Apple can pivot Siri pretty easily.

I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack, but if your bet is this a short term stop gap until the market is more “unlocked” - less of an issue, and better to get the direct market learnings along the way.

Apple's AI infrastructure is a hub device like AppleTV, Mac Mini, iMac, or MacBook connected to iPhone and Watch. They will be the first to benefit from cheaper to run, eventually embed in chip models, and are positioned to be a key player in offloading demand from data centers.

They’re the bridge to the frontier models until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.

They're not building on someone else's platform as much as leasing completely commoditized compute from whomever gave them the best deal. I wouldn't be surprised if this compute will actually be happening on xAI hardware [1].

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/google...

But they could rent from any of the 200+ neo clouds right?

They would not, they would make less on Studio Displays and Mac Studios and Mac Minis, the decision not to do is product segmentation because they hate us customers and want to maximise revenue :-/