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I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would

I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.

burnt-resistor 1y ago
Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
- dangus 1y ago
  Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy. While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined. Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products. Excessive greed obliterates goodwill. You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark. Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
    - Fade_Dance 1y ago
      Teen iPhone ownership is up to 88% (!) in the US. I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Except the little issue teens don't appear on the same rate as iPhones hit the store shelves.
    - nunez 1y ago
      Misinformed take IMO. M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches. Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet? Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years. Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door. That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy. Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used. Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure. Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
      - SturgeonsLaw 1y ago
        Vertically-integrated modems are not cool. I mean, they are to me and likely other geeks, but to the general public? Their eyes would glaze over. Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.
        MrDarcy 1y ago
        You’re not thinking two or three orders out. It’s not about the modem, it’s about reducing the resource allocation of a boring component to make space for increasing the resources of other exciting components, taking the whole into account. iPhone will get some new exciting feature and everyone will wonder how they managed to do it at the price point nobody else can.
- jkmcf 1y ago
  Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging). While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter. Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1] Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition. [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-3221497/ https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-322149... [2] https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smartphone-repair-market-117485 https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smar... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairability-scores https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    It seems like high app store fees must in the long term ensure that the quality of third party software for any system will be reduced. It will certainly attract less talent, so even that is slow enshittification. The sane thing would have been to use the software ecosystem to sell the platform, and have no fees.
elpakal 1y ago
They announced this at wwdc this year in “Foundation Models”. Developers have access to an on-device llm (not sure how good it is yet).
- mips_avatar 1y ago
  Yeah but they're just too small to do anything useful with yet. Like we're in this weird state where you can't easily sell usage based pricing through appstore payments (and customers don't really understand usage anyways). So you need to sell access to an agent via a subscription, but your costs are 90% usage based so it's hard to price. If appstore developers could use a quota of access tokens from a users apple intelligence subscription we could offer AI agents for $3-5/mo and they would be actually usable! But if you need to pay for inference costs it has to be $10-20/mo. It's just a lame experience and makes the web the place to build agents even though they'd be more useful on mobile devices.
  - elpakal 1y ago
    Wait, usage for the on-device LLM is free, so why would you charge for it? I think that's just a mental model shift.
cgearhart 1y ago
I mean, they’ve released a framework to access the on device model https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels
- mips_avatar 1y ago
  They're just too small though, maybe in the future you will be able to run a larger model on device or smaller models will become more finetuneable to be actually useful, but the current slate are pointless.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.

dangus 1y ago
Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy. While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined. Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products. Excessive greed obliterates goodwill. You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark. Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    Teen iPhone ownership is up to 88% (!) in the US. I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Except the little issue teens don't appear on the same rate as iPhones hit the store shelves.
  - nunez 1y ago
    Misinformed take IMO. M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches. Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet? Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years. Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door. That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy. Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used. Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure. Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
    - SturgeonsLaw 1y ago
      Vertically-integrated modems are not cool. I mean, they are to me and likely other geeks, but to the general public? Their eyes would glaze over. Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.
      - MrDarcy 1y ago
        You’re not thinking two or three orders out. It’s not about the modem, it’s about reducing the resource allocation of a boring component to make space for increasing the resources of other exciting components, taking the whole into account. iPhone will get some new exciting feature and everyone will wonder how they managed to do it at the price point nobody else can.
jkmcf 1y ago
Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging). While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter. Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1] Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition. [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-3221497/ https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-322149... [2] https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smartphone-repair-market-117485 https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smar... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairability-scores https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  It seems like high app store fees must in the long term ensure that the quality of third party software for any system will be reduced. It will certainly attract less talent, so even that is slow enshittification. The sane thing would have been to use the software ecosystem to sell the platform, and have no fees.

elpakal 1y ago

They announced this at wwdc this year in “Foundation Models”. Developers have access to an on-device llm (not sure how good it is yet).

mips_avatar 1y ago
Yeah but they're just too small to do anything useful with yet. Like we're in this weird state where you can't easily sell usage based pricing through appstore payments (and customers don't really understand usage anyways). So you need to sell access to an agent via a subscription, but your costs are 90% usage based so it's hard to price. If appstore developers could use a quota of access tokens from a users apple intelligence subscription we could offer AI agents for $3-5/mo and they would be actually usable! But if you need to pay for inference costs it has to be $10-20/mo. It's just a lame experience and makes the web the place to build agents even though they'd be more useful on mobile devices.
- elpakal 1y ago
  Wait, usage for the on-device LLM is free, so why would you charge for it? I think that's just a mental model shift.

cgearhart 1y ago

I mean, they’ve released a framework to access the on device model https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels

mips_avatar 1y ago
They're just too small though, maybe in the future you will be able to run a larger model on device or smaller models will become more finetuneable to be actually useful, but the current slate are pointless.