Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big seller. It's why they're investing in their own silicon. This strategy tends to yield unexpected wins, like the Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud, or the Mac Studio becoming arguably the best way to run local AI models (a nascent space that is on the cusp of becoming genuinely relevant), or the MacBook Pro becoming by far the best laptop in the world for productivity in the AI age (and it's not even close).
Your conclusion is that they're going to be left behind, but the evidence is that they're already well ahead in the areas that are core to their business. They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. Nobody else can do what they can in the fusion of hardware, software, and materials as long as they stay focused.
Where they genuinely slipped up was their marketing -- an unusual mistake for Apple. And that does indeed lie with the CEO.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
This was true maybe a decade ago, but not so now (under the watch of Tim Cook).
You listed Mac hardware becoming popular in the age of AI as examples of "unexpected wins". Maybe that's true (I don't know if it is) - but Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue. Apple has become an iPhone company (50% of revenue) that sells services (26% of revenue).
And AI can eat away at both. If Siri sucks so hard that people switch away, that would also reduce Services revenue from lost App Store revenue cuts. If Google bundles Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos storage, people might cancel their iCloud subscriptions.
I think the parent comment was making the point that Tim Cook's Apple has missed the boat and it doesn't show signs that it's going to catch the next wave.
I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscription. But in 2030, if my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting, have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting, and Siri can still only set a timer for 5 minutes, then I might actually switch.
If the Mac were its own standalone business, it would rank at no. 134 on the Fortune 500 with $33.7 billion in revenue. Also, that's a 12% increase in revenue compared to 2024.
If anything, AI has brought more attention to the Mac. Just about every major AI app is released for the Mac first. I've seen complaints about it on HN.
The latest is Claude Cowork. It was released for macOS on January 12th; it didn't ship for Windows until February 10th; it's still not available for Windows running on ARM.
It's been nearly a year since Dia launched [1], the first AI browser, and it's still not available for Windows.
We just had the frenzy over OpenClaw [2] with AI enthusiasts lining up at Apple Stores to buy a Mac mini just to run it!
The most popular AI channels on YouTube are almost exclusively using Macs. Apple seems to have enough runway until they get their act together.
Outside US, most people that buy Macs do so because they are developers targeting iDevices, or can afford Apple and want the ecosystem that comes with their iDevice.
An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
Where you live, maybe. It really depends on the country even outside the US. A lot of it is, to this day, because of things like Final Cut and Logic. Either because they dabble in it as a hobby or professionally.
A lot of the recent growth is developers in general, there's really been a huge shift there. 2010 developers using Macs vs 2026 developers using Macs, if you look at personal devices or workplaces that give them a choice. Biggest driver being Apple Silicon.
I live in one of those 70% market share Windows world region, where Apple gear is taken from a devices pool when required for project delivery, or bundled with cable TV subscriptions with credit payment scattered across several years.
> An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
For businesses and pro users, it isn't the Apple ecosystem that's the main driver.
Since Apple silicon a lot of laptops are just so far behind in battery life, speed and usability that you wouldn't get it. Often Apple ecosystem was a net negative since most things worked better on Windows but that has shifted.
Until the Apple tax goes away, most folks will put up with Windows flaws, unless Apple changes their pricing policy for countries that cannot afford G8 level salaries.
> No, as in the entire PC market for the past two decades
Is this why AI is winning? People aren't doing better. You pick a random stat and somehow make it support what you're arguing.
The link says DESKTOP. I said LAPTOP. Laptop after M1. Why are we going back 2 decades? They have >15% registered as unknown. Sure, "accurate". Cough cough. It doesn't differentiate new or old and IF (the original discussion) that Apple is gaining market share and NEW sales.
> and they're not gaining very quickly
This is just as bad as speculative stock trading e.g. with software stocks. They're losing to AI. Oh no. Dump. Oh they're actually not too bad. Buy it back. Apple doesn't have AI. Sell. Apple doesn't have AI. Buy. Are you ok?
Laptops are desktops in 2026, and without needing Apple style dongles to make out of missing ports, yet another Apple "improvement" in expensive hardware.
Tried an android phone given by my company. Gemini is at your fingertips, with a single button press.
That’s INCREDIBLE!
[everything Siri never delivered].
Put that into a headphone or headphone-enabled glasses. Plus a ring.
And the need for an advanced UI-based phone fades away for many usages.
I have a Pixel besides my iPhone (for reasons). When I got a Pixel 9 about a year ago, my feeling was the same (Gemini as at your fingertips. INCREDIBLE!). A few months later after the novelty wore off, I just found the push of AI everywhere in Pixel OS and Google apps just annoying. I now use GrapheneOS on my Pixel. One of the many reasons is that it does not try to push AI anywhere.
Now I just have a single LLM (Le Chat) isolated in its own little app sandbox, never getting in my face unless I choose to open it myself.
I’m not sure how to say it without sounding like an Apple fanboy, but Tim Cook has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Every single year people have been whining how “he’s not visionary and etc.”, but at some point you have to give him some credit. Apple of 2026 has completely different landscape versus apple of 2010/earlier. Scaling from millions to billions of sales is incredibly hard, and he’s been able to accomplish it.
Would you feel the same if in 2030, all the actions you describe, work most of the time but still produce questionable output requiring time to verify and fact check due to the probabilistic nature of the LLM engine? This is unsolvable with LLMs. I don't want an embedded or agentic AI but do give me the option to pick a model of my choice and accept the risks when I want to. I don't want tainted generated summaries, replies or code in certain critical areas.
Also, since AI will mean most are just let go, why would they need meeting minutes? AI would be so crucial as to be the make or break phone/laptop feature, but people would still have meetings?
At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.
You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone:
I'm road tripping to XYZ tomorrow, 10 am to 5 pm.
and have my phone become a guide for the day, including stops it knows I like and hotel in my price range with the amenities it knows I need. If I get hungry it just slips in a stop wherever I ask.
This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone.
If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.
The moment this is automated and overseen by an AI implementation it'll turn into a marketing game like SEO did. You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up.
It's bad enough already. But I do not want someone making decisions for me on that and booking things, which is the only uplift that an AI implementation can give over the current situation.
>You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up
...and how does your "by hand" process solve this problem? You are influenced by the same SEO crap regardless of AI intervention.
I think that sounds like an incredible feature, but like so many things my phone can already do I'd never actually use it. I just don't want to become someone who does what their phone suggests.
Plus I have a partner and friends, so unless we all want to follow my phone's instructions it's not going to work.
It should easily be able to understand a user's personality well enough to know how to manipulate them. E.g., 4 suggestions that user avoids directing user to the remaining 5th location that wasn't suggested.
How do you find those 5 locations? You open Google Maps and search for them. Too bad the app already selects 4 places to show you and hide the 5th.
So often I look for a business but Google Maps won't show it because it has no reviews. An AI assistant wouldn't change that, as long as it's still interactively programmable (i.e. give me 5 options, I'll pick 3)
I'm not arguing that the feature wouldn't be used at all, just that I believe I'm fairly typical in not using clever phone features. It'd be used by a small number of people but that wouldn't make a noticeable change in marketshare if Android had it and iOS didn't.
To be honest, there probably isn't any feature of a phone OS would make a difference these days. People have decided which camp they're in and they're not going to change.
I saw a video of a Chinese phone that did something like that. Their implementation was a privacy and security nightmare but basically it shared a active feed of your screen with an LLM and would literally tap, type and swipe to achieve your objective. Like order these oodles from this app, it would only interrupt it's actions at payment processing screens.
Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.
This is why Apple (and Google) is in a privileged position to tackle this issue at the OS level. If you currently trust your OS, then having a local agent use your apps wouldn't be terribly different (prompt injection risk aside)
After having given Openclaw a try as my "personal assistant" for a day when traveling, I 100% want this to be one possible way I can interact with my computer going forward.
Of course it's failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private (I want local inference before giving it access to anything material, or it'll indeed be a privacy nightmare), and crashes all the time, but the fact that a (not yet) walking, talking CVE can do a better job at this than one of the most wealthy corporations in the world after several years of trying should give them some serious pause.
The “failing hilariously” bit is critical for this road-tripping use case.
It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation to lose faith in simply handing over a whole day’s itinerary to an LLM. Honestly that can go so bad very easily.
We are decades into the GPS navigation era and I still don’t trust the route my vehicle suggests. I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
> I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
I heard this often but what has been the issue in practice? The worst that happened to me is Google Maps suggesting I cross a bridge that was washed away by the last typhoon, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Only in very remote places has Google Maps failed me, at least for driving directions (for trails it's another story...)
> It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation
I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.
> failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private, and crashes all the time, a (not yet) walking, talking CVE
Is actually doing a better job than not doing any of that at all? This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation. Sometimes if you can’t do it right it’s better to not do it at all. Better to wait for the full meal instead of having a “slop snack”.
I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies. Terrible. Which is more than any company can do so yay?
Some things are worse than nothing in terms of quality or liability.
Yes, it's significantly better than nobody doing any of this for me, and the important thing for the purpose of this prediction is that the error rate still seems to be going down exponentially with time.
> This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation.
That's exactly where it would make sense to try a new thing then, no?
> I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies.
Sounds like a much more high stakes activity than telling me factoids around my travel itinerary, so I agree that we shouldn't have you run the neurosurgery department yet, yes.
Disregarding for a moment whether that's what HN-greybeards want or not, being behind in this area doesn't necessarily preclude Apple from catching up later. There's enough of a market that they can buy it from one of Google's competitors if they have to.
Can you not already do nearly that right now with Gemini on any device, iOS or not? I just gave a similar prompt to Gemini. It activated Gemini's "personal intelligence" feature and gave me the kind of highly personalized itinerary and advice you just suggested. It's not quite as seamless as being built directly into the OS, but I actually prefer it this way -- it's mildly sandboxed for safety while still giving me almost everything you just described if I want it. I certainly wouldn't switch away from my iPhone just to remove that sandboxing.
It doesn't even need to be coming from a single AI vendor either. For instance, I can already use Grok's voice mode inside our Model Y to add stops along the route if we're hungry.
I get what you want, its pretty sophisticated and yes probably a huge added value if it works reliably.
And there is no fucking way I want that in my life or my family's lives, ever. I will fight this very actively, with my wallet, voting and voice. Thats far beyond 1984 and at this point, in 2026, we know all that info will be weaponized against me, will try to manipulate me into decisions I would not do otherwise, for ads and other purposes. Also, it removes a lot of joy from one's life with discovering places and just being an adult and deciding for oneself, but that can be subjective.
If I dare to speak out, if I dare to disagree with official opinions, if I dare to have higher morals than those at the power at given moment. Look at all the shit happening even former bastion of democracy - US. Do you really think this is the bottom? We/You are still far from that and who knows if you bounce back. Past performance doesnt indicate future and all that.
Even when I am well shielded in proper bastion of true democracy and freedom - Switzerland in my case, nobody is immune. EU hates additional freedoms Swiss have and push hard for their dissolution, a reminder in their heart how better a very diverse European country can be run compared to mess EU is. US, at least current gov, hates this place too based on their moves.
Its not really helpful to leave snarky comments in bad taste neither, is it. I suggest you read up a bit on this country, its history (I mean proper history not some primitive blahs on qanon level) and educate yourself, its not that hard or long if you care about the topic.
You're here, right? How much of your life is already stored on digital devices one warrant away from the state?
I read your comment as someone from the 80s complaining about digitalization and it all applied. And yet here we are, my WHOLE photo library on my phone, most of communication with everyone on my phone, and AI isn't even part of it.
Thats your phone, I have no cloud storage and no most of my photos are not on my phone. Its not my first nor second account here, I don't care about some meaningless reward points. Same goes for everything else, very little of my life is stored digitally and connected/shared to internet. I see simply no reason for that, not cruising on some paranoia.
Its a fight worth fighting or behavior to adhere to, for me. Natural and logical. You seemingly gave up, thats fine as long as you are happy with your choices and consequences.
Why would you ever want to do that? Why wont' you stop and live life for a moment?, stop delegating stuff to your phone, especially when it comes to personal trips. Really bleak, this "always optimizing stuff" thing, really, really bleak. Tech-bro culture has done a good one to mainstream culture, because I see the same mindset seeping through to mainstream life.
I travel a lot and it's extremely time consuming. I don't even do much research beforehand anymore. I really wish I got a notification like "I know you're heading that way, how about this waterfall? It only adds 15 minutes of driving."
The reality is that I do not enjoy at all sorting through tickets and booking emails and apps, I just want to ask my phone "show me tonight's booking" and then hand the phone to the hotel's front desk.
There's so much an assistant can do and Siri is just so far from it.
It doesn't, but I'd rather book a hotel with full confidence and go to a restaurant that will be actually open, given all the information that is available to me at the time of planning, than having my trip ruined by a dumb bot because it cannot tell imagination from reality. All you get is "you're absolutely right".
Yeah what I do when I'm on a holiday is just walk out and see what's around, what places look good and have a good vibe. Maybe then check their rating but usually I don't bother do do even that. I'm not a minmaxer, I care more about living in the moment.
I do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...
Even if that worked, how do you know it will choose the stops you like and not the ones that paid Apple more to be featured?
How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it?
And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that?
Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business
Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in...
One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill.
It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in.
For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things.
So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?
My take is that the future will look something like this:
- You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads.
- This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.).
- You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses.
- Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though.
For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above?
Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.
I'm personally not convinced about "next-gen form factors", although I know that's what many companies are focusing on - some type of smart glasses, or whatever kind of (screen-less?) device Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on.
Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face, and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them), so, seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
I think Apple's brand loyalty buys them some lead time in being a fast-follower, but the danger to them would be if things change so fast and profoundly that they get left behind a la Nokia. What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)? I wouldn't expect it to kill Apple overnight, but it seems that they are in effect gambling that "we can always pay for AI if we have to", and "someone will always license it to run on-device if we need to".
> Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face
Have you seen the Ray Ban meta glasses? They already look pretty close to existing fashionable sunglasses, albeit with a visible camera.
> and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them)
They already do; plenty of people carry a smart phone, a smart watch, and airpods.
> seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
People use smartphones to avoid being bored, but there are situations when it's unacceptable to use them (i.e. in a meeting); I could see smart glasses being used for that niche.
> What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)?
Knowing Google, that personal assistant would probably be shut down within a year.
> This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI
They aren’t. Mixed reality is getting little attention. It is in the “it remains a product in our line-up” phase. They are virtually all-in on AI. Their acquisitions have been AI-focused.
It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with are the same issues their competitors are dealing with and is isn’t stopping them from releasing.
> Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud
This isn’t why people are buying Mac minis. They’re buying them because that’s what the OpenClaw author was using, they’re cheap, and they run macOS, so the tools within OpenClaw can get deeper Apple API access to Calendar, iMessage, etc.
In the vast majority of cases, OpenClaw users aren’t using local models. They’re using “cloud” models like GPT and Claude.
>It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with aren’t stopping their competitors from releasing.
No, it’s a good sign that Apple has re-learned the lessons they used to take to heart but sometimes forget when they panic and scramble. Apple used to always be late to most changes but when they arrived, if it was with a cohesive answer that worked well. They’ve been scrambling instead and hopefully this is a sign they’ve realized that.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
And they’re failing at that too! I purchased an iPhone 16e thinking it would be like the iPhone SE, but what I got was worse than an SE. They used an old chip and I can tell you this phone cannot keep up with liquid glass, which they forced me to use and did not let me roll back.
And now we have the iPhone 17 suffering from chipping on the back of the phones.
The only reason Apple is succeeding is the only other thing is worse. And yes, I’m talking about android.
What? It has the same RAM size, same RAM speed, and same chip[0] (minus one (1) GPU core [6c, 4g, 16n]) as the iPhone 16 [6c, 5g, 16n] (and almost the same as the A18 Pro [6c, 5g, 16n] minus the enhanced memory bandwidth and video encoding, afaict.)
(I mean, sure, it's an old chip compared to the 17 but then it's a generation older and saying "they used an old chip" is a nonsense truism.)
>They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security.
That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.
You're not wrong, but you can also get most (or even nearly all) of that right now today on any device by just getting a Google AI subscription. Gemini already does most of that through its own personal intelligence feature. You do need to use Gmail at minimum for it to be useful, but the vast majority of iPhone users do already.
Those Macs you are talking about are still very niche and mostly used by loyal customers that do basic/common things or very vocal fanboys who always find a way to shill for whatever Apple comes up with, no matter how flawed and lackluster the product is.
Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS.
But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.
I think you’re underestimating or not understanding why Macs have taken off so much for AI. It has nothing to do with fanboys shilling for Apple. You can get a MBP today with 128GB of unified memory or a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. Then you get to run MacOS, which is vastly superior to Windows for AI productivity and far more accessible/convenient than Linux even today. There’s a reason so many AI apps are Mac native first (or exclusively). No other company offers so much memory and convenience in a consumer product for these purposes. These have become genuinely unique products with almost no competition, and by all accounts it seems Apple is just getting started in this direction.
Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.
I'm not contesting that AI will become worthwhile on local hardware at some point. With software optimization and hardware costs falling over time, that's pretty much a given.
But I'm arguing that it's not going to be worthwhile doing on Apple hardware.
GPU sharding is already a thing for PCs, and you don't need to stupidly buy multiple full computers for it to work.
Apple has put themselves into a corner with their Apple Silicon strategy. It's good for efficiency and thus quite nice for mobile usage, but it makes no sense for desktops that do not need to be power/space constrained.
Their GPUs are still weak, and their strategy of gluing 2 together gives poor results in general workloads. They are limited by the die size and the RAM bandwidth they can allocate to the whole thing because of physics.
If Apple manages to get good results by aggregating multiple computers, PCs will get even better results by using multiple GPUs in the same box, interconnected by the PCIe bus, which will always be faster than Thunderbolt no matter what, because of physics.
In fact, they could even come up with a new interconnect if need be.
There is just no realistic way for Apple to become a dominant player in AI. They cannot compete properly on the hardware side because they won't get the cash flow/key players NVidia and AMD are getting, and they cannot compete properly on software because it will always be ports of stuff made to run on better/faster hardware. They'll lose AI basically for the same reason they have lost gaming: uncompetitive performance for the price. People who actually want to do stuff care less about how things look and a lot more about how good/fast they run.
And whenever datacenters start offloading older GPUs, their price will fall, making it the cheapest way to do local AI. Apple hardware keeps a stupidly high price even when it's completely obsolete because of the status it confers; it will never be cost competitive.
It's basically a replay of their PPC mistake, where they thought they could compete by going at it alone but in the end fell pretty hard because they couldn't compete against the volume PCs were getting.
Now Apple has money but cannot attract enough talent because they have no vision, and the management style is basically mean girls running the show.
You are arguing about purchasing a solution that would cover 8 years of top-tier AI subscription. Seriously, who in their right mind would do that?
Apple hardware for AI makes no sense; either you have prosumer-level needs that are going to be served just fine with cheaper hardware (like, for example, Ryzen AI) or you have large needs, and investing in a real AI solution is going to be better because it's going to be much faster. Being able to fit large models is useless if they run too slow.
I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.
Google is not really a competitor to Apple in devices. I mean, they sell devices, but at a way lower volume. The Pixel phone is essentially a tech demo that exists to push their Android partners into making more competitive devices themselves.
The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services.
Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.
Your framing fits well for the Nexus era and even the earliest Pixel iterations, where Google’s hardware largely functioned as a reference implementation and ecosystem lever, nudging OEMs into making better devices.
However, the current Pixel strategy appears materially (no pun intended) different. Rather than serving as an “early adopter” pathfinder for the broader ecosystem, Pixel increasingly positions itself as the canonical expression of Android—the device on which the “true” Android experience is defined and delivered. Far from nudging OEMs, it's Google desperately reclaiming strategic control over their own platform.
By tightening the integration between hardware, software, and first-party silicon, Google appears to be pursuing the same structural advantages that underpin Apple’s hardware–software symbiosis. The last few generations of Pixel are, effectively, Google becoming more like Apple.
I think you're assuming that no durable or at-scale changes in compute form factor will occur, so that their success pretty much just solely comes down to differentiated iPhone software features. That seems unlikely to me. I don't see phones going away in the next decade like some have predicted, but I do think new compute form factors are going to start proliferating once a certain technological "take off" point is reached.
The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed).
https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)
PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.
Counterpoint the iPad has been brilliant with it’s software and implementation and that is the reason it essentially has the tablet market to itself, is the only tablet with a third-party ecosystem, and it continues to grow.
The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.
I agree on that they should focus on hardware, software, UX, etc.
I think the problem of current Apple management and especially Tim Cook is that they want to squeeze out as much profit as possible and they see AI as another _Services_ profit center.
A better Apple would say AI is just an app and provide extension points into the OS so that users can plug their favorite LLM, anything from ChatGPT to Mistral, but in a privacy-preserving way if the user wants.
While that would lead to less profit in the short term, Apple's moat was its UX and halo effects (cynically: social signalling). The draw to Apple may last for a bit during enshittification of the platform, but long-term the brand value is more important than short-term profits.
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers?
> They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.
If your high-profile misses become the subject of both memes and major news stories I'd say you are still the benchmark in UX, yes.
Even "Apple design has peaked" is a meme if you've been following this stuff for more than just one decade. (Sure, one day it'll most likely be true, but that doesn't make everyone predicting it now a prophet retroactively.)
Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big seller. It's why they're investing in their own silicon. This strategy tends to yield unexpected wins, like the Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud, or the Mac Studio becoming arguably the best way to run local AI models (a nascent space that is on the cusp of becoming genuinely relevant), or the MacBook Pro becoming by far the best laptop in the world for productivity in the AI age (and it's not even close).
Your conclusion is that they're going to be left behind, but the evidence is that they're already well ahead in the areas that are core to their business. They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. Nobody else can do what they can in the fusion of hardware, software, and materials as long as they stay focused.
Where they genuinely slipped up was their marketing -- an unusual mistake for Apple. And that does indeed lie with the CEO.