16 ms·

Apple has what it needs to launch its own Google replacement

52 points by retskrad 3y ago

smodo 3y ago
Local / online hybrid LLM’s could replace googling and Apple is in a great position to provide them. The scary question is how they will monetize this.
- api 3y ago
  Apple Silicon (M1/M2) is already great for local LLMs. More cost-effective in most cases than GPUs.
  - brutus1213 3y ago
    I'm curious if you can back this up from a technical perspective. I work with mobile (but all Android these days) and it is a mess. Best training ecosystem is Pytorch (and maybe Jax). For inference, you need to endure all manner of pain to optimize/quantize your model (PTQ has perf loss so Training aware quant is key). There are lil operator optimizations (fusion helps perf) but then certain ops have issues on the accelerator you care about. This android experience is mostly related to ARM issues. Q seems to be investing heavily in tooling but now that they are laying people off, I think their toolchain is a bit risky (and may not work if not on Q hardware). Is the story for optimization much different for Apple silicon?
    - upbeat_general 3y ago
      Not sure about the current situation but since Apple controls literally the entire stack, I can’t imagine it’s a big issue. If they really need a new op, they add it.
pram 3y ago
Amazon had A9 and that didn't seem to go anywhere. Not convinced Apple would end up with anything but another Bing.
- idontwantthis 3y ago
  But Bing launched when Google was also good and there was no reason to switch.
  - canadianfella 3y ago
    [dead]
  - deelowe 3y ago
    Simply launching another search engine, even if it's better, won't be enough. There needs to be a transformational change to get people to switch and I don't think llm integration is enough.
    - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
      One area they could gain an advantage over Google is by downgrading sites with advertising on them. Google won't do that because it would hurt their bottom line even though they know much of their results are garbage. >There needs to be a transformational change to get people to switch All they need to do is change the default search engine in the next version of iOS. As long as the results don't suck that would probably be enough of a leg up.
      - deelowe 3y ago
        Had that worked well for their maps solution? Genuinely curious.
    - mthoms 3y ago
      >Simply launching another search engine, even if it's better, won't be enough. I otherwise agree but defaults are a very powerful tool.
klysm 3y ago
is this just google propaganda trying to sway public opinion towards them not having a monopoly because “well apple could do it”. Why would apple invest anything into search when they get paid billions not to?
- r00fus 3y ago
  Timing is definitely sus.
dmvdoug 3y ago
Honest take: I’m an Apple customer (no, I’m not interested in hearing how terrible that makes me). I want to see them focusing on innovating in hardware that works for their products. I want to see them improving and stabilizing Swift and SwuftUI. I want to see them actually investing in fixing long-standing issues with macOS. The last thing I want as an Apple customer is for them to launch a giant new undertaking like search. Right now they have been fairly good, with some significant exceptions, on user privacy issues. A search engine, especially one relying on ad revenue, would muddy those incentives. And it would be a massive investment in an area they just don’t have any reason to touch aside from trying to stick it to Google.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  I share your concern, but I'm a bit ambivalent on this. I though the same of Apple TV: I don't want them wasting energy on things like bad movies/TV shows when macOS's got so many missing features and bugs. It turns out, it didn't diverge their attention, at least from the outside, and they created good content. Google needs a good push, that's for sure. I doubt Apple has the core talent now to compete when Siri is what is and has been for more than a decade, but who knows, they've got the money. Maybe they could buy Kagi.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Damn you're right, they're probably just going to buy kagi :-(
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    AppleTV felt to me like it wasn’t so far outside Apple’s reach, especially taking into consideration iTunes as a major product/precursor. I’m more concerned about the incentives that being in search would create, to be honest, because if it is at all based on ad revenue for support, it injects incentives exactly opposed to the ones they have now as far as user privacy, etc. are concerned.
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
sargun 3y ago
I will place a bet against Apple successfully launching their own general purpose Google competitor successfully before 2028. Search is incredibly complex and expensive to build and run. Apple lacks the server side chops to build super low margin services (iirc they’re around double the cost of gdrive). Say, it’s 2-3 years for them to build out capacity, and another 1-2 years to get the software working well. That still would make it a mad dash. That being said, I can see Apple building a special purpose alternative to Google, indexing a small subset of the web, which is curated - think what gets put on Apple News, or similar.
- freedomben 3y ago
  What they may lack today, they can easily hire away from Google. They have plenty of money to do whatever it takes
  - sargun 3y ago
    Right, but hiring, building a team, getting them performant — takes time. Apple can do it as a skunkworks style operation, probably better than most other companies out there, but such an undertaking would be a multibillion dollar hole that I expect would be hard to explain away, even if it classified as “iCloud R&D”
- barkerja 3y ago
  > Apple lacks the server side chops to build super low margin services https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engineers https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin... Has much materialized from this?
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I'd be extremely skeptical, as Apple has shown over time that this kind of large, data intensive software is not in their wheelhouse. I think Apple makes some great products, but if I had to make choose the shittiest products Apple makes, it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud. These are all areas where I think the Google equivalent (Google Assistant, Google Maps and GDrive/Docs) are much better, and the these are all much more closely related to search.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  > ... it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud Probably. And I think a large reason for that is because they don't like to solicit feedback for how their products work and for those types of products you NEED feedback.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    It's just not in their DNA. Steve Jobs famously laid out the philosophy of "the user doesn't know what they want until we tell them" and it's a core part of their formula. At any rate, they have enough money and time to get it wrong for a long time before getting it right.
- psyclobe 3y ago
  That might’ve been true a year ago but today apples maps is a viable replacement for google maps as well as their Siri offerings.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I haven't used Apple Maps much, but Siri is a total dog pile compared to Google Assistant.
    - barkerja 3y ago
      It really depends on what and how you use it. I know that's not saying a lot, but Siri is genuinely good at some things, and incredibly terrible at others. I know the same can be said about Assistant, Alexa, etc.
toasted-subs 3y ago
Have the reason I like to use google services would be due to that “layer” being a good abstraction. Only using 1 companies services seems like asking for trouble.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
If they try this, and I'm not convinced they will, it won't be a general purpose search engine. It'll be something that only runs on their devices and in their ecosystem.
- barkerja 3y ago
  I don't believe that would be possible. At worst, it could be locked behind an iCloud authentication.
- porsupah 3y ago
  Apple does have a crawler of its own, which feeds into Siri's knowledge. But, there's no public front end to use it as a search engine, though there was up to about 2021 or 2022, provided as a bit of fun by some enterprising third party.
- dabbz 3y ago
  Spotlight is already their search engine. You can search their app store, movies catalog, the web, etc. They're already doing this.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
summerlight 3y ago
This is probably something Tizen-equivalent for Apple. Even if they don't seriously consider launching this to public in a foreseable future, this will be a great card for negotiation against Google, not just for default browser auction but lots of other stuffs. This is especially important in the upcoming DMA context so that they would incentivize Google to keep the Duopoly situation rather than putting the app store/browser space into serious competitions even after Apple opening up the third party app store/browser.
human_error 3y ago
Why would Apple launch its own Google? What's the business case of this? Searching on iOS is vastly different than searching on the internet.
tantalor 3y ago
This is completely fabricated. Are any sources cited?
adolph 3y ago
Wait, I thought they were going to replace Tesla with a self-driving Johnny Ive Apple-mobile? Sarcasm aside, headlines like this about what Apple could do are the equivalent of flying car cover stories for Popular Science. The articles are probably like pre-written obituaries, just kept in the can for a slow news day. <popular company> <could, should, must, will> <something popular company doesn't do>.
pcurve 3y ago
Just for argument sake, Apple walks away from $20B/year in pure profit to develop its own search engine. Google is going to just sit idly? Google already knows how to make great search engine. It is just 'choosing' not to, so it can make more money from advertisers. If it didn't have to pay $20B/year to Apple, they can re-deploy all that capital however they see fit to maintain its dominance.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  >Google is going to just sit idly? Probably, that is what most companies the size of Google do.
  - gary_0 3y ago
    The Google of 2005 was running circles around the stupid, lumbering Microsoft, now they're the stupid lumbering ones.
- lancesells 3y ago
  > Google already knows how to make great search engine. It is just 'choosing' not to, so it can make more money from advertisers. I would guess they are trying to do both. I'm assuming the search team is 1000s of people with many of them trying to improve it. I think part of the reason search has gotten bad (once you get past the ads) is the SEO spammers. I use DuckDuckGo and it has pretty much the same problem of shitty websites with copied content clogging up the search engine. The more zeroed in I am on some of my searches the more duplicate websites with fucked urls comes into play.
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    try kagi
    - lancesells 3y ago
      I have and it's great and I'll probably switch sometime this year. I'm just very subscription-averse.
sholladay 3y ago
I would like to see less of Apple's revenue come from advertising, not more. So if it is a paid search engine with no ads, then awesome. But I doubt that will happen. More than search, I wish Apple would compete with Google Workspace. Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I can tell, even with the new support for custom domains and Apple Business Essentials, iCloud still isn't designed for teams. The number of people you can share a domain with and the number of email addresses you can have per domain seem very limited. Or are there different limits for managed Apple IDs?
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  >More than search, I wish Apple would compete with Google Workspace. One of the things I like about the Apple ecosystem is that it doesn't cater to enterprise customers very much. Their focus is on what the individual wants rather than what the CTO of some huge corporation needs as is the case with Microsoft.
  - sholladay 3y ago
    I’m not looking for enterprise level complexity. Rather just the ability to run a small business without using GMail.
gokuldas011011 3y ago
Apple doesn't need it's own search engine, but needs to improve siri.
hnbear 3y ago
I find the comments odd that Apple could do X. They made $30B in profit last quarter. $166B in the last 4. That level of profit, coupled with their existing manufacturing and software capabilities means they can do basically anything. What they do is very carefully chosen to maintain their current steady path. Speculating on what they could do in these terms is odd.
alephnan 3y ago
I’m an Apple fanboy and a Google hater, but Apple couldn’t even beat Google with Maps.
- Affric 3y ago
  Apple's Maps have only ever improved IMO. The feature roll out is slow but the UI is great. A better map if not better mapping.
- DieBruderBauer 3y ago
  I'd argue -- for my pedestrian use cases -- that Apple Maps is superior to Google Maps. UI is one reason.
joshstrange 3y ago
> assuming it can sell advertising and search slots at the same price as Google I'd imagine if Apple did launch a search engine (which I don't really believe is fully within their proficiency wheelhouse, though maybe buying something like Kagi could work?) I'd think they could sell their ads for more than Google does for the same reasons developers make more on iOS compared to Android. All that said I'd really not like to see Apple go down the advertising route. I'm already unhappy with the amount they do and would like to see that shrink, not grow.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  Yeah the iPhone has a massive install base, and those users are generally wealthier than the avg(generally). They could probably have sufficient ad inventory at launch to become a big player in the ad space.
7speter 3y ago
I’m always kinda bewildered by this idea. I see the plausibility, but over the last 10 or so years, apple has sold itself to people as the tech company that cares about privacy, so much so that you have to pay a premium and forego the ability to repair their products to enter their walled garden thats supposed to be privacy oriented. Would there be any fear on their part that customers would be upset that the company is now in a position to sell users data or services based on user data? Would this rollout of an ad supported search engine from apple have no backlash and be friction free?
anoninplace 3y ago
[flagged]
retskrad 3y ago
https://archive.ph/13Glc https://archive.ph/13Glc
dave4420 3y ago
If Apple launched its own search engine and made it the default on its products, everybody would welcome that and absolutely no-one at all would denounce it as an abuse of their dominant position on their own products and call for tougher antitrust enforcement against Apple. Also: > Apple already designs its own [list of digital services]. > The only thing missing is a full-blown Apple search engine. I dunno, being able to deploy their own baseband processors feels like a higher priority for Apple.
- canadianfella 3y ago
  [dead]
- Affric 3y ago
  > deploy their own baseband processors Will it happen though? I get that COVID will be disrupting this but in my mind this has been the next big hardware (vs device/software/service) target since Apple Silicon. In my mind it's almost Apple Car levels of vaporware.
  - Kirby64 3y ago
    They're certainly trying. They bought up the old Intel modem IP and team. Qualcomm is an existential threat to their business so it makes sense to try to get them out of there.
    - ksec 3y ago
      >Qualcomm is an existential threat to their business Which part of Qualcomm is an existential threat?
      - Kirby64 3y ago
        Their continuous rent-seeking, anti-competitive behavior. Anything they touch basically seems aimed at the goal of extracting as much money as possible. All their designs basically force companies to use all their products instead of using competitor products (notice how designs with Qualcomm SoCs also have Qualcomm power, audio, and numerous other QC chips). They're a blight on the industry.
uf00lme 3y ago
Gotta feed those AI bots
beardyw 3y ago
The article completely overlooks the cost of providing the service, which for Google is balanced against a bit more than "a revenue stream about the size of the Apple Watch".
liquidpele 3y ago
It also has what it needs to launch its own Facebook… oh that didn’t turn out well for google, almost like there’s more to a market than just making the tech.
- slac 3y ago
  Remember Ping?

52 points by retskrad 3y ago

Local / online hybrid LLM’s could replace googling and Apple is in a great position to provide them. The scary question is how they will monetize this.

api 3y ago
Apple Silicon (M1/M2) is already great for local LLMs. More cost-effective in most cases than GPUs.
- brutus1213 3y ago
  I'm curious if you can back this up from a technical perspective. I work with mobile (but all Android these days) and it is a mess. Best training ecosystem is Pytorch (and maybe Jax). For inference, you need to endure all manner of pain to optimize/quantize your model (PTQ has perf loss so Training aware quant is key). There are lil operator optimizations (fusion helps perf) but then certain ops have issues on the accelerator you care about. This android experience is mostly related to ARM issues. Q seems to be investing heavily in tooling but now that they are laying people off, I think their toolchain is a bit risky (and may not work if not on Q hardware). Is the story for optimization much different for Apple silicon?
  - upbeat_general 3y ago
    Not sure about the current situation but since Apple controls literally the entire stack, I can’t imagine it’s a big issue. If they really need a new op, they add it.

pram 3y ago

Amazon had A9 and that didn't seem to go anywhere. Not convinced Apple would end up with anything but another Bing.

idontwantthis 3y ago
But Bing launched when Google was also good and there was no reason to switch.
- canadianfella 3y ago
  [dead]
- deelowe 3y ago
  Simply launching another search engine, even if it's better, won't be enough. There needs to be a transformational change to get people to switch and I don't think llm integration is enough.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    One area they could gain an advantage over Google is by downgrading sites with advertising on them. Google won't do that because it would hurt their bottom line even though they know much of their results are garbage. >There needs to be a transformational change to get people to switch All they need to do is change the default search engine in the next version of iOS. As long as the results don't suck that would probably be enough of a leg up.
    - deelowe 3y ago
      Had that worked well for their maps solution? Genuinely curious.
  - mthoms 3y ago
    >Simply launching another search engine, even if it's better, won't be enough. I otherwise agree but defaults are a very powerful tool.

klysm 3y ago

is this just google propaganda trying to sway public opinion towards them not having a monopoly because “well apple could do it”. Why would apple invest anything into search when they get paid billions not to?

r00fus 3y ago
Timing is definitely sus.

dmvdoug 3y ago

Honest take: I’m an Apple customer (no, I’m not interested in hearing how terrible that makes me). I want to see them focusing on innovating in hardware that works for their products. I want to see them improving and stabilizing Swift and SwuftUI. I want to see them actually investing in fixing long-standing issues with macOS. The last thing I want as an Apple customer is for them to launch a giant new undertaking like search. Right now they have been fairly good, with some significant exceptions, on user privacy issues. A search engine, especially one relying on ad revenue, would muddy those incentives. And it would be a massive investment in an area they just don’t have any reason to touch aside from trying to stick it to Google.

tambourine_man 3y ago
I share your concern, but I'm a bit ambivalent on this. I though the same of Apple TV: I don't want them wasting energy on things like bad movies/TV shows when macOS's got so many missing features and bugs. It turns out, it didn't diverge their attention, at least from the outside, and they created good content. Google needs a good push, that's for sure. I doubt Apple has the core talent now to compete when Siri is what is and has been for more than a decade, but who knows, they've got the money. Maybe they could buy Kagi.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Damn you're right, they're probably just going to buy kagi :-(
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  AppleTV felt to me like it wasn’t so far outside Apple’s reach, especially taking into consideration iTunes as a major product/precursor. I’m more concerned about the incentives that being in search would create, to be honest, because if it is at all based on ad revenue for support, it injects incentives exactly opposed to the ones they have now as far as user privacy, etc. are concerned.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago

sargun 3y ago

I will place a bet against Apple successfully launching their own general purpose Google competitor successfully before 2028. Search is incredibly complex and expensive to build and run. Apple lacks the server side chops to build super low margin services (iirc they’re around double the cost of gdrive). Say, it’s 2-3 years for them to build out capacity, and another 1-2 years to get the software working well. That still would make it a mad dash. That being said, I can see Apple building a special purpose alternative to Google, indexing a small subset of the web, which is curated - think what gets put on Apple News, or similar.

freedomben 3y ago
What they may lack today, they can easily hire away from Google. They have plenty of money to do whatever it takes
- sargun 3y ago
  Right, but hiring, building a team, getting them performant — takes time. Apple can do it as a skunkworks style operation, probably better than most other companies out there, but such an undertaking would be a multibillion dollar hole that I expect would be hard to explain away, even if it classified as “iCloud R&D”
barkerja 3y ago
> Apple lacks the server side chops to build super low margin services https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engineers https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin... Has much materialized from this?

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I'd be extremely skeptical, as Apple has shown over time that this kind of large, data intensive software is not in their wheelhouse. I think Apple makes some great products, but if I had to make choose the shittiest products Apple makes, it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud. These are all areas where I think the Google equivalent (Google Assistant, Google Maps and GDrive/Docs) are much better, and the these are all much more closely related to search.

HumblyTossed 3y ago
> ... it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud Probably. And I think a large reason for that is because they don't like to solicit feedback for how their products work and for those types of products you NEED feedback.
- freedomben 3y ago
  It's just not in their DNA. Steve Jobs famously laid out the philosophy of "the user doesn't know what they want until we tell them" and it's a core part of their formula. At any rate, they have enough money and time to get it wrong for a long time before getting it right.
psyclobe 3y ago
That might’ve been true a year ago but today apples maps is a viable replacement for google maps as well as their Siri offerings.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I haven't used Apple Maps much, but Siri is a total dog pile compared to Google Assistant.
  - barkerja 3y ago
    It really depends on what and how you use it. I know that's not saying a lot, but Siri is genuinely good at some things, and incredibly terrible at others. I know the same can be said about Assistant, Alexa, etc.

toasted-subs 3y ago

Have the reason I like to use google services would be due to that “layer” being a good abstraction. Only using 1 companies services seems like asking for trouble.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

If they try this, and I'm not convinced they will, it won't be a general purpose search engine. It'll be something that only runs on their devices and in their ecosystem.

barkerja 3y ago
I don't believe that would be possible. At worst, it could be locked behind an iCloud authentication.
porsupah 3y ago
Apple does have a crawler of its own, which feeds into Siri's knowledge. But, there's no public front end to use it as a search engine, though there was up to about 2021 or 2022, provided as a bit of fun by some enterprising third party.
dabbz 3y ago
Spotlight is already their search engine. You can search their app store, movies catalog, the web, etc. They're already doing this.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

summerlight 3y ago

This is probably something Tizen-equivalent for Apple. Even if they don't seriously consider launching this to public in a foreseable future, this will be a great card for negotiation against Google, not just for default browser auction but lots of other stuffs. This is especially important in the upcoming DMA context so that they would incentivize Google to keep the Duopoly situation rather than putting the app store/browser space into serious competitions even after Apple opening up the third party app store/browser.

human_error 3y ago

Why would Apple launch its own Google? What's the business case of this? Searching on iOS is vastly different than searching on the internet.

tantalor 3y ago

This is completely fabricated. Are any sources cited?

adolph 3y ago

Wait, I thought they were going to replace Tesla with a self-driving Johnny Ive Apple-mobile? Sarcasm aside, headlines like this about what Apple could do are the equivalent of flying car cover stories for Popular Science. The articles are probably like pre-written obituaries, just kept in the can for a slow news day. <popular company> <could, should, must, will> <something popular company doesn't do>.

pcurve 3y ago

Just for argument sake, Apple walks away from $20B/year in pure profit to develop its own search engine. Google is going to just sit idly? Google already knows how to make great search engine. It is just 'choosing' not to, so it can make more money from advertisers. If it didn't have to pay $20B/year to Apple, they can re-deploy all that capital however they see fit to maintain its dominance.

tonyedgecombe 3y ago
>Google is going to just sit idly? Probably, that is what most companies the size of Google do.
- gary_0 3y ago
  The Google of 2005 was running circles around the stupid, lumbering Microsoft, now they're the stupid lumbering ones.
lancesells 3y ago
> Google already knows how to make great search engine. It is just 'choosing' not to, so it can make more money from advertisers. I would guess they are trying to do both. I'm assuming the search team is 1000s of people with many of them trying to improve it. I think part of the reason search has gotten bad (once you get past the ads) is the SEO spammers. I use DuckDuckGo and it has pretty much the same problem of shitty websites with copied content clogging up the search engine. The more zeroed in I am on some of my searches the more duplicate websites with fucked urls comes into play.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  try kagi
  - lancesells 3y ago
    I have and it's great and I'll probably switch sometime this year. I'm just very subscription-averse.

sholladay 3y ago

I would like to see less of Apple's revenue come from advertising, not more. So if it is a paid search engine with no ads, then awesome. But I doubt that will happen. More than search, I wish Apple would compete with Google Workspace. Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I can tell, even with the new support for custom domains and Apple Business Essentials, iCloud still isn't designed for teams. The number of people you can share a domain with and the number of email addresses you can have per domain seem very limited. Or are there different limits for managed Apple IDs?

tonyedgecombe 3y ago
>More than search, I wish Apple would compete with Google Workspace. One of the things I like about the Apple ecosystem is that it doesn't cater to enterprise customers very much. Their focus is on what the individual wants rather than what the CTO of some huge corporation needs as is the case with Microsoft.
- sholladay 3y ago
  I’m not looking for enterprise level complexity. Rather just the ability to run a small business without using GMail.

gokuldas011011 3y ago

Apple doesn't need it's own search engine, but needs to improve siri.

hnbear 3y ago

I find the comments odd that Apple could do X. They made $30B in profit last quarter. $166B in the last 4. That level of profit, coupled with their existing manufacturing and software capabilities means they can do basically anything. What they do is very carefully chosen to maintain their current steady path. Speculating on what they could do in these terms is odd.

alephnan 3y ago

I’m an Apple fanboy and a Google hater, but Apple couldn’t even beat Google with Maps.

Affric 3y ago
Apple's Maps have only ever improved IMO. The feature roll out is slow but the UI is great. A better map if not better mapping.
DieBruderBauer 3y ago
I'd argue -- for my pedestrian use cases -- that Apple Maps is superior to Google Maps. UI is one reason.

joshstrange 3y ago

> assuming it can sell advertising and search slots at the same price as Google I'd imagine if Apple did launch a search engine (which I don't really believe is fully within their proficiency wheelhouse, though maybe buying something like Kagi could work?) I'd think they could sell their ads for more than Google does for the same reasons developers make more on iOS compared to Android. All that said I'd really not like to see Apple go down the advertising route. I'm already unhappy with the amount they do and would like to see that shrink, not grow.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
patmorgan23 3y ago
Yeah the iPhone has a massive install base, and those users are generally wealthier than the avg(generally). They could probably have sufficient ad inventory at launch to become a big player in the ad space.

7speter 3y ago

I’m always kinda bewildered by this idea. I see the plausibility, but over the last 10 or so years, apple has sold itself to people as the tech company that cares about privacy, so much so that you have to pay a premium and forego the ability to repair their products to enter their walled garden thats supposed to be privacy oriented. Would there be any fear on their part that customers would be upset that the company is now in a position to sell users data or services based on user data? Would this rollout of an ad supported search engine from apple have no backlash and be friction free?

anoninplace 3y ago

[flagged]

retskrad 3y ago

https://archive.ph/13Glc https://archive.ph/13Glc

dave4420 3y ago

If Apple launched its own search engine and made it the default on its products, everybody would welcome that and absolutely no-one at all would denounce it as an abuse of their dominant position on their own products and call for tougher antitrust enforcement against Apple. Also: > Apple already designs its own [list of digital services]. > The only thing missing is a full-blown Apple search engine. I dunno, being able to deploy their own baseband processors feels like a higher priority for Apple.

canadianfella 3y ago
[dead]
Affric 3y ago
> deploy their own baseband processors Will it happen though? I get that COVID will be disrupting this but in my mind this has been the next big hardware (vs device/software/service) target since Apple Silicon. In my mind it's almost Apple Car levels of vaporware.
- Kirby64 3y ago
  They're certainly trying. They bought up the old Intel modem IP and team. Qualcomm is an existential threat to their business so it makes sense to try to get them out of there.
  - ksec 3y ago
    >Qualcomm is an existential threat to their business Which part of Qualcomm is an existential threat?
    - Kirby64 3y ago
      Their continuous rent-seeking, anti-competitive behavior. Anything they touch basically seems aimed at the goal of extracting as much money as possible. All their designs basically force companies to use all their products instead of using competitor products (notice how designs with Qualcomm SoCs also have Qualcomm power, audio, and numerous other QC chips). They're a blight on the industry.

uf00lme 3y ago

Gotta feed those AI bots

beardyw 3y ago

The article completely overlooks the cost of providing the service, which for Google is balanced against a bit more than "a revenue stream about the size of the Apple Watch".

liquidpele 3y ago

It also has what it needs to launch its own Facebook… oh that didn’t turn out well for google, almost like there’s more to a market than just making the tech.

slac 3y ago
Remember Ping?