Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.
The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit.
The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.
Doesn't somebody (not named Nvidia) need to make a serious profit on AI before we can say that Tim Cook failed?
OpenAI and Anthropic aren't anywhere close. Meta? Google? The only one I can think of might be Microsoft but they still refuse to break out AI revenue and expenses in the earnings reports. That isn't a good sign.
I won't pretend to know exactly how the AI landscape will look in the future, but at this point it's pretty clear that there's going to be massive revenue going to the sector, and Moore's law will continue to crank.
I see what you're saying though. In particular is first generation gigs data centers might be black holes of an investment, considering in the not too distant future AI compute will be fully commoditized and 10x cheaper.
"failed to skate where the puck was headed" assumes that we know where the puck is going to be. We don't.
Everyone is skating towards that same spot while Apple is over by the blue line practicing their swizzles. They sure look like they're doomed. But large groups of people have skated to the "wrong spot" thousands of times. That's the entire point that Gretzky was making with his quote. He's not big enough, strong enough, fast enough to get in that scrum. They're all fighting it out and the puck slides away. To him. All alone.
Maybe that is Apple, maybe it's not. I mean, they're still learning to skate while everyone else is playing hockey.
Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.
It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall
Zuck tried and flailed with the metaverse. That was a huge waste, but he can afford it and fortune favours the brave.
Not everyone has to make the same move at the same time.
If those don’t seem like right or good moves, I can’t imagine much will impress you in this world.
This does seem like an embarrassing fail, but even Google has not completed replacing Assistant with Gemini. There have also been lost functionality (maybe temporary) in the process.
This is actually one of the hardest frontier problems. The "general purpose" assistant is one of the singular hardest technical problems with LLMs (or any kind of NLP).
I think people are easily snowed by LLMs' apparent linguistic fluency that they impute that to capability. This cannot be further from the truth.
In reality a LLM presented with a vast array of tools has extremely poor reliability, so if you want a thing that can order delivery and remember your shopping list and remind you of your flight and play music you're radically exceeding the capabilities of current models. There's a reason successful (anything that isn't demoware/vaporware) uses of agentic LLMs tend to narrow-domain use cases.
There's a reason Google hasn't done it either, and indeed nor has anyone else: neither Anthropic nor OpenAI have a general purpose assistant (defined as being able to execute an indefinite number of arbitrary tools to do things for you, as opposed to merely converse with you).
While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.
Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
Excessive greed obliterates goodwill.
You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark.
Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.
Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?
Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.
Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.
That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.
Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.
Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.
Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.
iPhone will get some new exciting feature and everyone will wonder how they managed to do it at the price point nobody else can.
Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura.
Apple is not cool.
But those millions of data points can (rarely, briefly,) coalesce around a product or company, even though that’s mostly out of the control of those building the product or company.
EG if you asked someone in 1965 if a Jaguar E-Type was cool, or someone in 2000s London whether the Fruityloops DAW was cool, they’d say “yeah”.
I’m mostly agreeing, and it’s a super minor point, but tech specs are part of the unknowable, constantly-shifting constellation of symbols that produce “cool”, and there isn’t a reason an Apple product couldn’t, in the future, align the stars. They did before! The white iPod earbud wire did, briefly, signify cool.
Says who, exactly? It is very cool for most.
If they push forward with local AI that can be somewhat trusted, it would be a huge win.
While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter.
Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1]
Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-322149... [2] https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smar... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...
To detriment of Windows, XBox hardware, .NET team shooting into all directions.
That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.
Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:
> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,
When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form.
Apple made the bet that they could make the full screen experience much more compelling that people would accept the trade off of losing the keyboard.
Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims inventing things that have existed.
Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims reinventing things that have existed, or revolutionising them, or reimagining them, but rarely claims to be the first, ever, without qualification.
There were smartphones before the iPhone. Consider the IPAQ and Windows Mobile 6.0.
And of course plenty of MP3 players before iPod.
There were smartphones before iPhone, now all smartphones are black featureless rectangles. There were printers before LaserWriter, then for 20 years all printers became this. (And later disappeared.) There were wireless heaphones before Airpods, now the difference is in the shape of the stubs. There were laptops before the Macbook Air... etc
To be clear, just having a chatbot website/app does not count.
Nvidia
- If you are wearing an Apple Watch a ML model is constantly analyzing your heart rhythm and will alert you to (some types of) irregularities. It's so computationally efficient it can literally do this in the background all day long.
- When you take any picture on any iPhone a whole array of ML models immediately run to improve the image. More models are used when manually editing images.
- After you save the photo ML models run to analyze and index the photo so it's easily searchable later. That's why you can search for "golden retriever" and get actual results.
- When you speak at your device (for example, to dictate a text message) there's a ML model that transcribes that into text. Likewise, when you're hands-free and want to hear an incoming text message, an ML model converts it to audio. All on-device and available offline at that.
Or are we playing that stupid game where "AI === LLM"?
Well, the original question was specifically about LLMs. ("What other companies have successfully integrated LLM tech in their mainstream products?")
This seems "creepy" now, but people thought that about Google "reading" all your email too. The benefits of an ever present and aware assistant are just to great to ignore.
Apple's angle is that they are well liked and trusted (much more so than Facebook which people already think is eavesdropping on them to show ads) and will do all processing on device.
It’s the kind of mistake an LLM would make. Very Lacanian.
Like Nadella, you need someone from the early years, who knows the business, to run it.
Cook lacks product vision because 1) he’s no Steve Jobs. He was hired. He didn’t create. 2) He doesn’t have an Jonny Ive to make something as boring as a computer be as sexy as an Italian vase. Or as sleek as a pencil. Or as flat as paper. Or whatever metaphors were used during the Ive years to describe his design process.
But he has been there long enough to know how it works.
Based on what exactly? He led the overhaul of a massive amount of Apple under his tenure.
Also, it sounds like Cook and Federighi just repeated talking points the public has already heard, so I'm not sure what the point of this was.
If there are any current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.
Instead Apple can’t even manage to implement speech to text that works in safari and can’t manage to make Siri not suck.
This is under the assumption that we don't see any significant optimization in the meantime. Looking back over the last eight years, the probability of no progress on the software side is near zero.
For a breakthrough in the consumer market, running LLM on-device with today's capabilities requires solving one key topic: "JIT learning" [2]. We can see some progress here [3, 4]. Perhaps the transformer architecture is not the best for this requirement, but it is hard to argue that it is impossible for Generative AI.
Due to today's technical limitations, we don't have real personal assistants. This could be the Mac for Apple in the AI era.
[1] https://gadgetversus.com/graphics-card/apple-a11-bionic-gpu-...
[2] Increasing context size is not a valid option for my scenario as it also increases the computation demand linear.
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06668
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18466
[Edit: decimal separator mess]
Switching to Windows would also clearly be encouraging the AI juggernaut, so I will stay with Linux.
andsoitis•17h ago
andrew_lastmile•17h ago