12 ms·

Apple lacks strategic vision

80 points by retskrad 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
[dead]
objektif 1y ago
[flagged]
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  Not sure why the correct answer is being downvoted...
  - wasabi991011 1y ago
    Because it is not substantive
    - objektif 1y ago
      Let us say it is rather concise. It is just that you do not like the idea.
      - drewbeck 1y ago
        It is concise and it is not substantive.
        objektif 1y ago
        It is very very substantive. I am sure just looking at my post you realized that my proposal had significance and was meaningful. May be you are unhappy I did not list down the reasons why. But you already know that if you have slightest clue in this topic.
ZeroConcerns 1y ago
Well, as we speak, Apple is still one of the most valuable companies in the world, shareholder-value-wise and (most importantly) consumer-preference-wise. So, being an absolute Apple-skeptic, I don't blame them for not having a crystal-clear future direction right now. VR/AR? Nah, probably not happening. AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows? And they've got products in all these markets, just not obviously compelling ones. So, a holding pattern is more than warranted at this point. Will this allow anyone to bypass Apple? Possibly, but the chance/hope of Apple front-running everyone else is definitely still alive.
- tz18 1y ago
  The same things Intel said 10 years ago.
  - mrtesthah 1y ago
    Intel is not in the same business as Apple.
  - kayodelycaon 1y ago
    The difference is Intel actually has direct competitors in their market. Apple doesn’t. They created a market for products with a deep vertical integration of software and hardware. And they do it at enormous scale. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are the closest competitors but they license their software and have to compete on hardware across many products.
  - ZeroConcerns 1y ago
    Intel is as similar to Apple as Tata Steel is to Ford Motors. There was a time when the former was trying to get closer to the latter, but I think the folly of that is clear by now...
- kllrnohj 1y ago
  Waiting until others struggle with early pains before swooping in with a polished version after the idea has been demonstrated is also Apple's consistent playbook. They've never been innovators, that's not their strength. They're polishers.
mmastrac 1y ago
With that much cash on hand, Apple has at least a decade of failing before they even begin to worry.
matusp 1y ago
Doing AI just because everybody else is doing AI is not exactly a strategic vision. Going into AI without a clear plan is exactly what they should NOT be doing.
- emchammer 1y ago
  I simply don’t need a lot of AI. I would be very happy with a futuristic UNIX workstation with lots of development on the kind of things that used to get everyone excited about computers.
  - encom 1y ago
    What things? Apple doesn't really cater to the type of customer who's excited about computers, or even UNIX. And I'd argue that Mac OS barely qualifies as UNIX anyway. Yes, if you dig deep enough you'll get the faint smell of UNIX, but the spirit is long gone. Anyone who appreciates UNIX(likes) has much better options available.
- ryanobjc 1y ago
  There was a quote recently where Nadella was trash talking the apple AI stuff, and like yes sure, but also do we not realize that Nadella isn't a random third party CEO, he's literally financially incentivized to maximize AI usage because Microsoft is selling the stuff? It's like listening to the Intel CEO saying that the new apple silicon is alright, but what would REALLY make them go is to migrate back to Intel x86. I'm not really upset at Nadella for this, because it's what he should do. But for everyone else to breathlessly be obsessed with his word and forget his real job as salesman in chief is what's pathetic.
- redserk 1y ago
  I’m satisfied with the very subtle AI implementations in their products. Take the Photos app. I can type any object like “car” and it generally locates photos containing a car. This is far more useful to me than a LLM to generate paragraphs of text on a phone.
  - 1y ago
kayodelycaon 1y ago
Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. Technology is changing rapidly. Apple can easily afford to wait a few years for markets to appear.
tracerbulletx 1y ago
There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
- izacus 1y ago
  That was 5 years ago and the chips themselves are much older than that. They can't skate on that forever, especially since the competition caught up.
  - rogerrogerr 1y ago
    Oh great, where can I buy a non-Mac with the same performance, battery life, thermals, weight, premium materials, and a trackpad that doesn’t feel like styrofoam coated in oil? Since you say the competition has caught up, I assume it’ll be easy to send an Amazon link to the evidence.
    - worthless-trash 1y ago
      Not OP but that's the thing right, you've talked a lot about feels which means there will never be an answer that overcomes the emotion built in your head. I wonder what it would take to win you over, and i don't mean the rational you, which i'm sure you can justify, i mean the irrational 'i'm in love with the product' you.
      - rogerrogerr 1y ago
        It’d take these very objective things: - 7+ hour battery life while running a bunch of Docker containers and IDEs, at the same screen brightness nits I run my MacBook at. - Those things run not-perceptively-slower than on my Apple hardware - No perceptible fan noise while doing the above - The chassis does not creak when I pick it up from one corner - Does not weigh more than double my MacBook I’ll even relax the trackpad requirement and allow a 60Hz HiDPI screen instead of the 120Hz screen my MacBook from four years ago drives while doing all of the above. Is there anything that can check those boxes?
svaha1728 1y ago
I don’t see a compelling reason for Apple to jump into the AI game. The MacBook Pro M4 is a dream to work with, and it works great with Claude Code. Creating quality products is a niche market, but that strategy still has merit.
- acedTrex 1y ago
  I think its moreso their siri strategy is lacking. The personal assistant on IPhone game is what everyone is talking about.
- benoau 1y ago
  I think it's a combination of three things: 1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself 2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc 3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" - > Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.” https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544402/gov.uscourts.njd.544402.1.0_3.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    > AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself It threatens to do that, sure. But the reality will likely be significantly less dramatic. The most likely outcome is AI (like every other hyped technology) finds a niche and that everything else carries on as it was.
benoau 1y ago
> While he has achieved growth, innovation has tanked. The iPhone’s design has barely changed since 2019 The rules for iPhone software are almost unchanged since 2009!
- nine_k 1y ago
  Should it have changed? Does an iPhone have known pain points not fixed for years and years? Something that makes users migrate to Android in anger? Safety razor blades did not change a lot either since the time they were invented; the seem to be in a deep local optimum. Maybe the iPhone is in a somehow similar situation.
  - benoau 1y ago
    Yes it should have changed, but I disagree with your metric on measuring how change is required. By very-rarely revisiting these ~17 year old policies they avoided naturally-increasing their specs to foster and keep-up with more demanding software, and subsequently in the last two generations had to play catch-up and rush to upgrade their entire product line to a higher baseline of memory to support AI and increase their thermal capacities to support their foray into AAA games, leaving billions of active iOS devices as unsupported.
Jerry2 1y ago
I'm convinced that Tim Cook's biggest mistake was not creating an EV. Just look at how Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and BYD have moved into the EV space and have created amazing experiences for their customers. CarPlay paired with American cars is simply few generations behind from what the Chinese companies have done. Yet Apple was early enough and had an EV team but Cook killed it. Even if the 1st gen was crap and didn't live up to the Apple's standards, they should have kept iterating. Now they have nothing new and are just iterating current product lines. Which is fine but it doesn't create new growth. You need new markets to do that.
- slwvx 1y ago
  I think Tim Cook has bad product and design taste [1], and see no reason to think that there are enough good design people at Apple to make a good car. I think they likely got stuck looking at making a car version of the gold Apple Watch Edition [2] and rightly shut the project down. [1] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/07/31/ep-428 https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/07/31/ep-428 [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edition-gold-2015-obsolete-unsupported-beyonce https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edit...
  - cosmicgadget 1y ago
    What sort of backward company allows their CEO to have any design input? Gross.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      There was this guy named Jobs…
- karp773 1y ago
  Wasn't it a self-driving car project first and foremost not just an EV? It was the self-driving part that was not working.
- encom 1y ago
  I would have loved to see an Apple iCar, just to see the soulless, sterile and inoffensive result, and the resulting magical marketing circus. Do you take it to an Apple Store to refill the windshield wiper fluid? Does it use another bullshit proprietary charging port, and will it refuse to charge if I'm not using the supplied Apple cable? Is the bonnet glued shut? Do I need to hold the keyfob just so to unlock the doors? Does the car brick itself if you install 3rd party tyres? Does the horn require an in-app purchase? So many questions.
throwawa14223 1y ago
Apple doesn't need to be in AI because no one needs to be in AI just like no one needs to be in shitcoins.
devmor 1y ago
I think Apple’s strategic vision bas been pretty great. What they’re lacking is quality control. They need a hard-ass that will scream at them when they try to release stuff like liquid glass. It’s been too long since Jobs death and they’ve gotten comfortable pushing out poor quality features.
- st3fan 1y ago
  This is a funny comment. I think quality control should be mostly about undisputable bugs and hardware errors. But something like liquid glass is HIGHLY subjective. Lots of people love it. Others hate it. It has nothing to do with quality. Maybe you mean taste. But that is also super subjective and nobody gets it right for everyone.
  - devmor 1y ago
    I am not referring to taste. I am referring to its function. It had to be revised almost immediately upon entering beta because if you pulled down a menu over text, both became unreadable. Something as stupid as low opacity text UI over text should not have made it out to consumers to start with. It's the kind of thing that Jobs would have burst a blood vessel over.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
Apreche 1y ago
They put the manufacturing and supply chain expert in charge, and that’s what they excel at now. But they lost Jobs and Ive, so now they don’t have the imagination, vision, and design expertise anymore. They did make an attempt with the vision glasses, but it obviously flopped. They succeeded for so long with top-down direction because the top had ideas. I think the best move would be to allow for more bottom-up direction. Give the engineers and designers license to run wild a bit.
Oras 1y ago
Apple has a great chance of being the personal AI machines. If they managed to add inference chip that competes with Groq and similar hardware, they would make much bigger wins comparing to main their own models. Imagine being able to run 32B reasoning models with hundreds of tokens per second on your local laptop.
- st3fan 1y ago
  I'm sure that is the future. But we're still pretty far away from being able to put a 32B model in memory right? The whole industry is on that trajectory. Just give it another decade and the standard for base memory will likely be 64GB or more.
drewbeck 1y ago
I find it very strange to make this judgement by comparing Apple to Microsoft, nvidia, Meta. None of those companies are in the same business as Apple. If Apple fails to “beat” these companies they will still have incredibly popular consumer products and successful services. The competition is only in the mind of business writers and pundits; it maybe matters for the stock market but Apple has never made their stock the main driver of their efforts.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  Apple is in all of their businesses. OS ecosystem, graphics hardware, AR/VR. They don't need to beat these companies outright, but the more they fail to provide value relative to the competition, the more they will see users leave.
braum 1y ago
Tim Cook being replaced is long LONG overdue!
lapcat 1y ago
The author compares Apple to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. Broadly speaking, each company is in "tech", but looking more specifically, they are fundamentally in very different categories of tech. Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about. Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware. Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta. It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.
- ryanobjc 1y ago
  Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately. This isnt obvious at the Apple bottom line because iPhone dominates, but they are growing that market segment! The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.
serjester 1y ago
It seems like the company has stagnated and Cook seems to consistently makes questionable decisions - fighting the app store rulings, doubling down on vision pro, focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI. Maybe they've just calcified - the youngest person on their board is 63. At the end of the day they haven't had a credible threat in over a decade.
- st3fan 1y ago
  "focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI" Apple is like 150.000+ employees. What makes you think they have to choose between OS redesigns and AI. There is probably more than enough talent there to do all the things.
  - astrange 1y ago
    Apple is functionally organized, which means everyone really does have to focus on one thing at a time, because if you can imagine two features needing shared expertise there's often only one set of experts for it.
kettlecorn 1y ago
I think Apple is doing fine and is reasonably well positioned. The pre-Cook years basically established the skeleton of the company and Cook has fleshed it out with flesh and muscle. Now the company is far more of a Goliath with vast resources to help it weather strategic pivots, in addition to a loyal and trusting customer base. Looking ahead to the next decade or so I believe what we're likely on course for is some sort of AI OS. AI will be able to vibe-code apps for you and you'll be able to manage and dispatch individual agents to do tasks. There will be a messy transitionary period that lasts a while from today's software. Apple has a trusting customer base, they have tremendous hardware prowess, they have cross-platform cloud services, and they have design sense to figure out how to establish these new models. I think if a new form of computing emerges Apple basically gets a free first swing at it, in terms of consumer trust. We've seen that with their VR headset, that while a dud was given far more interest and attention than Facebook's and Microsoft's offerings. I do think they show signs of vulnerability as well, even if I think they're less than their strengths. Apple's famously design focused culture seems to be cracking a bit and giving way to more Microsoft / Google style PM-led culture. That can be OK, but I think PM led cultures are sometimes almost too strategic for their own good, like someone you can tell is a salesmen not a friend, and that can result in gradual brand erosion. A simple example of this happening is Apple's website. Like Microsoft the tabs at the top of their website now reflect the company's internal organization, not what makes the most sense to the user. In the Jobs era they insisted that there would be no separate "store" tab, a redundancy because the whole website was a store, but I suspect that changed because the "Store" division within Apple wants that extra prominence. If Apple isn't careful with enough missteps they may dilute their brand and Google / Microsoft may seem just as appealing for early adopters of emerging AI OSs.
david38 1y ago
Wow. This whole comment section is full of armchair CEOs saying how the iPhone, ARM laptops. tablets, and AirPods are just inevitable outcomes. Yet nobody else was able to do it. Microsoft, for all its power and money, couldn’t make it happen. Samsung+Google have come closest, but even then, Apple dominates the profits.
- astrange 1y ago
  Sony is the closest company to Apple (and the original inspiration for it), but they can't do anything like it because they have no taste and no internal standards for simplicity. AirPods in particular really are that good, and compared to them essentially every other audio product is a scam. Japanese companies instead invented something called "hi-res audio" which is just a pledge to only focus on useless features. (The scam prevention systems like rtings' objective headphone reviews are themselves scams because they don't measure actually useful scenarios.)
k310 1y ago
When you're that big, you're allowed to make mistakes without major damage. Microsoft did it for ages. Remember Zune? But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem. And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later" As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine. "Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.
no_op 1y ago
Apple's "strategic vision" for AI is to add a computer use agent (AI assistant) to the OS to perform tasks on behalf of the user, plus contextually surface AI capabilities in many specific contexts they've got utility (copy editing, image generation, photo organization, translation, coding). What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say. If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it. If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.
- the_snooze 1y ago
  I feel that any vision needs to have some actual execution behind it, otherwise it's just a twinkle in someone's eye. "Built for Apple Intelligence" is literally the slogan for Apple's 2024 lineup. The vision is there front and center. But everything they layed out in their vision (and explicitly advertised!) has been a joke so far, falling somewhere between half-baked, trivial, or nonexistent. They've had to pull that ad showing contextually-aware interactions because that's nowhere near ready. https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/the-bella-ramsey-apple-intelligence-ad-that-disappeared-and-why-apple-is-now-facing-a-false-advertising-lawsuit https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/... After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.
jmclnx 1y ago
Boo Hoo, Apple not doing AI. To me not doing AI is a major plus.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tetrisgm 1y ago
Apple is the embodiment of Gunpei Yokoi (creator of the Game Boy and Game & Watch)’s philosophy. “Withered technology, with lateral thinking”. Sure, they find ways to have bleeding edge tech, especially in terms of hardware design. But at the core, their products do not differentiate with bleeding edge software. They aim to surprise and delight by delivering things that are well understood, in a convenient and focused manner. This mode of thinking is incompatible with shipping the latest trend instantly.
wolvesechoes 1y ago
Apple doesn't have that many customers, but has a lot of followers. You can see them in this thread. This says all you need to know about futility of discussing their vision, innovation etc.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Apple has 70% market share in phones in the US and even in other countries a large share of affluent users have iPhones.
  - wolvesechoes 1y ago
    Nice! I am not sure what does it have to do with my comment, but good to know.
    - JustExAWS 1y ago
      1.5 billion active users worldwide and the most affluent user base is not “that many”?
      - wolvesechoes 1y ago
        Think a little about the meaning of the phrase "Apple doesn't have that many customers, but has a lot of followers".
        scarface_74 1y ago
        You don’t consider a quarter of the world’s population to be “that many”?
burnt-resistor 1y ago
There's incessant economic strategy that's heavily optimized but not new product categories or quantum leaps in features or usability. For far too many years, there have been dubious wild UI refreshes and then recently version numbering changes to give the appearance of progress. This is what happens when the CFO is made CEO and there isn't a sufficiently apropos apparent successor. I think sj could've and should've done more to scour the world for a capable, adroit successor who would push design and technology limits without falling into the traps of a current profitable (for now) para-luxury that doesn't contain as much cool and durability as it once did.
flohofwoe 1y ago
Apple not hopping on the AI hype train might actually turn out to be an advantage when the next AI winter arrives ;)
- oumua_don17 1y ago
  Yes and it isn’t just a matter of in but when the bubble pops. Then everyone will be hailing apple as the strategic visionary, fun times!!!
- jajuuka 1y ago
  This reminds me of the "well Blackberry doesn't need to worry. People in business will still prefer Blackberry after the smart phone hype dies down."
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    It all depends on if one believes whether the current one is the last AI hype cycle, or "just another" AI hype cycle. We might just be at the start of the peak of the current hype cycle, or maybe we're already slightly over it without knowing it yet... which would mean that in around 10 years we might know whether there will be another AI winter or not. Until then I'll be happy to wait-and-see and use LLMs as a glorified StackOverflow / search-engine replacement - at least as long as they're still free to use, and it doesn't take too long to get an answer back ;)
sidcool 1y ago
At the risk of seeming a cynic, I can't take such articles seriously. A trillionaire company not being serious about AI does not seem correct. Same was told about Google, and now they are one of the fastest growing AI footprint with soaring revenues.
xnx 1y ago
Apple stock is up ~1400% under Tim Cook. How much better do you think it would do with "strategic vision"?
- jajuuka 1y ago
  This is by and large not because of him though. Tim was handed a golden goose with the iPhone and Mac line. Comparing Apple when Tim took over and Apple today and they are not very different. Still majority of revenue from iPhone sales. They have a couple new products now. The only way he could have failed is due to active sabotage. Apple is "dominant" now in a couple spaces, but if they miss the next thing they will become the next Blackberry.
fullshark 1y ago
All these tech giants lack strategic vision, they build monopolies/moats and offload innovation to startups and then copy/acquire them when they gain traction to keep the party going. There's no vision beyond defending the cashflow and squeezing it.
SebFender 1y ago
Jobs sold dreams - Cook sells accessories. Apple is now a lifestyle brand with a supply chain.

80 points by retskrad 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

oldpersonintx2 1y ago

[dead]

objektif 1y ago

[flagged]

Der_Einzige 1y ago
Not sure why the correct answer is being downvoted...
- wasabi991011 1y ago
  Because it is not substantive
  - objektif 1y ago
    Let us say it is rather concise. It is just that you do not like the idea.
    - drewbeck 1y ago
      It is concise and it is not substantive.
      - objektif 1y ago
        It is very very substantive. I am sure just looking at my post you realized that my proposal had significance and was meaningful. May be you are unhappy I did not list down the reasons why. But you already know that if you have slightest clue in this topic.

ZeroConcerns 1y ago

Well, as we speak, Apple is still one of the most valuable companies in the world, shareholder-value-wise and (most importantly) consumer-preference-wise. So, being an absolute Apple-skeptic, I don't blame them for not having a crystal-clear future direction right now. VR/AR? Nah, probably not happening. AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows? And they've got products in all these markets, just not obviously compelling ones. So, a holding pattern is more than warranted at this point. Will this allow anyone to bypass Apple? Possibly, but the chance/hope of Apple front-running everyone else is definitely still alive.

tz18 1y ago
The same things Intel said 10 years ago.
- mrtesthah 1y ago
  Intel is not in the same business as Apple.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  The difference is Intel actually has direct competitors in their market. Apple doesn’t. They created a market for products with a deep vertical integration of software and hardware. And they do it at enormous scale. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are the closest competitors but they license their software and have to compete on hardware across many products.
- ZeroConcerns 1y ago
  Intel is as similar to Apple as Tata Steel is to Ford Motors. There was a time when the former was trying to get closer to the latter, but I think the folly of that is clear by now...
kllrnohj 1y ago
Waiting until others struggle with early pains before swooping in with a polished version after the idea has been demonstrated is also Apple's consistent playbook. They've never been innovators, that's not their strength. They're polishers.

mmastrac 1y ago

With that much cash on hand, Apple has at least a decade of failing before they even begin to worry.

matusp 1y ago

Doing AI just because everybody else is doing AI is not exactly a strategic vision. Going into AI without a clear plan is exactly what they should NOT be doing.

emchammer 1y ago
I simply don’t need a lot of AI. I would be very happy with a futuristic UNIX workstation with lots of development on the kind of things that used to get everyone excited about computers.
- encom 1y ago
  What things? Apple doesn't really cater to the type of customer who's excited about computers, or even UNIX. And I'd argue that Mac OS barely qualifies as UNIX anyway. Yes, if you dig deep enough you'll get the faint smell of UNIX, but the spirit is long gone. Anyone who appreciates UNIX(likes) has much better options available.
ryanobjc 1y ago
There was a quote recently where Nadella was trash talking the apple AI stuff, and like yes sure, but also do we not realize that Nadella isn't a random third party CEO, he's literally financially incentivized to maximize AI usage because Microsoft is selling the stuff? It's like listening to the Intel CEO saying that the new apple silicon is alright, but what would REALLY make them go is to migrate back to Intel x86. I'm not really upset at Nadella for this, because it's what he should do. But for everyone else to breathlessly be obsessed with his word and forget his real job as salesman in chief is what's pathetic.
redserk 1y ago
I’m satisfied with the very subtle AI implementations in their products. Take the Photos app. I can type any object like “car” and it generally locates photos containing a car. This is far more useful to me than a LLM to generate paragraphs of text on a phone.
- 1y ago

kayodelycaon 1y ago

Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. Technology is changing rapidly. Apple can easily afford to wait a few years for markets to appear.

tracerbulletx 1y ago

There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.

izacus 1y ago
That was 5 years ago and the chips themselves are much older than that. They can't skate on that forever, especially since the competition caught up.
- rogerrogerr 1y ago
  Oh great, where can I buy a non-Mac with the same performance, battery life, thermals, weight, premium materials, and a trackpad that doesn’t feel like styrofoam coated in oil? Since you say the competition has caught up, I assume it’ll be easy to send an Amazon link to the evidence.
  - worthless-trash 1y ago
    Not OP but that's the thing right, you've talked a lot about feels which means there will never be an answer that overcomes the emotion built in your head. I wonder what it would take to win you over, and i don't mean the rational you, which i'm sure you can justify, i mean the irrational 'i'm in love with the product' you.
    - rogerrogerr 1y ago
      It’d take these very objective things: - 7+ hour battery life while running a bunch of Docker containers and IDEs, at the same screen brightness nits I run my MacBook at. - Those things run not-perceptively-slower than on my Apple hardware - No perceptible fan noise while doing the above - The chassis does not creak when I pick it up from one corner - Does not weigh more than double my MacBook I’ll even relax the trackpad requirement and allow a 60Hz HiDPI screen instead of the 120Hz screen my MacBook from four years ago drives while doing all of the above. Is there anything that can check those boxes?

svaha1728 1y ago

I don’t see a compelling reason for Apple to jump into the AI game. The MacBook Pro M4 is a dream to work with, and it works great with Claude Code. Creating quality products is a niche market, but that strategy still has merit.

acedTrex 1y ago
I think its moreso their siri strategy is lacking. The personal assistant on IPhone game is what everyone is talking about.
benoau 1y ago
I think it's a combination of three things: 1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself 2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc 3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" - > Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.” https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544402/gov.uscourts.njd.544402.1.0_3.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself It threatens to do that, sure. But the reality will likely be significantly less dramatic. The most likely outcome is AI (like every other hyped technology) finds a niche and that everything else carries on as it was.

benoau 1y ago

> While he has achieved growth, innovation has tanked. The iPhone’s design has barely changed since 2019 The rules for iPhone software are almost unchanged since 2009!

nine_k 1y ago
Should it have changed? Does an iPhone have known pain points not fixed for years and years? Something that makes users migrate to Android in anger? Safety razor blades did not change a lot either since the time they were invented; the seem to be in a deep local optimum. Maybe the iPhone is in a somehow similar situation.
- benoau 1y ago
  Yes it should have changed, but I disagree with your metric on measuring how change is required. By very-rarely revisiting these ~17 year old policies they avoided naturally-increasing their specs to foster and keep-up with more demanding software, and subsequently in the last two generations had to play catch-up and rush to upgrade their entire product line to a higher baseline of memory to support AI and increase their thermal capacities to support their foray into AAA games, leaving billions of active iOS devices as unsupported.

Jerry2 1y ago

I'm convinced that Tim Cook's biggest mistake was not creating an EV. Just look at how Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and BYD have moved into the EV space and have created amazing experiences for their customers. CarPlay paired with American cars is simply few generations behind from what the Chinese companies have done. Yet Apple was early enough and had an EV team but Cook killed it. Even if the 1st gen was crap and didn't live up to the Apple's standards, they should have kept iterating. Now they have nothing new and are just iterating current product lines. Which is fine but it doesn't create new growth. You need new markets to do that.

slwvx 1y ago
I think Tim Cook has bad product and design taste [1], and see no reason to think that there are enough good design people at Apple to make a good car. I think they likely got stuck looking at making a car version of the gold Apple Watch Edition [2] and rightly shut the project down. [1] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/07/31/ep-428 https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/07/31/ep-428 [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edition-gold-2015-obsolete-unsupported-beyonce https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edit...
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  What sort of backward company allows their CEO to have any design input? Gross.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    There was this guy named Jobs…
karp773 1y ago
Wasn't it a self-driving car project first and foremost not just an EV? It was the self-driving part that was not working.
encom 1y ago
I would have loved to see an Apple iCar, just to see the soulless, sterile and inoffensive result, and the resulting magical marketing circus. Do you take it to an Apple Store to refill the windshield wiper fluid? Does it use another bullshit proprietary charging port, and will it refuse to charge if I'm not using the supplied Apple cable? Is the bonnet glued shut? Do I need to hold the keyfob just so to unlock the doors? Does the car brick itself if you install 3rd party tyres? Does the horn require an in-app purchase? So many questions.

throwawa14223 1y ago

Apple doesn't need to be in AI because no one needs to be in AI just like no one needs to be in shitcoins.

devmor 1y ago

I think Apple’s strategic vision bas been pretty great. What they’re lacking is quality control. They need a hard-ass that will scream at them when they try to release stuff like liquid glass. It’s been too long since Jobs death and they’ve gotten comfortable pushing out poor quality features.

st3fan 1y ago
This is a funny comment. I think quality control should be mostly about undisputable bugs and hardware errors. But something like liquid glass is HIGHLY subjective. Lots of people love it. Others hate it. It has nothing to do with quality. Maybe you mean taste. But that is also super subjective and nobody gets it right for everyone.
- devmor 1y ago
  I am not referring to taste. I am referring to its function. It had to be revised almost immediately upon entering beta because if you pulled down a menu over text, both became unreadable. Something as stupid as low opacity text UI over text should not have made it out to consumers to start with. It's the kind of thing that Jobs would have burst a blood vessel over.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

Apreche 1y ago

They put the manufacturing and supply chain expert in charge, and that’s what they excel at now. But they lost Jobs and Ive, so now they don’t have the imagination, vision, and design expertise anymore. They did make an attempt with the vision glasses, but it obviously flopped. They succeeded for so long with top-down direction because the top had ideas. I think the best move would be to allow for more bottom-up direction. Give the engineers and designers license to run wild a bit.

Oras 1y ago

Apple has a great chance of being the personal AI machines. If they managed to add inference chip that competes with Groq and similar hardware, they would make much bigger wins comparing to main their own models. Imagine being able to run 32B reasoning models with hundreds of tokens per second on your local laptop.

st3fan 1y ago
I'm sure that is the future. But we're still pretty far away from being able to put a 32B model in memory right? The whole industry is on that trajectory. Just give it another decade and the standard for base memory will likely be 64GB or more.

drewbeck 1y ago

I find it very strange to make this judgement by comparing Apple to Microsoft, nvidia, Meta. None of those companies are in the same business as Apple. If Apple fails to “beat” these companies they will still have incredibly popular consumer products and successful services. The competition is only in the mind of business writers and pundits; it maybe matters for the stock market but Apple has never made their stock the main driver of their efforts.

cosmicgadget 1y ago
Apple is in all of their businesses. OS ecosystem, graphics hardware, AR/VR. They don't need to beat these companies outright, but the more they fail to provide value relative to the competition, the more they will see users leave.

braum 1y ago

Tim Cook being replaced is long LONG overdue!

lapcat 1y ago

The author compares Apple to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. Broadly speaking, each company is in "tech", but looking more specifically, they are fundamentally in very different categories of tech. Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about. Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware. Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta. It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.

ryanobjc 1y ago
Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately. This isnt obvious at the Apple bottom line because iPhone dominates, but they are growing that market segment! The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.

serjester 1y ago

It seems like the company has stagnated and Cook seems to consistently makes questionable decisions - fighting the app store rulings, doubling down on vision pro, focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI. Maybe they've just calcified - the youngest person on their board is 63. At the end of the day they haven't had a credible threat in over a decade.

st3fan 1y ago
"focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI" Apple is like 150.000+ employees. What makes you think they have to choose between OS redesigns and AI. There is probably more than enough talent there to do all the things.
- astrange 1y ago
  Apple is functionally organized, which means everyone really does have to focus on one thing at a time, because if you can imagine two features needing shared expertise there's often only one set of experts for it.

kettlecorn 1y ago

I think Apple is doing fine and is reasonably well positioned. The pre-Cook years basically established the skeleton of the company and Cook has fleshed it out with flesh and muscle. Now the company is far more of a Goliath with vast resources to help it weather strategic pivots, in addition to a loyal and trusting customer base. Looking ahead to the next decade or so I believe what we're likely on course for is some sort of AI OS. AI will be able to vibe-code apps for you and you'll be able to manage and dispatch individual agents to do tasks. There will be a messy transitionary period that lasts a while from today's software. Apple has a trusting customer base, they have tremendous hardware prowess, they have cross-platform cloud services, and they have design sense to figure out how to establish these new models. I think if a new form of computing emerges Apple basically gets a free first swing at it, in terms of consumer trust. We've seen that with their VR headset, that while a dud was given far more interest and attention than Facebook's and Microsoft's offerings. I do think they show signs of vulnerability as well, even if I think they're less than their strengths. Apple's famously design focused culture seems to be cracking a bit and giving way to more Microsoft / Google style PM-led culture. That can be OK, but I think PM led cultures are sometimes almost too strategic for their own good, like someone you can tell is a salesmen not a friend, and that can result in gradual brand erosion. A simple example of this happening is Apple's website. Like Microsoft the tabs at the top of their website now reflect the company's internal organization, not what makes the most sense to the user. In the Jobs era they insisted that there would be no separate "store" tab, a redundancy because the whole website was a store, but I suspect that changed because the "Store" division within Apple wants that extra prominence. If Apple isn't careful with enough missteps they may dilute their brand and Google / Microsoft may seem just as appealing for early adopters of emerging AI OSs.

david38 1y ago

Wow. This whole comment section is full of armchair CEOs saying how the iPhone, ARM laptops. tablets, and AirPods are just inevitable outcomes. Yet nobody else was able to do it. Microsoft, for all its power and money, couldn’t make it happen. Samsung+Google have come closest, but even then, Apple dominates the profits.

astrange 1y ago
Sony is the closest company to Apple (and the original inspiration for it), but they can't do anything like it because they have no taste and no internal standards for simplicity. AirPods in particular really are that good, and compared to them essentially every other audio product is a scam. Japanese companies instead invented something called "hi-res audio" which is just a pledge to only focus on useless features. (The scam prevention systems like rtings' objective headphone reviews are themselves scams because they don't measure actually useful scenarios.)

k310 1y ago

When you're that big, you're allowed to make mistakes without major damage. Microsoft did it for ages. Remember Zune? But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem. And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later" As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine. "Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.

no_op 1y ago

Apple's "strategic vision" for AI is to add a computer use agent (AI assistant) to the OS to perform tasks on behalf of the user, plus contextually surface AI capabilities in many specific contexts they've got utility (copy editing, image generation, photo organization, translation, coding). What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say. If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it. If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.

the_snooze 1y ago
I feel that any vision needs to have some actual execution behind it, otherwise it's just a twinkle in someone's eye. "Built for Apple Intelligence" is literally the slogan for Apple's 2024 lineup. The vision is there front and center. But everything they layed out in their vision (and explicitly advertised!) has been a joke so far, falling somewhere between half-baked, trivial, or nonexistent. They've had to pull that ad showing contextually-aware interactions because that's nowhere near ready. https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/the-bella-ramsey-apple-intelligence-ad-that-disappeared-and-why-apple-is-now-facing-a-false-advertising-lawsuit https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/... After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.

jmclnx 1y ago

Boo Hoo, Apple not doing AI. To me not doing AI is a major plus.

deleted 1y ago

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tetrisgm 1y ago

Apple is the embodiment of Gunpei Yokoi (creator of the Game Boy and Game & Watch)’s philosophy. “Withered technology, with lateral thinking”. Sure, they find ways to have bleeding edge tech, especially in terms of hardware design. But at the core, their products do not differentiate with bleeding edge software. They aim to surprise and delight by delivering things that are well understood, in a convenient and focused manner. This mode of thinking is incompatible with shipping the latest trend instantly.

wolvesechoes 1y ago

Apple doesn't have that many customers, but has a lot of followers. You can see them in this thread. This says all you need to know about futility of discussing their vision, innovation etc.

scarface_74 1y ago
Apple has 70% market share in phones in the US and even in other countries a large share of affluent users have iPhones.
- wolvesechoes 1y ago
  Nice! I am not sure what does it have to do with my comment, but good to know.
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    1.5 billion active users worldwide and the most affluent user base is not “that many”?
    - wolvesechoes 1y ago
      Think a little about the meaning of the phrase "Apple doesn't have that many customers, but has a lot of followers".
      - scarface_74 1y ago
        You don’t consider a quarter of the world’s population to be “that many”?

burnt-resistor 1y ago

There's incessant economic strategy that's heavily optimized but not new product categories or quantum leaps in features or usability. For far too many years, there have been dubious wild UI refreshes and then recently version numbering changes to give the appearance of progress. This is what happens when the CFO is made CEO and there isn't a sufficiently apropos apparent successor. I think sj could've and should've done more to scour the world for a capable, adroit successor who would push design and technology limits without falling into the traps of a current profitable (for now) para-luxury that doesn't contain as much cool and durability as it once did.

flohofwoe 1y ago

Apple not hopping on the AI hype train might actually turn out to be an advantage when the next AI winter arrives ;)

oumua_don17 1y ago
Yes and it isn’t just a matter of in but when the bubble pops. Then everyone will be hailing apple as the strategic visionary, fun times!!!
jajuuka 1y ago
This reminds me of the "well Blackberry doesn't need to worry. People in business will still prefer Blackberry after the smart phone hype dies down."
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  It all depends on if one believes whether the current one is the last AI hype cycle, or "just another" AI hype cycle. We might just be at the start of the peak of the current hype cycle, or maybe we're already slightly over it without knowing it yet... which would mean that in around 10 years we might know whether there will be another AI winter or not. Until then I'll be happy to wait-and-see and use LLMs as a glorified StackOverflow / search-engine replacement - at least as long as they're still free to use, and it doesn't take too long to get an answer back ;)

sidcool 1y ago

At the risk of seeming a cynic, I can't take such articles seriously. A trillionaire company not being serious about AI does not seem correct. Same was told about Google, and now they are one of the fastest growing AI footprint with soaring revenues.

xnx 1y ago

Apple stock is up ~1400% under Tim Cook. How much better do you think it would do with "strategic vision"?

jajuuka 1y ago
This is by and large not because of him though. Tim was handed a golden goose with the iPhone and Mac line. Comparing Apple when Tim took over and Apple today and they are not very different. Still majority of revenue from iPhone sales. They have a couple new products now. The only way he could have failed is due to active sabotage. Apple is "dominant" now in a couple spaces, but if they miss the next thing they will become the next Blackberry.

fullshark 1y ago

All these tech giants lack strategic vision, they build monopolies/moats and offload innovation to startups and then copy/acquire them when they gain traction to keep the party going. There's no vision beyond defending the cashflow and squeezing it.

SebFender 1y ago

Jobs sold dreams - Cook sells accessories. Apple is now a lifestyle brand with a supply chain.