Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big seller. It's why they're investing in their own silicon. This strategy tends to yield unexpected wins, like the Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud, or the Mac Studio becoming arguably the best way to run local AI models (a nascent space that is on the cusp of becoming genuinely relevant), or the MacBook Pro becoming by far the best laptop in the world for productivity in the AI age (and it's not even close).
Your conclusion is that they're going to be left behind, but the evidence is that they're already well ahead in the areas that are core to their business. They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. Nobody else can do what they can in the fusion of hardware, software, and materials as long as they stay focused.
Where they genuinely slipped up was their marketing -- an unusual mistake for Apple. And that does indeed lie with the CEO.
This was true maybe a decade ago, but not so now (under the watch of Tim Cook).
You listed Mac hardware becoming popular in the age of AI as examples of "unexpected wins". Maybe that's true (I don't know if it is) - but Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue. Apple has become an iPhone company (50% of revenue) that sells services (26% of revenue).
And AI can eat away at both. If Siri sucks so hard that people switch away, that would also reduce Services revenue from lost App Store revenue cuts. If Google bundles Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos storage, people might cancel their iCloud subscriptions.
I think the parent comment was making the point that Tim Cook's Apple has missed the boat and it doesn't show signs that it's going to catch the next wave.
I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscription. But in 2030, if my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting, have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting, and Siri can still only set a timer for 5 minutes, then I might actually switch.
If the Mac were its own standalone business, it would rank at no. 134 on the Fortune 500 with $33.7 billion in revenue. Also, that's a 12% increase in revenue compared to 2024.
If anything, AI has brought more attention to the Mac. Just about every major AI app is released for the Mac first. I've seen complaints about it on HN.
The latest is Claude Cowork. It was released for macOS on January 12th; it didn't ship for Windows until February 10th; it's still not available for Windows running on ARM.
It's been nearly a year since Dia launched [1], the first AI browser, and it's still not available for Windows.
We just had the frenzy over OpenClaw [2] with AI enthusiasts lining up at Apple Stores to buy a Mac mini just to run it!
The most popular AI channels on YouTube are almost exclusively using Macs. Apple seems to have enough runway until they get their act together.
[1]: https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...
[2]: https://builder.aws.com/content/399VbZq9tzAYguWfAHMtHBD6x8H/...
An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
A lot of the recent growth is developers in general, there's really been a huge shift there. 2010 developers using Macs vs 2026 developers using Macs, if you look at personal devices or workplaces that give them a choice. Biggest driver being Apple Silicon.
For businesses and pro users, it isn't the Apple ecosystem that's the main driver.
Since Apple silicon a lot of laptops are just so far behind in battery life, speed and usability that you wouldn't get it. Often Apple ecosystem was a net negative since most things worked better on Windows but that has shifted.
Who? As in you?
But Apple is gaining market share. Apple is cheaper for what it offers in hardware ignoring the Apple ecosystem.
Are we up to date? The Apple tax is old news. With all the ram and ssd price hikes Apple is proving even more value.
No, as in the entire PC market for the past two decades: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
> Apple is cheaper for what it offers in hardware ignoring the Apple ecosystem.
Then it sounds like their work is cut out for them. They've got a lot of market share to catch up on, and they're not gaining very quickly.
Makes me glad for businesses like Nvidia, who are very willing to ship industry-grade ARM hardware even if Apple won't.
Is this why AI is winning? People aren't doing better. You pick a random stat and somehow make it support what you're arguing.
The link says DESKTOP. I said LAPTOP. Laptop after M1. Why are we going back 2 decades? They have >15% registered as unknown. Sure, "accurate". Cough cough. It doesn't differentiate new or old and IF (the original discussion) that Apple is gaining market share and NEW sales.
> and they're not gaining very quickly
This is just as bad as speculative stock trading e.g. with software stocks. They're losing to AI. Oh no. Dump. Oh they're actually not too bad. Buy it back. Apple doesn't have AI. Sell. Apple doesn't have AI. Buy. Are you ok?
The Apple tax are the hedious margins Apple imposes into their customers.
I don’t think people choose iPhone for the Siri.
> my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting
I think lots of startups are tackling this in this space. Hardly a native feature. Attainable an app install away
Now I just have a single LLM (Le Chat) isolated in its own little app sandbox, never getting in my face unless I choose to open it myself.
Ever heard of the Data Transfer Project? https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?sjid=95203...
> have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting
Slack already has this integrated and it works quite well.
At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.
You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone:
I'm road tripping to XYZ tomorrow, 10 am to 5 pm.
This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone.
If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.
The moment this is automated and overseen by an AI implementation it'll turn into a marketing game like SEO did. You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up.
It's bad enough already. But I do not want someone making decisions for me on that and booking things, which is the only uplift that an AI implementation can give over the current situation.
It's a race to the bottom. Nothing more.
...and how does your "by hand" process solve this problem? You are influenced by the same SEO crap regardless of AI intervention.
It's the difference between buying the top sponsored result on an online marketplace vs. reading reviews and deciding between products.
Plus I have a partner and friends, so unless we all want to follow my phone's instructions it's not going to work.
So often I look for a business but Google Maps won't show it because it has no reviews. An AI assistant wouldn't change that, as long as it's still interactively programmable (i.e. give me 5 options, I'll pick 3)
If my device is “suggesting” a hotel or restaurant, or wherever, that’s advertising.
Advertising is largely self-praise.
And self praise is no recommendation.
Or perhaps I misunderstood, and you were suggesting ignoring the recommendations of one’s travel companions.
1. Open Google Maps
2. Search "hotel"
3. Pick the first one
4. See "sponsored" just before the first link to a third party
To be honest, there probably isn't any feature of a phone OS would make a difference these days. People have decided which camp they're in and they're not going to change.
Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.
Then we can get on with exploring the galaxy.
Butlerian jihad.
Of course it's failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private (I want local inference before giving it access to anything material, or it'll indeed be a privacy nightmare), and crashes all the time, but the fact that a (not yet) walking, talking CVE can do a better job at this than one of the most wealthy corporations in the world after several years of trying should give them some serious pause.
It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation to lose faith in simply handing over a whole day’s itinerary to an LLM. Honestly that can go so bad very easily.
We are decades into the GPS navigation era and I still don’t trust the route my vehicle suggests. I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
I heard this often but what has been the issue in practice? The worst that happened to me is Google Maps suggesting I cross a bridge that was washed away by the last typhoon, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Only in very remote places has Google Maps failed me, at least for driving directions (for trails it's another story...)
I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.
> failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private, and crashes all the time, a (not yet) walking, talking CVE
Is actually doing a better job than not doing any of that at all? This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation. Sometimes if you can’t do it right it’s better to not do it at all. Better to wait for the full meal instead of having a “slop snack”.
I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies. Terrible. Which is more than any company can do so yay?
Some things are worse than nothing in terms of quality or liability.
> This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation.
That's exactly where it would make sense to try a new thing then, no?
> I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies.
Sounds like a much more high stakes activity than telling me factoids around my travel itinerary, so I agree that we shouldn't have you run the neurosurgery department yet, yes.
It doesn't even need to be coming from a single AI vendor either. For instance, I can already use Grok's voice mode inside our Model Y to add stops along the route if we're hungry.
And there is no fucking way I want that in my life or my family's lives, ever. I will fight this very actively, with my wallet, voting and voice. Thats far beyond 1984 and at this point, in 2026, we know all that info will be weaponized against me, will try to manipulate me into decisions I would not do otherwise, for ads and other purposes. Also, it removes a lot of joy from one's life with discovering places and just being an adult and deciding for oneself, but that can be subjective.
If I dare to speak out, if I dare to disagree with official opinions, if I dare to have higher morals than those at the power at given moment. Look at all the shit happening even former bastion of democracy - US. Do you really think this is the bottom? We/You are still far from that and who knows if you bounce back. Past performance doesnt indicate future and all that.
Even when I am well shielded in proper bastion of true democracy and freedom - Switzerland in my case, nobody is immune. EU hates additional freedoms Swiss have and push hard for their dissolution, a reminder in their heart how better a very diverse European country can be run compared to mess EU is. US, at least current gov, hates this place too based on their moves.
Isn’t it largely made up of Swiss, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese?
I read your comment as someone from the 80s complaining about digitalization and it all applied. And yet here we are, my WHOLE photo library on my phone, most of communication with everyone on my phone, and AI isn't even part of it.
Its a fight worth fighting or behavior to adhere to, for me. Natural and logical. You seemingly gave up, thats fine as long as you are happy with your choices and consequences.
Why would you ever want to do that? Why wont' you stop and live life for a moment?, stop delegating stuff to your phone, especially when it comes to personal trips. Really bleak, this "always optimizing stuff" thing, really, really bleak. Tech-bro culture has done a good one to mainstream culture, because I see the same mindset seeping through to mainstream life.
The reality is that I do not enjoy at all sorting through tickets and booking emails and apps, I just want to ask my phone "show me tonight's booking" and then hand the phone to the hotel's front desk.
There's so much an assistant can do and Siri is just so far from it.
I do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...
How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it?
And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that?
Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in...
One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill.
It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in.
For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things.
So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?
- You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads.
- This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.).
- You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses.
- Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though.
For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above?
Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.
Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face, and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them), so, seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
I think Apple's brand loyalty buys them some lead time in being a fast-follower, but the danger to them would be if things change so fast and profoundly that they get left behind a la Nokia. What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)? I wouldn't expect it to kill Apple overnight, but it seems that they are in effect gambling that "we can always pay for AI if we have to", and "someone will always license it to run on-device if we need to".
Only the paranoid survive !
Have you seen the Ray Ban meta glasses? They already look pretty close to existing fashionable sunglasses, albeit with a visible camera.
> and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them)
They already do; plenty of people carry a smart phone, a smart watch, and airpods.
> seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
People use smartphones to avoid being bored, but there are situations when it's unacceptable to use them (i.e. in a meeting); I could see smart glasses being used for that niche.
> What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)?
Knowing Google, that personal assistant would probably be shut down within a year.
They aren’t. Mixed reality is getting little attention. It is in the “it remains a product in our line-up” phase. They are virtually all-in on AI. Their acquisitions have been AI-focused.
It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with are the same issues their competitors are dealing with and is isn’t stopping them from releasing.
> Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud
This isn’t why people are buying Mac minis. They’re buying them because that’s what the OpenClaw author was using, they’re cheap, and they run macOS, so the tools within OpenClaw can get deeper Apple API access to Calendar, iMessage, etc.
In the vast majority of cases, OpenClaw users aren’t using local models. They’re using “cloud” models like GPT and Claude.
No, it’s a good sign that Apple has re-learned the lessons they used to take to heart but sometimes forget when they panic and scramble. Apple used to always be late to most changes but when they arrived, if it was with a cohesive answer that worked well. They’ve been scrambling instead and hopefully this is a sign they’ve realized that.
I’m fully expecting the stuff that was reported to supposed to show up in 26.4 being pushed to 27.4 or later. It’s that bad.
And they’re failing at that too! I purchased an iPhone 16e thinking it would be like the iPhone SE, but what I got was worse than an SE. They used an old chip and I can tell you this phone cannot keep up with liquid glass, which they forced me to use and did not let me roll back.
And now we have the iPhone 17 suffering from chipping on the back of the phones.
The only reason Apple is succeeding is the only other thing is worse. And yes, I’m talking about android.
What? It has the same RAM size, same RAM speed, and same chip[0] (minus one (1) GPU core [6c, 4g, 16n]) as the iPhone 16 [6c, 5g, 16n] (and almost the same as the A18 Pro [6c, 5g, 16n] minus the enhanced memory bandwidth and video encoding, afaict.)
(I mean, sure, it's an old chip compared to the 17 but then it's a generation older and saying "they used an old chip" is a nonsense truism.)
[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16...
But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security.
That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.
did best. did.
Does the management know this?
From whose point if view is it not core? I very much doubt any tech business not focusing on AI at the moment is maximising their share price.
Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS. But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.
But by all means, throw more money at Apple for a problem they can't even solve themselves.
If AI was that good on Apple hardware, they wouldn't need to buy access from their competitors to finally make Siri not completely useless.
But I'm arguing that it's not going to be worthwhile doing on Apple hardware. GPU sharding is already a thing for PCs, and you don't need to stupidly buy multiple full computers for it to work.
Apple has put themselves into a corner with their Apple Silicon strategy. It's good for efficiency and thus quite nice for mobile usage, but it makes no sense for desktops that do not need to be power/space constrained.
Their GPUs are still weak, and their strategy of gluing 2 together gives poor results in general workloads. They are limited by the die size and the RAM bandwidth they can allocate to the whole thing because of physics.
If Apple manages to get good results by aggregating multiple computers, PCs will get even better results by using multiple GPUs in the same box, interconnected by the PCIe bus, which will always be faster than Thunderbolt no matter what, because of physics. In fact, they could even come up with a new interconnect if need be.
There is just no realistic way for Apple to become a dominant player in AI. They cannot compete properly on the hardware side because they won't get the cash flow/key players NVidia and AMD are getting, and they cannot compete properly on software because it will always be ports of stuff made to run on better/faster hardware. They'll lose AI basically for the same reason they have lost gaming: uncompetitive performance for the price. People who actually want to do stuff care less about how things look and a lot more about how good/fast they run.
And whenever datacenters start offloading older GPUs, their price will fall, making it the cheapest way to do local AI. Apple hardware keeps a stupidly high price even when it's completely obsolete because of the status it confers; it will never be cost competitive.
It's basically a replay of their PPC mistake, where they thought they could compete by going at it alone but in the end fell pretty hard because they couldn't compete against the volume PCs were getting.
Now Apple has money but cannot attract enough talent because they have no vision, and the management style is basically mean girls running the show.
You are arguing about purchasing a solution that would cover 8 years of top-tier AI subscription. Seriously, who in their right mind would do that? Apple hardware for AI makes no sense; either you have prosumer-level needs that are going to be served just fine with cheaper hardware (like, for example, Ryzen AI) or you have large needs, and investing in a real AI solution is going to be better because it's going to be much faster. Being able to fit large models is useless if they run too slow.
The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services.
Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.
However, the current Pixel strategy appears materially (no pun intended) different. Rather than serving as an “early adopter” pathfinder for the broader ecosystem, Pixel increasingly positions itself as the canonical expression of Android—the device on which the “true” Android experience is defined and delivered. Far from nudging OEMs, it's Google desperately reclaiming strategic control over their own platform.
By tightening the integration between hardware, software, and first-party silicon, Google appears to be pursuing the same structural advantages that underpin Apple’s hardware–software symbiosis. The last few generations of Pixel are, effectively, Google becoming more like Apple.
I’m sure Apple is working like mad on their own system they control, and Google is trying very hard to lock out the competition like openAI.
The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)
PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.
The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.
I think the problem of current Apple management and especially Tim Cook is that they want to squeeze out as much profit as possible and they see AI as another _Services_ profit center.
A better Apple would say AI is just an app and provide extension points into the OS so that users can plug their favorite LLM, anything from ChatGPT to Mistral, but in a privacy-preserving way if the user wants.
While that would lead to less profit in the short term, Apple's moat was its UX and halo effects (cynically: social signalling). The draw to Apple may last for a bit during enshittification of the platform, but long-term the brand value is more important than short-term profits.
Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers?
> They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.
Or maybe Pippin, A/UX, OpenDoc, Copland?
Even "Apple design has peaked" is a meme if you've been following this stuff for more than just one decade. (Sure, one day it'll most likely be true, but that doesn't make everyone predicting it now a prophet retroactively.)
Sure, there were things like AirPower and the MobileMe widgets… things that were announced, but never shipped. However, by and large, a big new thing was announced, and a week later it would ship. The iPhone was only announced 6 months early to avoid it being leaked by compliance filing (or maybe it was patents).
Cook would be wise to go back to this instead of promising the shareholders things he can’t deliver on.
I think slow playing AI is the right move for Apple. Third party apps give their customers access today, and Apple can take the time to figure out how AI fits into a large cohesive vision for their products and ecosystem… or if it fits at all. Rushing something out doesn’t do anyone any favors, and has never been Apple’s competitive advantage.
Is there evidence of this? I think the phone and watch were announced early because Apples vertical integration strategy and quality standards require them to reveal the existence to the rest of the company so they can get everything else working well with the new product category on release. It wouldn't be possible to keep it secret after revealing it internally so they did a simultaneous internal/external reveal to control the message, to maximize impact, to deny rumor sites, etc...
> We’re going to be shipping these in June. We’re announcing it today because with products like this we’ve got to go ahead and get FCC approval which takes a few months, and we thought it would be better if we introduced this rather than ask the FCC to introduce it for us. So here we are.
Apple has already been left behind by many tech shifts: web, search, social, crypto, metaverse, etc. At various times popular opinion had them left behind by netbooks, by tablets, by smart phones, by Windows, by web browsers… until they weren’t.
Apple does not have to lead all categories of tech to be a very successful company.
Google just launched the Pixel 10 with several promised AI features broken, and could really stand to learn the same lesson.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-hu...
It regularly directs me to incorrect addresses and businesses and labels places obviously incorrectly.
Every use of the search function promotes guide content for a single city I'm not currently in, with no way to configure or turn them off. Good products should go out of their way to annoy you IMHO.
They only managed to get their cycle routing for the UK and Ireland working in 2025 after years and years of complaints.
I'm not a fan of Google but I feel compelled to keep Google Maps because Apple Maps is still so unreliable.
I'd offer the balance here that I still don't enjoy using Android and generally prefer iOS to it, warts and all.
So at least for me Apple Maps wins.
It's about product specification. There's no way it fits into their ecosystem without compromising it. Everyone else has compromised theirs and their customers. Apple do not want to do this. I suspect they will fail on AI but will win in the long run as competitors screw their customers over.
Apple has BY FAR the best chips at this level. I don't see anything changing that in less than 5 years. That will be a pretty big advantage in the near future.
At least Apple has other products that make money.
My prediction is that Apple is the hardware and platform provider (like it’s always been). We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
I think their proprietary chips and GPUs are being undervalued.
My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
iTunes Ping was a Jobs-era attempt to create a social network for music. It seems that they were trying to rely on integrating with Facebook, who pulled out of the collaboration in the last minute before Ping's release.
Apple hasn't seem to have given up on social networks for music. Apple Music presents a nascent networking feature where users can see what their friends are listening to.[2] It seems that Apple has learned their lesson from Ping and does not rely on a third-party for a social graph, which is instead powered by iOS contacts.
While social media is not Apple's bread and butter, they have maintained their interest in having presence in this market. I would assume that this stems from Apple's overall desire to maintain influence over on-the-top services that define the iOS experience. If they let third parties flourish even further, thirds parties gain leverage that they can use during negotiations with Apple. If third parties successfully negotiate for more features that creates parity with apps on non-Apple devices, Apple loses its differentiation on the device markets, thereby losing revenue.
(I think Stratechery wrote about Apple's service strategy that was motivated by its past relationships with Adobe and Spotify. Couldn't find the link.)
> We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
You're right that we haven't asked them for better on-the-top services. But it seems to be in Apple's interest to compete with third party services providers and make sure they do not supersede Apple in terms of their influence over on-the-top experiences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
[2] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphdf490a9e9/io...
That's what is happening but I don't think it was by choice. They clearly had plans to deliver a lot more and have repeatedly failed.
Apple’s reliably late to the party most of the time, but they also reliably steal the show. I’m doubtful about OpenAI’s hardware just taking over.
I rather wait and keep using 3rd party models that keep leap frogging themselves and adding features every once in a while, than them just publicly beta testing a bunch of things on my iPhone. If this was the case, we’d see a bunch of people complaining about how terrible the product is and how Claude or GPT or OpenClaw is so much better.
If Apple's products and services were heads-and-shoulder above their competition, we'd know. The iPhone is the only modern example, and it relies on lock-in that is considered illegally anticompetitive in multiple jurisdictions worldwide.
Simple diversity of what people want means lots of people buy Apple because it is better for them. It isn't like anyone gets what they really want across many features, whatever they buy.
And iPad's are optimized for different uses than the switch. Those are entirely different form factors. (You can turn an iPad mini into a switch like device with controller add ons. But those are add ons so the software does not put that form factor first.)
I don't know that Apple will dominate AI, personally I dislike Siri and iOS, but I think Apple have a very good shot at delivering workable local AI for professionals.
If Apple can lift the inference performance of their forthcoming M5 Ultra chip I think they may become an off the shelf standard for those that want to run large models locally.
That in itself is probably enough to keep them relevant until actual useful uses of Apple Intelligence come to light.
It wasn’t that long ago (ignoring the current DRAM market shenanigans) that it was unthinkable to have a single machine with over terabyte of RAM and 192 physical cores. Now that’s absolutely doable in a single workstation. Heck even my comparatively paltry 96GB of RAM would’ve been absurd in 2010, now there are single prosumer GPUs with that.
Maybe that won't matter when the user is asking it a 5th grade question, but for any more complex application of AI than "what's the weather" or "turn on a light", users should want a better AI, particularly if they don't have to pay for all that silicon sitting around unused in their machine for most of the day?
It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?*
And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows.
* (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)
Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.
Companies also lean into this. Just consider Photoshop. It used to be a one-time purchase, then it became a cloud subscription, now virtually every new AI feature uses paid credits. Despite having that fast SoC, Photoshop will still throw your request to their cloud and charge you for it.
The big point still remains: by the time you can run that trillion parameter model at home, it’s old news. If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one? AI on edge devices will exist, but will forever remain behind data center AI.
Yes, this is a convenience argument, not a technical one. It's not that your PC doesn't have or could have more than enough storage -- it likely does -- it's that there are other factors that make you use Dropbox.
So now the question becomes: do we not believe that personal devices will ever become good enough to run a "good enough" LLM (technical barrier), or do we believe that other factors will make it seem less desirable to do so (social/financial/legal barrier)?
I think there's a very decent chance that the latter will be true, but the original argument was a technical one -- that good-enough LLMs will always require so much compute that you wouldn't want to run one locally even if you could.
If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one?
What people want to do changes with time, and therefore your PC XT will no longer hack it in the modern workplace, but the point is that from the point that a personal computer of any kind was good enough, people kept using personal computers. The parallel argument here would be that if there is a plateau where LLM improvement slows and converges with ability to run something good enough on consumer hardware, why would people not then just keep running those good enough models on their hardware? The models would get better with time, sure, but so would the hardware running them.
Even if LLM improvement slows, it’ll probably result in the same treadmill effect we see in other software.
Consider MS Office, Adobe Creative (Cloud), or just about any pro level software. The older versions aren’t really used, for various reasons, including performance, features, compatibility, etc. Why would LLMs, which seem to be on an even faster trajectory than conventional software, be any different? Users will want to continue upgrading, and in the case of AI, that’ll mean continuing to access the latest cloud model.
No doubt that someone can run gpt-oss-120b five years from now on device, but outside of privacy, why would they when you can get a faster, smarter answer (for free, likely) from a service?
Cloud based AI obviously has a lot of advantages e.g. batched proccessing on the best hardward, low power edge devices, data sharing, etc.
There's still room for local inference though. I don't know that I want "more context on me" all the time. I want some context, some of the time and I want to be in full control of it.
I'd pay for that. I don't think it will be for everyone but a number of people would pay a premium for an off shelf product that provides privacy and control that cloud vendors by their nature just can't offer.
But I just don't think for most users that local LLM capabilities will be a deciding factor in either hardware or OS choices.
A cloud subscription model will be the premium offering ($20 for consumers, $100 to $1000 or pay-per-token for businesses), and inevitably something ad-supported at a lower price or free for low-end consumers.
Once Joe Consumer has access to that subscription ChatGPT or free tier, are they really going to run a far-less-powerful model on their laptop? Outside of a few simple tasks like semantic search in your email, notes, photos; or localized transcription, local models will just be too far behind the curve for the public to make much use of them.
In terms of something that adults want, you’re right. It would take about 10 years before the only generation who is into it, Gen Alpha, would come of age and be able to make that transition to AR/VR like how Gen X did with high speed internet.
Also the m series can be attributed to him and it’s as good as innovation can get.
That said, I don't really use this functionality all that often, because it didn't really (effortlessly) solve a big need for me. Apple sitting out LLMs means they didn't build this competency along the way, even when the technology is now proven.
I think the same thing is true was VR - except Apple did invest heavily in it and bring a product to market. Maybe we won't see anything big for a while, and Silicon Valley becomes the next Detroit.
Wait, how does that work? I've never heard of this outside of closed ecosystems (iPhone is obviously the best at this, but I guess also google crap if you're invested into gmail/gcal/etc)
Beyond that, Claude and ChatGPT (the other major chat providers) both support integrations that let you link your email etc. to allow the chat bot to search through them.
Except no. After getting the hardware right, Tim gave us an another iOS toy / media kiosk (in 3D!) for $3500.
I would have paid $5000 if it was the new developer friendly, macOS spacial, pro software, room-scale interface machine.
I would have thought Tim Cook would have been proud to push the product line / user interface, bicycle-for-the-mind bar higher during his tour of duty. An historic computing advancement.
But I guess raising the media kiosk, novelty apps and purchases, third party creator tax, service subscriptions and scammy ads with no ad-free tier revenue bar, is what he wants to be remembered for.
You haven't heard of Siri?
I don't see the OP stating he only talked about software, and what I mentioned also software in it.
OP said whatever the next shift in technology, Apple will be left behind. You said Apple actually developed new advanced products, but only mentioned hardware examples. If the new big shift in technology is in software (such as AI), we have no reason to predict Apple will fare well there.
AI is not only software but also hardware. Apple were the first to develop a (good) chip specifically for AI computation (ANE), and their MacBooks are very good for running AI models locally.
Apple are not like Google or Facebook (they're mainly software, and Apple are titled more towards hardware), their vision isn't the same as theirs, but their vision will hold for a very long time.
Siri was bought for $200 million in 2010 from Stanford Research Institute ( hence the name ). It wasn't developed at Apple.
However everything else is quite similar for those of us that were around.
Except now there isn't a Be or NeXT to acquire, nor the former founder to get back.
I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance, makes better use of AI than any other photo management app in existence. If anything, ChatGPT/Microsoft/Google/etc are absolutely crippled because they don't have access to the data people actually use on a day to day basis—instead, it's scattered across a million browser apps and private silos.
And, you don't have to use an asinine chatbot integration looking like a fool to use it.
Perhaps Google comes the closest to being able to capitalize on this, but I can't say I can remember using any AI integration they have, and I stopped giving them my data over a decade ago.
Have you used a Samsung? Apple's AI miserably fails in every comparison out there in the photos app.
There's also Google Photos with Gemini which helps you find any photo you want with AI better than anyone else.
But sure, Apple has the best AI integration
I have been using Apple devices and supporting many of their users for over 20 years, and they are all extremely invested in their choice of computing device. It's really a source of pride for many of them, weirdly. For this reason, anything Apple does is necessarily better than everything else on the market. It's a bit pointless to argue because they come from an emotional standpoint; if you point at the many things not working properly, they always have an excuse to handwave it away. It's really funny because I use Apple stuff, and I find many qualities in it, but I'm unwilling to be blind to the faults and weaknesses.
This sort of ego investment exists for other brands as well; I think it is a lack of emotional maturity and an inability to realize that a brand does not care if you do not fully "love" their products.
Hilariously, you are going to argue that Apple is good because they sell a lot of stuff, but somehow Microsoft is bad because they sell a lot of stuff (a lot more, in fact).
Samsung is just straight-up spyware infested crap that's somehow even worse than the other android options.
I'm really pulling for Huawei to rescue us at this point.
Instead they choose to optimize for shareholder value.
While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu.
I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot.
"I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving."
Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser!
I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts.
Think about what data and access the phone has:
1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port.
2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating.
3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu.
4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?"
5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now.
How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.
I am pretty sure they aren't doing any QA or the QA results don't get to the developers. With Pixel Watch I can still understand all the little bugs, it is well-known by now that (some of) the Pixel Watch PMs themselves use iPhones and Apple Watches. But you'd think that the Apple Watch PMs themselves use Apple Watches? The only other explanation that I can think of is that the org is pretty dysfunctional by now.
Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?
Whether it was worth it is another question, but I would not be surprised is recycled to power a futuristic AI interface or something similar at some point.
Since then we lost all the medium players and it's basically just Facebook, Valve, and Apple.
Honestly, I bet your question is exactly what every team adjacent to this problem at Apple is doing. Pointing fingers at each other and saying, "This isn't my problem. This is some other team." It's so egregiously broken that obviously no one inside there considers it their problem. I think this must be rampant at Apple currently. There's just no explanation for how their software has gone so completely to shit over the last ten years.
Siri can't understand or pronounce very well.
A few weeks ago Siri via Car Play responded to a text and sent it without me saying a word or radio on, and with the setting where it asks first before sending enabled. It responding "Why?" to a serious text was seriously inconvenient in the moment. I watched it happen in disbelief.
I think there is a distinction between Siri misunderstanding what was said (which you can see/hear), and Siri understanding what you said but hallucinating an answer. In both cases, you strictly have to check the result, but in the first case it's clear that you've been misunderstood.
To my Apple Watch: "Hey Siri, tell me what the time is in the central time zone right now"
"I found this on the web", watch shows a link to time.gov
The only thing I find Siri useful for is: a voice-activated timer, handy in the kitchen when my hands are full and I am juggling multiple timed process. It does that well about 80% of the time.
What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".
What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows.
At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works.
Today, I still cannot reliably:
- Dictate complex voice input without constant correction
- Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …”
- Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent
These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle.
The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.
Basically they bet that compute efficient LLMs were the future. That bet was wrong and the opposite came true.
But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context.
Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.
But it’s been a complex undertaking. The revamped Siri is built on an entirely new architecture dubbed Linwood. Its software will rely on the company’s large language model platform — known as Apple Foundations Models — which is now incorporating technology from Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini team.
Is this really a reason to delay though? It's not like the current Siri is capable of processing queries outside of "set a timer"
Or are these challenges very Siri/iOS specific?
Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device.
Which is currently slower than the servers that others can bring to the table - because they already grab every piece of data you have.
Apple is not trying to do everything on-device, though it prefers this as much as possible. This is why it built Private Cloud Compute (PCC) and as I understand it, it’s within a PCC environment that Google’s Gemini (for Apple’s users) will be hosted as well.
It'll be 15 years this October and I can't still use siri with my language.
I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it.
In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker
They are late with a release, they must have unlearned to build software.
I am so tired of every Sunday when he unleashes his garbage out upon the masses and every Apple blog shits it back out as reliable info.
One of his recent “guesses” was that iOS 26.4 beta would be out soon. Like, really?
There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.
I use Siri daily for controlling HomeKit devices. She's not always on point though. I've named a light basically "Radiohouse", because that's what the designer called it, but 25% of the time she insists of playing radio instead of turning on the light. I'm not a native english speaker and communicate with Siri in Danish, but still. Siri is definitely not useless and I would love for her to become a lot better.
You may be right that the majority probably doesn't use Siri, but that's because it doesn't really make sense to use Siri on the phone. I rely on HomePod speakers to interface with it, that makes a lot more sense for me.
If you name your Hue light "House Music" and you're confused when you ask to "turn on house music", you've played yourself. I am interested to see if such a light was in the LLM context window or there were memories recorded of past bad encounters if an LLM would predict better...
Do you drive to work?
I don't either, but I suspect anyone that does, and that's hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, would get a lot of value out of a version of Siri that can actually act as a "personal assistant", capable of doing things like booking a doctor's appointment that fits into their calendar, summarizing email, canceling subscriptions etc.
And beyond that, I suspect the main reason voice assistants haven't taken off yet is the fact that they just haven't been possible pre-LLMs. Siri has been voice dial on a prescription-free amount of steroids. Imagine what it could do with actual contextual understanding.
And a *lot* of people want to use Siri while driving, when they can't access the phone, at least not legally.
Apple will remove successful phones models, because they did sell as well as expected, but they keep pumping money into software that still only does basic voice assistance? The problem for Apple is that they can't NOT invest in turning Siri into an AI product, because the stock would lose value the minute that announcement was made, regardless of how sound the financials of that decision might be.
I might be completely wrong and 80% of iPhone users use Siri, but I'd surprised if it's even 20%.