when using an eye - use a service that accesses enterprise APIs, which have good privacy policies. I use the service from the guys who create the This day in AI podcast called smithery.ai -we are access to all of the sota models so we can flip between any model including lots of open source ones within one chat or within multiple chats and compared the same query, using various MCPs and lots of other features. If you're interested have a look at the discord to simtheory.ai (I have no connection to the service or to the creators)
Johnny Srouji sent out an email to his team confirming he is staying.
That’s huge. Hope they can continue to keep such people because it isn’t just about one person. It’s all the other smart people that want to work with them.
On-device moves all compute cost (incl. electricity) to the consumer. I.e., as of 2025 that means much less battery life, a much warmer device, and much higher electricity costs. Unless the M-series can do substantially more with less this is a dead end.
That's fair for brute force (running a model on the GPU), but that's exactly where NPUs come in - they are orders of magnitude more energy-efficient for matrix operations than GPUs. Apple has been putting NPUs in every chip for years for a reason. For short, bursty tasks (answer a question, generate an image), the battery impact will be minimal. It's not 24/7 crypto mining, it's impulse load
For the occasional local LLM query, running locally probably won't make much of a dent in the battery life, smaller models like mistral-7b can run at 258 tokens/s on an iPhone 17[0].
The reason why local LLMs are unlikely to displace cloud LLMs is memory footprint, and search. The most capable models require hundreds of GB of memory, impractical for consumer devices.
I run Qwen 3 2507 locally using llama-cpp, it's not a bad model, but I still use cloud models more, mainly due to them having good search RAG. There are local tools for this, but they don't work as well, this might continue to improve, but I don't think it's going to get better than the API integrations with google/bing that cloud models use.
[0]: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4508
I used Mistral 7B a lot in 2023. It was a good model then. Now its not anywhere near where SOTA models are.
For me, when the AI service is operatied by the OS vendor, with root... What is the possible benefit of on device processing?
* If you trust the OS vendor, why wouldn't you trust them to handle AI queries in a responsible, privacy respecting manner?
* If you don't trust your OS vendor, you have a bigger problem than just privacy. Stop using it.
What makes people think that on-device processed queries can't be logged and sent off for analysis anyway?
What is the possible benefit of on device processing?
I envy your very simple, sedentary life where you are never outside of a high-speed wifi bubble.
Look at almost every Apple ad: It's people climbing rocks, surfing, skiing, enjoying majestic vistas, and all those things that very often come with reduced or zero connectivity.
Apple isn't trying to reach couch potatoes.
Battery isn't relevant to plugged-in devices, and in the end, electricity costs roughly the same to generate and deliver to a data center as to a home. The real cost advantage that cloud has is better amortization of hardware since you can run powerful hardware at 100% 24/7 spread across multiple people. I wouldn't bet on that continuing indefinitely, consumer hardware tends to catch up to HPC-exclusive workloads eventually.
You could have an AppleTV with 48 GB VRAM backing the local requests, but... the trend is "real computers" disappearing from homes, replaced by tablets and phones. The advantage the cloud has is Real Compute Power for the few seconds you need to process the interaction. That's not coming home any time soon.
Interestingly, some of Apple’s devices do already serve a special purpose like this in their ecosystem. The HomePod, HomePod Mini, and Apple TV act as Home Hubs for your network, which proxy WAN Apple Home requests to your IoT devices. No other Apple devices can do this.
They also already practice a concept of computational offloading with the Apple Watch and iPhone; more complicated fitness calculations, like VO2Max, rely on watch-collected data, but evidence suggests they’re calculated on the phone (new VO2Max algorithms are implemented when you update iOS, not watchOS)
So yeah; I can imagine a future where Apple devices could offload substantial AI requests to other devices on your Apple account, to optimize for both power consumption (plugged in versus battery) and speed (if you have a more powerful Mac versus your iPhone). There’s good precedent in the Apple ecosystem for this. Then, of course, the highest tier of requests are processed in their private cloud.
My Sun Ray is back in style! $30 on eBay!
One of the costs I see at the end of a month. The other I don't.
If the cloud AI is ad or VC-supported, sure, but that doesn't seem like a sustainable way to provide good user experience.
And don't worry, I'm sure some enterprising electricity company is working out how to give you free electricity in exchange for beaming more ads into your home.
Apple runs all the heavy compute stuff overnight when your device is plugged in. The cost of the electricity is effectively nothing. And there is no impact on your battery life or device performance.
I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment.
From there, AI integration is enough of a different paradigm that the existing apple ecosystem is not a meaningful advantage.
Best case Apple is among the fast copies of whoever is actually innovative, but I don't see anything interesting coming from apple or apple devs anytime soon.
People said the same things about mobile gaming [1] and mainframes. Technology keeps pushing forward. Neural coprocessors will get more efficient. Small LLMs will get smarter. New use-cases will emerge that don't need 160IQ super-intellects (most use-cases even today do not)
The problem for other companies is not necessarily that data center-borne GPUs aren't technically better; its that the financials might never make sense, much like how the financials behind Stadia never did, or at least need Google-levels of scale to bring in advertising and ultra-enterprise revenue.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-evil-3/id1640630077
Grammar-check and clip-art work fine locally. There are local use-cases, but the powerful use-cases are very important.
Machine translation in Firefox I think works locally. That has to be a neural net and those models can be just a couple of hundred megabytes.
> I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke.
Until the first Cambridge Analytica-sized privacy story hits a major cloud LLM provider, maybe.
> All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment.
With "Apple Intelligence" it looks like Apple is setting themselves up (again) to be the gatekeeper for these kind of services, "allow" their users to participate and earn a revenue share for this, all while collecting data on what types of tasks are actually in high-demand, ready to in-source something whenever it makes economic sense for them...
Outside of fun stuff there is potential to just make chat another UI technology that is coupled with a specific API. Surely smaller models could do that, particularly as improvements happen. If that was good enough what would be the benefit of an app developer using an extra API? Particularly if Apple can offer an experience that can be familiar across apps.
Also why would you want it sucking your battery or heating your room when a data center is only 20 milliseconds away and it's nothing more than a few kilobytes of text. It makes no sense for the large majority of users' preferences which downweight privacy and the ability to tinker.
I don't think so.
Consumers don't care about whether an LLM is local, and one that runs on your phone is always going to be vastly worse than ChatGPT.
I see zero indication that Apple is going to replace people going to chatgpt.com or using its app.
All I see Apple doing is eventually building a better new generation of Siri, not much different from Google/Alexa.
An LLM on your phone can know everything else that is on your phone. Even Signal chat plaintexts are visible on the phone itself.
People definitely will care that such private data stays safely on the phone. But it’s kind of a moot point since there is no way to share that kind of data with ChatGPT anyway.
I think Apple is not trying to compete with the big central “answer machine” LLMs like Google or ChatGPT. Apple is aiming at something more personal. Their AI goal may not be to know everything, but rather to know you better than any other piece of tech in the world.
And monetization is easy: just keep selling devices that are more capable than the last one.
Gemini can know everything in my Google account, which is basically synonymous with everything that's on my phone, except for text messages. And I use an iPhone. And then Gemini will work just as well on the web when I use my laptop.
So I don't see what unique advantage this gives Apple. These days people's data lives mostly in the cloud. What's on their phone is just a local cache.
>Gemini can know everything in my Google account
Sorry, this just made shivers run up my back.
... why?
If I ask Gemini a question, I definitely want it to be able to search everything in my calendar, Gmail, Drive.
No shivers here. Do you get shivers from using the search box on your Google Drive too?
I don't know, I feel like Apple shot themselves in the foot selling 8GB consumer laptops up until around 2024 while packing them with advanced AI inference, and usually had lower RAM on their mobile and ipads.
On the other hand all devs having to optimize for lower RAM will help with freeing it up for AI on newer devices with more.
I'd loved to see a strong on-device multi-modal Siri + flexibility with shortcuts. Besides the "best consumer AI story" they could additionally create a strong offering to SMBs with FileMaker + strong foundation models support baked in. Actually rooting for both!
I agree with the assessment that Apple has by far the best platform to ship features.
That being said, if people spend all their time interacting with LLMs for nearly everything, which is the direction we seem to be going in, what locks them in the Apple ecosystem?
How much, at what odds, who will decide if they do, and who will hold the money?
Have you ever heard of Doubao mobile phone, specifically the Nubia M153? Would Apple willing to do it to give value to customer but not app developer?
i'd have a lot more respect for apple's "cautious" approach to AI if they didn't keep promising and then failing to deliver siri upgrades (while still calling out to cloud backends, despite all the talk about local LLM), or if they hadn't shipped the absolute trash that is notification summaries.
i think at this point it's pretty clear that their AI products aren't bad because it's some clever strategy, it's bad because they're bad at it. I agree that their platform puts them in a good place to provide a local LLM experience to developers, but i remain skeptical that they will be able to execute on it.
They can buy a local LLM from an expert provider.
Local LLMs will never be better than cloud LLMs. They can close the gap if/when cloud LLM progress stalls.
Let's not conflate Apple's failure in cutting edge transformer models with good strategy.
Apple Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with "set[ting] up complicated local LLMs".
Nah it’s going to be Google by most measures
I said "Consumer AI". Even Apple is likely beating Google in consumer AI DAUs, today. Google has the Pixel and gemini.google.com, and that's it; practically zero strategy.
You've never heard of google search (with AI), gmail (with ai), google maps (with ai). Not to mention that most android devices come with google-ified apps that are at worst a click away from Google AI being on the device, in many cases the AI search app is bundled.
No clue how many google smart speakers sold either, but not reason to think it's lower than homepods really, they're 1/3 the price.
Google has search with AI and yet 99% of my search has gone to competitor AI products. Google AI in search is legit terrible.
Make a poly market bet, you will lose. Siri has been horrible for a decade, no way they fix that in two years.
And is any of that based on anything other than “AI is coming really soon!”?
Unfortunately, apple will never ditch its luxury brand, so like its memory, even if its good, their business model will never leverage wide spread adoption.
I think you have steve jobs colored glasses.
Local AI sounds nice but most of Apple’s PCs and other devices don’t come with enough RAM for a decent price needed for good model performance and macOS itself is incredibly bloated.
That's true for current LLMs, but Apple is playing the long game. First, they are masters of quantization optimization (their 3-4 bit models perform surprisingly well). Second, Unified Memory is a cheat code. Even 8GB on M1/M2 allows for things impossible on a discrete GPU with 8GB VRAM due to data transfer overhead. And for serious tasks, there's the Mac Studio with 192GB RAM, which is actually the cheapest way to run Llama-400B locally
The Mac Studio comes with up to 512GB of unified memory now.
Depends what you are actually doing. It's not enough to run a chatbot that can answer complex questions. But it's more than enough to index your data for easy searching, to prioritise notifications and hide spam ones, to create home automations from natural language, etc.
Apple has the ability and hardware to deeply integrate this stuff behind the scenes without buying in to the hype of a shiny glowing button that promises to do literally everything.
That might work well for Apple to be the consumer electronic manufacturer that people use to connect to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google for their powerful creative work.
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> I would bet significant money that,
You can do that right now, on the stock market. Sometimes it's good to put your money where your mouth is, that forces you to correct your world view.
FWIW, AI is not entirely locked down in the Apple ecosystem. Sure, they control it but they've already built the foundation of a major opportunity for developers.
There's an on device LLM that is packaged in iOS, iPadOS and macOS 26 (Tahoe) [1]. They even have a HIG on use of generative AI [2]
Something like half of all macs are running macOS 26 [3] already, so this could be the most widely distributed on-device LLM on the planet.
I think people are sleeping on this, partly because the model is seen as under powered. But I think we can presume it won't always be so.
I've just posted a Show HN of app for macOS 26 I created that uses Apple's local LLM to summarize conversations you've had with Claude Code and Codex. [3]
I've been somewhat surprised at the quality and reliability of Apple's built-in LLM and have only been limited by the logic I've built around it.
I think Apple's packaging of an LLM in its core operating systems is actually a fast move with AI and even has potential to act as an existential threat to Windows.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286/
[2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209081
I can second this. I am nearing launch on an app that uses both the new SpeechAnalyzer and on device LLM and it has met or exceeded my expectations. A longer context would always be nice but then I remember its running on a phone.
Are you using to for speech-to-text/text-to-speech? I have been using SpeechRecognizer & SpeechSynthesizer and they have been pretty underwhelming.
Thanks for the follow-on anecdote. I'd be happy to try out your app. Please email me when it is available: rob@contextify.sh.
How are you evaluating it against your expectations?
Lick your finger before you stick it in the air. Amplifies the signal.
I'd like to know this too. Whisper is hard to beat.
Don’t a lot of Android devices come with Gemini Nano on the device?
Probably not as many out there as there are Apple devices because it is only the high end ones at the moment. I don’t think they are that far behind in numbers though.
I'd be curious to see an estimate on the google side.
Here are some real rough estimates in Apple's ecosystem:
For macos alone the install base is something like 110-130 million, and only Apple Silicon macs can run the new model, so maybe 45 million active macs are updated to macos 26 and can run their model.
There are a bunch of details but of the iPhones out there that are new enough to run Apple Intelligence and have iOS 26, something like 220 million can.
For iPad same conditions but for iPados its something like 60 million.
So, something like 325 million active devices are out there ready to run LLM completion requests.
Also in Chrome.
I've tested almost every LLM which will work on a modern iPhone and Apples models are universally terrible in comparison to almost every open-weights model, they're so bad it's a joke amongst devs who work in this space.
The only thing it's useful is super basic tasks like sentiment classification, summarization (sort of), or stuff like, "Does this message contain toxic/bad language, answer yes or no only".
"existential threat to Windows" - from your lips to whoever's ear.
There is no major opportunity for developers on Apple's platforms when they can just rug pull you as they please.
It might as well be the visualization of the two strategies:
- Everyone else: "We mainly build huge AI compute clusters to process large amount of data and create value, at high cost for ramp-up and operation."
- Apple: "We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and operational cost all paid by the consumer."
I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.
No matter what they do, they will sell hundreds of millions compute devices for the foreseeable future. They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers.
THIS is their unique strength.
> We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and operational cost all paid by the consumer
I wish they did but they don't. They have been for decade so stingy on RAM for iPhone and iPad. There are at current point that only small percent of their userbase have iPhone or iPad with 8GB RAM that somehow can run any AI models even open source and be of any use. Not mentioning they don't compare to big Models.
They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger RAM. iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air also can have max 32 GB RAM.
And for the current price of cheap online AI where e.g. perplexity provides so many promo for PRO version for like less $10 per year and all ai providers give good free models with enough rate limit for many users I don't see apple hardware like particularly bought because of AI compute-chips - at least not non-pro users.
If the loose AI though and because of that won't have good AI integrations they will loose also eventually in hardware. e.g. Polish language in Siri still not supported so my mum cannot use it. OSS Whisper v3 turbo was available ages ago but apple still support only few languages. 3rd party keyboard cannot integrate so well with audio input and all sux in this case because platform limitation.
Their strategy is not to sell you a device that YOU can use for AI, they sell you a device that THEY can use for AI.
Some lot of good that's done them. The Neural Engine is dark silicon on most devices I've seen, and now we're getting another product segment with M5's matmul GPUs.
To me, it feels like Apple should have supported CUDA from the start. Sell the ARM-hungry datacenter some rackmount Macs with properly fast GPUs, and Apple can eventually bring the successful inference technology to cheaper devices. Apple's current all-or-nothing strategy has produced nothing but redundant hardware accelerators, while Nvidia's vertical integration only gets stronger.
> The Neural Engine is dark silicon on most devices I've seen
At the very least it's used by the Photos app[1]. Likely other Apple apps too.
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-peopl...
I have a little rust script that uses the built in vision toolkit to do ocr of pdfs, it spins up the ANE to a full 1W compared to 0 as measured by the power profiler. So it is used!
IMO, It’s a very apple strategy, stuff just works and is slowly more accelerated/lower power.
Maybe. But Apple tried the server business and found that they can't compete there.
Not because of Engineering deficiencies, but because datacenters buy based on facts, not fluff.
Now their ARM silicon is top-notch, no doubt about that. But will they earn a higher margin if they put it in a datacenter instead of a consumer device which is then used to consume Apple Services? I don't think so.
> But will they earn a higher margin if they put it in a datacenter
Nvidia is a five trillion dollar business right now. The total sum of Apple's profits from services, hardware and servicing/repair costs all fail to crest Nvidia's total addressable market. We've been past the point of theorizing for almost two years now.
Apple has the means to break into that market, too. They don't need the silicon (iPhone/iPad are way overpowered, Vision Pro and Mac are low-volume), they have thousands of engineers with UNIX experience, and hundreds of billions of dollars in liquid cash waiting to be spent. If the China divestment and monopoly case happen, Apple needs a game plan that guarantees them protection from US politicians and secures an easy cash flow.
From the consumer perspective, it seems simple; stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone. Nobody uses it. They're not playing AAA-games or inferencing the latest AI models, and the efficiency gains haven't been noticable for a decade. You don't need TSMC 2nm to browse the App Store, or watch AppleTV. The only opportunity cost comes from selling consumers hardware they can't appreciate.
> From the consumer perspective, it seems simple; stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone. Nobody uses it.
From a vendor-perspective, ~200mn iPhones are sold each year, the end-user will pay for it. The scale of this is financing the entire development and supply-chain for the silicon itself, and it contributes not only to hardware but also service revenue of the entire company.
nVidia owns 94% of the GPU market and shipped 11.6mn GPU's in Q2/2025, let's say they ship 60mn GPUs in 2025 total.
--> Why should I stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone?
Even without stopping production, why should I enter and compete in a market that is currently dominated by a single player, has a total size of ~60mn units/year, with each product deprecating almost instantly as soon as a more efficient product is announced?
Apple's silicon is not magically more efficient than everything else, their products are efficient because they are vertically integrated.
I doubt that Apple Silicon is competitive to nVidia in a datacenter setting
> Their strategy is not to sell you a device that YOU can use for AI, they sell you a device that THEY can use for AI.
How will that work out with the battery?
I mean, they could have mined crypto on our phones but that would have been a bad idea for the same reason.
> They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger RAM. iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air also can have max 32 GB RAM.
That's a selective list. High RAM Macs are available. MBPro goes up to 128GB. Mac Studio goes up to 512GB. Not cheap, but available.
The existential hope that all the other players have is that AI will drive adoption of a form factor that replaces the phone. Because if in 5 years the dominant device is still the phone, Apple wins.
Consumer hardware chips will be plenty powerful to run “good enough” models.
If I’m an application dev, do I want to develop something on top of OpenAI, or Apple’s on device model that I can use as much as a I want for free? On device is the future
In 5 years, the dominant form-factor will still be a phone. This is not the risk.
The existential FEAR of the smartphone ecosystem players (Apple, Google) is, that another ecosystem (!) may come along, one that is tighter integrated into the daily lives, is more predictive of the users' needs, requires less interaction and is not under THEIR control.
Because this is not about devices, it's about owning the total userbase of that OS-ecosystem.
Replacing the Smartphone has been attempted numerous times in the past decade, but no device was able to replace it as a consumption device. Now technology has reached a level of maturity that Smart Glasses may have a shot at this. AND they come along with their own ecosystem as well.
Whatever happens, they won't replace all phones within 5 years. But it's possible that such a device would become a companion to an iOS/Android phone and within 5 years gradually eases off users of their phones into that other ecosystem.
And that's scary for Apple and Google.
Because this is not a device-war, this is an ecosystem-war.
How late do you think Apple can come to that party and still wind up winning in the end?
Having piles of money when everyone else is lighting it on fire and a brand that would require quite the mistake to ruin gives you a long runway.
Is anyone really profiting from AI yet? I know Google basically saved their search monopoly but any one else?
> How late do you think Apple can come to that party and still wind up winning in the end?
In my view Apple is positioning themselves (once more) to win without the need of competing on fair grounds. They are late to this party, but their biggest asset is the control over the data and spending of their users.
The users WANT to use those services, and Apple is not ready to offer anything. But as long as they can be the "broker" between the user and such services (and most of all the deciding party!), they can sell the consumption of their entire userbase for revenue-share to the service-providers.
Their biggest risk (beside of stock-market impacts) is, that Apple users start to engage directly with such services without Apple being an intermediary party (using a browser or another device).
So their highest priority will be to keep the user entertained so they can continue profiting from their consumption until they themselves have arrived at the party.
Once they have arrived, they will start diverting profitable AI-tasks from 3rd parties back to their own services, leaving unprofitable ones to the then-integrated 3rd party providers
> Is anyone really profiting from AI yet?
...Nvidia? Did you just step out of a cryogenic chamber from 2008?
The datacenter business is booming right now, cutting-edge and efficient hardware is needed more than ever. Nvidia and Apple are the only two companies in the world with the design chops and TSMC inroads to address that market. Nvidia's fully committed and making money hand over fist; Apple is putting 2nm silicon in the iPad Pro and asking fucking consumers to pay $1,500 for it. Do you not see the issue with this business model?
People will say Apple can't crack the datacenter market, I say bullshit. Apple drafted OpenCL. Every dollar Nvidia makes is money Apple pissed away on trinkets like smartwatches and TikTok tablets.
Yes, as I said in another thread a few days ago: Apple's strength is in making personal computing endpoint devices for consumers. That's what's in their DNA. They have not done well at anything else.
While that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.
They do great at consumer services as well. Worth noting that no other company in the world has more credit cards on file than Apple.
That will look just great alongside the other monopoly abuse evidence.
"Monopoly abuse"? Apple Pay was a huge leap forward in preventing credit card info theft, to the point that I only buy gas at stations that use Apple Pay to avoid having my bank account emptied by someone running a pump skimmer.
Uhh, do you mean contactless payments? That wasn't Apple. Apple wasn't even the first to offer it on phones. Android beat them by 3 years.
...Apple didn't invent the credit card proxy. Their biggest "innovation" was locking it into their walled garden.
It's worth mentioning that those personal computing devices have enabled them to make bank on cloud services.
Yeah and part of that specifically came by sacrificing a personal computing endpoint product they used to sell, networked storage, at the sacrificial alter.
The funny thing is that Time Machine still works, and works better than any local backup solution for Windows that I'm aware of (let alone what comes with Windows itself).
Not to mention, they are generous enough to allow it to work with a non-apple NAS setup. I feel like that would be a different story if they were still in the NAS business.
Like they say: "In a goldrush, sell vendor locked shovels."
I would say that's what Nvidia is doing.
I'm not sure how Apple is enabling anything interesting around AI right now.
That's what this bland article is not even touching on. Yes, having missed the boat is great if the boat ends up sinking. That doesn't make missing boats a great strategy.
Building huge models and huge data centers is not the only thing they could have done.
They had some interesting early ideas on letting AI tap app functionality client-side. But that has gone nowhere, and now everything of relevance is happening on servers.
Apple's devices are not even remotely the best dumb terminals to tap into that. Even that crown goes to Android.
May I remind that iPhone can’t remove the crowds from tourism photos, so all Android users have memories without crowds. So, in a goldrush, sell dirt.
There's a thing I didn't know I was missing.
Although I am an Android user, I am not enough of a narcissist to need to remove the crowds from my tourism photos. So, not all Android users have photos without crowds.
Yeah I mean... I take a lot of joy in the random yet specific faces in those places I visited long ago. It's an important part of the memory for me.
Having a clear background used to be difficult/expensive, so a photo where you appear to have exclusive access to the area is a high social signal.
Now that it’s cheap and easy, those kind of photos will lose its signal.
Everyday Syndrome is proven right.
> They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers.
I'm not following. What infrastructure? Pre-paid how?
Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid.
And what infrastructure? The inference chips on iPhones aren't part of any Apple AI infrastructure. Apple's not using them as distributed computing for LLM training or anything, or for relaying web queries to a complete stranger's device -- nor would they.
> Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid.
The AI-capabilities of the devices will be pre-paid, as they will come with the product without delivering any significant value yet. The end-user will bear the cost for that before he is getting anything meaningful in return, because Apple's production volume is at such a scale that they can offset those investments without risking to lose any meaningful sales volume.
Other players can't do that because they don't sell 200mn units per year. If they would add on-device inference chips, they would have to significantly increase the device-price, risking to not sell any product
That's not "prepaid", that's just normal building of hardware. And Apple's AI hardware is pretty general-purpose -- it's already widely used for things like dictation, image recognition, all sorts of stuff. Sure they've upgraded their "neural engine" into a "neural accelerator" to optimize it more for LLM's, but that's still incremental.
What Apple is also doing is investing server-side, just like everybody else, precisely because phones can't handle the serious stuff:
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-serv...
So I'm not really seeing the unique Apple advantage here. Samsung is doing the exact same thing with Android, with LLM-optimized silicon.
Sometimes doing nothing is the winning move.
Look at Magic Cue in this year's Android update
> Magic Cue - Magic Cue proactively surfaces relevant info and suggests actions, similar to how Apple's personalized Siri features were supposed to work. It can display flight information when you call an airline, or cue up a photo if a friend asks for an image.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-ai-feat...
Google shipped it, despite it not working.
> I spent a month with the Pixel 10's most hyped AI feature, and it hasn't gone well
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
Likewise Daily Hub didn't work but was shipped anyway.
> In our testing, Daily Hub rarely showed anything beyond the weather, suggested videos, and AI search prompts. When it did integrate calendar data, it seemed unable to differentiate between the user’s own calendar and data from shared calendars. This largely useless report was pushed to the At a Glance widget multiple times per day, making it more of a nuisance than helpful.
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-hu...
Apple announced that the Siri uodate didn't work well enough to ship, and didn't ship it.
...as I wrote, they don't do "nothing".
They roll out hardware to consumers they can use for AI once their service is ready, with users paying for that rollout until then.
Meanwhile they have started to deploy a marketplace ecosystem for AI tasks on iOS, where Apple has the first right-to-refuse, allowing the user to select a (revenue-share-vetted) 3rd party provider to complete the task.
So until Apple is ready, the user can select OpenAI (or soon other providers) to fulfill an AI-task, and Apple will collect metrics on the demand of each type of task.
This will help them prioritize for development of own models, to finally make use of their own marketplace rules to direct the business away from third parties to themselves.
My guess is that they will offer a mixed on-device/cloud AI-service that will use the end-users hardware where possible, offloading compute from their clouds to the end-users hardware and energy-bill, with a "cheap" subscription price undercutting others on that AI-marketplace.
You are just making things up in this grand AI strategy you have imagined for Apple. I cannot "fulfill an AI-task" with my phone because the overpaid idiots building it in Cupertino have years ago bought into the trainwreck that is Siri. So now I cannot "select my favorite AI provider" from the "marketplace ecosystem for AI tasks" to "fulfill an AI-task" nor will a meddling middle manager in the Loop collect metrics on the demand for "my AI tasks".
And now they are converting Siri into an orchestrator to "broker" between the user and the AI-providers for a revenue-share, because they are not ready to compete in that space themselves...
see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210481
It isn’t clear to me that Apple will ever pursue their own chatbot like Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. There’s lots of potential for on device AI functions without it ever being a general purpose agent that tries to do everything. AI and LLMs are not synonymous.
From UX perspective they already have Siri for that
Assuming that Apple take 30% rev-share from other AI-service providers on their AI-marketplace, once they are ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone else and still retain a higher profit-margin.
But for this to make economic sense, the "AI-bubble" may need to burst first, forcing the competitors to actually provide their services for-profit.
Until then it might be more profitable to just forward AI-tasks to OpenAI and others and let them burn more money.
> once they are ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone else
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
> Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
Sorry, I didn't mean to state that Apple A/M-series will be competitive on inference performance compared to other solutions. There is no sufficient data for this at the moment. But this is not the competition I expect to happen.
I expect them to stiffle competition and setting themselves up as the primary player in the Apple ecosystem for AI services, simply because they are making "Apple Intelligence" an ecosystem orchestration layer (and thus themselves the gatekeeper).
1. They made a deal with OpenAI to close Apple's competitive gap on consumer AI, allowing users to upgrade to paid ChatGPT subscriptions from within the iOS menu. OpenAI has to pay at least (!) the usual revenue share for this, but considering that Apple integrated them directly into iOS I'm sure OpenAI has to pay MORE than that. (also supported by the fact that OpenAI doesn't allow users to upgrade to the 200USD PRO tier using this path, but only the 20USD Plus tier) [1]
2. Apple's integration is set up to collect data from this AI digital market they created: Their legal text for the initial release with OpenAI already states that all requests sent to ChatGPT are first evaluated by "Apple Intelligence & Siri" and "your request is analyzed to determine whether ChatGPT might have useful results" [2]. This architecture requires(!) them to not only collect and analyze data about the type of requests, but also gives them first-right-to-refuse for all tasks.
3. Developers are "encouraged" to integrate Apple Intelligence right into their apps [3]. This will have AI-tasks first evaluated by Apple
4. Apple has confirmed that they are interested to enable other AI-providers using the same path [4]
--> Apple will be the gatekeeper to decide whether they can fulfill a task by themselves or offer the user to hand it off to a 3rd party service provider.
--> Apple will be in control of the "Neural Engine" on the device, and I expect them to use it to run inference models they created based on statistics of step#2 above
--> I expect that AI orchestration, including training those models and distributing/maintaining them on the devices will be a significant part of Apple's AI strategy. This could cover alot of text and image processing and already significantly reduce their datacenter cost for cloud-based AI-services. For the remaining, more compute-intensive AI-services they will be able to closely monitor (via above step#2) when it will be most economic to in-source a service instead of "just" getting revenue-share for it (via above step#1).
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-ios-app-...
[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-extensio...
[3] https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
[4] https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-apple-ho...
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
> I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.
I'm not sure where you position Samsung or Xiaomi, Oppo etc. They're competitive on price with chipsets that can handle AI loads in the same ballpark, as attested by Google's features running on them.
They're not vertically integrated and don't have the same business structure, but does it matter regarding on-device AI ?
Vertical integration matters for sure, but people often underestimate the scale in which this market is already skewed.
- Apple owns more than 50% of this market-segment, the annual sales of iPhones is roughly 200 Million units. In comparison, Samsung Galaxy S-series sits at roughly 20-25 Millions.
- Apple's is alone in the iOS ecosystem, while Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo have to compete within the Android space every year. iOS is extremely sticky, which makes a certain volume of iPhones almost guaranteed to sell every year, at a lofty profit margin.
In comparison, Samsung always has to consider that the next BAD Galaxy-S might only sell a fraction of the previous one, because users might move horizontally to another Android brand (even to Pixel, a first-party product of their ecosystem provider). So Samsung cannot even make bets based on the sale of 20 million units, they are already at risk to make bets on the initial shipment-volume (~5 millions) because if the device doesn't sell they will have to PAY money to the carriers to get them into the market.
Apple has a much lower risk here. If the next iPhone is not catching on, Apple will likely still sell 200mn iPhones in that year, because the ecosystem lock-in is so strong that there is little risk of losing customers to anything else than ANOTHER (then more-profitable) iPhone.
So even when assuming a MASSIVE annual drop of 25% in Sales, Apple can still make development bets based on a production forecast of 150 MILLION units.
For their supply-chain that's still an average production output of ~400k units per DAY for each component. With that volume you can get entire factories to only produce for you.
That's why I can't think of any company in a comparable position. Apple can add hardware to their device and sell the resulting product to the consumer for profit before delivering any actual value with it.
If any competitor in the Android space attempts that, just the component costs alone will risk the device to be dead-on-arrival just because "some other Android device" delivers the same experience at lower cost.
I'm with you in that no other company is in the exact same position as Apple.
I read the original comment as positing no other company is positionned to forgot building their own AI platform and instead sell pricey terminals that can run second party local models.
From that POV, sur Samsung and others have competition, and theirargins won't be as large as Apple, but they also have a larger market and can work with less money (Samsung as a whole will never struggle to find more)
> 50% of this market-segment
If we're limiting the segment to phones that have enough RAM to run decent models, Apple users who haven't updated to the upper models (no SE, no 16e etc) recent years are all out of the picture. I didn't check the numbers, but wouldn't have expect them to be much ahead of Samsung and the beasties Android devices.
I agree that this is a reasonable perspective, but from my cursory understanding of the “shakeup” at Apple, I am not sure it is seen that way by the Board and Cook.
Yes, I also see what you mean.
I don't want to imply that this is their only play or that it will even work out.
The EU (and others) already identified this general scheme of stiffling competition by "brokering" between the consumer and the free market, so outside of the US I'm not even sure how much Apple will be able to rely on such a strategy (again)...
I recently tried to figure out what their offerings currently are. I'm hoping for `efficent but performant AI compute-chips` by Apple ever since they kicked out Nvidia in 2015 (for the ML Models / Exploration parts bellow). It will be interesting to see how good their products will feel in this fast-paced environment and how much legroom (RAM + Compute) will be left non-platform offerings.
To my understanding, they market their ML stack as four layers [1]:
- Platform Intelligence: ready-made OS features (e.g., Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground) that apps can adopt with minimal customization.
- ML-powered APIs: higher-level frameworks for common tasks—on-device Foundation Models (LLM), plus Vision, Natural Language, Translation, Sound Analysis, and Speech; with optional customization via Create ML.
- ML Models (Core ML): ship your own models on-device in Core ML format; convert/optimize from PyTorch/TF via coremltools, and run efficiently across CPU/GPU/Neural Engine (optionally paired with Metal/Accelerate for more control).
- Exploration/Training: Metal-backed PyTorch/JAX for experimentation, plus Apple’s MLX for training/fine-tuning on Apple Silicon using unified memory, with multi-language bindings and models commonly sourced from Hugging Face.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/360/
I think one of Apple's strengths since Tim Cook took over is their ability to avoid "gimmicks". As much criticism as people have of apple for not innovating on the iPhone, I appreciate their ability to not screw products up.
I'm not saying AI is a gimmick, but the caution they show is a good quality I think
They're being sued over an Apple Intelligence gimmick in an ad campaign that turned out to be vaporware at this very moment!
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/apple-suit-false-advertisin...
Apple could have avoid that by released it half arsed like all the AI stuff, claim that it does all those things and write somewhere "AI may make mistakes".
Their latest OS design shows they are quite capable of falling for gimmicks
I work in UI in enterprise, where slight color shade differences between releases can cause uproar. I cannot imagine the thought process behind liquid glass in any sense.
OSX's Aqua was also an insanely bold UI with a lot of gimmicks, but was still usable for the most part. I'm so very curious about the internal discussions around this.
It was a different time, too. I remember being starstruck after seeing the UI. Windows looked overwhelmingly grey in comparison.
The guy responsible is fortunately out of Apple
That would be fine if he was a lone wolf and nobody supported his vision, or if his whole org moved out with him.
Several of his “lieutenants” are following, actually.
His successor Stephen Lemay has exactly the kind of pedigree a person who cares about UI could ask for. There's a lot to be optimistic about. https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
I have no idea what's going on but Apple is an extremely top down place. Its entirely possible that Apple pivots on a dime after the departure of the baffoon.
If its a gimmick to have a functioning Siri, please give me gimmicks. Siri is a generation behind Alexa and Hey Google. Siri is next to worthless.
I have some good news: I use both Apple and Amazon products, and both voice assistants are equally useless.
Gemini, grok, etc all have 100x better experiences with voice. Apple is bad at this.
I’m an hour from Cambridge, MA. Ask the weather? I always get Cambridge, UK. Siri is terrible.
They can’t even make a functional keyboard anymore. The text prediction and autocorrect is worse now than it was in 2010!
These are all solved problems in 2025.
They haven't really updated Siri though? That's still in the pipeline. So not a very fair comparison. The article states that they are behind and I think everyone knows that
They have though, they added the "ask ChatGPT" thing which is friggin useless
Why would it not assume you meant the best Cambridge?
The AI "features" Apple advertise are largely gimmicky. The Apple Vision Pro is a gimmicky product. The MacBook touchbar was gimmicky.
Cook might be less susceptible to gimmickery than some of his peers. But he's definitely got an imperfect batting average, here.
It was disappointing to see one of the most advertised Apple “AI” features was “Genmoji”, which falls squarely in the “gimmick” category for me.
AI isn't a gimmick, but a huge portion of the way it's presented to consumers is, especially given the fact that it never really was meant for consumers. As an Apple user, I'm thrilled at how "behind" they are.
But also, their tendency to "not fall from gimmicks" sometimes makes it so we didn't get a 2nd mouse button for decades. Ultimately, the way they implemented this was super cool, but still.
The balancing act of figuring out what you can reasonably rely on from an LLM and what you need to be skeptical or dismissive of is not the type of experience an iPhone user should be expected to navigate.
ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude are gimmicks?
Having to license Gemini from Google and Qwen from Alibaba for Siri isn’t Apple falling severely behind?
I was going to link you the Apple Vision Pro as a counterpoint, but after clicking the link and being reminded of what that product actually looks like, I really don't know what to say any more. I'm literally dumbfounded anyone could make your comment at all
To their credit, they specifically decided not to make a big deal out of AR like Meta did and keep production small and expensive. They realized the tech wasn't ready for a mass adoption campaign. I'd say Apple, overall, has been pretty cautious with AR. I wouldn't be surprised if they even have the guts to cancel that project entirely like they did with self-driving cars
That's not credit at all. If your strongest defense of AVP is "at least they're not Meta" then you've stopped making grounded observations and gone straight to ad-hominem.
I'd also go as far as to say that Apple knew they could have made the Vision Pro better. It should be running a real computer operating system like the headset Valve is making, and Apple knows that. The arbitrary insistence on iPad-tier software in a $3,500 headset guaranteed it was unlovable and dead-on-arrival.
I ran into an AVP recently and it actually is a great piece of hardware. It only has two issues: price and software. The former is forgivable because it really is an amazing piece of hardware and the price is justified. The latter is not and is the original sin that has killed it.
There's an unfulfilled promise of spatial computing. I wish I could load up my preferred CAD program and have wide and deep menus quickly traversable with hand gestures. Barring that the least it could do is support games. Maybe if some combination of miracle shims (fex emu, asahi, w/e) were able to get onto the platform it might be savable. The input drivers alone would be a herculean task.
gimmicks like a sock for your phone?
Coincidentally, in macOS and iOS design and functionality - especially since Tahoe and 26 - it rather feels like the slop has taken over.
quality sacrificed for speed, resulting in mediocre, buggy software.
The classic AI business manager formula.
I have been needing to hard restart my fully juiced up mac mini more often than ever.
Seems that this is apples modus operandi since the app store, their last "thing" they've made really.
Hype about self driving cars -> apple chases it with apple car -> investors pleased they kept up with the joneses -> apple car is behind or not good enough or whatever -> quietly cancelled -> investors pleased they culled the deadweight.
You can replace apple car with vision pro or soon apple intelligence and it will play out the same formula. Luckily it allows investors to profit.
Google's headline new AI feature for this year's Pixel phone, Magic Cue, shipped despite not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
I'd rather see companies admit that a promised feature isn't ready for prime time than hype it up only to ship it broken.
It actually popped up and was useful for me yesterday when I was calling a hotel I had booked. I was kind of surprised because I had forgotten about the feature, but it is there and does occasionally offer helpful info.
How does the Vision Pro not qualify as a "thing" Apple made?
Because 8 people worldwide own one, and it will stop receiving support shortly, if it hasn't already.
OP doesn't literally mean they haven't made anything, he means that they've made nothing of real substance - which holds true when their biggest recent release is already completely forgotten by the public writ large.
"If it hasn't already"? They released a new model not even two months ago.
it's dead in the water
I dont think it's safe to say that a multi-billion dollar revenue product line, even if underperforming expectations is dead in the water.
Especially one bound to a future vision they have for computing. Companies are betting way more on a similar future vision with AI than Apple has with Vision.
Is it even underperforming expectations? At that price point, I can’t imagine they expected to sell millions.
What an odd reply.
You're being combative, but it's true. Yes, a new low-effort refresh came out recently. But the product is really going nowhere.
Apple's next Vision product is almost certainly going to be more of a Meta glasses clone leaning more into Apple's fashion pedigree where they've had massive success with the Apple Watch.
But even then, eyewear has the limitation that not everyone is interested in wearing eyewear at all.
We’ll see where it goes, and it may well end up being nowhere, but it’s not currently “dead in the water” when the company is actively refreshing hardware and supporting it.
I’m not being “combative,” I’m correcting obvious exaggerations about the state of the product.
Tim Cook did comment on it to a degree: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/01/tim-cook-comments-on-ap...
How do the sales numbers stack up to the first gen iPod?
Or the Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, iPad, etc.
They’ve made plenty of things. I liken them to the Lexus of consumer electronics; expensive for what they are, thoughtfully designed, and conservative in their approach to adopting new trends.
>Apple watch
Iphone on your wrist. Most people I know with one have it for two years then once the battery goes they throw it in a drawer and don't buy another one. Most were actually gifted it.
> airpods
They just took the same old earpods they used to give you for free due to ewaste concerns and forced you to buy the disposable bluetooth version if you want to charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.
>homepod
I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
>ipad
No one knows why they need one. They get one because there's hype. They use it for three years to look at instagram then its put in a drawer forever. "ipad for education" is a scam/failure; just give kids macbook airs so I don't have to teach new hires what a file is anymore.
All of this is a farcry from the ipod and I feel like apologists like you understand that too.
This sounds like you need to do some homework before derailing the thread. You’re very confidently saying there’s no use for things which millions of people keep buying, so consider the possibility that you might have missed something.
> >homepod
> I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
Ahh, man! I'm a HomePod (mini) fan. I've got 4 of the little things scattered around my house. I use 2 as speakers for my TV, which sounds excellent compared to similarly-priced soundbars. Then, yea, it's got Siri for setting timers in the kitchen, can intercom to other rooms' HomePods, can recognize who's talking to do things like send / read text messages, set reminders, etc. For $99, they're actually incredible little devices.
Airpods are by far the best mass-market headphones in existence for apple device owners. The noise cancellation is unparalleled (which is huge if you use public transit or use them in the gym). The audio quality is also among the best you can get for a wireless headphone. This is true of both the Airpods Pros and the Max
Airpods are a joke. Apple killed the headphone jack for no reason, then sold the "solution", and people ate it up. Great business strategy for them to screw their customers for cash, but an abjectly terrible product. They are worse than wired headphones in every way except "they are wireless", which isn't actually a benefit.
Maybe to you, I enjoy the fact that
> I don't knock it out of my head by having the wire catching on something > Dealing with the cable and having to pack it back up when I'm done > It auto connects to both my phone and laptop 99% of the time > It easily swap between the 2 as I change the focus
Now they aren't perfect, charging can be a bit fiddly over time but they certainly are nicer than the normal headphones. Maybe you just aren't the target audience but clearly they are popular enough for most people.
> which isn't actually a benefit
What? You know they sold (lots of) wireless headphones before the audio jack got removed from phones, right?
> Apple watch
Bit like marmite, some people love it some people hate it, my wife did not like hers so she got a new gpu instead.
> Airpods
I have used airpods almost every day since they came out including the 1st gen, the pros and the usb-c pros. I will continue to buy them as they are first class experience on iOS
> homepod
didn't even know this existed lol
> ipad
This one is a bit difficult for me. When I was in school I did two years of work using just an IPad, some text books and my Apple Pencil, all my notes were taken on notability and synced with my google cloud AND my iCloud. Any homeworks I could request a PDF copy and fill out easily and submit via email. Now as a software engineer i really really really really wish that you could program on the IPad (Swift does NOT count) and it was more like a slightly smaller mac, it would crush the laptop market to shreds and nobody would buy a macbook air anymore if that was the case
It sounds like a lot of your opinions are formed within a very niche bubble.
Airpods for example - I see them everywhere, and every person I know that uses them, love them! Especially Airpods Pro 2.
iPad - I think the sales figures speak for themselves. It may not be popular among tech people, given they're used to a desktop environment, but I know many people that use iPads and love them.
Apple Watch, I admit is more of a mixed bag among the people I know and spoken to. But I'd say the majority like it, and have bought another one after their first one gave out/upgraded. Again, the sales figures speak for themselves.
The parent is living in a different reality. They are all hugely popular products, just because he doesn't like them doesn't make it not true. And their introduction made a massive impact. Maybe not on the level of the iPhone but pretty impressive. The vision pro thing is a major flop. Nobody wanted one before it came out and nobody wants or needs one now and it's too expensive. It's a shame, because like e readers they are massively underused as a technology.
TBF, The Vision Pro failed from a sales perspective, no doubt, but after getting a demo at an Apple Store last year, I can see how it is promising tech once they make it a smaller form factor and cheaper.
Meanwhile I'm still here trying to make Shure happen. Their next bluetooth model will be amazing, I just know it!
iPad: i have thousands of music scores on it running ForScore, which I can annotate with an Apple Pencil (the cheap $99 one), I flip pages using a foot controller I built with an ESP32, and I run multiple audio and music apps on it that are extremely useful.
And it just ...works. It sits on my music stand, doesn't call attention to itself, and does the job I ask it too.
Could I do all that with some Android thing? Probably most of it. Truly differentiated tech is rare in the consumer space. It's the experience that counts, and that's what the iPad has.
As a musician, I read my music from an iPad. A phone or a laptop monitor would be impossibly small for this.
Hank Green mentioned in passing the other day how ungodly much money Apple is making off of airpods. I still have managed not to get one. But the watch and iPad definitely counts as something after the app store.
Which they didn't really invent the app store either. What they did was break the stranglehold cellphone carriers had on cellphone software, and we should kiss their butts every single week for that. Most people didn't work in mobile prior to the app store and holy shit.
They completely revolutionized laptop processors, were the first to put meaningful health data in watches, and created the first good bluetooth earbuds, but I guess they don't do things anymore.
> They completely revolutionized laptop processors
Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
Apple absolutely ran ahead of the industry technically, by a shocking amount. But in a commoditized field that isn't sensitive to quality metrics, that doesn't generate sales.
There's a reason why the iPhone remains the dominant product but macs are stuck at like 9% market share, and it's not the technlogy base that is basically the same between them.
Laptops are done, basically. It's like arguing about brands of kitchen ranges: sure, there are differences, but they all cook just fine.
> Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
This wildly, comically untrue in my experience: all of the normal people I know loooooove how fast it is and charging a few times a week. It was only the people who self-identify as PC users who said otherwise, much like the Ford guys who used to say Toyotas were junk rather than admit their preferred brand was facing tough competition.
Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users". You're measuring the 0.1%! (Which, fine, is probably more like 15% or whatever. Still not a representative sample.) You're likely also only sampling US consumers, or even Californians, and so missing an awful lot of the market.
Again, real normal people can't tell the difference. They don't care. And that's why they aren't buying macs. The clear ground truth is that Macintosh is a lagging brand with poor ROI and no market share growth over more than a decade. The challenge is explaining why this is true despite winning all the technical comparisons and being based on the same hardware stack as the world-beating iOS devices.
My answer is, again, "users don't care because the laptop market is commoditized so they'll pick the value product". You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Historically that analysis has tended to kill more companies than it saves.
> Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users”
No. Remember that Apple sells devices other than Macs: they were all non-IT people who liked their iPhones and figured they’d try a Mac for their next laptop and liked it. One thing to remember is that Windows is a lot less dominant when you’re looking at what people buy themselves as opposed to what an enterprise IT department picked out. There are a ton of kids who start with ChromeOS or iPads, got a console for gaming, and don’t feel any special attraction to Windows since everything they care about works on both.
> You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff".
Huh? Beyond being insulting, this is simply wrong. My position is that people actually do consider fast, silent, and multi-day battery life as desirable. That’s not the only factor in a buying decision, of course, but it seems really weird not to acknowledge it after the entire PC industry has spent years in a panic trying to catch up.
Best I can tell you're arguing that 9% market share by units sold is some kind of failure. Now go look at who has the highest market share by revenue. Hint: it's a fruit company.
This whole take might make sense if Apple didn’t double their laptop market share from like 10% to 20% when the M1 series came out, which actually happened.
Name one ASUS laptop with zero cooling fans.
The ASUS BR1204?
That's kind of a weird one because the PC market has notably regressed there over the past few years. Other than the Surface Pro 12 there've been no fanless PC laptops released since 2022-ish, when there used to be dozens.
On a technical basis, fanless PC laptops released now would be better than the ones in 2022 just on the basis of 2022 lineup having a moribund lineup of CPUs (Snapdragon SQ1, Amber Lake, etc.) You could release a lineup now that would be broadly competitive with the M1 at least, but it doesn't seem to be a market segment that PC OEMs are interested in.
Right, so, a K-12 education-oriented PC with an Intel N-series chip, about 1/3 as fast as what you get with an M4 (or worse).
When I asked my snarky question I'm really talking about "fanless laptops that someone would actually want to use and get some serious use out of."
The regression of the PC market is because the PC market didn't see the ARM train coming from a million miles away and just sat there and did nothing. They saw smartphones performing many times more efficiently than PCs and shrugged their arms at it.
Meanwhile, Apple's laptop marketshare has purportedly doubled from 10% to 20% or perhaps even higher since the M1 lineup was released.
I say this as someone who actually moved away from Apple systems to a Linux laptop. Don't get me wrong, modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences, but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life).
Yeah, like we're in agreement about the current state of the market, I just don't think it has to be that way. The Surface Pro 12 is fanless, so presumably anyone else could make a fanless Snapdragon laptop if they wanted to. (My daily driver work laptop is Windows-on-ARM, and most everything works pretty well on it.)
I believe the whole Vivobook Go line is fanless, actually.
But again, the point isn't to get into a shouting match over whose proxied anatomy is largest. It's to try to explain why the market as a whole doesn't move the way you think it should. And it's clearly not about fans.
I didn't even think about that, fans are the bane of my existence
You're kidding, right??
One could say it has a Newtonian gravity about it..
You know I would be happy to offer this service to investors for a mere tens of millions of dollars. I'll send you photos of our weekly money bonfire, built with your money, and when you're tired of pictures of your money on fire, I'll simply... stop.
Heck, in accordance with the several zeitgeists of our age, I'll even do you the solid of fraudulently generating the money-on-fire pictures with AI, so when you get tired of seeing your money on fire I'll even hand, say, 25% of it back to you, as the result of my tireless efforts to bring value to my shareholders. That's a better return than you'll get from most of these investments!
> Luckily it allows investors to profit.
That's not lucky. That's sad. They never ask the question "could we have earned _more_ profits with a better strategy?"
The market is not rational.
Split adjusted, I bought AAPL for $6 a share. They also pay dividends. This investor is feeling just fine about their stock price.
"Number goes up. I don't care how. I don't even like asking questions."
The referenced lack of rationality on perfect display.
Thank you.
Your dismissive tone is really discouraging me from replying with a legitimate answer to your concerns.
So you only get: people have been predicting the imminent demise of Apple every year for the last 20 and they are still the most valuable non-bubble stock in existence by a country mile.
Keep whining, I'm going to retire early on your whining.
Once again. It's great you earned money. Does it not bother you that you could have earned TWICE as much if the company didn't make so many stupid bets?
To completely ignore this obvious and clear point from the outset to crow about your stock market gains is absolutely the type of irrationality I was describing.
I'm not dismissing you. You've just failed to address the actual point.
This is the thing I've found amazing about people's complaints about Apple and AI.
Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
People have been complaining for years that Apple isn't shipping fast enough in this area. But if anything I think that they have been shipping (or trying to ship) too fast. There are a lot of scenarios that AI is actually great at but the ones that move the needle for Apple just aren't there yet in terms of quality.
The stuff that is at a scale that it matters to them are integrations that just magically do what you want with iMessage/calendars/photos/etc. There are potentially interesting scenarios there but the fact is that any time you touch my intimate personal (and work) data and do something meaningful I want it to work pretty much all the time. And current models aren't really there yet in my view. There are lots of scenarios that do work incredibly well right now (coding most obviously). But I don't think the Apple mainline ones do yet.
>> Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
They dragged their feet on a host of technologies that other handset makers adopted, released and subsequently improved.
- USB C charging
- 90hz, 120Hz refresh rates
- wireless charging
- larger batteries (the iPhone 17 still lags behind Samsung and Google)
I'm not sure what happened, but the iPhone used to have the most fluid, responsive experience compared to Android. Now, both Google and Samsung have surpassed them in that regard.
I've used both Android and have owned several iPhones and it just seems like its not an issue of releasing something that isn't ready, but more about them not being capable enough to release phones to compete with other phones that are regularly beating them in the specs race.
This isn't necessarily a counterargument. Apple's always been conservative with their specs but their tight link between software and hardware has meant they've been able to do more with less. Batteries are a good example of that. Apple has always had a much smaller battery than flagship competitors but has had similar or better battery life than, say, Samsung
> Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent
In general I would agree, but Siri is honestly still so bad.
Yep, I agree. Should have been more clear that it used to be their philosophy. It isn't nearly as much.
this night I got accidentially the update to the latest iOS with this liquid glass stuff - and its schockingly bad in any dimension. keyboard input lags, many thing ned MORE clicks/touches then before, weird contenxt menu popovers that don't even register taps 50% of the time, general lags and sluggishness and UI artifacts everywhere. Its really really a degradiation of UI/UX even though I personally am a fan of that glass-style design in itself
I really wish I lived in the world where Apple didn't ship things until they actually worked, that would be so cool.
I feel like the only people who say that still are people that don't actively or daily use Apple products because macOS Tahoe is a joke. Jelly scrolling on the iPad mini was a noticeable issue that should never have shipped. Antenna-gate on the iPhone 4. iOS 7... etc etc
iOS 26.1 will regularly blur the "status line" (clock, signal strength, network, battery) while the rest of the phone functions correctly. Just sitting on the home page with the status blurred. Locking, unlocking, switching screen modes, doesn't fix it - just have to reboot the phone. :\
The fucked up thing is that they're typically all-in on Apple and either don't notice bugs or blame themselves.
> Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
Tell that to almost anything they've shipped in the last 5-10 years. It's gotten so bad that I wait halfway through entire major OS version before upgrading. Every new thing they ship is almost guaranteed to be broken in some way, ranging from minor annoyance to fully unusable.
I buy Apple-everything, but I sure wish there were better options.
Oh, I totally agree that things have changed and that philosophy doesn't exist much any more. Should have been more clear on that point.
I wonder if a new tech company was founded with a quality-first and customer-service mentality, could they succeed? Especially if there are NO investors trying to make a quick buck.
Certainly the company would provide good jobs, good benefits, salary and bonuses.
But none of this "the company is the product".
MBAs would be strictly forbidden.
My complaint is that they overpromised and then didn't deliver anything at all. They should have just kept their mouth shut
they had to say something and show they're working on something even if it doesn't work to appease the market spirits so they didn't lose their best people (stock compensation, right?)
now the tides are turning, so they can go back to scheming behind the closed doors without risking their top people leaving for meta for a bazillion dollars.
When it came out in 2016 Google Assistant was delivering value while Siri was not.
What people hate about Apple is that they ship things other people couldn't get to capital-W Work, and they're seen as 'stealing' the idea instead of perfecting them.
Great artists steal.
iOS26 is a shit show. Glass looks terrible on my old 12 Pro Max, and just recently it has started trying to connect phone calls to my child's iPad Pro. That is, the speaker button, which previously I pushed to enable the speaker, now pops up a menu with other nearby devices listed in an annoyingly small font. My wife finally asked me for an Android because all her friends get far better pictures. Something isn't right over there, and a lot of people are leaving.
The core of Apple's problem boils down to apathy towards their product quality. I just recently switched from using Siri to Google Gemini in my car. The experience is dramatically better.
And this is the case across the board.
My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
Third and final example is how bad Apple's native dictation engine is. I can run OpenAI Whisper models on my Mac and get dramatically better output.
As a long time Apple fan who's had everything since before the first iPhone, I feel this apathy towards product quality cannot be disguised as some strategic decision to fast follow with AI.
> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
My husband has a Fitbit and it's so buggy he left it sit on the shelf most of the time - the only times he'd wear it is for exercise.
Siri is bad though, but I have found Google Voice Assistant and Alexa both really have become bad over time, to the point of us just giving up on them completely. My husband is on Android and I'm really surprised how bad voice assistant is despite all the Gemini launches! (mind you he has an Australian accent)
I have a Kiwi accent and it's fine...probably best to ensure you set correct language in settings too.
> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
I went through three FitBits. After the third failed just outside warranty I got an Apple watch, which has outlasted all three FitBits.
>> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
That's odd because I've used both, along with a bunch other wearables (e.g. Whoop), and I wouldn't give up my Apple Watch for anything. Massively useful, can take calls, make payments, stream music from my Apple playlists, read and reply to messages, and a ton of other things.
The wearos devices can do all that stuff too, and fitbit is kind of getting blended into those devices piece by piece -- so after years of Fitbit use I can say that the best fitbit device i've had is ... a Pixel Watch 4.
I mention this because , at least for the functionalities that you mention, I think the pixel watches are catching up nicely.
... but they still haven't been able to make me feel less stupid talking into a watch for phone calls like some off-brand James Bond wannabe, even if it works great.
I never talk into the watch, I just put on my airpods and they connect automatically.
The Fitbit is great until it bricks itself. Which it will. Probably in a year or two.
I'll have to disagree on Fitbit being better.
But for everything else, you literally just said, the handful of AI features are better on Google products... That seldom makes the product as a whole better.
You're arguing about product quality by using product availability examples.
Siri isn't competing with Gemini, yet.. Siri is old tech, Gemini is the new tech.
Same with dictation.
Siri hasn't been updated generationally with SOTA to compete with Gemini yet.. it simply hasn't been updated. This is part of the "slow pace" that the post is talking about (part of, not entirely the slowness though).
For example, Amazon updated my old Echo dots with Alexa+ beta, and it's pretty good. I have Grok in my Tesla, and though I don't like Grok or xAI, it's there and I use it occasionally.
Apple hasn't done their release of these things yet.
How so? Their brand new Siri _is_ available. I am using their Apple intelligence on my new iPhone. They even have half baked ChatGPT integrations everywhere. They got into lot of trouble last year for running ads for overselling what their new siri can do.
Overselling abilities is for sure a lack of quality.
The new Apple Intelligence version of Siri isn't out yet. It's scheduled to arrive with iOS 26.4 in early/mid 2026.
My assertion is that Apple hasn't yet released a generational complement to Gemini or ChatGPT voice modes. That's a problem, but one specifically of availability and release, which.. again (and despite the downvoters).. matches the assertion of the post ("slow AI pace").
If/when new Siri in 26.4 comes out and it sucks, then that'd be an issue of quality.
Reference: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/10/30/apple-intelligenc...
No, when I bought my first iphone, Siri could start a chronometer. Then it couldn’t for 5 years, and today it can again. It’s a big flaw for a product which can barely do anything else.
I only have Apple product because it’s good build quality. But it’s quite bad products.
I think Apple secretly doesn’t want more market share, to avoid anticompetitive accusations.
> Shares of Apple Inc. were battered earlier this year as the iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an artificial intelligence strategy.
Everyone’s shares were battered earlier this year, and it had nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with tariffs.
I think it was mostly Buffett's dumping. He's a smart guy and the world's best investor, but I think this was a mistake. The winning play is long on Apple, short on Microsoft.
This is from a financial market perspective.
From a user perspective it may not be a strength: users / customers may expect certain functionality that works accurately and responsively.
Beyond Hacker News, I haven't seen anyone actively asking for AI features. People have been complaining about Siri for over a decade but it's not like users are turning against Apple because it isn't using an LLM (yet). Rather, it seems like users are increasingly wary of AI features being shoehorned into products they were already using.
Apple originally planned to power Siri with ChatGPT under the hood. They quickly saw that other models, including open-source ones, were closing the gap fast.
A few months ago, MCP-style tool calling seemed like the clear standard. Now even Anthropic is shifting toward "code-mode" and reusable skills.
For Apple, reliable tool calling is critical because their AI needs to control apps and the whole device. My bet: Apple's AI will be able to create its own Shortcuts on the fly and call them as needed, with OSA Script support on Mac.
One of the reasons I'm heavily biased towards actual Mac native apps is that supporting callback URLs and Shortcuts unlocks so much of what I might ask of an AI tool already. Ironically I often ask AI assistants for line by line steps to create Shortcuts when I need them because actual Shortcut naming and properties can be quite obtuse.
Sadly, much as I love AppleScript, I think Apple giving it any love at this point in time is likely to be a pipe dream. Much more likely they're just going to try to beef up Shortcuts support across the board.
Users aren't really asking for AI features, but they may be asking for features that require AI.
As Google integrates Gemini into their Google Assistant and Google Home products, if it starts to become leaps and bounds better than Siri, customers are going to start wondering why Apple is falling behind. If Apple can't achieve those things without AI and that could cause problems. Customers aren't saying "I want AI features", but they are indirectly asking for them because the features they want require AI to do what they expect.
(I realize Google and Apple have a deal happening to have Gemini integrated into Siri so this isn't the best example, but I think it illustrates the point I'm trying to make)
I'm in that boat - I'm basically fine without AI features. I can think of a couple of hypothetical things that would be nice though - a smart and functional Siri - I never use it at the moment, and maybe a locally hosted LLM that could look through my documents so I can ask where's that spreadsheet with the housing costs etc.
?? Both normies and tech people seem to have been clued in that AI is a shoehorned in feature that companies focus on instead of fixing existing functionality, and that comes with a siphon that exfiltrates all your data for AI companies to train on.
Users weary about shoehorned AI features are probably all on Reddit or Hackernews.
I certainly never heard anyone complain in real life.
The people I know in real life, besides those that work in tech and use it for code assistance or for generating never-reviewed archival transcripts of meetings, mostly just laugh at AI foibles and faults and casually echo doomer-media worries about job replacement as a topic for small talk.
But admittedly, most of those people are established adults who've figured out an effective rhythm to their home and work life and aren't longing for some magic remedy or disruption. They're not necessarily weary, and they were curious at first, but it seems like they're mostly just waiting for either the buzz to burn off or for some "it just works" product to finally emerge.
I imagine there are younger people wowed by the apparent magic of what we have now and excited that they might use it punch up the homework assignments or emails or texts that make them anxious, or that might enjoy toying with it as a novel tool for entertainment and creative idling. Maybe these are some of the people in your "real life"
There are a lot of people out there in "real life", bringing different perspectives and needs.
Nah, LLMs and stable diffusion are being used everywhere by everyone hardcore.
I work at a coworking space. Most of the folks I've worked alongside had active chats in ChatGPT for all sorts of stuff. I've also seen devs use AI copilots, like Copilot and Codex. I feel big old when I drop into fullscreen vim on my Mac.
AI art is also used everywhere. Especially by bars and restaurants. So many AI happy hour/event promo posters now, complete with text (AI art font is kind-of samey for some reason). I've even seen (what look like) AI generated logos on work trucks.
People are getting use out of LLMs, 100%. Yet the anti-AI sentiment is through the roof. Maybe it's like social media where the most vocal opponents are secretly some of its most active users. Idk.
Yes, that sounds about right.
What I meant specifically was that I don't remember anyone complaining about AI features getting in the way or being shoehorned. That particular complaint seems popular only on Reddit or HN.
I've also never heard anyone praise the fact that the first Google result is now half way down page either. Most people don't care enough to complain.
Most of the people I've talked IRL to aren't against AI as a rule, but have grown tired of poorly implemented AI features, especially if they're used as marketing fodder. In my experience, shoehorned AI features have landed themselves in a category similar to that of bundled crapware and useless single-app hotkeys on cheap laptops.
Those of this group who use AI mostly ignore poor rebadges and integrations like MS Copilot and just use ChatGPT and Claude directly. They prefer it to remain intentional and contained within a box that they control the bounds of.
I talk to tons of people in real life who are deeply troubled by the AI-pocalypse. I was at a dinner party just the other day where out of the blue (wasn't me, I swear!), the conversation turned to the horrors of genAI and its negative effect on our society.
No, i don't want AI on my phones OS. I dont want any ai search in phone settings or files or anything like this.
It would be like MS is forcing their copilot currently everywhere, it is totally useless and a nuisance.
Copilot is useful for searching emails and SharePoint. It gives access to GPT-5 with Thinking, making it broadly useful for programming tasks.
It's certainly been useful in my organization.
Gmail search has been excellent for 20 years. Outlook search is still terrible even with copilot. LLM isn’t the killer feature, a search that works is.
For one I don't have Gmail at work.
Copilot can search even in PowerPoints. Being able to search your organisation's documents is kind of a killer feature, provided they make it work reliably.
I can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files. We have traditional search technology which would be excellent for that!
> can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files
Kati’s Research AI is genuinely great at search. It tries to answer your question, but also directly cites resources. This can help you when you’re not sure where the answer to a question lies, and it winds up being in multiple places.
Unless your query is super simple and of low consequence, you still need to open the files. But LLM-powered search is like the one domain (apart from coding) where these fuckers work.
Google has been doing this well in their office suite for years. Discoverability has been way higher in Gsuite than office.
In other words, something they cannot get from AI?
Disagree. It's a win win. As an example, Windows and Microsoft would benefit users if they focused less on injecting useless Copilot everywhere, and more on maintenance and improvement of the core functionality of the OS while not squandering the human resource of their development teams by forcing them to work on these things; bad opportunity cost.
Not to say Apple isn't also degrading their OS with bad design changes, but "more AI" is not something users are clamoring for.
From what I've seen AI isn't driving purchasing of consumer electronics. It's mainly a talking point for reviewers.
what functionality is this?
I am yet to see ai functionality ppl are dying for.
From a financial market perspective, AAPL is the second highest valuation for a publicly traded company and #1 is in first place because of the AI bubble.
I genuinely never understood why there was a narrative that Apple is "falling behind" when it comes to AI. They make phones, computers and an ecosystem of services to lock you in. None of this stuff is threatened by AI; with the right integration, it would enhance them!
I do think Siri is particularly behind, but they were behind long before the AI craze. I also understand you cannot simply make Siri “be smart” with an LLM without all kinds of consequences and edge cases to deal with.
It’s not the same, but PMs and VPs at my company think we can vibe code our way out of migrating a 1.6 million line codebase to a newer language / technology. Or that our problems can be solved by acquiring an AI startup, whose front end looks exactly the same as every other AI startup’s front page, and slapping a new CSS file that looks like that startup on top of our existing SPA because their product doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an absurd world out there.
They delayed a new product category because of poor AI performance (the iPad/HomePod fusion device)
And they also got slapped with class action lawsuits for failing to meet promised AI capabilities in products they launched
It’s easy to understand from evidence like this why they are falling behind, even if you believe they will pull ahead later
The falling behind was shipping a low quality integration.
What are some good quality AI integrations right now? The chat apps and the IDEs are sort of separate environments. A lot of "AI assistants" in other apps so far have been clunky/useless.
I don't even think Google has particularly good integration and they make Gemini. Although it was early when I was still using my Android phone, I went back to the old google assistant instead of letting Gemini take over because it didn't add anything of value for the basic functions that I need from a voice assistant. Hopefully that's changed and I'm simply uninformed, but I doubt it.
Nope, that did not change.
As someone who buys Apple-everything and has thought about switching to Android just so I can have Gemini as an assistant, my opinion is their selling of phones is threatened by AI.
I know it's fashionable to shit-talk AI and Google, and lord knows I dislike the latter, but Gemini works and is day-to-day useful.
You said you don't understand it while explaining it in the second sentence. They don't have a decent integration, hence the vulnerability. Devices that do have a good to great AI experience will win in the long run imho.
What integration features are they missing that people use/want? Genuinely not trying to be dismissive or stick my head in sand - I am out of the loop.
That's not all, my macbook (48 GM VRAM) can run better local LLMs at a workable speed than my RTX 5090 rig can, plus Apple has MLX and neural engines.
The reason there was such a narrative is because Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both narrative machines with little regard for veracity, and they are also not that smart (at least according to people who successfully beat their system, such as Buffett).
"Warren, if people weren't so often wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." – the late great Charlie Munger.
yeah tbh it sometimes feels like a lot of moaning from those crowds is more about self-validation than anything concrete
That's pretty cool! What are the advantages of using a local LLM currently? Do you tune them? I suppose it will be more enshittification proof..
> What are the advantages of using a local LLM currently?
You don't have to send all your thoughts to a third party. That's the advantage.
A good candidate for second mover advantage.
Let everyone else pay for the research and make the mistakes, find out what works and what doesn't. Apple already has the consumers, they might as well save a few (hundred?) bn in the process and later deploy something which doesn't tell you to glue your cheese to your pizza.
Or like with the M1 chip: wait until the incumbent alienates so many experts in the field that you can scoop them up and they will succeed partially fueled on spite against their old employer.
In theory yes, but a lot of the organizational reasons Siri is a flop are also similar to the reasons Apple Music loses to Spotify, Apple can't really get it together for ads.. I think Apple is a great company (disclosure : shareholder) but they have gotten so big and so stretched thin can't always take advantage of the opportunities in front of them.
Why would Apple care about “winning” at Apple Music when the labels get most of the money? Spotify’s first annual profit after years of losses was last year at 1.3 billion.
Apple Music is an ecosystem play.
It is a management problem. It’s not because of size. Talk to people who’ve worked there…
Thank you. All these people applauding Apple for not jumping on the bandwagon.
When in reality, they _wanted_ to but have become so dysfunctional organization wise, they weren't able to. Kind of funny how that worked out.
I still think they're really dropping the ball. They could have local models running on devices, interfacing with a big cloud partner (Google, OpenAI, etc.) Make Siri awesome. But no.
There is no use case for local models.
See Gemini Nano. It is available in custom apps, but the results are so bad; factual errors and hallucinations make it useless. I can see why Google did not roll it out to users.
Even if it was significantly better, inference is still slow. Adding a few milliseconds of network latency for contacting a server and getting a vastly superior result is going to be preferable in nearly all scenarios.
Arguments can be made for privacy or lack of connectivity, but it probably does not matter to most people.
I just want it to be able to control my apple home devices and trigger shortcuts, and maybe do a search into a few apps and find things. I know a local model can understand my intent for siri like operations because I literally have my own version of that on my laptop.
I think the real case is a future technology. Similar to speculative decoding but done over servers.
Local model answers and reaches into the cloud for hard tokens.
I am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a free API call is transparently made to a secure computed environment on Apple’s servers that are documented to preserve privacy.
A problem is that even though it is super simple to write Swift / SwiftOS apps to use the system model, I don’t see much evidence that many developers are using the model in their apps.
Hey Mark, I posted about this in another comment [1] but I also think the LLM is decent, and beyond its quality the scale of distribution is a big deal.
I had pondered practical implementations of the model since it was announced and have just released today a new native macos application that uses it to summarize Claude Code and Codex conversations as they occur. [2]
If you use either of these CLI agents and have time to try the app out and provide feedback, I'd appreciate it! I'm at rob@contextify.sh.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209975
[2] https://contextify.sh
Good product idea! Nice feature keeping track of Claude Code and codex and doing some syncing. I don’t use Claude code and cancelled my OpenAI subscription a few months ago (I use local models and Gemini) so I am not a possible customer for your product. BTW, I have experimented with storing my own sync info long term for local models - difficult problem.
A lot of people here are assuming Apple has chosen to sit out the AI race, but I don't believe that's the case.
Trying and failing to make a SoTA foundational model is not a strategic move. It's similar to Amazon and Meta, they also have tried and not succeeded.
Apple doesn’t own a search engine either, and gets $20B per year from Google to direct search queries to them.
I hope they adopt the same model with AI - leverage whatever frontier model is best and provide their own privacy infrastructure in front.
At some point Apple will figure out a way to provide the right info from your calendar, messages, email etc as context and couple this with a bunch of secure tools for creating calendar entries, etc. Agentic AI will then be something I personally benefit from.
The search arrangement was deemed to be an illegal monopoly
https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/judge-puts-a-one-year-limi...
Limits are now being placed on it as of a couple days ago
Perfect, let Apple spread it out over multiple AI providers - if that helps monopolies from forming in AI I’m all for it!
And the remedy was that Google can keep doing what it’s doing.
Apple's phones are responsible for most of their revenue. The phones are designed to pretty much exclusively interact with social media and take photos. AI doesn't really add anything to that experience since advertisement consumption by humans is the ultimate objective. That's why even though Apple's Siri has been about the most useless assistant in existence for years, Apple isn't in a rush to replace it. It simply doesn't have a big impact on their revenue.
Microsoft has been criticized for investing in AI heavily. But it actually makes sense for Microsoft if you consider the nature of their business. The problem is not with the investment per se but with what they got out of it. Unfortunately, Microsoft sucks at product management, so instead of creating useful stuff that users want and are ready to pay for, they created stuff that no one understands, no one can use, and no one wants to pay for. Github copilot is an exception of course. I'm talking more about their Office 365 AI.
I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone. Apple is famous for watching peanut butter and chocolate makers and swooping in with Reece's Peanut Butter cups while everyone scratches their head because they've had better chocolate and better peanut butter so what's the deal?
When and if Apple pulls the plug on AI, we can declare it dead for this cycle. See you all again in 2040.
I disagree with that analogy. Apple as the 'Reece's Peanut Butter Cups' in this analogy just screams of some bias.
Or, since the stock market is an emotional game (hear me out): Apple hasn't announced anything in the past year which caused comparable excitement and resulted in (further) overvaluation of their company like it happened on Microsoft, nVidia, etc.
Now, after a few months (!), reality sets in and those hyped-up investors realize that it's not as much of a short-term game as they told themselves it would be...
Apple has a p/e of 38, Nvidia is 46, Microsoft is 34. S&P has historically averaged around 20, so on that metric Apple and Nvidia are more similar than different.
Sooner or later, everyone will realize Apple isn't building another ChatGPT - they don't need to. They're working on the world's largest distributed inference network. With hundreds of millions of Apple Silicon devices, they are the only ones who can afford to run AI features at zero marginal cost to themselves - using the user's electricity and hardware. While Google and Microsoft burn billions on data centers, Apple is simply offloading the compute to our pockets. In the long run, when AI becomes a commodity, the winner will be whoever has the lowest transaction cost - and in that game, Apple simply has no competition
Nah. Local LLMs won't be big until maybe 10-20 years later. Phone devices will never run a model better than what ChatGPT runs in the cloud. People want to use the best models.
By the time local LLMs are good enough, OpenAI will already have an iPhone competitor.
Behind is the new ahead.
They resisted (most of the) LLM boosterism and kept decent focus on SLMs that can run on-device.
I think the decision is first a self-serving one that's in line with how they want their devices and services to operate, but it also happens to be (in my opinion) the future-proof way of integrating consumer AI.
Maybe not on the investment/new hotness side, but as a user I'm not clamoring for greater LLM integration. Maybe I'm a Luddite, though.
Apple, so hip they're clinging to 2008.
For anyone thats been around for more than one hype cycle, this is not a surprise.
Apple clearly takes a 'Measure Twice, Cut Once' approach.
It seems to me that tech and business analysts mostly supply uninformed nonsense opinions around whatever the popular rhetoric of the day is to generate more clicks :-/
How many times do we have to listen to tech and business analysts talking about lacklustre iPhone releases and how Apple hasn't done anything interesting since the original iPhone? But yet the iPhone 17 is flying off the shelves in China.
> Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its shares tumbled 18% through the end of June. That has reversed since then, with the stock soaring 35%, while AI darlings like Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. slid into the red and even Nvidia Corp. underperformed. The S&P 500 Index rose 10% in that time, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index gained 13%.
Why do papers do this. I can achieve any numbers by cherry picking the date for the random brownian motion.
And I think we're all weary of the whining about Apple being "behind on AI."
Consumers of Apple's core businesses do not stand to gain much, if anything, from so-called "AI." The failure of pundits and "analysts" to recognize and call that out just testifies to their laziness. They can never say exactly WHY or HOW this "behindness" is hindering Apple or its user base.
It's sad that Apple has capitulated to them at all by even talking about "AI."
The part about not gaining much is questionable.
“AI” is a semi-meaningless misnomer, of course, but e.g. a natural language interface is something Apple had tried since forever (Siri) and always failed to get functional and useful. So this part of “not gaining much” is probably false.
Paired with every vendor’s love to tweak things at random - including Apple, a natural language (if done right) could be a meaningful solution to UI consistency (“Hey Siri, I dunno where the goddamn toggle is located this time but stop making music auto-play every other time phone connects to CarPlay” - real use case with real value). Yet, as usual, Siri lacks in intelligence and capabilities.
I’m pretty sure it’s not some genius wisdom of Tim, or whoever. Apple simply didn’t do any user-facing useful shit (they did some interesting stuff for developers, but that’s a different story), plastered some generative emojis to tick the “AI” checkbox, and now people praise them for that.
Well, I can't fault you for suggesting that "AI" could be a workaround for Apple's derelict "design" of late.
And, I can see value in an all-local language model ingesting everything on my computer so I can find things. But let's face it: People managing large amounts of stuff on their computers and wanting to search it are a shrinking minority now.
But I still think the real-life payoff is minimal. A better Siri? Maybe. But if you look at Google's "AI" search results, they suck ass. They don't even hold up to what could be accomplished with straight-up parsing and searching. Here's an example I just got today, when I searched for "how much is a DeLorean worth?"
(Wow, Google has now disabled copying from search results. What petty jagoffs, after THEY copy and regurgitate others' work)
"A DeLorean DMC-12's value varies widely, from around $18,000 for project cars to over $50,000 for excellent condition models, with the nationwide average being about $83,725."
Apple: $60b in cash.
The revenue from AI is growing at a much slower rate than recurring capex and depreciation is accumulating. This will create distress opportunities that cash-rich companies like APPL may seize. Might be a private equity deal, might be in the public markets as some of the players dip hard after IPO.
As this plays out, APPL's silicon has unified memory, power consumption and native acceleration that gives it an edge running SLMs and possibly LLMs at scale. Wouldn't shock me to see APPL introduce a data-center solution.
Nit: stock ticker symbol is AAPL.
APPL was the Type Code[0] for an Application, in classic MacOS (1984).
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork#Types
Wasn’t it the same with covid hiring? While others over hired, Apple was modest in this position. Then everyone needed to significantly downsize, when Apple didn’t.
Apple has missed the train, from high-end computing they ended up as a low-end ML company (the most expensive MacStudio is way cheaper than a proper Nvidia card), and now some analyst is seeing virtue in that? They completely missed out on making serious money from AI and now that opportunity might be gone forever if AI cools down.
Looking at how others stuff AI into everything they can, user experience be damned, I’m kind of glad Apple was perfunctory in its jump on the bandwagon.
Meanwhile in China....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200819
This is a weird claim considering Apple has the best price/perf consumer grade hardware for AI
Interestingly, their slow 2020 hiring pace became a strength as the 2022 post-ZIRP layoff bloodbath hit as well. Though I don't know if they've had layoffs since.
Letting the market sort itself out then maybe buy whoever's left and aligns the most with their products is pretty obvious strategy.
All I really want from Apple is to be able to talk to Siri as effectively as I can with ChatGPT via advanced voice chat.
Is that so much to ask?
Companies with strong distribution have an option to be the "last" player in a market and simply force their way in. If Apply makes a "default" LLM which is as good or better than all premium LLM options... then you would obviously choose to use that over paying for a ChatGPT subscription. Apple could probably upcharge the phone by $200 for this privilege. Alternatively, they may do what they did with search and just get paid not to add an LLM chat functionality.
Apple is probably going to be an AI consumer and not an AI producer and that is fine. Not everyone needs to be openai or anthropic.
I assume they will produce their own AI once the dust settles, just like they produce their own chips now.
Apple has generally been a company that waits, gets criticized for being behind, and then produces a better version (more usable, better integrated, etc), claims it is new, and everybody buys it. Meanwhile a few people moan about how Apple wasn't actually the first to make it.
Old Apple wasn't run by ex-Microsoft and ex-consultancy MBAs... a serious cultural rot has set in and the much of the "bottom up" component powering much of the innovation is nothing but smoldering coals.
The golden goose is dead.
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Sounds like a broken clock gone right. That only happens once every 43200 seconds
So, basically Apple will be victorious in the AI Wars by sheer inaction;)
Apple's take was always have been right and so will be.
Being behind in AI is not the same thing as not spending a lot on AI.
They could be selling shovels and be making a killing
It's telling that one of the leaders in ai, Google, also can't seem to ship an assistant that is better than Siri. Maybe it's not the ai that's the problem.
And the bar is pretty low isn't it?
Now days with "Apple Intelligence" enabled, half of a siri response is "I found this with ChatGPT, verify important information".
As far as user experience goes, it reminds me of those stupid warnings every time you start a car that basically says "drive safe!"
It's infuriating. What's worse, we're part of the problem, with Apple shipping record units each quarter.
Indeed, the only winning move is not to play.
Nice quote from Joshua, the epic AI in War Games, followed by “How about a nice game of chess?"
Ah, the benefits of having a sober old CEO. And a business model that doesn't need to be buoyed nor stabilized by spinning and hyping a succession of hot new trends.
I'm bullish on Apple in the long term for AI. Don't get me wrong, they will always suck at it. But it seems obvious to me that we're sailing up to an enshittification cliff in the very near future. Every provider is going to start trying to prove they are making money from consumers and that means one thing: ads, ads ads. Or worse, invisible influence you can't even tell is there. There is going to be a trust crisis and that's going to send people flocking to on-device / local / trustworthy AI that will land right in Apple's lap.
My beloved boomer dad’s windows laptop died the other week. After being on the fence about buying him a macbook (which I have and love) because I know he will struggle to switch user interfaces, I ended up pulling the trigger after seeing yet another news article about more aggressive copilot integration. I’m not letting him anywhere near an agent which can control his laptop, not from Microsoft which has huge incentive to recover their ai bet in whatever way possible
I don't want AI on my phone.
I don’t want flaky, in-my-face AI on my phone.
I find a lot of the low-key things helpful: I use an app at the same time and place every day, and it’s nice to have a handy one-tap way to open it. It does a decent job organizing photos and letting me search text in screenshots.
Lmao their "slow AI pace"? After they banged out uncooked AI features that generated fake headlines and messages for people?
Apple didn't over-hire like other big tech and it didn't have to do the huge layoffs unlike others. This has similar smell - It won't win big in any ways, but the damage of bubble burst can be much less significant to them than to the peers.
swetenning the pill of a lost train
lol
lmao, even
They are flat-out incompetent. Siri has somehow regressed over the years and visual intelligence only works in demos. They have the most abominable integration with ChatGPT imaginable.
At least the MLX team has been shipping an impressive product.
I'd take a better Siri if it can happen on-device (for speed and privacy). They've been over-promising on Siri's capabilities for a decade at this point.
Apple: "It just works".
Me: Nah, it doesn't. I get fine-grained app permissions but there's a certain absurdity in using voice control for your CarPlay app, where Apple Maps is currently navigating you home, and you say "Find me the nearest Panera" and the reply is "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
nah its fine. i don't need any of that shit, esp not on my phone.
I just wish Siri fucking worked for just fucking ONCE when I actually fucking need it.
Has it ever, for anyone?
Yes.
3 AM. Watching a video on the Mac.
I'm on bed, the Mac's on the desk.
iPhone and iPad charging next to the Mac.
"Hey Siri, put the Mac to sleep"
iPhone blares up with a cacophony loud enough to wake the graveyard several blocks over, even though it's set to silent:
"IT LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVEN"T SET UP ANY SMART HOME ACCESSORIES BLAHABHLABHALDHFLDSFHELWRHWELRHWELHROUWEHROWEHRQWLR$P#@U4"
Fuck you Tim Cook.
neither indus nor levantine, the last holdouts
I mean also, AI is still just a "confident idiot". Even the latest iteration of models are wrong more than half the time.
Half? To make sure I don't use it where it's that bad, would you mind saying what you use it for?
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