For consumers, it would be more beneficial if Apple could actually use all the money they get to really build standalone products. It feels like Apple is not trying very hard (or has become too incompetent) to make a viable competitive product because they profit enough regardless. Don't you think it would be better if Apple were able to make a search engine against Google instead of just pocketing the profit?

I'm not saying that on-device AI is going away because of Gemini. I just mean that Apple's strategy wasn't good, and they wasted resources on a dead end (a common trend with Apple recently), and they will rely on a competitor until they can provide their own in-house solution (that may or may not be good). They marketed the shit out of their Apple Intelligence for their hardware, and that ended up not being good.

The Private Cloud Compute push does not inspire great confidence because it basically relies on their hardware, just at a bigger scale. If they can't get good results with a Mac Studio, it's not clear the results will be that much better. It seems like the approach has a built-in limitation from both a hardware and software standpoint. Apple hardware is only decent at inference, and that's only when going for memory-heavy models and comparing to single consumer GPU machines. I think they have to get the model from Google in part because even if they have in-house talent, they would need to rely on 3rd-party hardware anyway.

They are not very competitive with local AI for average consumer devices, and they are not competitive with local AI at the high end (prompt processing). You can load high-quality models if you spend lots of money on their unified RAM, but it's slow. The Nvidia DGX, as well as the newer APUs from AMD, are rendering their memory advantage somewhat irrelevant for the midrange. And they can't provide competitive cloud AI for consumers who will never pay for such powerful hardware. So why should we pay more money for Apple hardware when you are going to end up using their competitors technology ? It's like buying an item from a white-label brand on Amazon that is just rebadging generic Chinese stuff. There is nothing wrong per se, but you are just giving money to a useless middleman; it's not efficient, and in a way, you get scammed.

You mention privacy as if it were still relevant. It's all moral posturing and virtue signaling from Apple. As I said, they don't work any less with governments than the other tech company, which is the real privacy you want. As for ads/tracking, not only does using their hardware not at all prevent that, but they are starting to sell ads as well, just in Maps for now, but it's likely to spread.

This is why I talked about Maps. Apple does not offer a competitive solution; the routing is pretty good, but today we use mapping apps for discovery and reviews, and personally, I also use transit and bicycle routes. Apple Maps is really not a decent equivalent, and I say this as someone who had a lot of hope when Apple Maps came out and used it almost exclusively for as long as I could. Even using both a Mac and an iPhone, I find the Google solution more convenient and useful. I live in the EU, where Google was forced to remove Maps links in their search engine, which was quite convenient. But the Maps macOS app is even more useless, so it might as well not exist. Poor data, poor UI, poor performance, it's just plain bad.

So in the end I use Google Maps, and the privacy argument is largely pointless because Google gets my data anyway. This is the same thing for needing to use Google Search, YouTube, and various other Google properties. Ultimately, Apple receives large sums of money for nothing of value, and they continue to act morally as though they were providing their customers with satisfactory service. It's effortless to paint competitors negatively, but if you can't offer an adequate solution, then nobody will benefit except yourself. And they have the money, so it's either greed or incompetence.

And this is why I said that about their AI marketing. It's largely useless compared to cloud AI that most consumers get to use on competitors devices/solutions. Even for strictly local AI, they are not very competitive at any price point. Best-case scenario, it's a built-in solution that could be decent if they figure out the model part correctly.

The reality is that the hype is widely overblown, but I have been buying Apple hardware since the early 2000s, so I'm used to it. But they are just losing relevancy, and at some point having good chips and nice premium hardware won't be enough.