As an acquihire? I'm not clear what distinguishes perplexity/sonar from the others. Wouldn't Anthropic be a better horse right now?

Perplexity is currently valued at $15B, would be fun to see Apple go through with this because Apple, under Steve Jobs era and influence dont do big acquisition.

Perplexity to Apple brings obvious synergistic benefits techwise, and resembles previous Apple app acquisitions, but I really don't see how Apple can pay a huge premium for a miniscule userbase (effectively 1000 USD per user at current valuations), especially given that a large portion of the userbase are actually free users who were offered it via their telecom provider or something.

Isn't perplexity rather a "wrapper" company? Wouldn't acquiring a UX focused company bring enormous difficulties in integration, to retain Apples look and feel?

What seems to be missing for Apple is access to competitive foundation models. Perplexity has published a few finetuned models (https://openrouter.ai/provider/perplexity), but their focus does not seem to be own creating their own foundation models.

Furthermore, the entire angle on multimodality is also lacking, which is needed for true AI assistants.

I heavily use the free version of Perplexity app on all my devices (mobile, laptop and pc). I don't know any alternatives to Perplexity if Apple would buy them and revamp the product.