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Just my opinion: Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. What Apple

by nilkn 8mo ago

Just my opinion: Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big seller. It's why they're investing in their own silicon. This strategy tends to yield unexpected wins, like the Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud, or the Mac Studio becoming arguably the best way to run local AI models (a nascent space that is on the cusp of becoming genuinely relevant), or the MacBook Pro becoming by far the best laptop in the world for productivity in the AI age (and it's not even close). Your conclusion is that they're going to be left behind, but the evidence is that they're already well ahead in the areas that are core to their business. They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. Nobody else can do what they can in the fusion of hardware, software, and materials as long as they stay focused. Where they genuinely slipped up was their marketing -- an unusual mistake for Apple. And that does indeed lie with the CEO.

torben-friis 8mo ago
>They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security. That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.
- nilkn 8mo ago
  You're not wrong, but you can also get most (or even nearly all) of that right now today on any device by just getting a Google AI subscription. Gemini already does most of that through its own personal intelligence feature. You do need to use Gmail at minimum for it to be useful, but the vast majority of iPhone users do already.
strangeattractr 8mo ago
I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.
- nilkn 8mo ago
  I think you're assuming that no durable or at-scale changes in compute form factor will occur, so that their success pretty much just solely comes down to differentiated iPhone software features. That seems unlikely to me. I don't see phones going away in the next decade like some have predicted, but I do think new compute form factors are going to start proliferating once a certain technological "take off" point is reached. The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
- snowwrestler 8mo ago
  Google is not really a competitor to Apple in devices. I mean, they sell devices, but at a way lower volume. The Pixel phone is essentially a tech demo that exists to push their Android partners into making more competitive devices themselves. The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services. Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.
jannyfer 8mo ago
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This was true maybe a decade ago, but not so now (under the watch of Tim Cook). You listed Mac hardware becoming popular in the age of AI as examples of "unexpected wins". Maybe that's true (I don't know if it is) - but Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue. Apple has become an iPhone company (50% of revenue) that sells services (26% of revenue). And AI can eat away at both. If Siri sucks so hard that people switch away, that would also reduce Services revenue from lost App Store revenue cuts. If Google bundles Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos storage, people might cancel their iCloud subscriptions. I think the parent comment was making the point that Tim Cook's Apple has missed the boat and it doesn't show signs that it's going to catch the next wave. I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscription. But in 2030, if my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting, have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting, and Siri can still only set a timer for 5 minutes, then I might actually switch.
- tokioyoyo 8mo ago
  I’m not sure how to say it without sounding like an Apple fanboy, but Tim Cook has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Every single year people have been whining how “he’s not visionary and etc.”, but at some point you have to give him some credit. Apple of 2026 has completely different landscape versus apple of 2010/earlier. Scaling from millions to billions of sales is incredibly hard, and he’s been able to accomplish it.
- tarsinge 8mo ago
  I get your general point but specifically regarding : > have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting Slack already has this integrated and it works quite well.
  - coldtea 8mo ago
    Also, since AI will mean most are just let go, why would they need meeting minutes? AI would be so crucial as to be the make or break phone/laptop feature, but people would still have meetings? At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.
microtonal 8mo ago
I agree on that they should focus on hardware, software, UX, etc. I think the problem of current Apple management and especially Tim Cook is that they want to squeeze out as much profit as possible and they see AI as another _Services_ profit center. A better Apple would say AI is just an app and provide extension points into the OS so that users can plug their favorite LLM, anything from ChatGPT to Mistral, but in a privacy-preserving way if the user wants. While that would lead to less profit in the short term, Apple's moat was its UX and halo effects (cynically: social signalling). The draw to Apple may last for a bit during enshittification of the platform, but long-term the brand value is more important than short-term profits.
- amelius 8mo ago
  Yes, from a purely business perspective they should let others do the work for them and then pull a Sherlock down the line.
halapro 8mo ago
> It's not core to their business You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone: I'm road tripping to XYZ tomorrow, 10 am to 5 pm. and have my phone become a guide for the day, including stops it knows I like and hotel in my price range with the amenities it knows I need. If I get hungry it just slips in a stop wherever I ask. This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone. If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.
- nottorp 8mo ago
  Even if that worked, how do you know it will choose the stops you like and not the ones that paid Apple more to be featured? How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it? And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that? Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
- written-beyond 8mo ago
  I saw a video of a Chinese phone that did something like that. Their implementation was a privacy and security nightmare but basically it shared a active feed of your screen with an LLM and would literally tap, type and swipe to achieve your objective. Like order these oodles from this app, it would only interrupt it's actions at payment processing screens. Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.
  - nandomrumber 8mo ago
    Maybe rising up against the machines will come to be what finally unites humanity. Then we can get on with exploring the galaxy. Butlerian jihad.
seec 8mo ago
Those Macs you are talking about are still very niche and mostly used by loyal customers that do basic/common things or very vocal fanboys who always find a way to shill for whatever Apple comes up with, no matter how flawed and lackluster the product is. Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS. But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.
- nilkn 8mo ago
  I think you’re underestimating or not understanding why Macs have taken off so much for AI. It has nothing to do with fanboys shilling for Apple. You can get a MBP today with 128GB of unified memory or a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. Then you get to run MacOS, which is vastly superior to Windows for AI productivity and far more accessible/convenient than Linux even today. There’s a reason so many AI apps are Mac native first (or exclusively). No other company offers so much memory and convenience in a consumer product for these purposes. These have become genuinely unique products with almost no competition, and by all accounts it seems Apple is just getting started in this direction.
  - seec 8mo ago
    Local AI is very limited and mostly a waste of time/capital compared to subscribing to access the good stuff provided by the key players. But by all means, throw more money at Apple for a problem they can't even solve themselves. If AI was that good on Apple hardware, they wouldn't need to buy access from their competitors to finally make Siri not completely useless.
    - nilkn 8mo ago
      Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.
lxgr 8mo ago
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers? > They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.
- pjmlp 8mo ago
  Well-crafted products and user interfaces like butterfly keyboards, antennas, Leopard, Tahoe? Or maybe Pippin, A/UX, OpenDoc, Copland?
  - lxgr 8mo ago
    If your high-profile misses become the subject of both memes and major news stories I'd say you are still the benchmark in UX, yes. Even "Apple design has peaked" is a meme if you've been following this stuff for more than just one decade. (Sure, one day it'll most likely be true, but that doesn't make everyone predicting it now a prophet retroactively.)
    - pjmlp 8mo ago
      Ah, then it applies to Microsoft as well.
Noaidi 8mo ago
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. And they’re failing at that too! I purchased an iPhone 16e thinking it would be like the iPhone SE, but what I got was worse than an SE. They used an old chip and I can tell you this phone cannot keep up with liquid glass, which they forced me to use and did not let me roll back. And now we have the iPhone 17 suffering from chipping on the back of the phones. The only reason Apple is succeeding is the only other thing is worse. And yes, I’m talking about android.
- zimpenfish 8mo ago
  > [the iPhone 16e] used an old chip What? It has the same RAM size, same RAM speed, and same chip[0] (minus one (1) GPU core [6c, 4g, 16n]) as the iPhone 16 [6c, 5g, 16n] (and almost the same as the A18 Pro [6c, 5g, 16n] minus the enhanced memory bandwidth and video encoding, afaict.) (I mean, sure, it's an old chip compared to the 17 but then it's a generation older and saying "they used an old chip" is a nonsense truism.) [0] https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,iphone-16,iphone-16-pro https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16...
vaxman 8mo ago
Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed). https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.) PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286 https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.
- NetMageSCW 8mo ago
  Counterpoint the iPad has been brilliant with it’s software and implementation and that is the reason it essentially has the tablet market to itself, is the only tablet with a third-party ecosystem, and it continues to grow. The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.
avidphantasm 8mo ago
I use Siri to set alarms on my watch, that’s it. I don’t want much more than that.
b112 8mo ago
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. did best. did.
- tobr 8mo ago
  Their hardware and integration between hardware and software is extremely good, still. The software on its own has gone downhill for a long time.
graemep 8mo ago
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. Does the management know this? From whose point if view is it not core? I very much doubt any tech business not focusing on AI at the moment is maximising their share price.
HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in... One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill. It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in. For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things. So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?
- nilkn 8mo ago
  My take is that the future will look something like this: - You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads. - This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.). - You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses. - Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though. For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above? Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.
QuantumGood 8mo ago
Similarly, they didn't need to solve search.
runjake 8mo ago
> This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI They aren’t. Mixed reality is getting little attention. It is in the “it remains a product in our line-up” phase. They are virtually all-in on AI. Their acquisitions have been AI-focused. It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with are the same issues their competitors are dealing with and is isn’t stopping them from releasing. > Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud This isn’t why people are buying Mac minis. They’re buying them because that’s what the OpenClaw author was using, they’re cheap, and they run macOS, so the tools within OpenClaw can get deeper Apple API access to Calendar, iMessage, etc. In the vast majority of cases, OpenClaw users aren’t using local models. They’re using “cloud” models like GPT and Claude.
- NetMageSCW 8mo ago
  >It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with aren’t stopping their competitors from releasing. No, it’s a good sign that Apple has re-learned the lessons they used to take to heart but sometimes forget when they panic and scramble. Apple used to always be late to most changes but when they arrived, if it was with a cohesive answer that worked well. They’ve been scrambling instead and hopefully this is a sign they’ve realized that.
  - runjake 8mo ago
    Unfortunately, this does not reflect what’s going on inside the AI/ML+Siri groups. It’s missteps and internal wars and fumbles all the way down. I’m fully expecting the stuff that was reported to supposed to show up in 26.4 being pushed to 27.4 or later. It’s that bad.

by nilkn 8mo ago

torben-friis 8mo ago

>They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security. That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.

nilkn 8mo ago
You're not wrong, but you can also get most (or even nearly all) of that right now today on any device by just getting a Google AI subscription. Gemini already does most of that through its own personal intelligence feature. You do need to use Gmail at minimum for it to be useful, but the vast majority of iPhone users do already.

strangeattractr 8mo ago

I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.

nilkn 8mo ago
I think you're assuming that no durable or at-scale changes in compute form factor will occur, so that their success pretty much just solely comes down to differentiated iPhone software features. That seems unlikely to me. I don't see phones going away in the next decade like some have predicted, but I do think new compute form factors are going to start proliferating once a certain technological "take off" point is reached. The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
snowwrestler 8mo ago
Google is not really a competitor to Apple in devices. I mean, they sell devices, but at a way lower volume. The Pixel phone is essentially a tech demo that exists to push their Android partners into making more competitive devices themselves. The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services. Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.

jannyfer 8mo ago

> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This was true maybe a decade ago, but not so now (under the watch of Tim Cook). You listed Mac hardware becoming popular in the age of AI as examples of "unexpected wins". Maybe that's true (I don't know if it is) - but Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue. Apple has become an iPhone company (50% of revenue) that sells services (26% of revenue). And AI can eat away at both. If Siri sucks so hard that people switch away, that would also reduce Services revenue from lost App Store revenue cuts. If Google bundles Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos storage, people might cancel their iCloud subscriptions. I think the parent comment was making the point that Tim Cook's Apple has missed the boat and it doesn't show signs that it's going to catch the next wave. I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscription. But in 2030, if my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting, have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting, and Siri can still only set a timer for 5 minutes, then I might actually switch.

tokioyoyo 8mo ago
I’m not sure how to say it without sounding like an Apple fanboy, but Tim Cook has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Every single year people have been whining how “he’s not visionary and etc.”, but at some point you have to give him some credit. Apple of 2026 has completely different landscape versus apple of 2010/earlier. Scaling from millions to billions of sales is incredibly hard, and he’s been able to accomplish it.
tarsinge 8mo ago
I get your general point but specifically regarding : > have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting Slack already has this integrated and it works quite well.
- coldtea 8mo ago
  Also, since AI will mean most are just let go, why would they need meeting minutes? AI would be so crucial as to be the make or break phone/laptop feature, but people would still have meetings? At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.

microtonal 8mo ago

I agree on that they should focus on hardware, software, UX, etc. I think the problem of current Apple management and especially Tim Cook is that they want to squeeze out as much profit as possible and they see AI as another _Services_ profit center. A better Apple would say AI is just an app and provide extension points into the OS so that users can plug their favorite LLM, anything from ChatGPT to Mistral, but in a privacy-preserving way if the user wants. While that would lead to less profit in the short term, Apple's moat was its UX and halo effects (cynically: social signalling). The draw to Apple may last for a bit during enshittification of the platform, but long-term the brand value is more important than short-term profits.

amelius 8mo ago
Yes, from a purely business perspective they should let others do the work for them and then pull a Sherlock down the line.

halapro 8mo ago

> It's not core to their business You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone: I'm road tripping to XYZ tomorrow, 10 am to 5 pm. and have my phone become a guide for the day, including stops it knows I like and hotel in my price range with the amenities it knows I need. If I get hungry it just slips in a stop wherever I ask. This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone. If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.

nottorp 8mo ago
Even if that worked, how do you know it will choose the stops you like and not the ones that paid Apple more to be featured? How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it? And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that? Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
written-beyond 8mo ago
I saw a video of a Chinese phone that did something like that. Their implementation was a privacy and security nightmare but basically it shared a active feed of your screen with an LLM and would literally tap, type and swipe to achieve your objective. Like order these oodles from this app, it would only interrupt it's actions at payment processing screens. Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.
- nandomrumber 8mo ago
  Maybe rising up against the machines will come to be what finally unites humanity. Then we can get on with exploring the galaxy. Butlerian jihad.

seec 8mo ago

Those Macs you are talking about are still very niche and mostly used by loyal customers that do basic/common things or very vocal fanboys who always find a way to shill for whatever Apple comes up with, no matter how flawed and lackluster the product is. Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS. But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.

nilkn 8mo ago
I think you’re underestimating or not understanding why Macs have taken off so much for AI. It has nothing to do with fanboys shilling for Apple. You can get a MBP today with 128GB of unified memory or a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. Then you get to run MacOS, which is vastly superior to Windows for AI productivity and far more accessible/convenient than Linux even today. There’s a reason so many AI apps are Mac native first (or exclusively). No other company offers so much memory and convenience in a consumer product for these purposes. These have become genuinely unique products with almost no competition, and by all accounts it seems Apple is just getting started in this direction.
- seec 8mo ago
  Local AI is very limited and mostly a waste of time/capital compared to subscribing to access the good stuff provided by the key players. But by all means, throw more money at Apple for a problem they can't even solve themselves. If AI was that good on Apple hardware, they wouldn't need to buy access from their competitors to finally make Siri not completely useless.
  - nilkn 8mo ago
    Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.

lxgr 8mo ago

> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers? > They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.

pjmlp 8mo ago
Well-crafted products and user interfaces like butterfly keyboards, antennas, Leopard, Tahoe? Or maybe Pippin, A/UX, OpenDoc, Copland?
- lxgr 8mo ago
  If your high-profile misses become the subject of both memes and major news stories I'd say you are still the benchmark in UX, yes. Even "Apple design has peaked" is a meme if you've been following this stuff for more than just one decade. (Sure, one day it'll most likely be true, but that doesn't make everyone predicting it now a prophet retroactively.)
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    Ah, then it applies to Microsoft as well.

Noaidi 8mo ago

> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. And they’re failing at that too! I purchased an iPhone 16e thinking it would be like the iPhone SE, but what I got was worse than an SE. They used an old chip and I can tell you this phone cannot keep up with liquid glass, which they forced me to use and did not let me roll back. And now we have the iPhone 17 suffering from chipping on the back of the phones. The only reason Apple is succeeding is the only other thing is worse. And yes, I’m talking about android.

zimpenfish 8mo ago
> [the iPhone 16e] used an old chip What? It has the same RAM size, same RAM speed, and same chip[0] (minus one (1) GPU core [6c, 4g, 16n]) as the iPhone 16 [6c, 5g, 16n] (and almost the same as the A18 Pro [6c, 5g, 16n] minus the enhanced memory bandwidth and video encoding, afaict.) (I mean, sure, it's an old chip compared to the 17 but then it's a generation older and saying "they used an old chip" is a nonsense truism.) [0] https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,iphone-16,iphone-16-pro https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16...

vaxman 8mo ago

Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed). https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.) PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286 https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.

NetMageSCW 8mo ago
Counterpoint the iPad has been brilliant with it’s software and implementation and that is the reason it essentially has the tablet market to itself, is the only tablet with a third-party ecosystem, and it continues to grow. The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.

avidphantasm 8mo ago

I use Siri to set alarms on my watch, that’s it. I don’t want much more than that.

b112 8mo ago

What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. did best. did.

tobr 8mo ago
Their hardware and integration between hardware and software is extremely good, still. The software on its own has gone downhill for a long time.

graemep 8mo ago

> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. Does the management know this? From whose point if view is it not core? I very much doubt any tech business not focusing on AI at the moment is maximising their share price.

HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago

> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in... One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill. It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in. For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things. So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?

nilkn 8mo ago
My take is that the future will look something like this: - You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads. - This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.). - You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses. - Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though. For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above? Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.

QuantumGood 8mo ago

Similarly, they didn't need to solve search.

runjake 8mo ago

> This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI They aren’t. Mixed reality is getting little attention. It is in the “it remains a product in our line-up” phase. They are virtually all-in on AI. Their acquisitions have been AI-focused. It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with are the same issues their competitors are dealing with and is isn’t stopping them from releasing. > Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud This isn’t why people are buying Mac minis. They’re buying them because that’s what the OpenClaw author was using, they’re cheap, and they run macOS, so the tools within OpenClaw can get deeper Apple API access to Calendar, iMessage, etc. In the vast majority of cases, OpenClaw users aren’t using local models. They’re using “cloud” models like GPT and Claude.

NetMageSCW 8mo ago
>It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with aren’t stopping their competitors from releasing. No, it’s a good sign that Apple has re-learned the lessons they used to take to heart but sometimes forget when they panic and scramble. Apple used to always be late to most changes but when they arrived, if it was with a cohesive answer that worked well. They’ve been scrambling instead and hopefully this is a sign they’ve realized that.
- runjake 8mo ago
  Unfortunately, this does not reflect what’s going on inside the AI/ML+Siri groups. It’s missteps and internal wars and fumbles all the way down. I’m fully expecting the stuff that was reported to supposed to show up in 26.4 being pushed to 27.4 or later. It’s that bad.