Pretty much it. That said, they did try to appease the markets by announcing 'Apple Intelligence' so they didn't appear to be behind everyone.

They did do the smart thing of not throwing too much capital behind it. Once the hype crumbles, they will be able to do something amazing with this tech. That will be a few years off but probably worth the wait.

It’s even more superpowered than previous implementations of this strategy.

When they made the iPhone, iPod, and Apple Watch they had no specific hardware advantage over competitors. Especially with early iPhone and iPod: no moat at all, make a better product with better marketing and you’ll beat Apple.

Now? Good luck getting any kind of reasonably priced laptop or phone that can run local AI as well as the iPhone/MacBook. It doesn’t matter that Apple Intelligence sucks right now, what matters is that every request made to Gemini is losing money and possibly always will.

This is especially true in 2026 where Windows laptops are climbing in price while MacBooks stay the same.

When have they done that since the first iPhone in 2007? The watch maybe? Though not sure that's "leapfrog" better than anyone else's smartwatch, but I don't have one so maybe I'm wrong.

> wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing

My parents use Android to ask “What are the 5 biggest towers in Chicago” or “Remove the people on my picture” while apparently iPhone is only capable of doing “Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone”.

My iPhone is lagging a ridiculous 10 years behind. It’s just that I don’t trust Google with my credit card.

Quietly they are doing things on-device. The OCR + copy/paste is genuine goodness - modestly functional.

Yea, they nailed that with the Newton

Apple will just drip feed locally running models that enable minor conveniences. They will probably drop the Apple Intelligence label later and just have things with their own names like "magic eraser".

Software quality decline has been a recognised trend long before LLMs took the limelight. Apple included.

I don’t think it’s AI slop. Even before modern generative AI, I’ve noticed a decline in Apple’s software quality.

Rather, I feel that Apple has forgotten its roots. The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us,” and there were usability guidelines backed by research. What made the Mac stand out against Windows during a time when Windows had 95%+ marketshare was the Mac’s ease of use. The Mac really stood out in the 2000s, with Panther and Tiger being compelling alternatives to Windows XP.

I think Apple is less perfectionistic about its software than it was 15-20 years ago. I don’t know what caused this change, but I have a few hunches:

0. There’s no Steve Jobs.

1. When the competition is Windows and Android, and where there’s no other commercial competitors, there’s a temptation to just be marginally better than Windows/Android than to be the absolute best. Windows’ shooting itself in the foot doesn’t help matters.

2. The amazing performance and energy efficiency of Apple Silicon is carrying the Mac.

3. Many of the people who shaped the culture of Apple’s software from the 1980s to the 2000s are retired or have even passed away. Additionally, there are not a lot of young software developers who have heard of people like Larry Tesler, Bill Atkinson, Bruce Tognazzini, Don Norman, and other people who shaped Apple’s UI/UX principles.

4. Speaking of Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman, I am reminded of this 2015 article (https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...) where they criticized Apple’s design as being focused on form over function. It’s only gotten worse since 2015. The saving grace for Apple is that the rest of the industry has gone even further in reducing usability.

I think what it will take for Apple to readopt its perfectionism is if competition forced it to.

I don't like companies forcing their newest features on me noisily and constantly trying to ship new features and see what sticks so you can't trust whether a feature advertised one week will even be there the next.

However, I have even less patience for companies forcing paid-for third-party ads down my throat on a paid product. Slack at least doesn't sell my eyeballs. Facebook, Twitter, Google's ads are worse to me than new feature dialogues.

Which brings me to Apple. I pay for a $1k+ device, and yet the app store's first result is always a sponsored bit of spam, adware, or sometimes even malware (like the fake ledger wallet on iOS, that was a sponsored result for a crypto stealer). On my other devices, I can at least choose to not use ad-ridden BS (like on android you can use F-Droid and AuroraStore, on Linux my package manager has no ads), but on iOS it's harder to avoid.

Apple hasn't sunk to Google levels in terms of ads, but they've crossed a line.

~25% of Apple's revenue came from services in FY25 (and 50% from iPhone, ~25% from other hardware). They made $415B in that year, so ~$100B from services alone!

A lot of the people that bought iPhones are now buying Macs as well.

Yep, and to be honest we don't really need local models for intensive tasks. At least yet. You can use openrouter (and others) to consume a wide variety of open models which are capable of using tools in an agentic workflow, close to the SOTA models, which are essentially commodities - many providers, each serving the same model and competing with each-other on uptime, throughput, and price. At some point we will be able to run them on commodity hardware, but for now the fact that we can have competition between providers is enough to ensure that rug pulls aren't possible.

Plus having Gemma on my device for general chat ensures I will always have a privacy respecting offline oracle which fulfils all of the non-programming tasks I could ever want. We are already at the point where the moat for these hyper scalers has basically dissolved for the general public's use case.

If I was OpenAI or Anthropic I would be shitting my pants right now and trying every unethical dark pattern in the book to lock in my customers. And they are trying hard. It won't work. And I won't shed a single tear for them.

Local models seem somewhere between 9 and 24 months behind. I'm not saying I won't be impressed with what online models will be able to do in two years, but I'm pretty satisfied with the prediction that I won't really need them in a couple of years.

Having your cake and eating it too. Consumer goodwill and printing money.

There’s long been professional segmentation for GPUs, long before people started running AI models on them

[delayed]