Apple has generally been a company that waits, gets criticized for being behind, and then produces a better version (more usable, better integrated, etc), claims it is new, and everybody buys it. Meanwhile a few people moan about how Apple wasn't actually the first to make it.
The golden goose is dead.
From a user perspective it may not be a strength: users / customers may expect certain functionality that works accurately and responsively.
I certainly never heard anyone complain in real life.
But admittedly, most of those people are established adults who've figured out an effective rhythm to their home and work life and aren't longing for some magic remedy or disruption. They're not necessarily weary, and they were curious at first, but it seems like they're mostly just waiting for either the buzz to burn off or for some "it just works" product to finally emerge.
I imagine there are younger people wowed by the apparent magic of what we have now and excited that they might use it punch up the homework assignments or emails or texts that make them anxious, or that might enjoy toying with it as a novel tool for entertainment and creative idling. Maybe these are some of the people in your "real life"
There are a lot of people out there in "real life", bringing different perspectives and needs.
A few months ago, MCP-style tool calling seemed like the clear standard. Now even Anthropic is shifting toward "code-mode" and reusable skills.
For Apple, reliable tool calling is critical because their AI needs to control apps and the whole device. My bet: Apple's AI will be able to create its own Shortcuts on the fly and call them as needed, with OSA Script support on Mac.
Not to say Apple isn't also degrading their OS with bad design changes, but "more AI" is not something users are clamoring for.
I am yet to see ai functionality ppl are dying for.
It would be like MS is forcing their copilot currently everywhere, it is totally useless and a nuisance.
It's certainly been useful in my organization.
Let everyone else pay for the research and make the mistakes, find out what works and what doesn't. Apple already has the consumers, they might as well save a few (hundred?) bn in the process and later deploy something which doesn't tell you to glue your cheese to your pizza.
When in reality, they _wanted_ to but have become so dysfunctional organization wise, they weren't able to. Kind of funny how that worked out.
I still think they're really dropping the ball. They could have local models running on devices, interfacing with a big cloud partner (Google, OpenAI, etc.) Make Siri awesome. But no.
lmao, even
They are flat-out incompetent. Siri has somehow regressed over the years and visual intelligence only works in demos. They have the most abominable integration with ChatGPT imaginable.
At least the MLX team has been shipping an impressive product.
And they also got slapped with class action lawsuits for failing to meet promised AI capabilities in products they launched
It’s easy to understand from evidence like this why they are falling behind, even if you believe they will pull ahead later
It’s not the same, but PMs and VPs at my company think we can vibe code our way out of migrating a 1.6 million line codebase to a newer language / technology. Or that our problems can be solved by acquiring an AI startup, whose front end looks exactly the same as every other AI startup’s front page, and slapping a new CSS file that looks like that startup on top of our existing SPA because their product doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an absurd world out there.
The reason there was such a narrative is because Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both narrative machines with little regard for veracity, and they are also not that smart (at least according to people who successfully beat their system, such as Buffett).
"Warren, if people weren't so often wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." – the late great Charlie Munger.
I find a lot of the low-key things helpful: I use an app at the same time and place every day, and it’s nice to have a handy one-tap way to open it. It does a decent job organizing photos and letting me search text in screenshots.
Now, after a few months (!), reality sets in and those hyped-up investors realize that it's not as much of a short-term game as they told themselves it would be...
I hope they adopt the same model with AI - leverage whatever frontier model is best and provide their own privacy infrastructure in front.
At some point Apple will figure out a way to provide the right info from your calendar, messages, email etc as context and couple this with a bunch of secure tools for creating calendar entries, etc. Agentic AI will then be something I personally benefit from.
https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/judge-puts-a-one-year-limi...
Limits are now being placed on it as of a couple days ago
Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
People have been complaining for years that Apple isn't shipping fast enough in this area. But if anything I think that they have been shipping (or trying to ship) too fast. There are a lot of scenarios that AI is actually great at but the ones that move the needle for Apple just aren't there yet in terms of quality.
The stuff that is at a scale that it matters to them are integrations that just magically do what you want with iMessage/calendars/photos/etc. There are potentially interesting scenarios there but the fact is that any time you touch my intimate personal (and work) data and do something meaningful I want it to work pretty much all the time. And current models aren't really there yet in my view. There are lots of scenarios that do work incredibly well right now (coding most obviously). But I don't think the Apple mainline ones do yet.
In general I would agree, but Siri is honestly still so bad.
- Everyone else: "We mainly build huge AI compute clusters to process large amount of data and create value, at high cost for ramp-up and operation."
- Apple: "We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and operational cost all paid by the consumer."
I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.
No matter what they do, they will sell hundreds of millions compute devices for the foreseeable future. They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers.
THIS is their unique strength.
I wish they did but they don't. They have been for decade so stingy on RAM for iPhone and iPad. There are at current point that only small percent of their userbase have iPhone or iPad with 8GB RAM that somehow can run any AI models even open source and be of any use. Not mentioning they don't compare to big Models.
They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger RAM. iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air also can have max 32 GB RAM.
And for the current price of cheap online AI where e.g. perplexity provides so many promo for PRO version for like less $10 per year and all ai providers give good free models with enough rate limit for many users I don't see apple hardware like particularly bought because of AI compute-chips - at least not non-pro users.
If the loose AI though and because of that won't have good AI integrations they will loose also eventually in hardware. e.g. Polish language in Siri still not supported so my mum cannot use it. OSS Whisper v3 turbo was available ages ago but apple still support only few languages. 3rd party keyboard cannot integrate so well with audio input and all sux in this case because platform limitation.
Microsoft has been criticized for investing in AI heavily. But it actually makes sense for Microsoft if you consider the nature of their business. The problem is not with the investment per se but with what they got out of it. Unfortunately, Microsoft sucks at product management, so instead of creating useful stuff that users want and are ready to pay for, they created stuff that no one understands, no one can use, and no one wants to pay for. Github copilot is an exception of course. I'm talking more about their Office 365 AI.
The revenue from AI is growing at a much slower rate than recurring capex and depreciation is accumulating. This will create distress opportunities that cash-rich companies like APPL may seize. Might be a private equity deal, might be in the public markets as some of the players dip hard after IPO.
As this plays out, APPL's silicon has unified memory, power consumption and native acceleration that gives it an edge running SLMs and possibly LLMs at scale. Wouldn't shock me to see APPL introduce a data-center solution.
cmiles8•1h ago
meepmorp•57m ago
dizlexic•52m ago
Lalabadie•52m ago
I think the decision is first a self-serving one that's in line with how they want their devices and services to operate, but it also happens to be (in my opinion) the future-proof way of integrating consumer AI.