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Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending
- torginus 10mo agoThis is a weird claim considering Apple has the best price/perf consumer grade hardware for AI
- cmiles8 10mo agoBehind is the new ahead.
- meepmorp 10mo agoMaybe not on the investment/new hotness side, but as a user I'm not clamoring for greater LLM integration. Maybe I'm a Luddite, though.
- dizlexic 10mo agoApple, so hip they're clinging to 2008.
- Lalabadie 10mo agoThey resisted (most of the) LLM boosterism and kept decent focus on SLMs that can run on-device. I think the decision is first a self-serving one that's in line with how they want their devices and services to operate, but it also happens to be (in my opinion) the future-proof way of integrating consumer AI.
- empath75 10mo agoApple is probably going to be an AI consumer and not an AI producer and that is fine. Not everyone needs to be openai or anthropic.
- jtbayly 10mo agoI assume they will produce their own AI once the dust settles, just like they produce their own chips now. Apple has generally been a company that waits, gets criticized for being behind, and then produces a better version (more usable, better integrated, etc), claims it is new, and everybody buys it. Meanwhile a few people moan about how Apple wasn't actually the first to make it.
- trymas 10mo agoWasn’t it the same with covid hiring? While others over hired, Apple was modest in this position. Then everyone needed to significantly downsize, when Apple didn’t.
- throw0101d 10mo agoThis is from a financial market perspective. From a user perspective it may not be a strength: users / customers may expect certain functionality that works accurately and responsively.
- everdrive 10mo agoIn other words, something they cannot get from AI?
- smith7018 10mo agoBeyond Hacker News, I haven't seen anyone actively asking for AI features. People have been complaining about Siri for over a decade but it's not like users are turning against Apple because it isn't using an LLM (yet). Rather, it seems like users are increasingly wary of AI features being shoehorned into products they were already using.
- tim333 10mo agoI'm in that boat - I'm basically fine without AI features. I can think of a couple of hypothetical things that would be nice though - a smart and functional Siri - I never use it at the moment, and maybe a locally hosted LLM that could look through my documents so I can ask where's that spreadsheet with the housing costs etc.
- user34283 10mo agoUsers weary about shoehorned AI features are probably all on Reddit or Hackernews. I certainly never heard anyone complain in real life.
- swatcoder 10mo agoThe people I know in real life, besides those that work in tech and use it for code assistance or for generating never-reviewed archival transcripts of meetings, mostly just laugh at AI foibles and faults and casually echo doomer-media worries about job replacement as a topic for small talk. But admittedly, most of those people are established adults who've figured out an effective rhythm to their home and work life and aren't longing for some magic remedy or disruption. They're not necessarily weary, and they were curious at first, but it seems like they're mostly just waiting for either the buzz to burn off or for some "it just works" product to finally emerge. I imagine there are younger people wowed by the apparent magic of what we have now and excited that they might use it punch up the homework assignments or emails or texts that make them anxious, or that might enjoy toying with it as a novel tool for entertainment and creative idling. Maybe these are some of the people in your "real life" There are a lot of people out there in "real life", bringing different perspectives and needs.
- nehal3m 10mo agoLooking at how others stuff AI into everything they can, user experience be damned, I’m kind of glad Apple was perfunctory in its jump on the bandwagon.
- c16 10mo agoA good candidate for second mover advantage. Let everyone else pay for the research and make the mistakes, find out what works and what doesn't. Apple already has the consumers, they might as well save a few (hundred?) bn in the process and later deploy something which doesn't tell you to glue your cheese to your pizza.
- georgeecollins 10mo agoIn theory yes, but a lot of the organizational reasons Siri is a flop are also similar to the reasons Apple Music loses to Spotify, Apple can't really get it together for ads.. I think Apple is a great company (disclosure : shareholder) but they have gotten so big and so stretched thin can't always take advantage of the opportunities in front of them.
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoIt is a management problem. It’s not because of size. Talk to people who’ve worked there…
- kilroy123 10mo agoThank you. All these people applauding Apple for not jumping on the bandwagon. When in reality, they _wanted_ to but have become so dysfunctional organization wise, they weren't able to. Kind of funny how that worked out. I still think they're really dropping the ball. They could have local models running on devices, interfacing with a big cloud partner (Google, OpenAI, etc.) Make Siri awesome. But no.
- user34283 10mo agoThere is no use case for local models. See Gemini Nano. It is available in custom apps, but the results are so bad; factual errors and hallucinations make it useless. I can see why Google did not roll it out to users. Even if it was significantly better, inference is still slow. Adding a few milliseconds of network latency for contacting a server and getting a vastly superior result is going to be preferable in nearly all scenarios. Arguments can be made for privacy or lack of connectivity, but it probably does not matter to most people.
- linkage 10mo agolol lmao, even They are flat-out incompetent. Siri has somehow regressed over the years and visual intelligence only works in demos. They have the most abominable integration with ChatGPT imaginable. At least the MLX team has been shipping an impressive product.
- dominotw 10mo agonah its fine. i don't need any of that shit, esp not on my phone.
- Lalabadie 10mo agoI'd take a better Siri if it can happen on-device (for speed and privacy). They've been over-promising on Siri's capabilities for a decade at this point.
- FireBeyond 10mo agoApple: "It just works". Me: Nah, it doesn't. I get fine-grained app permissions but there's a certain absurdity in using voice control for your CarPlay app, where Apple Maps is currently navigating you home, and you say "Find me the nearest Panera" and the reply is "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
- biophysboy 10mo agoI genuinely never understood why there was a narrative that Apple is "falling behind" when it comes to AI. They make phones, computers and an ecosystem of services to lock you in. None of this stuff is threatened by AI; with the right integration, it would enhance them!
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoThey delayed a new product category because of poor AI performance (the iPad/HomePod fusion device) And they also got slapped with class action lawsuits for failing to meet promised AI capabilities in products they launched It’s easy to understand from evidence like this why they are falling behind, even if you believe they will pull ahead later
- nightski 10mo agoYou said you don't understand it while explaining it in the second sentence. They don't have a decent integration, hence the vulnerability. Devices that do have a good to great AI experience will win in the long run imho.
- biophysboy 10mo agoWhat integration features are they missing that people use/want? Genuinely not trying to be dismissive or stick my head in sand - I am out of the loop.
- some-guy 10mo agoI do think Siri is particularly behind, but they were behind long before the AI craze. I also understand you cannot simply make Siri “be smart” with an LLM without all kinds of consequences and edge cases to deal with. It’s not the same, but PMs and VPs at my company think we can vibe code our way out of migrating a 1.6 million line codebase to a newer language / technology. Or that our problems can be solved by acquiring an AI startup, whose front end looks exactly the same as every other AI startup’s front page, and slapping a new CSS file that looks like that startup on top of our existing SPA because their product doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an absurd world out there.
- meindnoch 10mo agoI don't want AI on my phone.
- mattkrause 10mo agoI don’t want flaky, in-my-face AI on my phone. I find a lot of the low-key things helpful: I use an app at the same time and place every day, and it’s nice to have a handy one-tap way to open it. It does a decent job organizing photos and letting me search text in screenshots.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- rickdeckard 10mo agoOr, since the stock market is an emotional game (hear me out): Apple hasn't announced anything in the past year which caused comparable excitement and resulted in (further) overvaluation of their company like it happened on Microsoft, nVidia, etc. Now, after a few months (!), reality sets in and those hyped-up investors realize that it's not as much of a short-term game as they told themselves it would be...
- mr_toad 10mo agoApple has a p/e of 38, Nvidia is 46, Microsoft is 34. S&P has historically averaged around 20, so on that metric Apple and Nvidia are more similar than different.
- bell-cot 10mo agoAh, the benefits of having a sober old CEO. And a business model that doesn't need to be buoyed nor stabilized by spinning and hyping a succession of hot new trends.
- JSR_FDED 10mo agoApple doesn’t own a search engine either, and gets $20B per year from Google to direct search queries to them. I hope they adopt the same model with AI - leverage whatever frontier model is best and provide their own privacy infrastructure in front. At some point Apple will figure out a way to provide the right info from your calendar, messages, email etc as context and couple this with a bunch of secure tools for creating calendar entries, etc. Agentic AI will then be something I personally benefit from.
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoThe search arrangement was deemed to be an illegal monopoly https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/judge-puts-a-one-year-limit-on-googles-contracts-for-default-search-placement-215549614.html https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/judge-puts-a-one-year-limi... Limits are now being placed on it as of a couple days ago
- JSR_FDED 10mo agoPerfect, let Apple spread it out over multiple AI providers - if that helps monopolies from forming in AI I’m all for it!
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoAnd the remedy was that Google can keep doing what it’s doing.
- exabrial 10mo agoI mean also, AI is still just a "confident idiot". Even the latest iteration of models are wrong more than half the time.
- ben_w 10mo agoHalf? To make sure I don't use it where it's that bad, would you mind saying what you use it for?
- convenwis 10mo agoThis is the thing I've found amazing about people's complaints about Apple and AI. Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent. People have been complaining for years that Apple isn't shipping fast enough in this area. But if anything I think that they have been shipping (or trying to ship) too fast. There are a lot of scenarios that AI is actually great at but the ones that move the needle for Apple just aren't there yet in terms of quality. The stuff that is at a scale that it matters to them are integrations that just magically do what you want with iMessage/calendars/photos/etc. There are potentially interesting scenarios there but the fact is that any time you touch my intimate personal (and work) data and do something meaningful I want it to work pretty much all the time. And current models aren't really there yet in my view. There are lots of scenarios that do work incredibly well right now (coding most obviously). But I don't think the Apple mainline ones do yet.
- some_random 10mo agoI really wish I lived in the world where Apple didn't ship things until they actually worked, that would be so cool.
- mitchell209 10mo agoI feel like the only people who say that still are people that don't actively or daily use Apple products because macOS Tahoe is a joke. Jelly scrolling on the iPad mini was a noticeable issue that should never have shipped. Antenna-gate on the iPhone 4. iOS 7... etc etc
- some_random 10mo agoThe fucked up thing is that they're typically all-in on Apple and either don't notice bugs or blame themselves.
- FireBeyond 10mo agoiOS 26.1 will regularly blur the "status line" (clock, signal strength, network, battery) while the rest of the phone functions correctly. Just sitting on the home page with the status blurred. Locking, unlocking, switching screen modes, doesn't fix it - just have to reboot the phone. :\
- rickdeckard 10mo agoIt might as well be the visualization of the two strategies: - Everyone else: "We mainly build huge AI compute clusters to process large amount of data and create value, at high cost for ramp-up and operation." - Apple: "We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and operational cost all paid by the consumer." I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy. No matter what they do, they will sell hundreds of millions compute devices for the foreseeable future. They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers. THIS is their unique strength.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoSometimes doing nothing is the winning move.
- rickdeckard 10mo ago...as I wrote, they don't do "nothing". They roll out hardware to consumers they can use for AI once their service is ready, with users paying for that rollout until then. Meanwhile they have started to deploy a marketplace ecosystem for AI tasks on iOS, where Apple has the first right-to-refuse, allowing the user to select a (revenue-share-vetted) 3rd party provider to complete the task. So until Apple is ready, the user can select OpenAI (or soon other providers) to fulfill an AI-task, and Apple will collect metrics on the demand of each type of task. This will help them prioritize for development of own models, to finally make use of their own marketplace rules to direct the business away from third parties to themselves. My guess is that they will offer a mixed on-device/cloud AI-service that will use the end-users hardware where possible, offloading compute from their clouds to the end-users hardware and energy-bill, with a "cheap" subscription price undercutting others on that AI-marketplace.
- rickdeckard 10mo agoAssuming that Apple take 30% rev-share from other AI-service providers on their AI-marketplace, once they are ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone else and still retain a higher profit-margin. But for this to make economic sense, the "AI-bubble" may need to burst first, forcing the competitors to actually provide their services for-profit. Until then it might be more profitable to just forward AI-tasks to OpenAI and others and let them burn more money.
- yatopifo 10mo agoApple's phones are responsible for most of their revenue. The phones are designed to pretty much exclusively interact with social media and take photos. AI doesn't really add anything to that experience since advertisement consumption by humans is the ultimate objective. That's why even though Apple's Siri has been about the most useless assistant in existence for years, Apple isn't in a rush to replace it. It simply doesn't have a big impact on their revenue. Microsoft has been criticized for investing in AI heavily. But it actually makes sense for Microsoft if you consider the nature of their business. The problem is not with the investment per se but with what they got out of it. Unfortunately, Microsoft sucks at product management, so instead of creating useful stuff that users want and are ready to pay for, they created stuff that no one understands, no one can use, and no one wants to pay for. Github copilot is an exception of course. I'm talking more about their Office 365 AI.
- howmayiannoyyou 10mo agoApple: $60b in cash. The revenue from AI is growing at a much slower rate than recurring capex and depreciation is accumulating. This will create distress opportunities that cash-rich companies like APPL may seize. Might be a private equity deal, might be in the public markets as some of the players dip hard after IPO. As this plays out, APPL's silicon has unified memory, power consumption and native acceleration that gives it an edge running SLMs and possibly LLMs at scale. Wouldn't shock me to see APPL introduce a data-center solution.
- quesera 10mo agoNit: stock ticker symbol is AAPL. APPL was the Type Code[0] for an Application, in classic MacOS (1984). 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork#Types
- VirusNewbie 10mo agoA lot of people here are assuming Apple has chosen to sit out the AI race, but I don't believe that's the case. Trying and failing to make a SoTA foundational model is not a strategic move. It's similar to Amazon and Meta, they also have tried and not succeeded.
- vadepaysa 10mo agoThe core of Apple's problem boils down to apathy towards their product quality. I just recently switched from using Siri to Google Gemini in my car. The experience is dramatically better. And this is the case across the board. My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch. Third and final example is how bad Apple's native dictation engine is. I can run OpenAI Whisper models on my Mac and get dramatically better output. As a long time Apple fan who's had everything since before the first iPhone, I feel this apathy towards product quality cannot be disguised as some strategic decision to fast follow with AI.
- enraged_camel 10mo ago>> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch. That's odd because I've used both, along with a bunch other wearables (e.g. Whoop), and I wouldn't give up my Apple Watch for anything. Massively useful, can take calls, make payments, stream music from my Apple playlists, read and reply to messages, and a ton of other things.
- serf 10mo agoThe wearos devices can do all that stuff too, and fitbit is kind of getting blended into those devices piece by piece -- so after years of Fitbit use I can say that the best fitbit device i've had is ... a Pixel Watch 4. I mention this because , at least for the functionalities that you mention, I think the pixel watches are catching up nicely. ... but they still haven't been able to make me feel less stupid talking into a watch for phone calls like some off-brand James Bond wannabe, even if it works great.
- enraged_camel 10mo agoI never talk into the watch, I just put on my airpods and they connect automatically.
- browningstreet 10mo agoYou're arguing about product quality by using product availability examples. Siri isn't competing with Gemini, yet.. Siri is old tech, Gemini is the new tech. Same with dictation. Siri hasn't been updated generationally with SOTA to compete with Gemini yet.. it simply hasn't been updated. This is part of the "slow pace" that the post is talking about (part of, not entirely the slowness though). For example, Amazon updated my old Echo dots with Alexa+ beta, and it's pretty good. I have Grok in my Tesla, and though I don't like Grok or xAI, it's there and I use it occasionally. Apple hasn't done their release of these things yet.
- mark_l_watson 10mo agoI am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a free API call is transparently made to a secure computed environment on Apple’s servers that are documented to preserve privacy. A problem is that even though it is super simple to write Swift / SwiftOS apps to use the system model, I don’t see much evidence that many developers are using the model in their apps.
- bredren 10mo agoHey Mark, I posted about this in another comment [1] but I also think the LLM is decent, and beyond its quality the scale of distribution is a big deal. I had pondered practical implementations of the model since it was announced and have just released today a new native macos application that uses it to summarize Claude Code and Codex conversations as they occur. [2] If you use either of these CLI agents and have time to try the app out and provide feedback, I'd appreciate it! I'm at rob@contextify.sh. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209975 [2] https://contextify.sh https://contextify.sh
- mark_l_watson 10mo agoGood product idea! Nice feature keeping track of Claude Code and codex and doing some syncing. I don’t use Claude code and cancelled my OpenAI subscription a few months ago (I use local models and Gemini) so I am not a possible customer for your product. BTW, I have experimented with storing my own sync info long term for local models - difficult problem.
- bredren 10mo agoFWIW, AI is not entirely locked down in the Apple ecosystem. Sure, they control it but they've already built the foundation of a major opportunity for developers. There's an on device LLM that is packaged in iOS, iPadOS and macOS 26 (Tahoe) [1]. They even have a HIG on use of generative AI [2] Something like half of all macs are running macOS 26 [3] already, so this could be the most widely distributed on-device LLM on the planet. I think people are sleeping on this, partly because the model is seen as under powered. But I think we can presume it won't always be so. I've just posted a Show HN of app for macOS 26 I created that uses Apple's local LLM to summarize conversations you've had with Claude Code and Codex. [3] I've been somewhat surprised at the quality and reliability of Apple's built-in LLM and have only been limited by the logic I've built around it. I think Apple's packaging of an LLM in its core operating systems is actually a fast move with AI and even has potential to act as an existential threat to Windows. [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286/ [2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/generative-ai https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209081
- fennecbutt 10mo agoThere is no major opportunity for developers on Apple's platforms when they can just rug pull you as they please.
- leftouterjoins 10mo agoI can second this. I am nearing launch on an app that uses both the new SpeechAnalyzer and on device LLM and it has met or exceeded my expectations. A longer context would always be nice but then I remember its running on a phone.
- seydor 10mo agoSounds like a broken clock gone right. That only happens once every 43200 seconds
- asdff 10mo agoSeems that this is apples modus operandi since the app store, their last "thing" they've made really. Hype about self driving cars -> apple chases it with apple car -> investors pleased they kept up with the joneses -> apple car is behind or not good enough or whatever -> quietly cancelled -> investors pleased they culled the deadweight. You can replace apple car with vision pro or soon apple intelligence and it will play out the same formula. Luckily it allows investors to profit.
- jerf 10mo agoYou know I would be happy to offer this service to investors for a mere tens of millions of dollars. I'll send you photos of our weekly money bonfire, built with your money, and when you're tired of pictures of your money on fire, I'll simply... stop. Heck, in accordance with the several zeitgeists of our age, I'll even do you the solid of fraudulently generating the money-on-fire pictures with AI, so when you get tired of seeing your money on fire I'll even hand, say, 25% of it back to you, as the result of my tireless efforts to bring value to my shareholders. That's a better return than you'll get from most of these investments!
- johnfn 10mo agoHow does the Vision Pro not qualify as a "thing" Apple made?
- guywithahat 10mo agoThey completely revolutionized laptop processors, were the first to put meaningful health data in watches, and created the first good bluetooth earbuds, but I guess they don't do things anymore.
- ajross 10mo ago> They completely revolutionized laptop processors Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours. Apple absolutely ran ahead of the industry technically, by a shocking amount. But in a commoditized field that isn't sensitive to quality metrics, that doesn't generate sales. There's a reason why the iPhone remains the dominant product but macs are stuck at like 9% market share, and it's not the technlogy base that is basically the same between them. Laptops are done, basically. It's like arguing about brands of kitchen ranges: sure, there are differences, but they all cook just fine.
- fennecbutt 10mo agoLmao their "slow AI pace"? After they banged out uncooked AI features that generated fake headlines and messages for people?
- arisAlexis 10mo agoswetenning the pill of a lost train
- mr_toad 10mo ago> Shares of Apple Inc. were battered earlier this year as the iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an artificial intelligence strategy. Everyone’s shares were battered earlier this year, and it had nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with tariffs.
- willis936 10mo agoI think it was mostly Buffett's dumping. He's a smart guy and the world's best investor, but I think this was a mistake. The winning play is long on Apple, short on Microsoft.
- throwaway613745 10mo ago[dead]
- 827a 10mo agoI would bet significant money that, within two years, it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company. I can explain more in-depth reasoning, but the most critical point: Apple builds the only platform where developers can construct a single distributable that works on mobile and desktop with standardized, easy access to a local LLM, and a quarter million people buy into this platform every year. The degree to which no one else on the planet is even close to this cannot be understated.
- twiddlethumbs 10mo agoAnd is any of that based on anything other than “AI is coming really soon!”?
- typewithrhythm 10mo agoI don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment. From there, AI integration is enough of a different paradigm that the existing apple ecosystem is not a meaningful advantage. Best case Apple is among the fast copies of whoever is actually innovative, but I don't see anything interesting coming from apple or apple devs anytime soon.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago> I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. Until the first Cambridge Analytica-sized privacy story hits a major cloud LLM provider, maybe.
- rickdeckard 10mo ago> All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment. With "Apple Intelligence" it looks like Apple is setting themselves up (again) to be the gatekeeper for these kind of services, "allow" their users to participate and earn a revenue share for this, all while collecting data on what types of tasks are actually in high-demand, ready to in-source something whenever it makes economic sense for them...
- lumost 10mo agoCompanies with strong distribution have an option to be the "last" player in a market and simply force their way in. If Apply makes a "default" LLM which is as good or better than all premium LLM options... then you would obviously choose to use that over paying for a ChatGPT subscription. Apple could probably upcharge the phone by $200 for this privilege. Alternatively, they may do what they did with search and just get paid not to add an LLM chat functionality.
- rconti 10mo agoBeing behind in AI is not the same thing as not spending a lot on AI.
- YetAnotherNick 10mo ago> Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its shares tumbled 18% through the end of June. That has reversed since then, with the stock soaring 35%, while AI darlings like Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. slid into the red and even Nvidia Corp. underperformed. The S&P 500 Index rose 10% in that time, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index gained 13%. Why do papers do this. I can achieve any numbers by cherry picking the date for the random brownian motion.
- mvkel 10mo agoIt's telling that one of the leaders in ai, Google, also can't seem to ship an assistant that is better than Siri. Maybe it's not the ai that's the problem.
- darknavi 10mo agoAnd the bar is pretty low isn't it? Now days with "Apple Intelligence" enabled, half of a siri response is "I found this with ChatGPT, verify important information". As far as user experience goes, it reminds me of those stupid warnings every time you start a car that basically says "drive safe!"
- mvkel 10mo agoIt's infuriating. What's worse, we're part of the problem, with Apple shipping record units each quarter.
- elfbargpt 10mo agoI think one of Apple's strengths since Tim Cook took over is their ability to avoid "gimmicks". As much criticism as people have of apple for not innovating on the iPhone, I appreciate their ability to not screw products up. I'm not saying AI is a gimmick, but the caution they show is a good quality I think
- culi 10mo agoTheir latest OS design shows they are quite capable of falling for gimmicks
- piskov 10mo agoThe guy responsible is fortunately out of Apple
- makeitdouble 10mo agoThat would be fine if he was a lone wolf and nobody supported his vision, or if his whole org moved out with him.
- outside1234 10mo agoI have no idea what's going on but Apple is an extremely top down place. Its entirely possible that Apple pivots on a dime after the departure of the baffoon.
- Eric_WVGG 10mo agoSeveral of his “lieutenants” are following, actually. His successor Stephen Lemay has exactly the kind of pedigree a person who cares about UI could ask for. There's a lot to be optimistic about. https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
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- zmmmmm 10mo agoI'm bullish on Apple in the long term for AI. Don't get me wrong, they will always suck at it. But it seems obvious to me that we're sailing up to an enshittification cliff in the very near future. Every provider is going to start trying to prove they are making money from consumers and that means one thing: ads, ads ads. Or worse, invisible influence you can't even tell is there. There is going to be a trust crisis and that's going to send people flocking to on-device / local / trustworthy AI that will land right in Apple's lap.
- Razengan 10mo agoI just wish Siri fucking worked for just fucking ONCE when I actually fucking need it. Has it ever, for anyone?
- slater 10mo agoYes.
- Razengan 10mo ago3 AM. Watching a video on the Mac. I'm on bed, the Mac's on the desk. iPhone and iPad charging next to the Mac. "Hey Siri, put the Mac to sleep" iPhone blares up with a cacophony loud enough to wake the graveyard several blocks over, even though it's set to silent: "IT LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVEN"T SET UP ANY SMART HOME ACCESSORIES BLAHABHLABHALDHFLDSFHELWRHWELRHWELHROUWEHROWEHRQWLR$P#@U4" Fuck you Tim Cook.
- 6510 10mo agoMeanwhile in China.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200819
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- coolcoder613 10mo agoIndeed, the only winning move is not to play.
- sgroppino 10mo agoNice quote from Joshua, the epic AI in War Games, followed by “How about a nice game of chess?"
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoLetting the market sort itself out then maybe buy whoever's left and aligns the most with their products is pretty obvious strategy.
- hinkley 10mo agoI don't know why this is a surprise to anyone. Apple is famous for watching peanut butter and chocolate makers and swooping in with Reece's Peanut Butter cups while everyone scratches their head because they've had better chocolate and better peanut butter so what's the deal? When and if Apple pulls the plug on AI, we can declare it dead for this cycle. See you all again in 2040.
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- ebbi 10mo agoI disagree with that analogy. Apple as the 'Reece's Peanut Butter Cups' in this analogy just screams of some bias.
- napierzaza 10mo ago[dead]
- firecall 10mo agoFor anyone thats been around for more than one hype cycle, this is not a surprise. Apple clearly takes a 'Measure Twice, Cut Once' approach. It seems to me that tech and business analysts mostly supply uninformed nonsense opinions around whatever the popular rhetoric of the day is to generate more clicks :-/ How many times do we have to listen to tech and business analysts talking about lacklustre iPhone releases and how Apple hasn't done anything interesting since the original iPhone? But yet the iPhone 17 is flying off the shelves in China.
- SilentM68 10mo agoSo, basically Apple will be victorious in the AI Wars by sheer inaction;)
- zombiwoof 10mo ago[dead]
- VerifiedReports 10mo agoAnd I think we're all weary of the whining about Apple being "behind on AI." Consumers of Apple's core businesses do not stand to gain much, if anything, from so-called "AI." The failure of pundits and "analysts" to recognize and call that out just testifies to their laziness. They can never say exactly WHY or HOW this "behindness" is hindering Apple or its user base. It's sad that Apple has capitulated to them at all by even talking about "AI."
- drdaeman 10mo agoThe part about not gaining much is questionable. “AI” is a semi-meaningless misnomer, of course, but e.g. a natural language interface is something Apple had tried since forever (Siri) and always failed to get functional and useful. So this part of “not gaining much” is probably false. Paired with every vendor’s love to tweak things at random - including Apple, a natural language (if done right) could be a meaningful solution to UI consistency (“Hey Siri, I dunno where the goddamn toggle is located this time but stop making music auto-play every other time phone connects to CarPlay” - real use case with real value). Yet, as usual, Siri lacks in intelligence and capabilities. I’m pretty sure it’s not some genius wisdom of Tim, or whoever. Apple simply didn’t do any user-facing useful shit (they did some interesting stuff for developers, but that’s a different story), plastered some generative emojis to tick the “AI” checkbox, and now people praise them for that.
- VerifiedReports 10mo agoWell, I can't fault you for suggesting that "AI" could be a workaround for Apple's derelict "design" of late. And, I can see value in an all-local language model ingesting everything on my computer so I can find things. But let's face it: People managing large amounts of stuff on their computers and wanting to search it are a shrinking minority now. But I still think the real-life payoff is minimal. A better Siri? Maybe. But if you look at Google's "AI" search results, they suck ass. They don't even hold up to what could be accomplished with straight-up parsing and searching. Here's an example I just got today, when I searched for "how much is a DeLorean worth?" (Wow, Google has now disabled copying from search results. What petty jagoffs, after THEY copy and regurgitate others' work) "A DeLorean DMC-12's value varies widely, from around $18,000 for project cars to over $50,000 for excellent condition models, with the nationwide average being about $83,725."
- andy_ppp 10mo agoThey could be selling shovels and be making a killing
- flakiness 10mo agoApple didn't over-hire like other big tech and it didn't have to do the huge layoffs unlike others. This has similar smell - It won't win big in any ways, but the damage of bubble burst can be much less significant to them than to the peers.
- bibimsz 10mo agoneither indus nor levantine, the last holdouts
- maxaw 10mo agoMy beloved boomer dad’s windows laptop died the other week. After being on the fence about buying him a macbook (which I have and love) because I know he will struggle to switch user interfaces, I ended up pulling the trigger after seeing yet another news article about more aggressive copilot integration. I’m not letting him anywhere near an agent which can control his laptop, not from Microsoft which has huge incentive to recover their ai bet in whatever way possible
- veunes 10mo agoSooner or later, everyone will realize Apple isn't building another ChatGPT - they don't need to. They're working on the world's largest distributed inference network. With hundreds of millions of Apple Silicon devices, they are the only ones who can afford to run AI features at zero marginal cost to themselves - using the user's electricity and hardware. While Google and Microsoft burn billions on data centers, Apple is simply offloading the compute to our pockets. In the long run, when AI becomes a commodity, the winner will be whoever has the lowest transaction cost - and in that game, Apple simply has no competition
- aurareturn 10mo agoNah. Local LLMs won't be big until maybe 10-20 years later. Phone devices will never run a model better than what ChatGPT runs in the cloud. People want to use the best models. By the time local LLMs are good enough, OpenAI will already have an iPhone competitor.
- mock-possum 10mo agoAll I really want from Apple is to be able to talk to Siri as effectively as I can with ChatGPT via advanced voice chat. Is that so much to ask?
- mengmota 10mo agoApple's take was always have been right and so will be.
- simonsarris 10mo agoInterestingly, their slow 2020 hiring pace became a strength as the 2022 post-ZIRP layoff bloodbath hit as well. Though I don't know if they've had layoffs since.
- storus 10mo agoApple has missed the train, from high-end computing they ended up as a low-end ML company (the most expensive MacStudio is way cheaper than a proper Nvidia card), and now some analyst is seeing virtue in that? They completely missed out on making serious money from AI and now that opportunity might be gone forever if AI cools down.