> But now there’s a new paradigm shift. The iPhone was perfect for the mobile era, which is why it hasn’t changed much over the last decade.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
> The other problem is that at its core, AI is two things: 1) software and 2) extremely fast-moving/evolving, two things Apple is bad at.
Idk my MacBook Pro is pretty great and runs well. Fast moving here implies that as soon as you release something there's like this big paradigm shift or change that means you need to move even faster to catch up, but I don't think that's the case, and where it is the case the new software (LLM) still need to be distributed to end users and devices so for a company like Apple they pay money and build functionality to be the distributor of the latest models and it doesn't really matter how fast they're created. Apple's real threat is a category shift in devices, which AI may or may not necessarily be part of.
I'm less certain about Amazon but unless (insert AI company) wants to take on all the business risk of hosting governments and corporations and hospitals on a cloud platform I think Amazon can just publish their own models, buy someone else's, or integrate with multiple leading AI model publishers.
I think the bet here is that AI is like Dropbox — a feature. Operating globally, these models are going to be a regulatory tar pit. The industry hype train is 100% reliant on courts ignoring the law - that didn’t work out well for Napster.
That makes the “category shift” difficult for Apple to execute well and difficult for competitors to gun for them. Microsoft is even worse off there because the PC OEMs relied on dying companies like Intel to deliver engineering for innovative things.
AWS, Azure, and GCP are doing the same stuff in different flavors. Google and Microsoft approach human facing stuff differently because they own collaboration platforms.
Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.
Apple could turn everything around overnight by quietly re-enabling the jailbreak community for a few years, or restoring the 2022 Hypervisor API entitlement for arbitrary VMs. Hopefully this does not have to wait for leadership changes.
Either of those actions would take the shackles off Apple's underutilized hardware and frustrated developers. The resulting innovations could be sherlocked back into new OS APIs under Apple guardrails, whence they could generate revenue via App Store software. Then retire the jailbreaks and silently thank OutsideJobs for uncredited contributions to Apple upstream.
At present, the only industry participants maximizing usage of Apple hardware are zero-day hoarders. Meanwhile, every passing day allows Qualcomm, Nvidia and Arm-generic/Mediatek to improve their nascent PC hw+OS stacks, whittling away at Apple's shrinking hardware lead.
Any loosening of Apple hardware restrictions is going to be judged internally on what impact it will have on App Store revenue & related DRM / IP contracts.
I'm not sure Tim Cook is the guy to overrule that based on a vision of the future.
Let's see if the $599 MacBook (iPhone SoC!) can run VMs and software distributed outside App Store, i.e. like existing MacBooks.
If Pixel phones (with inferior hardware) can run Debian Linux VMs with external USB-c display, so can Apple tablets/phones. Apple and Google app stores have similar business incentives and antitrust constraints.
You are spot on, they can indeed run that software.
The problem that you and others with similar interests are running into is that you’re asking Apple to spend perhaps tens of millions of dollars to make a change that, frankly, almost nobody wants or cares about. I don’t want it or care about it whatsoever, nor does my grandma. That’s why this all plays out in court and in countries that want to stick a finger in the eye of American tech companies.
Anti-trust concerns tend to just be multi-billion dollar corporations (Apple, Meta, Epic, Netflix, etc.) arguing over who gets the slice of your wallet. None of these companies lower prices when they win court battles, experiences don’t get better, and as Apple in particular loses more and more control over the App Store they lose the ability, however flawed, to collectively bargain on behalf of regular folks against developers [1].
Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?
Is there a single example?
[1] Items like forced private Sign in with Apple, or disclosing how data is used, don’t and won’t exist on “the Meta App Store” because as a single person or small group you’d rather have access to Facebook and you’ll give up data for it. But Apple can listen to users and then force Meta to comply with those demands, however flawed the situation may be and however self-serving Apple’s interests may be.
> Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?
That was prior to ceding control - now that companies have the ability to stand up their own app stores and do direct payments (as I understand to be the case now at least), where have prices gone down?
So after all the legal mess and crusading and white knighting about the Apple App Store what we got in return is now buy the same product as I did before for the same price in dollars, but I can get 20% of my purchase price back in what is the equivalent of carnival tokens if I use Epic’s proprietary payment system?
Do you wholeheartedly believe that this counts as lowering prices or providing improvements? Are the Vbucks still $8 or no?
You can choose to value company store bucks however you want, but they're worth >$0, which means that yes, Epic lowered prices. (Reasonably, considering they're saving a good chunk of the App Store tax)
> Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.
Can you elaborate? I don't see what you're seeing.
There’s a whole industry around critiquing Apple and their misadventures on iOS with respect to AI. We understand what is happening - there’s even podcasters castigating individual executives!
What is the story with Copilot as an on device feature of Windows? How dos that relate to an “AI PC”? In my business, what is Copilot (on the PC) do? How about Copilot Chat? How do they both relate to Copilot for Office 365?
Answer: I have no fucking idea. It’s a big soup of stuff with the same name that dumps everything in a bowl that the company makes. In a business, you’re going to make product decisions within your enterprise than fundamentally change the products based on your privacy and security needs and what countries you are operating in.
Apple has articulated a vision/framework for what they are delivering on device, with outside 1st party help and with 3rd parties. They’ve laid out how they are accessing your proprietary data. They have also failed to deliver.
Ah, by "Apple and Microsoft are failing at the device level", you are specifically saying they are failing specifically with respect to AI inference executing on edge devices (rather than in the cloud)?
Yes, that and edge platform integration with cloud services.
It’s complicated and difficult - I say fail in the “fail fast” sense, not as an insult. Where are the line(s) between Excel as a component of Windows, as a web service and as a node on the office graph?
If I need AI help integrated with the product to write Excel formulas, I think the way to get that from Microsoft is with Copilot for Office 365, which also accesses all of my data on the graph and can potentially leak stuff with web grounding. (Which for companies means you need to fix SharePoint governance and do lots of risk assessment #godbless)
>I'm less certain about Amazon but unless (insert AI company) wants to take on all the business risk of hosting governments and corporations and hospitals on a cloud platform I think Amazon can just publish their own models, buy someone else's, or integrate with multiple leading AI model publishers.
Amazon is capturing massive amounts of the value in AI via AWS. They'll be fine. But for real I don't see a reason why Alexa is not using a good LLM now. Could just be infinitely better...
I'm not clear on what would be better about my Echos having an LLM interface. I want to like the idea, but I'm also growing increasingly annoyed at how things that used to work are beginning to not.
If they could gate it behind a "start chat session" or something, I would be more excited. Doing it by cannibalizing how well basic "play radio/start time/read from audible" worked for the longest time, everything they do that causes friction there is frustrating, to the extreme.
>Doing it by cannibalizing how well basic "play radio/start time/read from audible" worked for the longest time, everything they do that causes friction there is frustrating, to the extreme.
Theres absolutely no reason why plugging in an LLM would break any of those features but asking generic questions would be 100x better than "Searching the web for a shitty Quora or Alexa answers question."
Pluhging in an LLM breaks it when those features require it to be worded a certain way. Agree that it shouldn't, but that seems to be the way it is often done.
For example, I tried Google's Gemini a while ago instead of Google Assistant on my phone and it was unable to do basic things like 'open the Signal app' and would instead go on a big tangent about how it can't open the Signal app for me, but that I could open the Signal app by finding it on my home screen or if I don't have it installed I can download it from the play store etc.
In principle, I agree with you. In practice, it keeps getting worse.
I also don't typically ask generic questions. Ever, that I can remember.
Again, I don't want to dislike the idea. If people are really getting value from it, I would like them to continue to do so. But it seems to be a more expensive way to service use cases that were working just fine.
> But for real I don't see a reason why Alexa is not using a good LLM now.
Large language models are too slow to use as real-time voice assistants. ChatGPT voice only barely works because they have to use a much worse (but faster) model to do it.
Amazon has a commercial Speech-to-Text model (Nova Sonic) that is passable. I used it to create a post-sales call assistant and was surprised that the underlying model was able to do a bunch of stuff I thought I was going to have to use Claude for.
At least on paper OpenAI claims the Voice models are actually the ones you are picking i.e. GPT 4o, 5. In any case even a GPT 3.5 would be superior to current alexa...
Came here to say pretty much this. Hardware seems more valuable than a model.
I think AI could be commoditized. Look at DeepSeek stealing OpenAI's model. Look at the competitive performance between Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. Look at open weight models, like Llama.
Commoditized AI need used via a device. The post argues that other devices, like watches or smart glasses, could be better posed to use AI. But...your point stands. Given Apple's success with hardware, I wouldn't bet against them making competitive wearables.
Hardware is hard. It's expensive to get wrong. It seems like a hardware company would be better positioned to build hardware than an AI company. Especially when you can steal the AI company's model.
Supply chains, battery optimization, etc. are all hard-won battles. But AI companies have had their models stolen in months.
If OpenAI really believed models would remain differentiated then why venture into hardware at all?
Moreover, Apple owning the access to the device-hardware AND to the data those models would need to create value for an Apple-user makes the company even more robust.
They could manage years of AI-missteps while cultivating their AI "marketplace", which allows the user to select a RevShare'd third party AI if (and only if) Apple cannot serve the request.
It would keep them afloat in the AI-space no matter how far they are behind, as long as the iPhone remains the dominant consumer mobile device.
The only risks are a paradigm shift in mobile devices, and the EU which clearly noticed that they operate multiple uneven digital markets within their ecosystem...
"The only risks" lol. Tim Cook thought those were the only risks to the App Store too, now look where he is. You lack imagination.
What if [Japan|EU|US DOJ|South Korea] passes a law preventing OEMs from claiming user data as their property? If Apple really tries to go down the road of squeezing pre-juiced lemons like this, I think they're going to be called out for stifling competition and real innovation.
Go further - what if those entities pass laws preventing Meta, or Google from claiming user data as their property? Or even the AI companies that are siphoning content from the web.
> I think Amazon can just publish their own models, buy someone else's, or integrate with multiple leading AI model publishers.
This is exactly what they've done: They offer SageMaker (and similar capabilities) for hosting smaller models that fit into a single instance GPU, and they have Bedrock that hosts a metric crap-ton of AWS and third party models. Many of the model architectures are supported for hosting fine-tuned versions.
(I am mostly going to comment on the Watch issue, as I have one.)
Apple makes a watch, yes. But is it an AI watch? Will they manage to make it become one? Intel made all kinds of chips. Intel's chips even could be used for mobile devices... only, Intel never (even still, to today) made a great mobile chip.
I have an Apple Watch--and AirPods Pro, which connect directly to it--with a cellular plan. I already found how few things I can do with my Watch kind of pathetic, given that I would think the vast majority of the things I want to do could be done with a device like my watch; but, in a world with AI, where voice mode finally becomes compelling enough to be willing to use, it just feels insane.
I mean, I can't even get access to YouTube Music on just my watch. I can use Apple's Music--so you know this hardware is capable of doing it--but a lot of the content I listen to (which isn't even always "Music": you can also access podcasts) is on YouTube. Somehow, the Apple Watch version of YouTube access requires me to have my phone nearby?! I can't imagine Google wanted that: I think that's a limitation of the application model (which is notoriously limited). If I could access YouTube Music on my watch, I would've barely ever needed my iPhone around.
But like, now, I spend a lot of time using ChatGPT, and I really like its advanced voice mode... it is a new reason to use my iPhone, but is a feature that would clearly be amazing with just the watch: hell... I can even use it to browse the web? With a tiny bit of work, I could have a voice interface for everything I do (aka, the dream of Siri long gone past).
But, I can't even access the thing that already works great, today, with just my watch. What's the deal? Is it that OpenAI really doesn't want me to do that? These two companies have a partnership over a bunch of things--my ChatGPT account credentials are even something embedded into my iPhone settings--so I'd think Apple would be hungry for this to happen, and should've asked them, thrown it in as a term, or even done the work of integrating it for them (as they have in the past for Google's services).
This feels to me like Apple has a way they intend me to use the watch, and "you don't need to ever have your phone with you" is not something they want to achieve: if they add functionality that allows the Watch to replace an iPhone, they might lose some usage of iPhones, and that probably sounds terrifying (in the same way they seem adamant that an iPad can't ever truly compete with a MacBook, even if it is only like two trivial features away).
I think you're getting confused here with app limitations vs platform limitations. YouTube Music not streaming without the paired phone on the same wifi is an app limitation: other music apps like Spotify work without it. Lacking a watch app (or having a bad watch app) probably never lost any non fitness company any customers. A good iPhone app is much more make or break.
So, when Apple released the iPhone, they went out of their way to make sure that YouTube and Google Maps were on the device, to the point of making special deals with Google and developing all of the software for them (as they didn't want to give up any control)... I maintain that, given how they already have a partnership with OpenAI, it is a strange lack of vision that I can't go down to the beach and spend my day talking to ChatGPT to get things done.
Just so you know, if you’re on your watch and you need ChatGPT, you can always just call 1-800 ChatGPT from your watch. I do it all the time and it’s fantastic.
I'm not sure I follow: Both Apple and Amazon are working on AI as we speak. They're just not following the popular approach of releasing a chatbot in the wild.
Apple is focusing on a privacy-first approach with smaller models that run locally. Amazon is tying it's models to an AWS subscription and incentivizing use by offering discounts, making it cheaper to use their models over GPT, Opus, etc.
Apple is not focusing on AI with any real emphasis. The engineers asked for $50B to train a model and Apple instead did stock buybacks. The stock kept underperforming and so they touted apple intelligence and a revamped Siri, only for it to fall flat. Siri was underinvested in for many years and should be at least as good as Claude or ChatGPT. ‘They’re not investing in a chatbot’ is a huge miss by apple who had a chatbot on everyone’s devices and a headstart on the whole concept.
> The engineers asked for $50B to train a model and Apple instead did stock buybacks.
It is probably cheaper to simply integrate with OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever might unseat them in the future, than spend $50B on training a model. Not only is it cheaper, but it also gives them the flexibility to ride the wave of popularity, without ceding hardware or software sales.
And in that is the issue, Apple does not believe they could do better than Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, or OpenAI. They are paying Google rather than building out their own products. Pre-Tim, Apple was pouring profits back into R&D but now the priority is rewarding shareholders.
It depends on what you think is going to happen with models.
The way I see it, models were always predicated on openness and data-sharing. That, too, will be the competitive downfall of those who poured billions into creating said models.
They won't stay caged up forever. Ultimately the only thing OpenAI has between itself and it's competitors is some really strong computers.
Well... anybody can buy strong computers. This is, of course, assuming you don't believe the promise of ever-increasing cognition and eventual AGI, which I don't. The people going fast aren't going to be the winners. The second movers and later on will be. They get all the model, with 1/100th the cost.
Ultimately models, right now, for most consumers, are nothing more than novelties. Just look at Google Pixel - I have one, by the way. I can generate a custom image? Neat... I guess. It's a cool novelty. I can edit people out of my pictures? Well... actually Apple had that a couple years ago... and it's not as useful as you would think.
It's hard to see it because we're programmers, but right now, the AI products are really lacking for consumers. They're not good for music, or TV, or Movies, or short-form entertainment. ChatGPT is neat for specific usecases like cheating on an essay or vibe coding, but how many people are doing that? Very, very few.
Let me put it this way. Do I think Claude Code is good? Yes. Do I think Claude Code is the next Madonna? No.
> Ultimately the only thing OpenAI has between itself and it's competitors is some really strong computers.
There's a lot of difference between OpenAI and, let's say, Facebook (Llama). The difference between them is not only strong computers. There's architectural differences to the models.
From a technical perspective, yes. But from a business perspective they're going to try to cram every model into every possible use case for as long as possible.
It will be a sign of a maturing market when we see vendors actually say "bad for X" and pulling away from general-purpose messaging.
You see it a little bit with the angling for code-specific products, but I think we're nowhere near a differentiated market.
> They are paying Google rather than building out their own products.
This is the real death knell people should focus on. Apple buried their AI R&D to rush complete flops like Vision Pro out the door. Now that the dust has settled, the opportunity cost of these hardware ventures was clearly a mistake. Apple had more than a decade to sharpen their knives and prepare for war with Nvidia, and now they're missing out on Nvidia's share of the datacenter market. Adding insult to injury, they're probably also ~10 years behind SOTA in the industry unless they hire well-paid veterans at great expense.
Apple's chronic disdain for unprofitable products, combined with boneheaded ambition, will be the death of them. They cannot obviate real innovation and competition while dropping nothingburger software and hardware products clearly intended to bilk an unconscious userbase.
Apple doesn't need its own model--it can license Google's model; or if terms are inprofitable, license Anthropic's or OpenAI's or Mistral's etc. And eventually it can build its own model.
Think of how important it is for any AI model company to be the go-to model on the iPhone. Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on the iPhone.
Exactly my point - OpenAI is giving Apple its model for free. Which saves Apple many $B's in compute to train their own model. You could argue it's being paid in-kind.
Unlike OpenAI, Apple doesn't need to charge a subscription to get AI-based revenue. It just needs to properly integrate it into its products that billions of people are already using, to make those products more useful so people continue buying them. At that point most users don't care what model is powering it - could be GPT, Claude, Mistral etc.
Right, but remember Microsoft was 'working on' mobile also. The issue is that they're working on it the wrong way. Amazon is focused on price and treating it like a commodity. Apple trying to keep the iPhone at the center of everything. Thus neither are fully committing to the paradigm shift because they say it is, but not acting like it because their existing strategy/culture precludes them from doing so.
> The issue is that they're working on it the wrong way.
So is everyone else, to be fair. Chat is a horrible way to interact with computers — and even if we accept worse is better its only viable future is to include ads in the responses. That isn't a game Apple is going to want to play. They are a hardware company.
More likely someday we'll get the "iPhone moment" when we realize all previous efforts were misguided. Can Apple rise up then? That remains to be seen, but it will likely be someone unexpected. Look at any successful business venture and the eventual "winner" is usually someone who sat back and watched all the mistakes be made first.
We begrudgingly accept chat as the lowest common denominator when there is no better option, but it's clear we don't prefer it when better options are available. Just look in any fast food restaurant that has adopted those ordering terminals and see how many are still lining up at the counter to chat with the cashier... In fact, McDonalds found that their sales rose by 30% when they eliminated chatting from the process, so clearly people found it to be a hinderance.
We don't know what is better for this technology yet, so it stands to reason that we reverted to the lowest common denominator again, but there is no reason why we will or will want to stay there. Someone is bound to figure out a better way. Maybe even Apple. That business was built on being late to the party. Although, granted, it remains to be seen if that is something it can continue with absent of Jobs.
What is representative, though, is simple use: All you have to do is use chat to see how awful it is.
It is better than nothing. It is arguably the best we have right now to make use of the technology. But, unless this is AI thing is all hype and goes nowhere, smart minds aren't going to sit idle as progression moves towards maturity.
The problem with UX driven by this kind of interface is latency. Right now, this kind of flow goes more like:
"What burgers do you have?"
(Thinking...)
(4 seconds later:)
(expands to show a set of pictures)
"Sigh. I'll have the thing with chicken and lettuce"
(Thinking...)
(3 seconds later:)
> "Do you mean the Crispy McChicken TM McSandwich TM?"
"Yes"
(Thinking...)
(4 seconds later:)
> "Would you like anything else?"
"No"
(Thinking...)
(5 seconds later:)
> "Would you like to supersize that?"
"Is there a human I can speak with? Or perhaps I can just point and grunt to one of the workers behind the counter? Anyone?"
It's just exasperating, and it's not easy to overcome until local inference is cheap and common. Even if you do voice recognition on the kiosk, which probably works well enough these days, there's still the round trip to OpenAI and then the inference time there. And of course, this whole scenario gets even worse and more frustrating anywhere with subpar internet.
Right. We talk when it is the only viable choice in front of us, but as soon as options are available, talk goes out the window pretty quickly. It is not our ideal mode of communication, just the lowest common denominator that works in most situations.
But, now, remember, unlike humans, AI can do things like materialize diagrams and pictures out of "thin air" and can even make them interactive right on the spot. It can also do a whole lot of things that you and I haven't even thought of yet. It is not bound by the same limitations of the human mind and body. It is not human.
For what reason is there to think that chat will remain the primary mode of using this technology? It is the easiest to conceive of way to use the technology, so it is unsurprising that it is what we got first, but why would we stop here? Chat works, but it is not good. There are so many unexplored possibilities to find better and we're just getting started.
I think chat will remain dominant, but we'll go into other modes as needed. There's no more efficient way to communicate "show me the burgers" than saying it - thinking it is possible, but sending thoughts is too far off right now. Then you switch to imagery or hand gestures or whatever else when they're a better way to show something.
> Chat is a horrible way to interact with computers
Chat is like the command line, but with easier syntax. This makes it usable by an order of magnitude more people.
Entertainment tasks lend themselves well to GUI type interfaces. Information retrieval and manipulation tasks will probably be better with chat type interfaces. Command and control are also better with chat or voice (beyond the 4-6 most common controls that can be displayed on a GUI).
> Chat is like the command line, but with easier syntax.
I kinda disagree with this analogy.
The command line is precise, concise, and opaque. If you know the right incantations, you can do some really powerful things really quickly. Some people understand the rules behind it, and so can be incredibly efficient with it. Most don't, though.
Chat with LLMs is fuzzy, slow-and-iterative... and differently opaque. You don't need to know how the system works, but you can probably approach something powerful if you accept a certain amount of saying "close, but don't delete files that end in y".
The "differently-opaque" for LLM chatbots comes in you needing to ultimately trust that the system is going to get it right based on what you said. The command line will do exactly what you told it to, if you know enough to understand what you told it to. The chatbot will do... something that's probably related to what you told it to, and might be what it did last time you asked for the same thing, or might not.
For a lot of people the chatbot experience is undeniably better, or at least lets them attempt things they'd never have even approached with the raw command line.
Exactly. Nobody really wants to use the command-line as the primary mode of computing; even the experts who know how to use it well. People will accept it when there is no better tool for the job, but it is not going to become the preferred way to use computers again no matter how much easier it is to use this time. We didn't move away from the command-line simply because it required some specialized knowledge to use.
Chatting with LLMs looks pretty good right now because we haven't yet figured out a better way, but there is no reason to think we won't figure out a better way. Almost certainly people will revert to chat for certain tasks, like people still use the command-line even today, but it won't be the primary mode of computing like the current crop of services are betting on. This technology is much too valuable for it to stay locked in shitty chat clients (and especially shitty chat clients serving advertisements, which is the inevitable future for these businesses betting on chat — they can't keep haemorrhaging money forever and individuals won't pay enough for a software service).
My experience with Claude Code is a fantastic way to interact with a (limited subset) of my computer. I do not think Claude is too far off from being able to do stuff like read my texts, emails, and calendar and take actions in those apps, which is pretty much what people want Siri to (reliably) do these days.
The author makes no effort to explain why AI :isn’t: a commodity as Apple and Amazon says. I was looking forward to that. I think the article is weak for not defending its premise. Everything else is fluff.
I agree - and if the article is correct and Apple and Amazon are the losers, I fail to glean who the winners will be or how their business model will be different.
That's fair, but it wasn't the point of the article because it's messy. Many would argue that core LLMs are 'trending' toward commodity, and I'd agree.
But it's complicated because commodities don't carry brand weight, yet there's obviously a brand power law. I (like most other people) use ChatGPT. But for coding I use Claude and a bit of Gemini, etc. depending on the problem. If they were complete commodities, it wouldn't matter much what I used.
A part of the issue here is that while LLMs may be trending toward commodity, "AI" isn't. As more people use AI, they get locked into their habits, memory (customization), ecosystem, etc. And as AI improves if everything I do has less and less to do with the hardware and I care more about everything else, then the hardware (e.g. iPhone) becomes the commodity.
Similar with AWS if data/workflow/memory/lock-in becomes the moat I'll want everything where the rest of my infra is.
> Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
People like screens. They like seeing IG pictures,they like scrolling through TikTok, they like seeing pictures/videos their friends/family send/post. I doubt many people will want to see pictures/videos on a watch screen or in glasses (which still have a ways to go).
Also I don't buy the premise of this article that Apple is deciding to take a backseat in AI, they were late to the party but they are trying (and failing it seems) to build foundational models. Reaching for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc while they continue to work on their internal models makes a lot of sense to me. It acknowledges they are behind and need to rely on a third-party but doesn't mean they won't ever use their own models.
Unless something changes (which is absolutely possible) it does seem we are headed towards LLMs being comedities. We will see what OpenAI/Ive end up releasing but I don't see a near-future where we don't have screens in our pockets and for that Google and Apple are best placed. With the GPT-5 flop (It's 4.6 at best IMHO) I have less concerns with LLMs growing as quickly as predicted.
For some time I have a feeling that Apple actually IS playing the hardware game in the age of AI. Even though they are not actively innovating on the AI software or shipping products with AI, their hardware (especially the unified memory) is great for running large models locally.
You can't get a consumer-grade GPU with enough VRAM to run a large model, but you can do so with macbooks.
I wonder if doubling down on that and shipping devices that let you run third party AI models locally and privately will be their path.
If only they made their unified memory faster as that seems to be the biggest bottleneck regarding LLMs and their tk/s performance.
True, but Apple is a consumer hardware company, which requires billions of users at their scale.
We may care about running LLMs locally, but 99% of consumers don't. They want the easiest/cheapest path, which will always be the cloud models. Spending ~$6k (what my M4 Max cost) every N years since models/HW keep improving to be able to run a somewhat decent model locally just isn't a consumer thing. Nonviable for a consumer hardware business at Apple's scale.
This. If we plateau around current SOTA LLM performance and 192/386Gb of memory can run a competitive model, Apple computers could become the new iPhone. They have a unique and unmatched product because of their hardware investment.
Of course nobody knows how this will eventually play out. But people without inside information on what these big organizations have/possess, cannot make such predictions.
On a hypothetical 70b q4 model, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (128GB memory with 96GB allocated to iGPU) delivers ~2–5 tokens/sec, slightly trailing the M4 Max’s ~3–7 tokens/sec. The next generation for AMD I expect can easily catch up to or surpass the M4 Max.
A pair of MaxSun/Intel Arc B60 48GB GPUs (dual 24GB B580's on one card) for $1200 each also outperforms the M4 Max.
I think it is a given that they are aiming for a fully custom training cluster with custom training chips and inference hardware. That would align well with their abilities and actually isn't too hard to pull off for them given that they have very decent processors, GPUs and NPUs already.
Memory is not in any way or shape some sort of crucial advantage, you were just tricked into thinking that because it's used for market segmentation and nobody would slaughter their datacenter profits cash cow. The inference and god forbid training on consumer Apple hardware is terrible and behind.
i think Nvidia is trying to create a sort of reference platform and have other OEMs produce mass market products, so a laptop might happen even if nvidia doesn't make one themselves
For local inference macs have indeed shined through this whole LLM thing, and came out as the preferred device. They are great, the dev experience is good, speeds are ok-ish (a bit slower w/ the new "thinking" models / agentic use with lots of context, but still manageable).
But nvda isn't that far behind, and has already moved to regain some space with their PRO6000 "workstation" GPUs. You get 96GB of VRAM for ~7.5k$, which is more than a comparable RAM mac, but not 30k you previously had to shell for top of the line GPUs. So you get a "prosumer" 5090 with a bit more compute and 3x VRAM, in a computer that can sell for <10k$ and beat any mac at both inference and training, for things that "fit" in that VRAM.
Macs still have the advantage for larger models, tho. The new DGX spark should join that market soon(tm). But they allegedly ran into problems on several fronts. We'll have to wait and see.
> LLMs can operate any kind of software (check MCP).
But they can't be trusted to do so in a reliable and sane way. Until the issues with hallucination and prompt adherence are resolved, including the issues with context injection, LLMs aren't any more useful for general software operation than `/dev/urandom` is.
Every time we get a "Gemini deleted my production database!" story everyone goes "well obviously you shouldn't have trusted it with production access". I don't play russian roulette with my CLI, why would I add a layer of uncertainty on top?
Every single instance to-date where "AI" has been integrated into a product of platform has been a hinderance rather than a benefit.
From milquetoast write-by-committee text generation engines that allow shitty writers to pump out terrible business boilerplate in an email client to customer service representatives tacked onto storefronts that don't do anything except waste your time, using anything AI feels like wading through a waist-deep swamp that ten thousand cows have shit in.
In a way, Apple having terrible AI is a plus to me. It recognizes that there's a cute puppy in a photo in my photo library and that's what I need, and want, it to do.
> Interestingly, Intel still reached new highs for a decade after missing mobile before it all collapsed
That's because their problems weren't due to missing mobile but rather taking too much risk on a fab tech transition that they then fumbled. This put them permanently behind and they were unable to catch up.
> Amazon’s AWS is predicated on the idea of commoditized infrastructure at scale where price is the priority
Since when does AWS compete on price? AWS is predicated on the idea of many proprietary services running on commodity hardware, and charging high prices for the privilege of not spending time on sysadmin work.
Your comment on Intel is correct, but it's also true that TSMC could invest billions into advanced fabs because Apple gave them a huge guaranteed demand base. Intel didn’t have the same economic flywheel since PCs/servers were flat or declinig.
That's a good clarification on Amazon, running on commodity hardware with competitive pricing != competing on price alone. It would have been better to clarify this difference when pointing out that they're trying the same commodity approach in AI.
Amazon is doing exactly everything except competing on price and they don't run commodity hardware either. They're even developing their own chips. Sure they have "commodity" GPUs and CPUs in some lineups, but they also have Graviton.
If you get something this mundane wrong from the start I don't know how I could trust anything else from the post either.
AI will become a commodity -- see Deepseek. The handwriting is on the wall and the open source models and practices to get to Claude 4.1 or GPT-5 are all in the public domain.
Apple could simply sell earpods with an AI voice interface, the UI/UX and solution space is evolving too quickly for a company like Apple to sensibly try to define how it will use the technology yet.
See Google and Microsoft's failed integrations of AI with search for an example of how it should not be done.
The more I use AI the more I think I don't need a laptop and would settle for a comfortable VR setup as I do far less typing of symbols.
I think Apple will come out looking great because they are less likely to release things that suck. It seems smarter to hoard cash right now rather than spending it on hardware for an unproven workload.
Yep, Apple is great at this. There have been times when random Android phones were ahead feature wise, but this doesn’t cause Apple to lose its customer base, even when Apple releases the same feature 2–4 years later. The same thing happened with smartwatches, Apple entered that industry late, yet the Apple Watch now dominates the market against well established players
Even the iPhone itself. They played around a bit with the Newton and Rokr E1, sure, but for the most part they sat back and let everyone else make all the mistakes first.
Apple does not need to develop AI software itself in order to remain successful.
We more and more turn into cyborgs, wearing all kinds of processors and sensors on our bodies. And we need this hardware and the software that runs on it to be trustworthy.
Being the hardware producer and gatekeeper for trustworthy software to run on it is probably big enough of a market for Apple.
Even more so if their business of getting 15% to 30% of the revenue apps generate on the iPhone continues.
It has yet to be seen what type of company becomes most valuable in the AI stack. It could very well be that it does not operate LLMs. Similar to how the most valuable company in the hospitality industry does not operate hotels. It just operates a website on which you book hotels.
Not to mention developer hardware. As more and more AI eats the world, more and more developers will become developers and they need machines capable of at least running quantized models. While it’s not as good as having your very own A20 or H100, the M4 Max is above all else on the desktop save the RTX5090 w/ a beast ryzen.
It’s also an opportunity to disrupt… build hardware specifically for ai tasks and reduce it down to just an asic.
maybe, maybe not. I don't want to live in a world where I can't develop software without the support of a massive corporation 3rd party. I think local model inference is going to pick up. Will it ever compete with the clusters? no, but it's good enough for a solo to get work done.
I could be wrong and we could be seeing the ladders being pulled up now, moats being filled with alligators and sharks, and soon we'll have no choice but to choose between providers. I hope we can keep the hacking/tinkering culture alive when we can no longer run things ourselves.
There's no real physical reason to run those LLMs on the end device. LLM interaction is not particularly latency sensitive as in single digit ms like gaming. So if there's no real usability drawback from hopping over the Internet then that's the direction it will go.
> But with AI, quality/performance is the priority. That’s why we see so many new AI startups and use cases lighting up as AI improves and finally becomes ‘good enough’ for new use cases.
But also, we are seeing models leapfrog each other; the best model this week is often not the best model next month and certainly not next quarter. I still see merit to the idea that cloud providers should focus on being the place where companies put their data, and make it easy for companies to bring models and tools to that data.
I agree with the article that Apple is probably cooked if the continue their current path for another couple of years.
I'm somewhat bullish on Google as well, they have the opportunity if they can figure out the product (which they are bad at) and they have the edge in cloud with their models + TPUs.
But your comment about the phone could have been about horses, or the notepad or any other technology paradigm we were used to in the past. Maybe it'll take a decade for the 'perfect' AI form factor to emerge, but it's unlikely to remain unchanged.
Yes brain chips and implants will be the next form factor. Until then the slab of battery and screen in your pocket is going to be present (and probably remain for a while even after we get brain implants).
Again, this sort of booster content speaks of Generative AI dominance as an inevitability despite mounting data that, and I really hate typing these words, Amazon and Apple are correct in their strategy.
This blog post only really makes sense if you wholesale buy into the concept that Generative AI is going to do everything its most ardent boosters claim it will, on the timeline they say it will, none of which has really bore out as true thus far. For anything less, Apple and Amazon’s strategy of commoditization of models themselves makes sense.
That being said, do I have nitpicks over their respective strategies? You betcha. Amazon is so focused on an Apple-like walled-garden approach for enterprise compute that they run the risk of being caught up in shifting tides of geopolitics and nationalism along with increased attention on cost reductions. Apple, on the other hand, is far too exposed with the iPhone being the center of their ecosystem that a fundamentally new device could easily render them the next Nokia.
Between the two, Apple at least seems to be keen innovating at its own pace and hoovering up competition that hits the true moonshots - not that I expect that strategy to keep working as antitrust scrutiny mounts against Big Tech. AWS, by comparison, is seemingly taking the Microsoft and VMware approach of just adding yet another service icon to the catalog and letting customers figure it out for themselves, which, well, just go ask the old guard of Big Tech how that strategy worked out for them when everyone ran into the public cloud.
Neither strategy has long (or even mid) term viability, but AI almost certainly won’t be the tech that pierces their moat.
You want to hear something crazy? Amazon is the biggest capex spender on AI in the world. Amazon is on track to spend over $155 this year alone on AI build out. They've already spent $100b
Yup, all in support of others’ models and the commoditization model of AI deployment. The benefit of this approach is that if AI is a bubble, they have a glut of hardware they can rent at discounts to other customers and startups who can reach for moonshots.
It’s a smart approach. Get the CAPEX done while there’s appetite and political will for it.
Apple has "missed" multiple trends according to bloggers, and a few years later they end up releasing something that reaches the top of the market. Remember that they weren't the first MP3 players, tablets, headphones, smartphones, or smart watches... they lagged in these markets for years and have been at the top of them for decades since.
I think their huge mistake was announcing a bunch of stuff (Apple Intelligence) that ended up being vaporware.
My guess is that they're also adapting to the changing ecosystem, and since they move very slowly, the trends seem archaic (like Apple Intelligence featuring image and summary generation 12-18 months after it was found to be novel by anyone).
I'm hoping that they lean in hard on their intents API forming a sort of "MCP" like ecosystem. That will be very powerful, and worth spending extra time perfecting.
Yeah they announced way too early, they probably didn't expect so much movement in the market (and to be fair it doesn't seem like it needs to be so volatile, GPT5's lackluster release feels like evidence of this)
leaks seem to indicate they're working on some home AI assistant, which kind of lends to their typical lagging timeline with the goal of quality
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
Voice input isn't suitable for many cases, and physical input seems generally superior to AR -- I've used a Vision Pro, and it's very impressive, but it's nowhere near the input-performance of a touchscreen or a mouse and keyboard. (To its credit: it's not aiming for that.)
Unless the argument is that you will never have to be precise, or do something that you don't want everyone within earshot to know about?
Also, a "dynamic, context-dependent generative UI" sounds like another way to describe a UI that changes every time you use it depending on subtle qualities of exactly how you reached it this time, preventing you from ever building up any kind of muscle-memory around using it.
All of the foundational models are converging on the same performance. For most use cases you can swap Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's top models interchangeably.
Barring some major methodology breakthrough, the next decade for AI will be about building software and hardware that actually makes use of AI, beyond Chatbots, which Apple and Amazon are positioned to do as well as anyone
Apple and Amazon have huge resources and a large installed base to which they can readily sell almost anything. Couple that with a narrow or even non-existent moat for AI and I’m thinking Apple and Amazon will do just fine. In fact, I think the reason that Apple is delaying is that they are finding that AI just isn’t what it’s being sold as by the market and they’re afraid of getting a black eye like OpenAI just did with GPT5. Worst case, they spend a few billion dollars and buy someone.
> Amazon’s AWS is predicated on the idea of commoditized infrastructure at scale where price is the priority. But with AI, quality/performance is the priority.
cost is not the priority with AWS. To quote my collaborator, "I just scaled up to 600 PB for our event"
When I think AWS I think speed, scale-up, scale-out, capacity & dynamic flexibility are more key.
AWS is not the "cheapo commodity option", nor is Azure
Just wrong. Apple just acquired 7 AI companies (talent pool). And amazon's Bedrock has been solid and pushing envelope for years.
The problem is with your expectations. Apple is no longer winning all the time, so relatively, it feels like it's losing. And Amazon is the quiet beast lurking, it's just doing a poor job at marketing.
Apple made the mistake of making a grand announcement and then not following through. They may have the talent, and even the hardware, but the product is still missing. OpenAIs open weight model runs great on my iMac, when is apple going to make a move?
We will see. One thing with AI is that access to data/APIs is key. There’s been a long term trend where services are locking down their APIs so that you can only interact with them through their native UI, either phone or web, sometimes just phone. Many of the most promising uses of AI are to automate around various annoying things service providers do to drive their own revenue, and the service providers aren’t taking this lying down.
Apple is in a very favorable position with its control of arguably the most important platform of all. They can force app developers to allow Apple AI to automate their apps, and prevent other AI providers from doing the same, and they make a strong privacy argument about why this is necessary.
They continue building a distributed data-acquisition and edge data-processing network with their iPhone sales, where the customer keeps paying for both hardware and traffic.
They constantly take measures to ensure that the data their customers generate is only available to Apple and is not siphoned away by the users themselves.
The moment they finish the orchestration of this distributed worldwide iOS AI-cluster, they will suddenly have both the data and the processing at comparatively low operational cost.
The biggest risk? A paradigm-shift where the Smartphone is no longer the main device (smart glasses being a major risk here), and some other player takes the lead here.
I could be wrong but I disagree with the premise of the article. One thing that both Apple and Amazon are extremely good is hardware (consumer, and cloud-infra, respectively). And ultimately what matters to user is going to be the hardware that properly integrates AI capabilities, ideally with some inference models running locally. We've already seen that multiple companies are able to produce high quality models, so the model is not a winner-take-all game. How many companies are able to compete with Apple on mobile and laptop hardware? That's a much harder game.
This is mostly true. Sure apple can make great cpu, gpu and innovate on airpods etc. But they are literally so behind on AI. This time they can't make that innovation jump like they did with iphone because there is no Steve jobs as a tech leader.
Apple now only cares about reveneue and retirement of all those who made Iphone and Macs great. They are rich so they don't need to innovate big until they are like Intel now. But they try creating toys like Vison Pro, and self driving car that was coming for a decade. Just all for the fun of it.
Old company with old leader and 0 hunger for succees. Opposite of all big AI startups today.
> Regardless of what the final form factor ends up being, there’s no doubt spending our lives hunched over staring at a piece of glass in our hand is suboptimal.
As opposed to what exactly? If the author really believes that a watch and glasses are preferred over a smartphone, I don't know what to say. Also, note that the author doesn't know what this new form factor will look like. In that case, what's the point in declaring that Apple and Amazon will miss the boat?
I think a much bigger threat to Apple is a smartphone with an AI driven operating system. But what do I know?
Apple will integrate AI in a not user facing fashion. They'll weave it underneath the OS and the ecosystem. Like how they locally update memories and do other stuff on-device.
What we gonna see from Apple, IMHO, is a horde of smaller models working on different tasks on the devices itself, plus heavier stuff is running on "personal cloud compute" instances.
We'll not see Apple AI besides a sticker, it'll just try to do its work at the background.
Oh, people balk at auto-word-complete in the latest macOS, but I find it very useful. Spending little time here and there and it counts.
This article doesn’t really seem to have any insight at all into Apple or Amazon’s AI strategies. The result that “Apple and Amazon will miss AI” seems to be a premise of the argument, and the rest of the article doesn’t really seem to even corroborate that.
Are phones and AI on the opposite ends of some axis where success in one precludes success in the other? Does the use of AI reduce the use of compute and data? I have my own opinions on the topic, but beyond the eye-catching title this article didn’t inform one way or the other.
Amazon is the only company I regularly use that has implemented AI as a front that users very often interact with, and it's not a total disaster. Their customer service AI (when you have an issue) actually works well, and in many cases I didn't need to escalate to a human to get something sorted. YMMV, of course, but I hate about 99.9999999% of those "AI" customer service crap usually, and the recent "smart" ones are somehow way worse than the tree based ones of old.
Huh, interesting. I periodically ask Siri "hey siri, are you actually smart yet?" (or variants on this depending on how I feel). So far I've always received a polite "I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that". No worries, you'll get there.
It's funny how the unexpected is way more impressive. I tried out the voice commands on my new car (BYD) and after it correctly interpreted and implemented my request, I politely said "thank you!" (as I always do, it's important to set a good example) and the car responded "you're welcome!". 100% could just have been a lucky setup for a scripted response... but...
Is Intel lost the mobile? Or a better question has arm lost mobile … the key is today the most profitable part is not arm even it has the isa.
Intel lost the hardware fight. But it lost all along as the most profitable part is software or who control the ecosystem. Microsoft and Apple. Not Intel.
It is amd cannot beat nvidia but the ecosystem of Ai (but not game) is what the lost is.
Now what ecosystem apple and Amazon lost … can it get to avoid nvidia controlling their Ai ecosystem. I doubt very much.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
If you earnestly believed that dynamic generative UIs are the future, surely you'd be betting on Apple.. The company with fully integrated hardware already capable of cost effectively running near-frontier generative models on the end user hardware.
The most useful AI feature for iOS I can image is actually intelligent Siri, which could use other applications installed on the phone as its tools to accomplish the tasks.
Apps would expose their functionality to the Smart Siri. Maybe there's already something like this with the shortcuts. Maybe I could give Claude Code style blanket permissions to some actions, some ones I would like to review.
A paradigm shift is actually easy: one has only to imagine. In the case of Amazon, one has to imagine how AI could radically change the cloud service landscape. And in case of Apple how AI could change the way people are using their ubiquitous computer. If they can not imagine it, then for them it’s no paradigm shift, but a commodity.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
Because this is not a science fiction future, but a corporate one, where neither do those magical UIs exist, nor do you have enough power in wearables for them to be everything you need?
One way out for Apple is facilitate running small local specialized models on its hardware, like Macbooks - with unlimited free use, like basic writing, translations, spreadsheets and maybe coding.
The macbook could come with some models, and brew ecosystem would supply others.
The gold rush metaphor loves to highlight the shovel sellers, but the actually valuable commodity (gold) still needs a broker. I cannot see any other hardware vendor being better positioned than Apple for consumer facing AI.
People are gonna pretty quickly quit paying for AI--we're well into the "let me see what everyone's talking about" phase and that'll wear off soon. The price is already skyrocketing way ahead of quality or utility, so that'll accelerate the decline. Businesses incorporating AI into their products will scale that back as costs increase, or as they replace the most commonly used functionality with purpose-built code.
The real question is how do we continue the grift? AI's a huge, economy-sustaining bubble, and there's currently no off-ramp. My guess is we'll rebrand ML: it's basically AI, it actually works, and it can use video cards.
AI is a great feature funnel in terms of like, "what workflows are people dumping into AI that we can write purpose-built code for", but it has to transition from revenue generator to loss leader. The enormity of the bubble has made this very difficult, but I have faith in us.
not to be a contrarian but i think apple will be the only tech giant standing after the inevitable ai winter, simply because they were too stupid to figure out how to integrate ai with their ecosystem.
I think both realize that nobody wants to buy an Apple or Amazon car. They want a Mercedes that drives itself. Mercedes is going to release one and Tesla is going to go bankrupt because of their ongoing negligence and disregard for safety. There's going to be a tidal wave of civil litigation at some point in the next 10 years.
Maybe Apple and Amazon are the only cool heads in this absolute shitstorm.
The real, intrinsic value of AI is essentially zero compared to the hype and tech-biz cargo culting. If I were John Apple, I would simply sit back and wait while all your competition dump all their money into the AI bonfire. Once the dust settles all the hyped-up ai startups are dead, you can come in and pick up whatever worked best and have a stellar AI product with no real cost. Assuming such a product can exist, it still isn't clear.
I don't think companies not literally setting billions of dollars on fire is a bad thing.
Its sad content like this makes it too front page. AI has been developed and used at both companies far before LLM TRANSFORMERS made such a hit. The author clearly doesn't have even a basic understanding of what AI is... AI is a giant umbrella term. The hype is essentially all about Transformer based models and I time will show its a hype bubble they don't need to be part of. I will never understand how people with so little technical knowledge on a subject can make grandiose claims like "Apple is losing out on AI!" and be taken seriously. Every company is high on their own damn supply with this pushing AI nonsense. I don't need language models shoved in my face by yet another company. I respect Apples approach far more than everyone else trying to ride the LLM bandwagon.
I don’t think anybody other than Google and Apple have a chance to win AI and it’s because they are the only companys with both the user base and the capacity to design and produce hardware for models.
Facebook has a data advantage and a use base but at the end of the day they will always need to make Nvidia or a cloud provider rich to run/train their models.
Sounds like, “Apple and Amazon will miss AI because they aren’t following the herd mentality and doing what everyone else does.”
They are doing something different and it might fail but I’m glad different large tech companies are trying different strategies.
I for one am a fan of Apple’s local-first approach. If they can get it to work it aligns more with my ideals. If it fails, at least they kept things interesting.
So what? Like there is no computing beyond gigantic screens held with both hands with weird look and 'features', or there will be no services to provide but AI?
Maybe they won't be so big in monetary value anymore? So what? There are endless states between huge and nothing, actually most organizations live there and most serve people well.
I'm sure they'll be fine. Apple and Amazon also "missed" blockchain, and nobody cares. You don't have to bet the house on every technology that comes along in order to be successful.
I think this analysis is directionally right but the supportive arguments are quite weak. Maybe the iPhone is the wrong form factor, but do we really doubt Apple's ability to create a new hardware device and tightly integrate software?
The deeper issue, in my view, is that Apple is violating its own philosophical belief, articulated by Steve Jobs himself: that Apple should always own the primary technology behind its products (i.e., multi-touch, click-wheel). This is central to Apple's "we need to make it ourselves" approach.
Camera lenses are commodities. AI models are foundational. Apple's own executive leadership likened models to the internet, and said, well surely we wouldn't try to build and own the internet! This misplaces AI as infrastructure when in fact it's foundational to building and serving useful applications.
They further see "chat" (and by extension) as an app, but I think it's more like a foundational user interface. And Apple's certainly always owned the user interface.
When Siri was first announced, there was excitement that voice might be the next paradigm shift in user interface. Partly because Siri is so bad for a decade now, and partly because people didn't feel like talking to their screens, Apple may have learned a very unhelpful lesson: that Siri is just a feature, not a user interface. In this age though, chat and voice are more than features, and yet Apple doesn't own this either.
Apple should not buy Perplexity. Perplexity is smoke and mirrors, and there's nothing defensible about its business. Apple cannot get the talent and the infrastructure to catch up on models.
So what then?
OpenAI is not for sale. Anthropic is likely not for sale, but even if it were, Apple wouldn't buy it: Anthropic is very risky to Apple's profit margin profile and Apple can't unlock Anthropic's bottleneck (capacity).
In fact, to Apple's advantage, why not let the VCs and competitors like Microsoft and Amazon and Google light their money on fire while this industry takes shape, provided you have an option in the end to sell a product to the consumer?
The best option, in my view, is Search Deal Redux: partner deeply with Google and Gemini. Google very obviously wants as much distribution as possible, and Apple has more hardware distribution than any company in history.
Partnership is the only path because, yes, Apple missed this one badly. There is one area where I agree with Tim Cook, though: being late doesn't guarantee you lose, even in AI.
> I think it's more like a foundational user interface.
I don't. The foundational interface hasn't been created yet. Let's be honest, chat isn't great. It is the best we have right now to leverage the technology, yes, but if it is our future — that we cannot conceive of anything better, we've failed miserably. We're still in the "command-line age". No doubt many computing pioneers thought that the command-line too was foundational, but nowadays most users will never touch it. In hindsight, it really wasn't important — at best a niche product for power users.
> Apple may have learned a very unhelpful lesson: that Siri is just a feature, not a user interface.
That is the right lesson, though. Chat sucks; be that through voice, typing, or anything else. People will absolutely put up with it absent of better options, but as soon as there is a better option nobody is preferring chat. This is where Apple has a huge opportunity to deliver the foundational interface. Metaphorically speaking, they don't need to delver the internet at all, they just need to deliver the web browser. If they miss that boat, then perhaps there is room for concern, but who knows what they have going on in secret?
> But now there’s a new paradigm shift. The iPhone was perfect for the mobile era, which is why it hasn’t changed much over the last decade.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
> The other problem is that at its core, AI is two things: 1) software and 2) extremely fast-moving/evolving, two things Apple is bad at.Idk my MacBook Pro is pretty great and runs well. Fast moving here implies that as soon as you release something there's like this big paradigm shift or change that means you need to move even faster to catch up, but I don't think that's the case, and where it is the case the new software (LLM) still need to be distributed to end users and devices so for a company like Apple they pay money and build functionality to be the distributor of the latest models and it doesn't really matter how fast they're created. Apple's real threat is a category shift in devices, which AI may or may not necessarily be part of.
I'm less certain about Amazon but unless (insert AI company) wants to take on all the business risk of hosting governments and corporations and hospitals on a cloud platform I think Amazon can just publish their own models, buy someone else's, or integrate with multiple leading AI model publishers.
I think the bet here is that AI is like Dropbox — a feature. Operating globally, these models are going to be a regulatory tar pit. The industry hype train is 100% reliant on courts ignoring the law - that didn’t work out well for Napster.
That makes the “category shift” difficult for Apple to execute well and difficult for competitors to gun for them. Microsoft is even worse off there because the PC OEMs relied on dying companies like Intel to deliver engineering for innovative things.
AWS, Azure, and GCP are doing the same stuff in different flavors. Google and Microsoft approach human facing stuff differently because they own collaboration platforms.
Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.
> at the device level. Apple is ahead
Apple could turn everything around overnight by quietly re-enabling the jailbreak community for a few years, or restoring the 2022 Hypervisor API entitlement for arbitrary VMs. Hopefully this does not have to wait for leadership changes.
Either of those actions would take the shackles off Apple's underutilized hardware and frustrated developers. The resulting innovations could be sherlocked back into new OS APIs under Apple guardrails, whence they could generate revenue via App Store software. Then retire the jailbreaks and silently thank OutsideJobs for uncredited contributions to Apple upstream.
At present, the only industry participants maximizing usage of Apple hardware are zero-day hoarders. Meanwhile, every passing day allows Qualcomm, Nvidia and Arm-generic/Mediatek to improve their nascent PC hw+OS stacks, whittling away at Apple's shrinking hardware lead.
Any loosening of Apple hardware restrictions is going to be judged internally on what impact it will have on App Store revenue & related DRM / IP contracts.
I'm not sure Tim Cook is the guy to overrule that based on a vision of the future.
Let's see if the $599 MacBook (iPhone SoC!) can run VMs and software distributed outside App Store, i.e. like existing MacBooks.
If Pixel phones (with inferior hardware) can run Debian Linux VMs with external USB-c display, so can Apple tablets/phones. Apple and Google app stores have similar business incentives and antitrust constraints.
You are spot on, they can indeed run that software.
The problem that you and others with similar interests are running into is that you’re asking Apple to spend perhaps tens of millions of dollars to make a change that, frankly, almost nobody wants or cares about. I don’t want it or care about it whatsoever, nor does my grandma. That’s why this all plays out in court and in countries that want to stick a finger in the eye of American tech companies.
Anti-trust concerns tend to just be multi-billion dollar corporations (Apple, Meta, Epic, Netflix, etc.) arguing over who gets the slice of your wallet. None of these companies lower prices when they win court battles, experiences don’t get better, and as Apple in particular loses more and more control over the App Store they lose the ability, however flawed, to collectively bargain on behalf of regular folks against developers [1].
Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?
Is there a single example?
[1] Items like forced private Sign in with Apple, or disclosing how data is used, don’t and won’t exist on “the Meta App Store” because as a single person or small group you’d rather have access to Facebook and you’ll give up data for it. But Apple can listen to users and then force Meta to comply with those demands, however flawed the situation may be and however self-serving Apple’s interests may be.
> Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?
Epic?
What prices were lowered? Or was there another improvement such as further privacy restrictions against developers?
The original 2020 discount was literally what sparked the Apple/Google-Epic lawsuits.
https://www.vg247.com/fortnite-v-bucks-discount-epic-direct
That was prior to ceding control - now that companies have the ability to stand up their own app stores and do direct payments (as I understand to be the case now at least), where have prices gone down?
VBucks are still $8 aren't they?
With 20% Epic rewards, if you use Epic's store. https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/better-deals-in-fortn...
So after all the legal mess and crusading and white knighting about the Apple App Store what we got in return is now buy the same product as I did before for the same price in dollars, but I can get 20% of my purchase price back in what is the equivalent of carnival tokens if I use Epic’s proprietary payment system?
Do you wholeheartedly believe that this counts as lowering prices or providing improvements? Are the Vbucks still $8 or no?
You can choose to value company store bucks however you want, but they're worth >$0, which means that yes, Epic lowered prices. (Reasonably, considering they're saving a good chunk of the App Store tax)
> Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.
Can you elaborate? I don't see what you're seeing.
There’s a whole industry around critiquing Apple and their misadventures on iOS with respect to AI. We understand what is happening - there’s even podcasters castigating individual executives!
What is the story with Copilot as an on device feature of Windows? How dos that relate to an “AI PC”? In my business, what is Copilot (on the PC) do? How about Copilot Chat? How do they both relate to Copilot for Office 365?
Answer: I have no fucking idea. It’s a big soup of stuff with the same name that dumps everything in a bowl that the company makes. In a business, you’re going to make product decisions within your enterprise than fundamentally change the products based on your privacy and security needs and what countries you are operating in.
Apple has articulated a vision/framework for what they are delivering on device, with outside 1st party help and with 3rd parties. They’ve laid out how they are accessing your proprietary data. They have also failed to deliver.
Ah, by "Apple and Microsoft are failing at the device level", you are specifically saying they are failing specifically with respect to AI inference executing on edge devices (rather than in the cloud)?
Yes, that and edge platform integration with cloud services.
It’s complicated and difficult - I say fail in the “fail fast” sense, not as an insult. Where are the line(s) between Excel as a component of Windows, as a web service and as a node on the office graph?
If I need AI help integrated with the product to write Excel formulas, I think the way to get that from Microsoft is with Copilot for Office 365, which also accesses all of my data on the graph and can potentially leak stuff with web grounding. (Which for companies means you need to fix SharePoint governance and do lots of risk assessment #godbless)
I just go to ChatGPT.
> fix SharePoint governance and do lots of risk assessment
Pretty sure that's the product requirement that drove MS Purview (previously: MS data protection?).
No business wants to take the time to do data classification. No business is going to do cool new stuff with sensitive data.
... Therefore, flip Microsoft Purview on and when you leak data you now have someone to point the finger at. And can do cool stuff.
>I'm less certain about Amazon but unless (insert AI company) wants to take on all the business risk of hosting governments and corporations and hospitals on a cloud platform I think Amazon can just publish their own models, buy someone else's, or integrate with multiple leading AI model publishers.
Amazon is capturing massive amounts of the value in AI via AWS. They'll be fine. But for real I don't see a reason why Alexa is not using a good LLM now. Could just be infinitely better...
I'm not clear on what would be better about my Echos having an LLM interface. I want to like the idea, but I'm also growing increasingly annoyed at how things that used to work are beginning to not.
If they could gate it behind a "start chat session" or something, I would be more excited. Doing it by cannibalizing how well basic "play radio/start time/read from audible" worked for the longest time, everything they do that causes friction there is frustrating, to the extreme.
>Doing it by cannibalizing how well basic "play radio/start time/read from audible" worked for the longest time, everything they do that causes friction there is frustrating, to the extreme.
Theres absolutely no reason why plugging in an LLM would break any of those features but asking generic questions would be 100x better than "Searching the web for a shitty Quora or Alexa answers question."
Pluhging in an LLM breaks it when those features require it to be worded a certain way. Agree that it shouldn't, but that seems to be the way it is often done.
For example, I tried Google's Gemini a while ago instead of Google Assistant on my phone and it was unable to do basic things like 'open the Signal app' and would instead go on a big tangent about how it can't open the Signal app for me, but that I could open the Signal app by finding it on my home screen or if I don't have it installed I can download it from the play store etc.
In principle, I agree with you. In practice, it keeps getting worse.
I also don't typically ask generic questions. Ever, that I can remember.
Again, I don't want to dislike the idea. If people are really getting value from it, I would like them to continue to do so. But it seems to be a more expensive way to service use cases that were working just fine.
> But for real I don't see a reason why Alexa is not using a good LLM now.
Large language models are too slow to use as real-time voice assistants. ChatGPT voice only barely works because they have to use a much worse (but faster) model to do it.
Amazon has a commercial Speech-to-Text model (Nova Sonic) that is passable. I used it to create a post-sales call assistant and was surprised that the underlying model was able to do a bunch of stuff I thought I was going to have to use Claude for.
At least on paper OpenAI claims the Voice models are actually the ones you are picking i.e. GPT 4o, 5. In any case even a GPT 3.5 would be superior to current alexa...
Alexa was a huge money loser for Amazon even before LLMs. They can't afford it.
> But for real I don't see a reason why Alexa is not using a good LLM now. Could just be infinitely better...
Alexa would "a higher order infinity" better if it wasn't spying on you ...
Came here to say pretty much this. Hardware seems more valuable than a model.
I think AI could be commoditized. Look at DeepSeek stealing OpenAI's model. Look at the competitive performance between Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. Look at open weight models, like Llama.
Commoditized AI need used via a device. The post argues that other devices, like watches or smart glasses, could be better posed to use AI. But...your point stands. Given Apple's success with hardware, I wouldn't bet against them making competitive wearables.
Hardware is hard. It's expensive to get wrong. It seems like a hardware company would be better positioned to build hardware than an AI company. Especially when you can steal the AI company's model.
Supply chains, battery optimization, etc. are all hard-won battles. But AI companies have had their models stolen in months.
If OpenAI really believed models would remain differentiated then why venture into hardware at all?
Moreover, Apple owning the access to the device-hardware AND to the data those models would need to create value for an Apple-user makes the company even more robust.
They could manage years of AI-missteps while cultivating their AI "marketplace", which allows the user to select a RevShare'd third party AI if (and only if) Apple cannot serve the request.
It would keep them afloat in the AI-space no matter how far they are behind, as long as the iPhone remains the dominant consumer mobile device.
The only risks are a paradigm shift in mobile devices, and the EU which clearly noticed that they operate multiple uneven digital markets within their ecosystem...
"The only risks" lol. Tim Cook thought those were the only risks to the App Store too, now look where he is. You lack imagination.
What if [Japan|EU|US DOJ|South Korea] passes a law preventing OEMs from claiming user data as their property? If Apple really tries to go down the road of squeezing pre-juiced lemons like this, I think they're going to be called out for stifling competition and real innovation.
Go further - what if those entities pass laws preventing Meta, or Google from claiming user data as their property? Or even the AI companies that are siphoning content from the web.
True, I should have framed it wider: "If any of those anti-competitive shenanigans are identified as what they are"
> I think Amazon can just publish their own models, buy someone else's, or integrate with multiple leading AI model publishers.
This is exactly what they've done: They offer SageMaker (and similar capabilities) for hosting smaller models that fit into a single instance GPU, and they have Bedrock that hosts a metric crap-ton of AWS and third party models. Many of the model architectures are supported for hosting fine-tuned versions.
>AI is two things: 1) software and 2) extremely fast-moving/evolving
3) massive scam
> > Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
> https://www.apple.com/watch/
(I am mostly going to comment on the Watch issue, as I have one.)
Apple makes a watch, yes. But is it an AI watch? Will they manage to make it become one? Intel made all kinds of chips. Intel's chips even could be used for mobile devices... only, Intel never (even still, to today) made a great mobile chip.
I have an Apple Watch--and AirPods Pro, which connect directly to it--with a cellular plan. I already found how few things I can do with my Watch kind of pathetic, given that I would think the vast majority of the things I want to do could be done with a device like my watch; but, in a world with AI, where voice mode finally becomes compelling enough to be willing to use, it just feels insane.
I mean, I can't even get access to YouTube Music on just my watch. I can use Apple's Music--so you know this hardware is capable of doing it--but a lot of the content I listen to (which isn't even always "Music": you can also access podcasts) is on YouTube. Somehow, the Apple Watch version of YouTube access requires me to have my phone nearby?! I can't imagine Google wanted that: I think that's a limitation of the application model (which is notoriously limited). If I could access YouTube Music on my watch, I would've barely ever needed my iPhone around.
But like, now, I spend a lot of time using ChatGPT, and I really like its advanced voice mode... it is a new reason to use my iPhone, but is a feature that would clearly be amazing with just the watch: hell... I can even use it to browse the web? With a tiny bit of work, I could have a voice interface for everything I do (aka, the dream of Siri long gone past).
But, I can't even access the thing that already works great, today, with just my watch. What's the deal? Is it that OpenAI really doesn't want me to do that? These two companies have a partnership over a bunch of things--my ChatGPT account credentials are even something embedded into my iPhone settings--so I'd think Apple would be hungry for this to happen, and should've asked them, thrown it in as a term, or even done the work of integrating it for them (as they have in the past for Google's services).
This feels to me like Apple has a way they intend me to use the watch, and "you don't need to ever have your phone with you" is not something they want to achieve: if they add functionality that allows the Watch to replace an iPhone, they might lose some usage of iPhones, and that probably sounds terrifying (in the same way they seem adamant that an iPad can't ever truly compete with a MacBook, even if it is only like two trivial features away).
I think you're getting confused here with app limitations vs platform limitations. YouTube Music not streaming without the paired phone on the same wifi is an app limitation: other music apps like Spotify work without it. Lacking a watch app (or having a bad watch app) probably never lost any non fitness company any customers. A good iPhone app is much more make or break.
So, when Apple released the iPhone, they went out of their way to make sure that YouTube and Google Maps were on the device, to the point of making special deals with Google and developing all of the software for them (as they didn't want to give up any control)... I maintain that, given how they already have a partnership with OpenAI, it is a strange lack of vision that I can't go down to the beach and spend my day talking to ChatGPT to get things done.
Just so you know, if you’re on your watch and you need ChatGPT, you can always just call 1-800 ChatGPT from your watch. I do it all the time and it’s fantastic.
I'm not sure I follow: Both Apple and Amazon are working on AI as we speak. They're just not following the popular approach of releasing a chatbot in the wild.
Apple is focusing on a privacy-first approach with smaller models that run locally. Amazon is tying it's models to an AWS subscription and incentivizing use by offering discounts, making it cheaper to use their models over GPT, Opus, etc.
Apple is not focusing on AI with any real emphasis. The engineers asked for $50B to train a model and Apple instead did stock buybacks. The stock kept underperforming and so they touted apple intelligence and a revamped Siri, only for it to fall flat. Siri was underinvested in for many years and should be at least as good as Claude or ChatGPT. ‘They’re not investing in a chatbot’ is a huge miss by apple who had a chatbot on everyone’s devices and a headstart on the whole concept.
> The engineers asked for $50B to train a model and Apple instead did stock buybacks.
It is probably cheaper to simply integrate with OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever might unseat them in the future, than spend $50B on training a model. Not only is it cheaper, but it also gives them the flexibility to ride the wave of popularity, without ceding hardware or software sales.
And in that is the issue, Apple does not believe they could do better than Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, or OpenAI. They are paying Google rather than building out their own products. Pre-Tim, Apple was pouring profits back into R&D but now the priority is rewarding shareholders.
It depends on what you think is going to happen with models.
The way I see it, models were always predicated on openness and data-sharing. That, too, will be the competitive downfall of those who poured billions into creating said models.
They won't stay caged up forever. Ultimately the only thing OpenAI has between itself and it's competitors is some really strong computers.
Well... anybody can buy strong computers. This is, of course, assuming you don't believe the promise of ever-increasing cognition and eventual AGI, which I don't. The people going fast aren't going to be the winners. The second movers and later on will be. They get all the model, with 1/100th the cost.
Ultimately models, right now, for most consumers, are nothing more than novelties. Just look at Google Pixel - I have one, by the way. I can generate a custom image? Neat... I guess. It's a cool novelty. I can edit people out of my pictures? Well... actually Apple had that a couple years ago... and it's not as useful as you would think.
It's hard to see it because we're programmers, but right now, the AI products are really lacking for consumers. They're not good for music, or TV, or Movies, or short-form entertainment. ChatGPT is neat for specific usecases like cheating on an essay or vibe coding, but how many people are doing that? Very, very few.
Let me put it this way. Do I think Claude Code is good? Yes. Do I think Claude Code is the next Madonna? No.
> Ultimately the only thing OpenAI has between itself and it's competitors is some really strong computers.
There's a lot of difference between OpenAI and, let's say, Facebook (Llama). The difference between them is not only strong computers. There's architectural differences to the models.
From a technical perspective, yes. But from a business perspective they're going to try to cram every model into every possible use case for as long as possible.
It will be a sign of a maturing market when we see vendors actually say "bad for X" and pulling away from general-purpose messaging.
You see it a little bit with the angling for code-specific products, but I think we're nowhere near a differentiated market.
> They are paying Google rather than building out their own products.
This is the real death knell people should focus on. Apple buried their AI R&D to rush complete flops like Vision Pro out the door. Now that the dust has settled, the opportunity cost of these hardware ventures was clearly a mistake. Apple had more than a decade to sharpen their knives and prepare for war with Nvidia, and now they're missing out on Nvidia's share of the datacenter market. Adding insult to injury, they're probably also ~10 years behind SOTA in the industry unless they hire well-paid veterans at great expense.
Apple's chronic disdain for unprofitable products, combined with boneheaded ambition, will be the death of them. They cannot obviate real innovation and competition while dropping nothingburger software and hardware products clearly intended to bilk an unconscious userbase.
Apple doesn't need its own model--it can license Google's model; or if terms are inprofitable, license Anthropic's or OpenAI's or Mistral's etc. And eventually it can build its own model.
Think of how important it is for any AI model company to be the go-to model on the iPhone. Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on the iPhone.
According to my information, Apple is currently being paid ~0.0 billion dollars for the privilege of being the default AI provider.
Am I supposed to keep waiting until that changes one day?
Exactly my point - OpenAI is giving Apple its model for free. Which saves Apple many $B's in compute to train their own model. You could argue it's being paid in-kind.
Unlike OpenAI, Apple doesn't need to charge a subscription to get AI-based revenue. It just needs to properly integrate it into its products that billions of people are already using, to make those products more useful so people continue buying them. At that point most users don't care what model is powering it - could be GPT, Claude, Mistral etc.
> Not only is it cheaper, but it also gives them the flexibility to ride the wave
And also to hop off without any penalty if/when the wave collapses.
Didn't Apple's research lab release some open source/weights diffusion-based LLM that was blowing away all the benchmarks?
Edit: Yes it exists, seems to be built off qwen2.5 coder. Not sure it proves the point I thought it was, but diffusion LLMs still seem neat
> ‘They’re not investing in a chatbot’ is a huge miss by apple
Why? Because everyone else is doing it (and not making a profit btw)?
Why bungle an AI release named Apple intelligence that doesn’t do what was advertised then half ass integration with OpenAI.
Something about incentive for people to buy a phone that looks and acts identical to a 5 year old phone otherwise
> The engineers asked for $50B to train a model and Apple instead did stock buybacks.
Source?
I heard this from an apple explained video, don’t know the original source https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JUG1PlqAUJk
I’ll train their model for 49.9B
Right, but remember Microsoft was 'working on' mobile also. The issue is that they're working on it the wrong way. Amazon is focused on price and treating it like a commodity. Apple trying to keep the iPhone at the center of everything. Thus neither are fully committing to the paradigm shift because they say it is, but not acting like it because their existing strategy/culture precludes them from doing so.
> The issue is that they're working on it the wrong way.
So is everyone else, to be fair. Chat is a horrible way to interact with computers — and even if we accept worse is better its only viable future is to include ads in the responses. That isn't a game Apple is going to want to play. They are a hardware company.
More likely someday we'll get the "iPhone moment" when we realize all previous efforts were misguided. Can Apple rise up then? That remains to be seen, but it will likely be someone unexpected. Look at any successful business venture and the eventual "winner" is usually someone who sat back and watched all the mistakes be made first.
> Chat is a horrible way to interact with computers
Why? We interact with people via chat when possible. It seems pretty clear that's humanity's preferred ineraction model.
We begrudgingly accept chat as the lowest common denominator when there is no better option, but it's clear we don't prefer it when better options are available. Just look in any fast food restaurant that has adopted those ordering terminals and see how many are still lining up at the counter to chat with the cashier... In fact, McDonalds found that their sales rose by 30% when they eliminated chatting from the process, so clearly people found it to be a hinderance.
We don't know what is better for this technology yet, so it stands to reason that we reverted to the lowest common denominator again, but there is no reason why we will or will want to stay there. Someone is bound to figure out a better way. Maybe even Apple. That business was built on being late to the party. Although, granted, it remains to be seen if that is something it can continue with absent of Jobs.
> In fact, McDonalds found that their sales rose by 30% when they eliminated chatting from the process, so clearly people found it to be a hinderance.
That's a good supporting argument, but I don't think McDonald's adequately represents more complex discussions.
What is representative, though, is simple use: All you have to do is use chat to see how awful it is.
It is better than nothing. It is arguably the best we have right now to make use of the technology. But, unless this is AI thing is all hype and goes nowhere, smart minds aren't going to sit idle as progression moves towards maturity.
I imagine it's like how humans converse: we talk, but sometimes we need diagrams and pictures.
"What burgers do you have?"
(expands to show a set of pictures)
"I'll have the thing with chicken and lettuce"
The problem with UX driven by this kind of interface is latency. Right now, this kind of flow goes more like:
"What burgers do you have?"
(Thinking...) (4 seconds later:)
(expands to show a set of pictures)
"Sigh. I'll have the thing with chicken and lettuce"
(Thinking...) (3 seconds later:)
> "Do you mean the Crispy McChicken TM McSandwich TM?"
"Yes"
(Thinking...) (4 seconds later:)
> "Would you like anything else?"
"No"
(Thinking...) (5 seconds later:)
> "Would you like to supersize that?"
"Is there a human I can speak with? Or perhaps I can just point and grunt to one of the workers behind the counter? Anyone?"
It's just exasperating, and it's not easy to overcome until local inference is cheap and common. Even if you do voice recognition on the kiosk, which probably works well enough these days, there's still the round trip to OpenAI and then the inference time there. And of course, this whole scenario gets even worse and more frustrating anywhere with subpar internet.
Right. We talk when it is the only viable choice in front of us, but as soon as options are available, talk goes out the window pretty quickly. It is not our ideal mode of communication, just the lowest common denominator that works in most situations.
But, now, remember, unlike humans, AI can do things like materialize diagrams and pictures out of "thin air" and can even make them interactive right on the spot. It can also do a whole lot of things that you and I haven't even thought of yet. It is not bound by the same limitations of the human mind and body. It is not human.
For what reason is there to think that chat will remain the primary mode of using this technology? It is the easiest to conceive of way to use the technology, so it is unsurprising that it is what we got first, but why would we stop here? Chat works, but it is not good. There are so many unexplored possibilities to find better and we're just getting started.
I think chat will remain dominant, but we'll go into other modes as needed. There's no more efficient way to communicate "show me the burgers" than saying it - thinking it is possible, but sending thoughts is too far off right now. Then you switch to imagery or hand gestures or whatever else when they're a better way to show something.
> Chat is a horrible way to interact with computers
Chat is like the command line, but with easier syntax. This makes it usable by an order of magnitude more people.
Entertainment tasks lend themselves well to GUI type interfaces. Information retrieval and manipulation tasks will probably be better with chat type interfaces. Command and control are also better with chat or voice (beyond the 4-6 most common controls that can be displayed on a GUI).
> Chat is like the command line, but with easier syntax.
I kinda disagree with this analogy.
The command line is precise, concise, and opaque. If you know the right incantations, you can do some really powerful things really quickly. Some people understand the rules behind it, and so can be incredibly efficient with it. Most don't, though.
Chat with LLMs is fuzzy, slow-and-iterative... and differently opaque. You don't need to know how the system works, but you can probably approach something powerful if you accept a certain amount of saying "close, but don't delete files that end in y".
The "differently-opaque" for LLM chatbots comes in you needing to ultimately trust that the system is going to get it right based on what you said. The command line will do exactly what you told it to, if you know enough to understand what you told it to. The chatbot will do... something that's probably related to what you told it to, and might be what it did last time you asked for the same thing, or might not.
For a lot of people the chatbot experience is undeniably better, or at least lets them attempt things they'd never have even approached with the raw command line.
> Chat is like the command line
Exactly. Nobody really wants to use the command-line as the primary mode of computing; even the experts who know how to use it well. People will accept it when there is no better tool for the job, but it is not going to become the preferred way to use computers again no matter how much easier it is to use this time. We didn't move away from the command-line simply because it required some specialized knowledge to use.
Chatting with LLMs looks pretty good right now because we haven't yet figured out a better way, but there is no reason to think we won't figure out a better way. Almost certainly people will revert to chat for certain tasks, like people still use the command-line even today, but it won't be the primary mode of computing like the current crop of services are betting on. This technology is much too valuable for it to stay locked in shitty chat clients (and especially shitty chat clients serving advertisements, which is the inevitable future for these businesses betting on chat — they can't keep haemorrhaging money forever and individuals won't pay enough for a software service).
My experience with Claude Code is a fantastic way to interact with a (limited subset) of my computer. I do not think Claude is too far off from being able to do stuff like read my texts, emails, and calendar and take actions in those apps, which is pretty much what people want Siri to (reliably) do these days.
> Apple trying to keep iPhone at the centre of everything.
Mac, iPad and iPhone, eventually Watch and Vision. Which makes sense since Apple is first and foremost a hardware company.
Well no Alexa plus is the first LLM to integrate with the smart home in a big way.
Aws is making strides but in a different area.
it is a commodity. that's the paradigm shift. there is no moat
The author makes no effort to explain why AI :isn’t: a commodity as Apple and Amazon says. I was looking forward to that. I think the article is weak for not defending its premise. Everything else is fluff.
I agree - and if the article is correct and Apple and Amazon are the losers, I fail to glean who the winners will be or how their business model will be different.
That's fair, but it wasn't the point of the article because it's messy. Many would argue that core LLMs are 'trending' toward commodity, and I'd agree.
But it's complicated because commodities don't carry brand weight, yet there's obviously a brand power law. I (like most other people) use ChatGPT. But for coding I use Claude and a bit of Gemini, etc. depending on the problem. If they were complete commodities, it wouldn't matter much what I used.
A part of the issue here is that while LLMs may be trending toward commodity, "AI" isn't. As more people use AI, they get locked into their habits, memory (customization), ecosystem, etc. And as AI improves if everything I do has less and less to do with the hardware and I care more about everything else, then the hardware (e.g. iPhone) becomes the commodity.
Similar with AWS if data/workflow/memory/lock-in becomes the moat I'll want everything where the rest of my infra is.
> Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
People like screens. They like seeing IG pictures,they like scrolling through TikTok, they like seeing pictures/videos their friends/family send/post. I doubt many people will want to see pictures/videos on a watch screen or in glasses (which still have a ways to go).
Also I don't buy the premise of this article that Apple is deciding to take a backseat in AI, they were late to the party but they are trying (and failing it seems) to build foundational models. Reaching for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc while they continue to work on their internal models makes a lot of sense to me. It acknowledges they are behind and need to rely on a third-party but doesn't mean they won't ever use their own models.
Unless something changes (which is absolutely possible) it does seem we are headed towards LLMs being comedities. We will see what OpenAI/Ive end up releasing but I don't see a near-future where we don't have screens in our pockets and for that Google and Apple are best placed. With the GPT-5 flop (It's 4.6 at best IMHO) I have less concerns with LLMs growing as quickly as predicted.
Yet I still don’t get an external monitor with a proper desktop experience on my phone
For some time I have a feeling that Apple actually IS playing the hardware game in the age of AI. Even though they are not actively innovating on the AI software or shipping products with AI, their hardware (especially the unified memory) is great for running large models locally.
You can't get a consumer-grade GPU with enough VRAM to run a large model, but you can do so with macbooks.
I wonder if doubling down on that and shipping devices that let you run third party AI models locally and privately will be their path.
If only they made their unified memory faster as that seems to be the biggest bottleneck regarding LLMs and their tk/s performance.
> You can't get a consumer-grade GPU with enough VRAM to run a large model, but you can do so with macbooks.
You can if you're willing to trust a modded GPU with leaked firmware from a Chinese backshop
Short of flying to China and buying in person, how can an American find/get one of these?
True, but Apple is a consumer hardware company, which requires billions of users at their scale.
We may care about running LLMs locally, but 99% of consumers don't. They want the easiest/cheapest path, which will always be the cloud models. Spending ~$6k (what my M4 Max cost) every N years since models/HW keep improving to be able to run a somewhat decent model locally just isn't a consumer thing. Nonviable for a consumer hardware business at Apple's scale.
This. If we plateau around current SOTA LLM performance and 192/386Gb of memory can run a competitive model, Apple computers could become the new iPhone. They have a unique and unmatched product because of their hardware investment.
Of course nobody knows how this will eventually play out. But people without inside information on what these big organizations have/possess, cannot make such predictions.
On a hypothetical 70b q4 model, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (128GB memory with 96GB allocated to iGPU) delivers ~2–5 tokens/sec, slightly trailing the M4 Max’s ~3–7 tokens/sec. The next generation for AMD I expect can easily catch up to or surpass the M4 Max.
A pair of MaxSun/Intel Arc B60 48GB GPUs (dual 24GB B580's on one card) for $1200 each also outperforms the M4 Max.
This isn’t a great point. “A hypothetical model with hypothetical hardware will beat Apple on a hypothetical timeline.”
The tangible hardware you point out is $2,400 for two niche-specific components vs the Apple hardware which benefits more general use cases.
> A pair of MaxSun/Intel Arc B60 48GB GPUs (dual 24GB B580's on one card)
please point me to the laptop with these
I think it is a given that they are aiming for a fully custom training cluster with custom training chips and inference hardware. That would align well with their abilities and actually isn't too hard to pull off for them given that they have very decent processors, GPUs and NPUs already.
>I think it is a given that they are aiming for a fully custom training cluster with custom training chips and inference hardware.
It is? I haven't seen anything about this.
They're working—almost done—on a CUDA backend for their Apple Silicon framework:
https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/pull/1983
Memory is not in any way or shape some sort of crucial advantage, you were just tricked into thinking that because it's used for market segmentation and nobody would slaughter their datacenter profits cash cow. The inference and god forbid training on consumer Apple hardware is terrible and behind.
Show me another consumer hardware that handles inference and/or training better. How many RTX5090s would you need?
https://liliputing.com/nvidia-dgx-spark-is-3000-ai-supercomp...
looks like there will be several good options "soon"?
this is cool! Nvidia should sell notebooks, too.
i think Nvidia is trying to create a sort of reference platform and have other OEMs produce mass market products, so a laptop might happen even if nvidia doesn't make one themselves
For local inference macs have indeed shined through this whole LLM thing, and came out as the preferred device. They are great, the dev experience is good, speeds are ok-ish (a bit slower w/ the new "thinking" models / agentic use with lots of context, but still manageable).
But nvda isn't that far behind, and has already moved to regain some space with their PRO6000 "workstation" GPUs. You get 96GB of VRAM for ~7.5k$, which is more than a comparable RAM mac, but not 30k you previously had to shell for top of the line GPUs. So you get a "prosumer" 5090 with a bit more compute and 3x VRAM, in a computer that can sell for <10k$ and beat any mac at both inference and training, for things that "fit" in that VRAM.
Macs still have the advantage for larger models, tho. The new DGX spark should join that market soon(tm). But they allegedly ran into problems on several fronts. We'll have to wait and see.
AI tokens are a commodity. They're the bottom of the value-chain and they're all converging onto the same performance.
What matters for the future is what killer apps can be built on this commodity (tokens)?
Right now we've got content/text generation and ... nothing else?
> Right now we've got content/text generation and ... nothing else?
Software operators. LLMs can operate any kind of software (check MCP). If you reduce this to just "text generation", what else is left?
> LLMs can operate any kind of software (check MCP).
But they can't be trusted to do so in a reliable and sane way. Until the issues with hallucination and prompt adherence are resolved, including the issues with context injection, LLMs aren't any more useful for general software operation than `/dev/urandom` is.
Every time we get a "Gemini deleted my production database!" story everyone goes "well obviously you shouldn't have trusted it with production access". I don't play russian roulette with my CLI, why would I add a layer of uncertainty on top?
> What matters for the future is what killer apps can be built on this commodity (tokens)?
AI chatbots in pdf viewers!
Oh wait.. we already have that and it's useless.
Hi, I'm Clippy! It looks like you are trying to read a document. Do you need assistance?
- Introduction to C programming language.pdf
"I see you're trying to kill children, may I recommend the following methods:
- zyklon B
- hammer
- shotgun"
Every single instance to-date where "AI" has been integrated into a product of platform has been a hinderance rather than a benefit.
From milquetoast write-by-committee text generation engines that allow shitty writers to pump out terrible business boilerplate in an email client to customer service representatives tacked onto storefronts that don't do anything except waste your time, using anything AI feels like wading through a waist-deep swamp that ten thousand cows have shit in.
In a way, Apple having terrible AI is a plus to me. It recognizes that there's a cute puppy in a photo in my photo library and that's what I need, and want, it to do.
Yeah Apple is going to miss AI the same way they missed crypto and "metaverse." Whether by apathy or choice, it turned out for the best.
Basic point seems sound, analysis slightly off.
> Interestingly, Intel still reached new highs for a decade after missing mobile before it all collapsed
That's because their problems weren't due to missing mobile but rather taking too much risk on a fab tech transition that they then fumbled. This put them permanently behind and they were unable to catch up.
> Amazon’s AWS is predicated on the idea of commoditized infrastructure at scale where price is the priority
Since when does AWS compete on price? AWS is predicated on the idea of many proprietary services running on commodity hardware, and charging high prices for the privilege of not spending time on sysadmin work.
OP here, good points.
Your comment on Intel is correct, but it's also true that TSMC could invest billions into advanced fabs because Apple gave them a huge guaranteed demand base. Intel didn’t have the same economic flywheel since PCs/servers were flat or declinig.
That's a good clarification on Amazon, running on commodity hardware with competitive pricing != competing on price alone. It would have been better to clarify this difference when pointing out that they're trying the same commodity approach in AI.
Amazon is doing exactly everything except competing on price and they don't run commodity hardware either. They're even developing their own chips. Sure they have "commodity" GPUs and CPUs in some lineups, but they also have Graviton.
If you get something this mundane wrong from the start I don't know how I could trust anything else from the post either.
AI will become a commodity -- see Deepseek. The handwriting is on the wall and the open source models and practices to get to Claude 4.1 or GPT-5 are all in the public domain.
Apple could simply sell earpods with an AI voice interface, the UI/UX and solution space is evolving too quickly for a company like Apple to sensibly try to define how it will use the technology yet.
See Google and Microsoft's failed integrations of AI with search for an example of how it should not be done.
The more I use AI the more I think I don't need a laptop and would settle for a comfortable VR setup as I do far less typing of symbols.
I think Apple will come out looking great because they are less likely to release things that suck. It seems smarter to hoard cash right now rather than spending it on hardware for an unproven workload.
Yep, Apple is great at this. There have been times when random Android phones were ahead feature wise, but this doesn’t cause Apple to lose its customer base, even when Apple releases the same feature 2–4 years later. The same thing happened with smartwatches, Apple entered that industry late, yet the Apple Watch now dominates the market against well established players
Even the iPhone itself. They played around a bit with the Newton and Rokr E1, sure, but for the most part they sat back and let everyone else make all the mistakes first.
Apple does not need to develop AI software itself in order to remain successful.
We more and more turn into cyborgs, wearing all kinds of processors and sensors on our bodies. And we need this hardware and the software that runs on it to be trustworthy.
Being the hardware producer and gatekeeper for trustworthy software to run on it is probably big enough of a market for Apple.
Even more so if their business of getting 15% to 30% of the revenue apps generate on the iPhone continues.
It has yet to be seen what type of company becomes most valuable in the AI stack. It could very well be that it does not operate LLMs. Similar to how the most valuable company in the hospitality industry does not operate hotels. It just operates a website on which you book hotels.
Not to mention developer hardware. As more and more AI eats the world, more and more developers will become developers and they need machines capable of at least running quantized models. While it’s not as good as having your very own A20 or H100, the M4 Max is above all else on the desktop save the RTX5090 w/ a beast ryzen.
It’s also an opportunity to disrupt… build hardware specifically for ai tasks and reduce it down to just an asic.
The vast majority by an order of magnitude of those developers will be using AI models on a server somewhere.
maybe, maybe not. I don't want to live in a world where I can't develop software without the support of a massive corporation 3rd party. I think local model inference is going to pick up. Will it ever compete with the clusters? no, but it's good enough for a solo to get work done.
I could be wrong and we could be seeing the ladders being pulled up now, moats being filled with alligators and sharks, and soon we'll have no choice but to choose between providers. I hope we can keep the hacking/tinkering culture alive when we can no longer run things ourselves.
There's no real physical reason to run those LLMs on the end device. LLM interaction is not particularly latency sensitive as in single digit ms like gaming. So if there's no real usability drawback from hopping over the Internet then that's the direction it will go.
> But with AI, quality/performance is the priority. That’s why we see so many new AI startups and use cases lighting up as AI improves and finally becomes ‘good enough’ for new use cases.
But also, we are seeing models leapfrog each other; the best model this week is often not the best model next month and certainly not next quarter. I still see merit to the idea that cloud providers should focus on being the place where companies put their data, and make it easy for companies to bring models and tools to that data.
I agree with the article that Apple is probably cooked if the continue their current path for another couple of years.
100% disgree - My biggest bet for a long time is that Apple and Google will win by far the most on Ai.
The phone is where the data is and Ai will find its usefulness in that data (and interface).
I'm somewhat bullish on Google as well, they have the opportunity if they can figure out the product (which they are bad at) and they have the edge in cloud with their models + TPUs.
But your comment about the phone could have been about horses, or the notepad or any other technology paradigm we were used to in the past. Maybe it'll take a decade for the 'perfect' AI form factor to emerge, but it's unlikely to remain unchanged.
Yes brain chips and implants will be the next form factor. Until then the slab of battery and screen in your pocket is going to be present (and probably remain for a while even after we get brain implants).
Again, this sort of booster content speaks of Generative AI dominance as an inevitability despite mounting data that, and I really hate typing these words, Amazon and Apple are correct in their strategy.
This blog post only really makes sense if you wholesale buy into the concept that Generative AI is going to do everything its most ardent boosters claim it will, on the timeline they say it will, none of which has really bore out as true thus far. For anything less, Apple and Amazon’s strategy of commoditization of models themselves makes sense.
That being said, do I have nitpicks over their respective strategies? You betcha. Amazon is so focused on an Apple-like walled-garden approach for enterprise compute that they run the risk of being caught up in shifting tides of geopolitics and nationalism along with increased attention on cost reductions. Apple, on the other hand, is far too exposed with the iPhone being the center of their ecosystem that a fundamentally new device could easily render them the next Nokia.
Between the two, Apple at least seems to be keen innovating at its own pace and hoovering up competition that hits the true moonshots - not that I expect that strategy to keep working as antitrust scrutiny mounts against Big Tech. AWS, by comparison, is seemingly taking the Microsoft and VMware approach of just adding yet another service icon to the catalog and letting customers figure it out for themselves, which, well, just go ask the old guard of Big Tech how that strategy worked out for them when everyone ran into the public cloud.
Neither strategy has long (or even mid) term viability, but AI almost certainly won’t be the tech that pierces their moat.
You want to hear something crazy? Amazon is the biggest capex spender on AI in the world. Amazon is on track to spend over $155 this year alone on AI build out. They've already spent $100b
Yup, all in support of others’ models and the commoditization model of AI deployment. The benefit of this approach is that if AI is a bubble, they have a glut of hardware they can rent at discounts to other customers and startups who can reach for moonshots.
It’s a smart approach. Get the CAPEX done while there’s appetite and political will for it.
Apple has "missed" multiple trends according to bloggers, and a few years later they end up releasing something that reaches the top of the market. Remember that they weren't the first MP3 players, tablets, headphones, smartphones, or smart watches... they lagged in these markets for years and have been at the top of them for decades since.
I think their huge mistake was announcing a bunch of stuff (Apple Intelligence) that ended up being vaporware.
My guess is that they're also adapting to the changing ecosystem, and since they move very slowly, the trends seem archaic (like Apple Intelligence featuring image and summary generation 12-18 months after it was found to be novel by anyone).
I'm hoping that they lean in hard on their intents API forming a sort of "MCP" like ecosystem. That will be very powerful, and worth spending extra time perfecting.
Yeah they announced way too early, they probably didn't expect so much movement in the market (and to be fair it doesn't seem like it needs to be so volatile, GPT5's lackluster release feels like evidence of this)
leaks seem to indicate they're working on some home AI assistant, which kind of lends to their typical lagging timeline with the goal of quality
1000% They make the good versions of things when the technology gets to a point that it is genuinely useful for users.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
Voice input isn't suitable for many cases, and physical input seems generally superior to AR -- I've used a Vision Pro, and it's very impressive, but it's nowhere near the input-performance of a touchscreen or a mouse and keyboard. (To its credit: it's not aiming for that.)
Unless the argument is that you will never have to be precise, or do something that you don't want everyone within earshot to know about?
Also, a "dynamic, context-dependent generative UI" sounds like another way to describe a UI that changes every time you use it depending on subtle qualities of exactly how you reached it this time, preventing you from ever building up any kind of muscle-memory around using it.
All of the foundational models are converging on the same performance. For most use cases you can swap Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's top models interchangeably.
Barring some major methodology breakthrough, the next decade for AI will be about building software and hardware that actually makes use of AI, beyond Chatbots, which Apple and Amazon are positioned to do as well as anyone
Apple and Amazon have huge resources and a large installed base to which they can readily sell almost anything. Couple that with a narrow or even non-existent moat for AI and I’m thinking Apple and Amazon will do just fine. In fact, I think the reason that Apple is delaying is that they are finding that AI just isn’t what it’s being sold as by the market and they’re afraid of getting a black eye like OpenAI just did with GPT5. Worst case, they spend a few billion dollars and buy someone.
> Amazon’s AWS is predicated on the idea of commoditized infrastructure at scale where price is the priority. But with AI, quality/performance is the priority.
cost is not the priority with AWS. To quote my collaborator, "I just scaled up to 600 PB for our event"
When I think AWS I think speed, scale-up, scale-out, capacity & dynamic flexibility are more key.
AWS is not the "cheapo commodity option", nor is Azure
Just wrong. Apple just acquired 7 AI companies (talent pool). And amazon's Bedrock has been solid and pushing envelope for years.
The problem is with your expectations. Apple is no longer winning all the time, so relatively, it feels like it's losing. And Amazon is the quiet beast lurking, it's just doing a poor job at marketing.
Apple made the mistake of making a grand announcement and then not following through. They may have the talent, and even the hardware, but the product is still missing. OpenAIs open weight model runs great on my iMac, when is apple going to make a move?
You could also say "like they missed virtual reality". Apple is selling the shovels with hardware that can be used to run home models.
I don't think they are missing out on anything. Everyone wants products from Apple or Amazon, only some power users and managers want "AI".
We will see. One thing with AI is that access to data/APIs is key. There’s been a long term trend where services are locking down their APIs so that you can only interact with them through their native UI, either phone or web, sometimes just phone. Many of the most promising uses of AI are to automate around various annoying things service providers do to drive their own revenue, and the service providers aren’t taking this lying down.
Apple is in a very favorable position with its control of arguably the most important platform of all. They can force app developers to allow Apple AI to automate their apps, and prevent other AI providers from doing the same, and they make a strong privacy argument about why this is necessary.
I don't see how Apple is that much at risk here.
They continue building a distributed data-acquisition and edge data-processing network with their iPhone sales, where the customer keeps paying for both hardware and traffic.
They constantly take measures to ensure that the data their customers generate is only available to Apple and is not siphoned away by the users themselves.
The moment they finish the orchestration of this distributed worldwide iOS AI-cluster, they will suddenly have both the data and the processing at comparatively low operational cost.
The biggest risk? A paradigm-shift where the Smartphone is no longer the main device (smart glasses being a major risk here), and some other player takes the lead here.
I could be wrong but I disagree with the premise of the article. One thing that both Apple and Amazon are extremely good is hardware (consumer, and cloud-infra, respectively). And ultimately what matters to user is going to be the hardware that properly integrates AI capabilities, ideally with some inference models running locally. We've already seen that multiple companies are able to produce high quality models, so the model is not a winner-take-all game. How many companies are able to compete with Apple on mobile and laptop hardware? That's a much harder game.
This is mostly true. Sure apple can make great cpu, gpu and innovate on airpods etc. But they are literally so behind on AI. This time they can't make that innovation jump like they did with iphone because there is no Steve jobs as a tech leader.
Apple now only cares about reveneue and retirement of all those who made Iphone and Macs great. They are rich so they don't need to innovate big until they are like Intel now. But they try creating toys like Vison Pro, and self driving car that was coming for a decade. Just all for the fun of it.
Old company with old leader and 0 hunger for succees. Opposite of all big AI startups today.
> But they are literally so behind on AI
Which AI products are Apple lacking that put them so far behind?
coding, on device photo editing vs Samsung and voice thing from any AI company. Siri is 10 years behind them. do you want more?
> Regardless of what the final form factor ends up being, there’s no doubt spending our lives hunched over staring at a piece of glass in our hand is suboptimal.
As opposed to what exactly? If the author really believes that a watch and glasses are preferred over a smartphone, I don't know what to say. Also, note that the author doesn't know what this new form factor will look like. In that case, what's the point in declaring that Apple and Amazon will miss the boat?
I think a much bigger threat to Apple is a smartphone with an AI driven operating system. But what do I know?
Apple will integrate AI in a not user facing fashion. They'll weave it underneath the OS and the ecosystem. Like how they locally update memories and do other stuff on-device.
What we gonna see from Apple, IMHO, is a horde of smaller models working on different tasks on the devices itself, plus heavier stuff is running on "personal cloud compute" instances.
We'll not see Apple AI besides a sticker, it'll just try to do its work at the background.
Oh, people balk at auto-word-complete in the latest macOS, but I find it very useful. Spending little time here and there and it counts.
This article doesn’t really seem to have any insight at all into Apple or Amazon’s AI strategies. The result that “Apple and Amazon will miss AI” seems to be a premise of the argument, and the rest of the article doesn’t really seem to even corroborate that.
Are phones and AI on the opposite ends of some axis where success in one precludes success in the other? Does the use of AI reduce the use of compute and data? I have my own opinions on the topic, but beyond the eye-catching title this article didn’t inform one way or the other.
Amazon is the only company I regularly use that has implemented AI as a front that users very often interact with, and it's not a total disaster. Their customer service AI (when you have an issue) actually works well, and in many cases I didn't need to escalate to a human to get something sorted. YMMV, of course, but I hate about 99.9999999% of those "AI" customer service crap usually, and the recent "smart" ones are somehow way worse than the tree based ones of old.
Have you tried the new Alexa?
An LLM controls all my house lights right now.
Huh, interesting. I periodically ask Siri "hey siri, are you actually smart yet?" (or variants on this depending on how I feel). So far I've always received a polite "I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that". No worries, you'll get there.
It's funny how the unexpected is way more impressive. I tried out the voice commands on my new car (BYD) and after it correctly interpreted and implemented my request, I politely said "thank you!" (as I always do, it's important to set a good example) and the car responded "you're welcome!". 100% could just have been a lucky setup for a scripted response... but...
It's not available here in Europe, but I have homeassistant coupled with Gemini and it works rather well.
Is Intel lost the mobile? Or a better question has arm lost mobile … the key is today the most profitable part is not arm even it has the isa.
Intel lost the hardware fight. But it lost all along as the most profitable part is software or who control the ecosystem. Microsoft and Apple. Not Intel.
It is amd cannot beat nvidia but the ecosystem of Ai (but not game) is what the lost is.
Now what ecosystem apple and Amazon lost … can it get to avoid nvidia controlling their Ai ecosystem. I doubt very much.
I don't think the author understands Amazon's AI product offering or what gen AI is doing internally at Amazon.
Except it was always clear that smartphones are here to stay, while AI is an unsustainable fad that will go out of fashion, the sooner the better.
Totally unwarranted level of confidence here about both claims.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
If you earnestly believed that dynamic generative UIs are the future, surely you'd be betting on Apple.. The company with fully integrated hardware already capable of cost effectively running near-frontier generative models on the end user hardware.
The most useful AI feature for iOS I can image is actually intelligent Siri, which could use other applications installed on the phone as its tools to accomplish the tasks.
Apps would expose their functionality to the Smart Siri. Maybe there's already something like this with the shortcuts. Maybe I could give Claude Code style blanket permissions to some actions, some ones I would like to review.
A paradigm shift is actually easy: one has only to imagine. In the case of Amazon, one has to imagine how AI could radically change the cloud service landscape. And in case of Apple how AI could change the way people are using their ubiquitous computer. If they can not imagine it, then for them it’s no paradigm shift, but a commodity.
> Nvidia owns the platform and OpenAI owns the general consumer interface.
I'd have to disagree with this. There are a number of general consumer interfaces and none of them have much of a moat or brand loyalty.
Also, Apple is in the best position by far to make consumer hardware that can do inference on-device. No other company even comes close.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
Because this is not a science fiction future, but a corporate one, where neither do those magical UIs exist, nor do you have enough power in wearables for them to be everything you need?
Just two posts before in HN :
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/generative_ai_zero_re...
One way out for Apple is facilitate running small local specialized models on its hardware, like Macbooks - with unlimited free use, like basic writing, translations, spreadsheets and maybe coding.
The macbook could come with some models, and brew ecosystem would supply others.
If Elon/xAI can catch up within a year, I doubt it would take Apple and Amazon longer
The gold rush metaphor loves to highlight the shovel sellers, but the actually valuable commodity (gold) still needs a broker. I cannot see any other hardware vendor being better positioned than Apple for consumer facing AI.
> Apple and Amazon will miss AI like Intel missed mobile.
I think they’ll be fine. Amazon is an investor in Anthropic and Apple has an agreement with OpenAi. I’d consider that as an inorganic growth.
People are gonna pretty quickly quit paying for AI--we're well into the "let me see what everyone's talking about" phase and that'll wear off soon. The price is already skyrocketing way ahead of quality or utility, so that'll accelerate the decline. Businesses incorporating AI into their products will scale that back as costs increase, or as they replace the most commonly used functionality with purpose-built code.
The real question is how do we continue the grift? AI's a huge, economy-sustaining bubble, and there's currently no off-ramp. My guess is we'll rebrand ML: it's basically AI, it actually works, and it can use video cards.
AI is a great feature funnel in terms of like, "what workflows are people dumping into AI that we can write purpose-built code for", but it has to transition from revenue generator to loss leader. The enormity of the bubble has made this very difficult, but I have faith in us.
Apple’s AI opportunity is in AirPods if they can be the one to deliver perfect full-duplex or half-duplex voice communication choices with an LLM.
not to be a contrarian but i think apple will be the only tech giant standing after the inevitable ai winter, simply because they were too stupid to figure out how to integrate ai with their ecosystem.
Or will they miss it like they missed self-driving cars? It remains to be seen.
I think both realize that nobody wants to buy an Apple or Amazon car. They want a Mercedes that drives itself. Mercedes is going to release one and Tesla is going to go bankrupt because of their ongoing negligence and disregard for safety. There's going to be a tidal wave of civil litigation at some point in the next 10 years.
Tesla is going downhill. Just in today's news they slashed prices to car leasing companies by 40% in the UK. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/elon-musk-s-tesla-repor...
A lot of assumptions and confident statements with nothing to back it up.
Maybe Apple and Amazon are the only cool heads in this absolute shitstorm.
The real, intrinsic value of AI is essentially zero compared to the hype and tech-biz cargo culting. If I were John Apple, I would simply sit back and wait while all your competition dump all their money into the AI bonfire. Once the dust settles all the hyped-up ai startups are dead, you can come in and pick up whatever worked best and have a stellar AI product with no real cost. Assuming such a product can exist, it still isn't clear.
I don't think companies not literally setting billions of dollars on fire is a bad thing.
AWS Kiro came out with a bang and now it’s a waitlisted whimper.
Its sad content like this makes it too front page. AI has been developed and used at both companies far before LLM TRANSFORMERS made such a hit. The author clearly doesn't have even a basic understanding of what AI is... AI is a giant umbrella term. The hype is essentially all about Transformer based models and I time will show its a hype bubble they don't need to be part of. I will never understand how people with so little technical knowledge on a subject can make grandiose claims like "Apple is losing out on AI!" and be taken seriously. Every company is high on their own damn supply with this pushing AI nonsense. I don't need language models shoved in my face by yet another company. I respect Apples approach far more than everyone else trying to ride the LLM bandwagon.
I don’t think anybody other than Google and Apple have a chance to win AI and it’s because they are the only companys with both the user base and the capacity to design and produce hardware for models.
Facebook has a data advantage and a use base but at the end of the day they will always need to make Nvidia or a cloud provider rich to run/train their models.
Amazon servers run LLMs, they’ll be fine
Apple has performant/power efficient hardware for AI few others do. Can't totally count them out for that reason.
Sounds like, “Apple and Amazon will miss AI because they aren’t following the herd mentality and doing what everyone else does.”
They are doing something different and it might fail but I’m glad different large tech companies are trying different strategies.
I for one am a fan of Apple’s local-first approach. If they can get it to work it aligns more with my ideals. If it fails, at least they kept things interesting.
So what? Like there is no computing beyond gigantic screens held with both hands with weird look and 'features', or there will be no services to provide but AI?
Maybe they won't be so big in monetary value anymore? So what? There are endless states between huge and nothing, actually most organizations live there and most serve people well.
I'm sure they'll be fine. Apple and Amazon also "missed" blockchain, and nobody cares. You don't have to bet the house on every technology that comes along in order to be successful.
I think this analysis is directionally right but the supportive arguments are quite weak. Maybe the iPhone is the wrong form factor, but do we really doubt Apple's ability to create a new hardware device and tightly integrate software?
The deeper issue, in my view, is that Apple is violating its own philosophical belief, articulated by Steve Jobs himself: that Apple should always own the primary technology behind its products (i.e., multi-touch, click-wheel). This is central to Apple's "we need to make it ourselves" approach.
Camera lenses are commodities. AI models are foundational. Apple's own executive leadership likened models to the internet, and said, well surely we wouldn't try to build and own the internet! This misplaces AI as infrastructure when in fact it's foundational to building and serving useful applications.
They further see "chat" (and by extension) as an app, but I think it's more like a foundational user interface. And Apple's certainly always owned the user interface.
When Siri was first announced, there was excitement that voice might be the next paradigm shift in user interface. Partly because Siri is so bad for a decade now, and partly because people didn't feel like talking to their screens, Apple may have learned a very unhelpful lesson: that Siri is just a feature, not a user interface. In this age though, chat and voice are more than features, and yet Apple doesn't own this either.
Apple should not buy Perplexity. Perplexity is smoke and mirrors, and there's nothing defensible about its business. Apple cannot get the talent and the infrastructure to catch up on models.
So what then?
OpenAI is not for sale. Anthropic is likely not for sale, but even if it were, Apple wouldn't buy it: Anthropic is very risky to Apple's profit margin profile and Apple can't unlock Anthropic's bottleneck (capacity).
In fact, to Apple's advantage, why not let the VCs and competitors like Microsoft and Amazon and Google light their money on fire while this industry takes shape, provided you have an option in the end to sell a product to the consumer?
The best option, in my view, is Search Deal Redux: partner deeply with Google and Gemini. Google very obviously wants as much distribution as possible, and Apple has more hardware distribution than any company in history.
Partnership is the only path because, yes, Apple missed this one badly. There is one area where I agree with Tim Cook, though: being late doesn't guarantee you lose, even in AI.
> I think it's more like a foundational user interface.
I don't. The foundational interface hasn't been created yet. Let's be honest, chat isn't great. It is the best we have right now to leverage the technology, yes, but if it is our future — that we cannot conceive of anything better, we've failed miserably. We're still in the "command-line age". No doubt many computing pioneers thought that the command-line too was foundational, but nowadays most users will never touch it. In hindsight, it really wasn't important — at best a niche product for power users.
> Apple may have learned a very unhelpful lesson: that Siri is just a feature, not a user interface.
That is the right lesson, though. Chat sucks; be that through voice, typing, or anything else. People will absolutely put up with it absent of better options, but as soon as there is a better option nobody is preferring chat. This is where Apple has a huge opportunity to deliver the foundational interface. Metaphorically speaking, they don't need to delver the internet at all, they just need to deliver the web browser. If they miss that boat, then perhaps there is room for concern, but who knows what they have going on in secret?
Or, they will miss AI like Toyota missed electric. Oh, wait...
next part of the headine should be " while saving billions not chasing a mass delusion event"