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It 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 cre

It 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 ago
Sometimes 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 ago
    Assuming 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.
    - bigyabai 10mo ago
      > once they are ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone else Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
      - rickdeckard 10mo ago
        > Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference. Sorry, I didn't mean to state that Apple A/M-series will be competitive on inference performance compared to other solutions. There is no sufficient data for this at the moment. But this is not the competition I expect to happen. I expect them to stiffle competition and setting themselves up as the primary player in the Apple ecosystem for AI services, simply because they are making "Apple Intelligence" an ecosystem orchestration layer (and thus themselves the gatekeeper). 1. They made a deal with OpenAI to close Apple's competitive gap on consumer AI, allowing users to upgrade to paid ChatGPT subscriptions from within the iOS menu. OpenAI has to pay at least (!) the usual revenue share for this, but considering that Apple integrated them directly into iOS I'm sure OpenAI has to pay MORE than that. (also supported by the fact that OpenAI doesn't allow users to upgrade to the 200USD PRO tier using this path, but only the 20USD Plus tier) [1] 2. Apple's integration is set up to collect data from this AI digital market they created: Their legal text for the initial release with OpenAI already states that all requests sent to ChatGPT are first evaluated by "Apple Intelligence & Siri" and "your request is analyzed to determine whether ChatGPT might have useful results" [2]. This architecture requires(!) them to not only collect and analyze data about the type of requests, but also gives them first-right-to-refuse for all tasks. 3. Developers are "encouraged" to integrate Apple Intelligence right into their apps [3]. This will have AI-tasks first evaluated by Apple 4. Apple has confirmed that they are interested to enable other AI-providers using the same path [4] --> Apple will be the gatekeeper to decide whether they can fulfill a task by themselves or offer the user to hand it off to a 3rd party service provider. --> Apple will be in control of the "Neural Engine" on the device, and I expect them to use it to run inference models they created based on statistics of step#2 above --> I expect that AI orchestration, including training those models and distributing/maintaining them on the devices will be a significant part of Apple's AI strategy. This could cover alot of text and image processing and already significantly reduce their datacenter cost for cloud-based AI-services. For the remaining, more compute-intensive AI-services they will be able to closely monitor (via above step#2) when it will be most economic to in-source a service instead of "just" getting revenue-share for it (via above step#1). [1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-ios-app-upgrading-to-a-paid-subscription https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-ios-app-... [2] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-extension/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-extensio... [3] https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ [4] https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-apple-hopes-to-add-google-gemini-and-other-ai-models-to-ios-18/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-apple-ho...
- GeekyBear 10mo ago
  Look at Magic Cue in this year's Android update > Magic Cue - Magic Cue proactively surfaces relevant info and suggests actions, similar to how Apple's personalized Siri features were supposed to work. It can display flight information when you call an airline, or cue up a photo if a friend asks for an image. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-ai-features/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-ai-feat... Google shipped it, despite it not working. > I spent a month with the Pixel 10's most hyped AI feature, and it hasn't gone well https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-one-month-later-3598684/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o... Likewise Daily Hub didn't work but was shipped anyway. > In our testing, Daily Hub rarely showed anything beyond the weather, suggested videos, and AI search prompts. When it did integrate calendar data, it seemed unable to differentiate between the user’s own calendar and data from shared calendars. This largely useless report was pushed to the At a Glance widget multiple times per day, making it more of a nuisance than helpful. https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-hub-ai-feature-from-pixel-10-phones/ https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-hu... Apple announced that the Siri uodate didn't work well enough to ship, and didn't ship it.
- twsted 10mo ago
  "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
pzo 10mo ago
> 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 wish they did but they don't. They have been for decade so stingy on RAM for iPhone and iPad. There are at current point that only small percent of their userbase have iPhone or iPad with 8GB RAM that somehow can run any AI models even open source and be of any use. Not mentioning they don't compare to big Models. They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger RAM. iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air also can have max 32 GB RAM. And for the current price of cheap online AI where e.g. perplexity provides so many promo for PRO version for like less $10 per year and all ai providers give good free models with enough rate limit for many users I don't see apple hardware like particularly bought because of AI compute-chips - at least not non-pro users. If the loose AI though and because of that won't have good AI integrations they will loose also eventually in hardware. e.g. Polish language in Siri still not supported so my mum cannot use it. OSS Whisper v3 turbo was available ages ago but apple still support only few languages. 3rd party keyboard cannot integrate so well with audio input and all sux in this case because platform limitation.
- rickdeckard 10mo ago
  Their strategy is not to sell you a device that YOU can use for AI, they sell you a device that THEY can use for AI.
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    Some lot of good that's done them. The Neural Engine is dark silicon on most devices I've seen, and now we're getting another product segment with M5's matmul GPUs. To me, it feels like Apple should have supported CUDA from the start. Sell the ARM-hungry datacenter some rackmount Macs with properly fast GPUs, and Apple can eventually bring the successful inference technology to cheaper devices. Apple's current all-or-nothing strategy has produced nothing but redundant hardware accelerators, while Nvidia's vertical integration only gets stronger.
    - 10mo ago
jjfoooo4 10mo ago
The existential hope that all the other players have is that AI will drive adoption of a form factor that replaces the phone. Because if in 5 years the dominant device is still the phone, Apple wins. Consumer hardware chips will be plenty powerful to run “good enough” models. If I’m an application dev, do I want to develop something on top of OpenAI, or Apple’s on device model that I can use as much as a I want for free? On device is the future
- rickdeckard 10mo ago
  In 5 years, the dominant form-factor will still be a phone. This is not the risk. The existential FEAR of the smartphone ecosystem players (Apple, Google) is, that another ecosystem (!) may come along, one that is tighter integrated into the daily lives, is more predictive of the users' needs, requires less interaction and is not under THEIR control. Because this is not about devices, it's about owning the total userbase of that OS-ecosystem. Replacing the Smartphone has been attempted numerous times in the past decade, but no device was able to replace it as a consumption device. Now technology has reached a level of maturity that Smart Glasses may have a shot at this. AND they come along with their own ecosystem as well. Whatever happens, they won't replace all phones within 5 years. But it's possible that such a device would become a companion to an iOS/Android phone and within 5 years gradually eases off users of their phones into that other ecosystem. And that's scary for Apple and Google. Because this is not a device-war, this is an ecosystem-war.
  - jpace121 10mo ago
    How late do you think Apple can come to that party and still wind up winning in the end? Having piles of money when everyone else is lighting it on fire and a brand that would require quite the mistake to ruin gives you a long runway. Is anyone really profiting from AI yet? I know Google basically saved their search monopoly but any one else?
    - bigyabai 10mo ago
      > Is anyone really profiting from AI yet? ...Nvidia? Did you just step out of a cryogenic chamber from 2008? The datacenter business is booming right now, cutting-edge and efficient hardware is needed more than ever. Nvidia and Apple are the only two companies in the world with the design chops and TSMC inroads to address that market. Nvidia's fully committed and making money hand over fist; Apple is putting 2nm silicon in the iPad Pro and asking fucking consumers to pay $1,500 for it. Do you not see the issue with this business model? People will say Apple can't crack the datacenter market, I say bullshit. Apple drafted OpenCL. Every dollar Nvidia makes is money Apple pissed away on trinkets like smartwatches and TikTok tablets.
SoftTalker 10mo ago
Yes, as I said in another thread a few days ago: Apple's strength is in making personal computing endpoint devices for consumers. That's what's in their DNA. They have not done well at anything else.
- qzw 10mo ago
  While that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.
- badc0ffee 10mo ago
  It's worth mentioning that those personal computing devices have enabled them to make bank on cloud services.
  - asdff 10mo ago
    Yeah and part of that specifically came by sacrificing a personal computing endpoint product they used to sell, networked storage, at the sacrificial alter.
    - badc0ffee 10mo ago
      The funny thing is that Time Machine still works, and works better than any local backup solution for Windows that I'm aware of (let alone what comes with Windows itself).
      - platevoltage 10mo ago
        Not to mention, they are generous enough to allow it to work with a non-apple NAS setup. I feel like that would be a different story if they were still in the NAS business.
- snowwrestler 10mo ago
amelius 10mo ago
Like they say: "In a goldrush, sell vendor locked shovels."
- eastbound 10mo ago
  May I remind that iPhone can’t remove the crowds from tourism photos, so all Android users have memories without crowds. So, in a goldrush, sell dirt.
  - buellerbueller 10mo ago
    Although I am an Android user, I am not enough of a narcissist to need to remove the crowds from my tourism photos. So, not all Android users have photos without crowds.
    - causal 10mo ago
      Yeah I mean... I take a lot of joy in the random yet specific faces in those places I visited long ago. It's an important part of the memory for me.
      - ares623 10mo ago
        Having a clear background used to be difficult/expensive, so a photo where you appear to have exclusive access to the area is a high social signal. Now that it’s cheap and easy, those kind of photos will lose its signal. Everyday Syndrome is proven right.
  - platevoltage 10mo ago
    There's a thing I didn't know I was missing.
- fauigerzigerk 10mo ago
  I would say that's what Nvidia is doing. I'm not sure how Apple is enabling anything interesting around AI right now. That's what this bland article is not even touching on. Yes, having missed the boat is great if the boat ends up sinking. That doesn't make missing boats a great strategy. Building huge models and huge data centers is not the only thing they could have done. They had some interesting early ideas on letting AI tap app functionality client-side. But that has gone nowhere, and now everything of relevance is happening on servers. Apple's devices are not even remotely the best dumb terminals to tap into that. Even that crown goes to Android.
hopelite 10mo ago
I agree that this is a reasonable perspective, but from my cursory understanding of the “shakeup” at Apple, I am not sure it is seen that way by the Board and Cook.
- rickdeckard 10mo ago
  Yes, I also see what you mean. I don't want to imply that this is their only play or that it will even work out. The EU (and others) already identified this general scheme of stiffling competition by "brokering" between the consumer and the free market, so outside of the US I'm not even sure how much Apple will be able to rely on such a strategy (again)...
makeitdouble 10mo ago
> 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. I'm not sure where you position Samsung or Xiaomi, Oppo etc. They're competitive on price with chipsets that can handle AI loads in the same ballpark, as attested by Google's features running on them. They're not vertically integrated and don't have the same business structure, but does it matter regarding on-device AI ?
- rickdeckard 10mo ago
  Vertical integration matters for sure, but people often underestimate the scale in which this market is already skewed. - Apple owns more than 50% of this market-segment, the annual sales of iPhones is roughly 200 Million units. In comparison, Samsung Galaxy S-series sits at roughly 20-25 Millions. - Apple's is alone in the iOS ecosystem, while Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo have to compete within the Android space every year. iOS is extremely sticky, which makes a certain volume of iPhones almost guaranteed to sell every year, at a lofty profit margin. In comparison, Samsung always has to consider that the next BAD Galaxy-S might only sell a fraction of the previous one, because users might move horizontally to another Android brand (even to Pixel, a first-party product of their ecosystem provider). So Samsung cannot even make bets based on the sale of 20 million units, they are already at risk to make bets on the initial shipment-volume (~5 millions) because if the device doesn't sell they will have to PAY money to the carriers to get them into the market. Apple has a much lower risk here. If the next iPhone is not catching on, Apple will likely still sell 200mn iPhones in that year, because the ecosystem lock-in is so strong that there is little risk of losing customers to anything else than ANOTHER (then more-profitable) iPhone. So even when assuming a MASSIVE annual drop of 25% in Sales, Apple can still make development bets based on a production forecast of 150 MILLION units. For their supply-chain that's still an average production output of ~400k units per DAY for each component. With that volume you can get entire factories to only produce for you. That's why I can't think of any company in a comparable position. Apple can add hardware to their device and sell the resulting product to the consumer for profit before delivering any actual value with it. If any competitor in the Android space attempts that, just the component costs alone will risk the device to be dead-on-arrival just because "some other Android device" delivers the same experience at lower cost.
wiesbadener 10mo ago
I recently tried to figure out what their offerings currently are. I'm hoping for `efficent but performant AI compute-chips` by Apple ever since they kicked out Nvidia in 2015 (for the ML Models / Exploration parts bellow). It will be interesting to see how good their products will feel in this fast-paced environment and how much legroom (RAM + Compute) will be left non-platform offerings. To my understanding, they market their ML stack as four layers [1]: - Platform Intelligence: ready-made OS features (e.g., Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground) that apps can adopt with minimal customization. - ML-powered APIs: higher-level frameworks for common tasks—on-device Foundation Models (LLM), plus Vision, Natural Language, Translation, Sound Analysis, and Speech; with optional customization via Create ML. - ML Models (Core ML): ship your own models on-device in Core ML format; convert/optimize from PyTorch/TF via coremltools, and run efficiently across CPU/GPU/Neural Engine (optionally paired with Metal/Accelerate for more control). - Exploration/Training: Metal-backed PyTorch/JAX for experimentation, plus Apple’s MLX for training/fine-tuning on Apple Silicon using unified memory, with multi-language bindings and models commonly sourced from Hugging Face. [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/360/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/360/
crazygringo 10mo ago
> They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers. I'm not following. What infrastructure? Pre-paid how? Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid. And what infrastructure? The inference chips on iPhones aren't part of any Apple AI infrastructure. Apple's not using them as distributed computing for LLM training or anything, or for relaying web queries to a complete stranger's device -- nor would they.
- rickdeckard 10mo ago
  > Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid. The AI-capabilities of the devices will be pre-paid, as they will come with the product without delivering any significant value yet. The end-user will bear the cost for that before he is getting anything meaningful in return, because Apple's production volume is at such a scale that they can offset those investments without risking to lose any meaningful sales volume. Other players can't do that because they don't sell 200mn units per year. If they would add on-device inference chips, they would have to significantly increase the device-price, risking to not sell any product
  - crazygringo 10mo ago
    That's not "prepaid", that's just normal building of hardware. And Apple's AI hardware is pretty general-purpose -- it's already widely used for things like dictation, image recognition, all sorts of stuff. Sure they've upgraded their "neural engine" into a "neural accelerator" to optimize it more for LLM's, but that's still incremental. What Apple is also doing is investing server-side, just like everybody else, precisely because phones can't handle the serious stuff: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-servers-new-chip-report/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-serv... So I'm not really seeing the unique Apple advantage here. Samsung is doing the exact same thing with Android, with LLM-optimized silicon.

toomuchtodo 10mo ago

Sometimes 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 ago
  Assuming 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.
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    > once they are ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone else Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
    - rickdeckard 10mo ago
      > Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference. Sorry, I didn't mean to state that Apple A/M-series will be competitive on inference performance compared to other solutions. There is no sufficient data for this at the moment. But this is not the competition I expect to happen. I expect them to stiffle competition and setting themselves up as the primary player in the Apple ecosystem for AI services, simply because they are making "Apple Intelligence" an ecosystem orchestration layer (and thus themselves the gatekeeper). 1. They made a deal with OpenAI to close Apple's competitive gap on consumer AI, allowing users to upgrade to paid ChatGPT subscriptions from within the iOS menu. OpenAI has to pay at least (!) the usual revenue share for this, but considering that Apple integrated them directly into iOS I'm sure OpenAI has to pay MORE than that. (also supported by the fact that OpenAI doesn't allow users to upgrade to the 200USD PRO tier using this path, but only the 20USD Plus tier) [1] 2. Apple's integration is set up to collect data from this AI digital market they created: Their legal text for the initial release with OpenAI already states that all requests sent to ChatGPT are first evaluated by "Apple Intelligence & Siri" and "your request is analyzed to determine whether ChatGPT might have useful results" [2]. This architecture requires(!) them to not only collect and analyze data about the type of requests, but also gives them first-right-to-refuse for all tasks. 3. Developers are "encouraged" to integrate Apple Intelligence right into their apps [3]. This will have AI-tasks first evaluated by Apple 4. Apple has confirmed that they are interested to enable other AI-providers using the same path [4] --> Apple will be the gatekeeper to decide whether they can fulfill a task by themselves or offer the user to hand it off to a 3rd party service provider. --> Apple will be in control of the "Neural Engine" on the device, and I expect them to use it to run inference models they created based on statistics of step#2 above --> I expect that AI orchestration, including training those models and distributing/maintaining them on the devices will be a significant part of Apple's AI strategy. This could cover alot of text and image processing and already significantly reduce their datacenter cost for cloud-based AI-services. For the remaining, more compute-intensive AI-services they will be able to closely monitor (via above step#2) when it will be most economic to in-source a service instead of "just" getting revenue-share for it (via above step#1). [1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-ios-app-upgrading-to-a-paid-subscription https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-ios-app-... [2] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-extension/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-extensio... [3] https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ [4] https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-apple-hopes-to-add-google-gemini-and-other-ai-models-to-ios-18/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-apple-ho...
GeekyBear 10mo ago
Look at Magic Cue in this year's Android update > Magic Cue - Magic Cue proactively surfaces relevant info and suggests actions, similar to how Apple's personalized Siri features were supposed to work. It can display flight information when you call an airline, or cue up a photo if a friend asks for an image. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-ai-features/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-ai-feat... Google shipped it, despite it not working. > I spent a month with the Pixel 10's most hyped AI feature, and it hasn't gone well https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-one-month-later-3598684/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o... Likewise Daily Hub didn't work but was shipped anyway. > In our testing, Daily Hub rarely showed anything beyond the weather, suggested videos, and AI search prompts. When it did integrate calendar data, it seemed unable to differentiate between the user’s own calendar and data from shared calendars. This largely useless report was pushed to the At a Glance widget multiple times per day, making it more of a nuisance than helpful. https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-hub-ai-feature-from-pixel-10-phones/ https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-hu... Apple announced that the Siri uodate didn't work well enough to ship, and didn't ship it.
twsted 10mo ago
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

pzo 10mo ago

> 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 wish they did but they don't. They have been for decade so stingy on RAM for iPhone and iPad. There are at current point that only small percent of their userbase have iPhone or iPad with 8GB RAM that somehow can run any AI models even open source and be of any use. Not mentioning they don't compare to big Models. They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger RAM. iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air also can have max 32 GB RAM. And for the current price of cheap online AI where e.g. perplexity provides so many promo for PRO version for like less $10 per year and all ai providers give good free models with enough rate limit for many users I don't see apple hardware like particularly bought because of AI compute-chips - at least not non-pro users. If the loose AI though and because of that won't have good AI integrations they will loose also eventually in hardware. e.g. Polish language in Siri still not supported so my mum cannot use it. OSS Whisper v3 turbo was available ages ago but apple still support only few languages. 3rd party keyboard cannot integrate so well with audio input and all sux in this case because platform limitation.

rickdeckard 10mo ago
Their strategy is not to sell you a device that YOU can use for AI, they sell you a device that THEY can use for AI.
- bigyabai 10mo ago
  Some lot of good that's done them. The Neural Engine is dark silicon on most devices I've seen, and now we're getting another product segment with M5's matmul GPUs. To me, it feels like Apple should have supported CUDA from the start. Sell the ARM-hungry datacenter some rackmount Macs with properly fast GPUs, and Apple can eventually bring the successful inference technology to cheaper devices. Apple's current all-or-nothing strategy has produced nothing but redundant hardware accelerators, while Nvidia's vertical integration only gets stronger.
  - 10mo ago

jjfoooo4 10mo ago

The existential hope that all the other players have is that AI will drive adoption of a form factor that replaces the phone. Because if in 5 years the dominant device is still the phone, Apple wins. Consumer hardware chips will be plenty powerful to run “good enough” models. If I’m an application dev, do I want to develop something on top of OpenAI, or Apple’s on device model that I can use as much as a I want for free? On device is the future

rickdeckard 10mo ago
In 5 years, the dominant form-factor will still be a phone. This is not the risk. The existential FEAR of the smartphone ecosystem players (Apple, Google) is, that another ecosystem (!) may come along, one that is tighter integrated into the daily lives, is more predictive of the users' needs, requires less interaction and is not under THEIR control. Because this is not about devices, it's about owning the total userbase of that OS-ecosystem. Replacing the Smartphone has been attempted numerous times in the past decade, but no device was able to replace it as a consumption device. Now technology has reached a level of maturity that Smart Glasses may have a shot at this. AND they come along with their own ecosystem as well. Whatever happens, they won't replace all phones within 5 years. But it's possible that such a device would become a companion to an iOS/Android phone and within 5 years gradually eases off users of their phones into that other ecosystem. And that's scary for Apple and Google. Because this is not a device-war, this is an ecosystem-war.
- jpace121 10mo ago
  How late do you think Apple can come to that party and still wind up winning in the end? Having piles of money when everyone else is lighting it on fire and a brand that would require quite the mistake to ruin gives you a long runway. Is anyone really profiting from AI yet? I know Google basically saved their search monopoly but any one else?
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    > Is anyone really profiting from AI yet? ...Nvidia? Did you just step out of a cryogenic chamber from 2008? The datacenter business is booming right now, cutting-edge and efficient hardware is needed more than ever. Nvidia and Apple are the only two companies in the world with the design chops and TSMC inroads to address that market. Nvidia's fully committed and making money hand over fist; Apple is putting 2nm silicon in the iPad Pro and asking fucking consumers to pay $1,500 for it. Do you not see the issue with this business model? People will say Apple can't crack the datacenter market, I say bullshit. Apple drafted OpenCL. Every dollar Nvidia makes is money Apple pissed away on trinkets like smartwatches and TikTok tablets.

SoftTalker 10mo ago

Yes, as I said in another thread a few days ago: Apple's strength is in making personal computing endpoint devices for consumers. That's what's in their DNA. They have not done well at anything else.

qzw 10mo ago
While that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.
badc0ffee 10mo ago
It's worth mentioning that those personal computing devices have enabled them to make bank on cloud services.
- asdff 10mo ago
  Yeah and part of that specifically came by sacrificing a personal computing endpoint product they used to sell, networked storage, at the sacrificial alter.
  - badc0ffee 10mo ago
    The funny thing is that Time Machine still works, and works better than any local backup solution for Windows that I'm aware of (let alone what comes with Windows itself).
    - platevoltage 10mo ago
      Not to mention, they are generous enough to allow it to work with a non-apple NAS setup. I feel like that would be a different story if they were still in the NAS business.
snowwrestler 10mo ago

amelius 10mo ago

Like they say: "In a goldrush, sell vendor locked shovels."

eastbound 10mo ago
May I remind that iPhone can’t remove the crowds from tourism photos, so all Android users have memories without crowds. So, in a goldrush, sell dirt.
- buellerbueller 10mo ago
  Although I am an Android user, I am not enough of a narcissist to need to remove the crowds from my tourism photos. So, not all Android users have photos without crowds.
  - causal 10mo ago
    Yeah I mean... I take a lot of joy in the random yet specific faces in those places I visited long ago. It's an important part of the memory for me.
    - ares623 10mo ago
      Having a clear background used to be difficult/expensive, so a photo where you appear to have exclusive access to the area is a high social signal. Now that it’s cheap and easy, those kind of photos will lose its signal. Everyday Syndrome is proven right.
- platevoltage 10mo ago
  There's a thing I didn't know I was missing.
fauigerzigerk 10mo ago
I would say that's what Nvidia is doing. I'm not sure how Apple is enabling anything interesting around AI right now. That's what this bland article is not even touching on. Yes, having missed the boat is great if the boat ends up sinking. That doesn't make missing boats a great strategy. Building huge models and huge data centers is not the only thing they could have done. They had some interesting early ideas on letting AI tap app functionality client-side. But that has gone nowhere, and now everything of relevance is happening on servers. Apple's devices are not even remotely the best dumb terminals to tap into that. Even that crown goes to Android.

hopelite 10mo ago

I agree that this is a reasonable perspective, but from my cursory understanding of the “shakeup” at Apple, I am not sure it is seen that way by the Board and Cook.

rickdeckard 10mo ago
Yes, I also see what you mean. I don't want to imply that this is their only play or that it will even work out. The EU (and others) already identified this general scheme of stiffling competition by "brokering" between the consumer and the free market, so outside of the US I'm not even sure how much Apple will be able to rely on such a strategy (again)...

makeitdouble 10mo ago

> 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. I'm not sure where you position Samsung or Xiaomi, Oppo etc. They're competitive on price with chipsets that can handle AI loads in the same ballpark, as attested by Google's features running on them. They're not vertically integrated and don't have the same business structure, but does it matter regarding on-device AI ?

rickdeckard 10mo ago
Vertical integration matters for sure, but people often underestimate the scale in which this market is already skewed. - Apple owns more than 50% of this market-segment, the annual sales of iPhones is roughly 200 Million units. In comparison, Samsung Galaxy S-series sits at roughly 20-25 Millions. - Apple's is alone in the iOS ecosystem, while Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo have to compete within the Android space every year. iOS is extremely sticky, which makes a certain volume of iPhones almost guaranteed to sell every year, at a lofty profit margin. In comparison, Samsung always has to consider that the next BAD Galaxy-S might only sell a fraction of the previous one, because users might move horizontally to another Android brand (even to Pixel, a first-party product of their ecosystem provider). So Samsung cannot even make bets based on the sale of 20 million units, they are already at risk to make bets on the initial shipment-volume (~5 millions) because if the device doesn't sell they will have to PAY money to the carriers to get them into the market. Apple has a much lower risk here. If the next iPhone is not catching on, Apple will likely still sell 200mn iPhones in that year, because the ecosystem lock-in is so strong that there is little risk of losing customers to anything else than ANOTHER (then more-profitable) iPhone. So even when assuming a MASSIVE annual drop of 25% in Sales, Apple can still make development bets based on a production forecast of 150 MILLION units. For their supply-chain that's still an average production output of ~400k units per DAY for each component. With that volume you can get entire factories to only produce for you. That's why I can't think of any company in a comparable position. Apple can add hardware to their device and sell the resulting product to the consumer for profit before delivering any actual value with it. If any competitor in the Android space attempts that, just the component costs alone will risk the device to be dead-on-arrival just because "some other Android device" delivers the same experience at lower cost.

wiesbadener 10mo ago

I recently tried to figure out what their offerings currently are. I'm hoping for `efficent but performant AI compute-chips` by Apple ever since they kicked out Nvidia in 2015 (for the ML Models / Exploration parts bellow). It will be interesting to see how good their products will feel in this fast-paced environment and how much legroom (RAM + Compute) will be left non-platform offerings. To my understanding, they market their ML stack as four layers [1]: - Platform Intelligence: ready-made OS features (e.g., Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground) that apps can adopt with minimal customization. - ML-powered APIs: higher-level frameworks for common tasks—on-device Foundation Models (LLM), plus Vision, Natural Language, Translation, Sound Analysis, and Speech; with optional customization via Create ML. - ML Models (Core ML): ship your own models on-device in Core ML format; convert/optimize from PyTorch/TF via coremltools, and run efficiently across CPU/GPU/Neural Engine (optionally paired with Metal/Accelerate for more control). - Exploration/Training: Metal-backed PyTorch/JAX for experimentation, plus Apple’s MLX for training/fine-tuning on Apple Silicon using unified memory, with multi-language bindings and models commonly sourced from Hugging Face. [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/360/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/360/

crazygringo 10mo ago

> They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers. I'm not following. What infrastructure? Pre-paid how? Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid. And what infrastructure? The inference chips on iPhones aren't part of any Apple AI infrastructure. Apple's not using them as distributed computing for LLM training or anything, or for relaying web queries to a complete stranger's device -- nor would they.

rickdeckard 10mo ago
> Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid. The AI-capabilities of the devices will be pre-paid, as they will come with the product without delivering any significant value yet. The end-user will bear the cost for that before he is getting anything meaningful in return, because Apple's production volume is at such a scale that they can offset those investments without risking to lose any meaningful sales volume. Other players can't do that because they don't sell 200mn units per year. If they would add on-device inference chips, they would have to significantly increase the device-price, risking to not sell any product
- crazygringo 10mo ago
  That's not "prepaid", that's just normal building of hardware. And Apple's AI hardware is pretty general-purpose -- it's already widely used for things like dictation, image recognition, all sorts of stuff. Sure they've upgraded their "neural engine" into a "neural accelerator" to optimize it more for LLM's, but that's still incremental. What Apple is also doing is investing server-side, just like everybody else, precisely because phones can't handle the serious stuff: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-servers-new-chip-report/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-serv... So I'm not really seeing the unique Apple advantage here. Samsung is doing the exact same thing with Android, with LLM-optimized silicon.