[HN Gopher] Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market gr...
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Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of
spending
Author : bgwalter
Score : 308 points
Date : 2025-12-09 15:08 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| cmiles8 wrote:
| Behind is the new ahead.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Maybe not on the investment/new hotness side, but as a user I'm
| not clamoring for greater LLM integration. Maybe I'm a Luddite,
| though.
| dizlexic wrote:
| Apple, so hip they're clinging to 2008.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| They resisted (most of the) LLM boosterism and kept decent
| focus on SLMs that can run on-device.
|
| I think the decision is first a self-serving one that's in line
| with how they want their devices and services to operate, but
| it also happens to be (in my opinion) the future-proof way of
| integrating consumer AI.
| empath75 wrote:
| Apple is probably going to be an AI consumer and not an AI
| producer and that is fine. Not everyone needs to be openai or
| anthropic.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I assume they will produce their own AI once the dust settles,
| just like they produce their own chips now.
|
| Apple has generally been a company that waits, gets criticized
| for being behind, and then produces a better version (more
| usable, better integrated, etc), claims it is new, and
| everybody buys it. Meanwhile a few people moan about how Apple
| wasn't actually the first to make it.
| engcoach wrote:
| Old Apple wasn't run by ex-Microsoft and ex-consultancy
| MBAs... a serious cultural rot has set in and the much of the
| "bottom up" component powering much of the innovation is
| nothing but smoldering coals.
|
| The golden goose is dead.
| trymas wrote:
| Wasn't it the same with covid hiring? While others over hired,
| Apple was modest in this position. Then everyone needed to
| significantly downsize, when Apple didn't.
| throw0101d wrote:
| This is from a _financial market_ perspective.
|
| From a _user_ perspective it may not be a strength: users /
| customers may expect certain functionality that works accurately
| and responsively.
| everdrive wrote:
| In other words, something they cannot get from AI?
| smith7018 wrote:
| Beyond Hacker News, I haven't seen anyone actively asking for
| AI features. People have been complaining about Siri for over a
| decade but it's not like users are turning against Apple
| because it isn't using an LLM (yet). Rather, it seems like
| users are increasingly wary of AI features being shoehorned
| into products they were already using.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm in that boat - I'm basically fine without AI features. I
| can think of a couple of hypothetical things that would be
| nice though - a smart and functional Siri - I never use it at
| the moment, and maybe a locally hosted LLM that could look
| through my documents so I can ask where's that spreadsheet
| with the housing costs etc.
| user34283 wrote:
| Users weary about shoehorned AI features are probably all on
| Reddit or Hackernews.
|
| I certainly never heard anyone complain in real life.
| swatcoder wrote:
| The people I know in real life, besides those that work in
| tech and use it for code assistance or for generating
| never-reviewed archival transcripts of meetings, mostly
| just laugh at AI foibles and faults and casually echo
| doomer-media worries about job replacement as a topic for
| small talk.
|
| But admittedly, most of those people are established adults
| who've figured out an effective rhythm to their home and
| work life and aren't longing for some magic remedy or
| disruption. They're not necessarily weary, and they were
| curious at first, but it seems like they're mostly just
| waiting for either the buzz to burn off or for some "it
| just works" product to finally emerge.
|
| I imagine there are younger people wowed by the apparent
| magic of what we have now and excited that they might use
| it punch up the homework assignments or emails or texts
| that make them anxious, or that might enjoy toying with it
| as a novel tool for entertainment and creative idling.
| Maybe these are some of the people in your "real life"
|
| There are a lot of people out there in "real life",
| bringing different perspectives and needs.
| user34283 wrote:
| Yes, that sounds about right.
|
| What I meant specifically was that I don't remember
| anyone complaining about AI features getting in the way
| or being shoehorned. That particular complaint seems
| popular only on Reddit or HN.
| platevoltage wrote:
| I've also never heard anyone praise the fact that the
| first Google result is now half way down page either.
| Most people don't care enough to complain.
| nunez wrote:
| Nah, LLMs and stable diffusion are being used everywhere
| by everyone hardcore.
|
| I work at a coworking space. Most of the folks I've
| worked alongside had active chats in ChatGPT for all
| sorts of stuff. I've also seen devs use AI copilots, like
| Copilot and Codex. I feel big old when I drop into
| fullscreen vim on my Mac.
|
| AI art is also used everywhere. Especially by bars and
| restaurants. So many AI happy hour/event promo posters
| now, complete with text (AI art font is kind-of samey for
| some reason). I've even seen (what look like) AI
| generated logos on work trucks.
|
| People are getting use out of LLMs, 100%. Yet the anti-AI
| sentiment is through the roof. Maybe it's like social
| media where the most vocal opponents are secretly some of
| its most active users. Idk.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| I talk to _tons_ of people in real life who are deeply
| troubled by the AI-pocalypse. I was at a dinner party just
| the other day where out of the blue (wasn 't me, I swear!),
| the conversation turned to the horrors of genAI and its
| negative effect on our society.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Most of the people I've talked IRL to aren't against AI as
| a rule, but have grown tired of poorly implemented AI
| features, especially if they're used as marketing fodder.
| In my experience, shoehorned AI features have landed
| themselves in a category similar to that of bundled
| crapware and useless single-app hotkeys on cheap laptops.
|
| Those of this group who use AI mostly ignore poor rebadges
| and integrations like MS Copilot and just use ChatGPT and
| Claude directly. They prefer it to remain intentional and
| contained within a box that they control the bounds of.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Apple originally planned to power Siri with ChatGPT under the
| hood. They quickly saw that other models, including open-
| source ones, were closing the gap fast.
|
| A few months ago, MCP-style tool calling seemed like the
| clear standard. Now even Anthropic is shifting toward "code-
| mode" and reusable skills.
|
| For Apple, reliable tool calling is critical because their AI
| needs to control apps and the whole device. My bet: Apple's
| AI will be able to create its own Shortcuts on the fly and
| call them as needed, with OSA Script support on Mac.
| threetonesun wrote:
| One of the reasons I'm heavily biased towards actual Mac
| native apps is that supporting callback URLs and Shortcuts
| unlocks so much of what I might ask of an AI tool already.
| Ironically I often ask AI assistants for line by line steps
| to create Shortcuts when I need them because actual
| Shortcut naming and properties can be quite obtuse.
| danaris wrote:
| Sadly, much as I love AppleScript, I think Apple giving it
| any love at this point in time is likely to be a pipe
| dream. Much more likely they're just going to try to beef
| up Shortcuts support across the board.
| torginus wrote:
| ?? Both normies and tech people seem to have been clued in
| that AI is a shoehorned in feature that companies focus on
| instead of fixing existing functionality, and that comes with
| a siphon that exfiltrates all your data for AI companies to
| train on.
| superfrank wrote:
| Users aren't really asking for AI features, but they may be
| asking for features that require AI.
|
| As Google integrates Gemini into their Google Assistant and
| Google Home products, if it starts to become leaps and bounds
| better than Siri, customers are going to start wondering why
| Apple is falling behind. If Apple can't achieve those things
| without AI and that could cause problems. Customers aren't
| saying "I want AI features", but they are indirectly asking
| for them because the features they want require AI to do what
| they expect.
|
| (I realize Google and Apple have a deal happening to have
| Gemini integrated into Siri so this isn't the best example,
| but I think it illustrates the point I'm trying to make)
| PKop wrote:
| Disagree. It's a win win. As an example, Windows and Microsoft
| would benefit users if they focused less on injecting useless
| Copilot everywhere, and more on maintenance and improvement of
| the core functionality of the OS while not squandering the
| human resource of their development teams by forcing them to
| work on these things; bad opportunity cost.
|
| Not to say Apple isn't also degrading their OS with bad design
| changes, but "more AI" is not something users are clamoring
| for.
| dizlexic wrote:
| From what I've seen AI isn't driving purchasing of consumer
| electronics. It's mainly a talking point for reviewers.
| dominotw wrote:
| what functionality is this?
|
| I am yet to see ai functionality ppl are dying for.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| No, i don't want AI on my phones OS. I dont want any ai search
| in phone settings or files or anything like this.
|
| It would be like MS is forcing their copilot currently
| everywhere, it is totally useless and a nuisance.
| user34283 wrote:
| Copilot is useful for searching emails and SharePoint. It
| gives access to GPT-5 with Thinking, making it broadly useful
| for programming tasks.
|
| It's certainly been useful in my organization.
| goalieca wrote:
| Gmail search has been excellent for 20 years. Outlook
| search is still terrible even with copilot. LLM isn't the
| killer feature, a search that works is.
| user34283 wrote:
| For one I don't have Gmail at work.
|
| Copilot can search even in PowerPoints. Being able to
| search your organisation's documents is kind of a killer
| feature, provided they make it work reliably.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| I can't think of a single reason why you would need an
| LLM to search through PowerPoint files. We have
| traditional search technology which would be excellent
| for that!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _can 't think of a single reason why you would need an
| LLM to search through PowerPoint files_
|
| Kati's Research AI is genuinely great at search. It tries
| to answer your question, but also directly cites
| resources. This can help you when you're not sure where
| the answer to a question lies, and it winds up being in
| multiple places.
|
| Unless your query is super simple and of low consequence,
| you still need to open the files. But LLM-powered search
| is like the one domain (apart from coding) where these
| fuckers work.
| goalieca wrote:
| Google has been doing this well in their office suite for
| years. Discoverability has been way higher in Gsuite than
| office.
| hinkley wrote:
| From a financial market perspective, AAPL is the second highest
| valuation for a publicly traded company and #1 is in first
| place because of the AI bubble.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Looking at how others stuff AI into everything they can, user
| experience be damned, I'm kind of glad Apple was perfunctory in
| its jump on the bandwagon.
| c16 wrote:
| A good candidate for second mover advantage.
|
| Let everyone else pay for the research and make the mistakes,
| find out what works and what doesn't. Apple already has the
| consumers, they might as well save a few (hundred?) bn in the
| process and later deploy something which doesn't tell you to glue
| your cheese to your pizza.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| In theory yes, but a lot of the organizational reasons Siri is
| a flop are also similar to the reasons Apple Music loses to
| Spotify, Apple can't really get it together for ads.. I think
| Apple is a great company (disclosure : shareholder) but they
| have gotten so big and so stretched thin can't always take
| advantage of the opportunities in front of them.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It is a management problem. It's not because of size. Talk to
| people who've worked there...
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Thank you. All these people applauding Apple for not
| jumping on the bandwagon.
|
| When in reality, they _wanted_ to but have become so
| dysfunctional organization wise, they weren't able to. Kind
| of funny how that worked out.
|
| I still think they're really dropping the ball. They could
| have local models running on devices, interfacing with a
| big cloud partner (Google, OpenAI, etc.) Make Siri awesome.
| But no.
| user34283 wrote:
| There is no use case for local models.
|
| See Gemini Nano. It is available in custom apps, but the
| results are so bad; factual errors and hallucinations
| make it useless. I can see why Google did not roll it out
| to users.
|
| Even if it was significantly better, inference is still
| slow. Adding a few milliseconds of network latency for
| contacting a server and getting a vastly superior result
| is going to be preferable in nearly all scenarios.
|
| Arguments can be made for privacy or lack of
| connectivity, but it probably does not matter to most
| people.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| I think the real case is a future technology. Similar to
| speculative decoding but done over servers.
|
| Local model answers and reaches into the cloud for hard
| tokens.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I just want it to be able to control my apple home
| devices and trigger shortcuts, and maybe do a search into
| a few apps and find things. I know a local model can
| understand my intent for siri like operations because I
| literally have my own version of that on my laptop.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Why would Apple care about "winning" at Apple Music when the
| labels get most of the money? Spotify's first annual profit
| after years of losses was last year at 1.3 billion.
|
| Apple Music is an ecosystem play.
| hinkley wrote:
| Or like with the M1 chip: wait until the incumbent alienates so
| many experts in the field that you can scoop them up and they
| will succeed partially fueled on spite against their old
| employer.
| linkage wrote:
| lol
|
| lmao, even
|
| They are flat-out incompetent. Siri has somehow regressed over
| the years and visual intelligence only works in demos. They have
| the most abominable integration with ChatGPT imaginable.
|
| At least the MLX team has been shipping an impressive product.
| dominotw wrote:
| nah its fine. i don't need any of that shit, esp not on my
| phone.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| I'd take a better Siri if it can happen on-device (for speed
| and privacy). They've been over-promising on Siri's
| capabilities for a decade at this point.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Apple: "It just works".
|
| Me: Nah, it doesn't. I get fine-grained app permissions but
| there's a certain absurdity in using voice control for your
| CarPlay app, where Apple Maps is currently navigating you home,
| and you say "Find me the nearest Panera" and the reply is
| "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
| biophysboy wrote:
| I genuinely never understood why there was a narrative that Apple
| is "falling behind" when it comes to AI. They make phones,
| computers and an ecosystem of services to lock you in. None of
| this stuff is threatened by AI; with the right integration, it
| would enhance them!
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| They delayed a new product category because of poor AI
| performance (the iPad/HomePod fusion device)
|
| And they also got slapped with class action lawsuits for
| failing to meet promised AI capabilities in products they
| launched
|
| It's easy to understand from evidence like this why they are
| falling behind, even if you believe they will pull ahead later
| nightski wrote:
| You said you don't understand it while explaining it in the
| second sentence. They don't have a decent integration, hence
| the vulnerability. Devices that do have a good to great AI
| experience will win in the long run imho.
| biophysboy wrote:
| What integration features are they missing that people
| use/want? Genuinely not trying to be dismissive or stick my
| head in sand - I am out of the loop.
| some-guy wrote:
| I do think Siri is particularly behind, but they were behind
| long before the AI craze. I also understand you cannot simply
| make Siri "be smart" with an LLM without all kinds of
| consequences and edge cases to deal with.
|
| It's not the same, but PMs and VPs at my company think we can
| vibe code our way out of migrating a 1.6 million line codebase
| to a newer language / technology. Or that our problems can be
| solved by acquiring an AI startup, whose front end looks
| exactly the same as every other AI startup's front page, and
| slapping a new CSS file that looks like that startup on top of
| our existing SPA because their product doesn't actually do
| anything. It's an absurd world out there.
| some_random wrote:
| The falling behind was shipping a low quality integration.
| biophysboy wrote:
| What are some good quality AI integrations right now? The
| chat apps and the IDEs are sort of separate environments. A
| lot of "AI assistants" in other apps so far have been
| clunky/useless.
| mitchell209 wrote:
| I don't even think Google has particularly good integration
| and they make Gemini. Although it was early when I was
| still using my Android phone, I went back to the old google
| assistant instead of letting Gemini take over because it
| didn't add anything of value for the basic functions that I
| need from a voice assistant. Hopefully that's changed and
| I'm simply uninformed, but I doubt it.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Nope, that did not change.
| epoch1677 wrote:
| That's not all, my macbook (48 GM VRAM) can run better local
| LLMs at a workable speed than my RTX 5090 rig can, plus Apple
| has MLX and neural engines.
|
| The reason there was such a narrative is because Wall Street
| and Silicon Valley are both narrative machines with little
| regard for veracity, and they are also not that smart (at least
| according to people who successfully beat their system, such as
| Buffett).
|
| "Warren, if people weren't so often wrong, we wouldn't be so
| rich." - the late great Charlie Munger.
| smileson2 wrote:
| yeah tbh it sometimes feels like a lot of moaning from those
| crowds is more about self-validation than anything concrete
| biophysboy wrote:
| That's pretty cool! What are the advantages of using a local
| LLM currently? Do you tune them? I suppose it will be more
| enshittification proof..
| creata wrote:
| > What are the advantages of using a local LLM currently?
|
| You don't have to send all your thoughts to a third party.
| That's the advantage.
| ghusto wrote:
| As someone who buys Apple-everything and has thought about
| switching to Android just so I can have Gemini as an assistant,
| my opinion is their selling of phones is threatened by AI.
|
| I know it's fashionable to shit-talk AI and Google, and lord
| knows I dislike the latter, but Gemini works and is day-to-day
| useful.
| meindnoch wrote:
| I don't want AI on my phone.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I don't want _flaky, in-my-face_ AI on my phone.
|
| I find a lot of the low-key things helpful: I use an app at the
| same time and place every day, and it's nice to have a handy
| one-tap way to open it. It does a decent job organizing photos
| and letting me search text in screenshots.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Or, since the stock market is an emotional game (hear me out):
| Apple hasn't announced anything in the past year which caused
| comparable excitement and resulted in (further) overvaluation of
| their company like it happened on Microsoft, nVidia, etc.
|
| Now, after a few months (!), reality sets in and those hyped-up
| investors realize that it's not as much of a short-term game as
| they told themselves it would be...
| mr_toad wrote:
| Apple has a p/e of 38, Nvidia is 46, Microsoft is 34. S&P has
| historically averaged around 20, so on that metric Apple and
| Nvidia are more similar than different.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Ah, the benefits of having a sober old CEO. And a business model
| that doesn't need to be buoyed nor stabilized by spinning and
| hyping a succession of hot new trends.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Apple doesn't own a search engine either, and gets $20B per year
| from Google to direct search queries to them.
|
| I hope they adopt the same model with AI - leverage whatever
| frontier model is best and provide their own privacy
| infrastructure in front.
|
| At some point Apple will figure out a way to provide the right
| info from your calendar, messages, email etc as context and
| couple this with a bunch of secure tools for creating calendar
| entries, etc. Agentic AI will then be something I personally
| benefit from.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| The search arrangement was deemed to be an illegal monopoly
|
| https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/judge-puts-a-one-year-limi...
|
| Limits are now being placed on it as of a couple days ago
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Perfect, let Apple spread it out over multiple AI providers -
| if that helps monopolies from forming in AI I'm all for it!
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And the remedy was that Google can keep doing what it's
| doing.
| exabrial wrote:
| I mean also, AI is still just a "confident idiot". Even the
| latest iteration of models are wrong more than half the time.
| ben_w wrote:
| Half? To make sure I don't use it where it's that bad, would
| you mind saying what you use it for?
| convenwis wrote:
| This is the thing I've found amazing about people's complaints
| about Apple and AI.
|
| Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship
| things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology
| was there and ready to make an experience that was truly
| excellent.
|
| People have been complaining for years that Apple isn't shipping
| fast enough in this area. But if anything I think that they have
| been shipping (or trying to ship) _too_ fast. There are a lot of
| scenarios that AI is actually great at but the ones that move the
| needle for Apple just aren 't there yet in terms of quality.
|
| The stuff that is at a scale that it matters to them are
| integrations that just magically do what you want with
| iMessage/calendars/photos/etc. There are potentially interesting
| scenarios there but the fact is that any time you touch my
| intimate personal (and work) data and do something meaningful I
| want it to work pretty much all the time. And current models
| aren't really there yet in my view. There are lots of scenarios
| that _do_ work incredibly well right now (coding most obviously).
| But I don 't think the Apple mainline ones do yet.
| awestroke wrote:
| My complaint is that they overpromised and then didn't deliver
| anything at all. They should have just kept their mouth shut
| baq wrote:
| they had to say _something_ and show they 're working on
| _something_ even if it doesn 't work to appease the market
| spirits so they didn't lose their best people (stock
| compensation, right?)
|
| now the tides are turning, so they can go back to scheming
| behind the closed doors without risking their top people
| leaving for meta for a bazillion dollars.
| nik736 wrote:
| > Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an
| experience that was truly excellent
|
| In general I would agree, but Siri is honestly still so bad.
| convenwis wrote:
| Yep, I agree. Should have been more clear that it used to be
| their philosophy. It isn't nearly as much.
| esafak wrote:
| When it came out in 2016 Google Assistant was delivering value
| while Siri was not.
| some_random wrote:
| I really wish I lived in the world where Apple didn't ship
| things until they actually worked, that would be so cool.
| mitchell209 wrote:
| I feel like the only people who say that still are people
| that don't actively or daily use Apple products because macOS
| Tahoe is a joke. Jelly scrolling on the iPad mini was a
| noticeable issue that should never have shipped. Antenna-gate
| on the iPhone 4. iOS 7... etc etc
| some_random wrote:
| The fucked up thing is that they're typically all-in on
| Apple and either don't notice bugs or blame themselves.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| iOS 26.1 will regularly blur the "status line" (clock,
| signal strength, network, battery) while the rest of the
| phone functions correctly. Just sitting on the home page
| with the status blurred. Locking, unlocking, switching
| screen modes, doesn't fix it - just have to reboot the
| phone. :\
| ghusto wrote:
| > Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship
| things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology
| was there and ready to make an experience that was truly
| excellent.
|
| Tell that to almost anything they've shipped in the last 5-10
| years. It's gotten so bad that I wait halfway through entire
| major OS version before upgrading. Every new thing they ship is
| almost guaranteed to be broken in some way, ranging from minor
| annoyance to fully unusable.
|
| I buy Apple-everything, but I sure wish there were better
| options.
| convenwis wrote:
| Oh, I totally agree that things have changed and that
| philosophy doesn't exist much any more. Should have been more
| clear on that point.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I wonder if a new tech company was founded with a quality-
| first and customer-service mentality, could they succeed?
| Especially if there are NO investors trying to make a quick
| buck.
|
| Certainly the company would provide good jobs, good
| benefits, salary and bonuses.
|
| But none of this "the company is the product".
|
| MBAs would be strictly forbidden.
| anonyfox wrote:
| this night I got accidentially the update to the latest iOS
| with this liquid glass stuff - and its schockingly bad in any
| dimension. keyboard input lags, many thing ned MORE
| clicks/touches then before, weird contenxt menu popovers that
| don't even register taps 50% of the time, general lags and
| sluggishness and UI artifacts everywhere. Its really really a
| degradiation of UI/UX even though I personally am a fan of that
| glass-style design in itself
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| iOS26 is a shit show. Glass looks terrible on my old 12 Pro
| Max, and just recently it has started trying to connect phone
| calls to my child's iPad Pro. That is, the speaker button,
| which previously I pushed _to enable the speaker_ , now pops up
| a menu with other nearby devices listed in an annoyingly small
| font. My wife finally asked me for an Android because all her
| friends get far better pictures. Something isn't right over
| there, and a lot of people are leaving.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship
| things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology
| was there and ready to make an experience that was truly
| excellent.
|
| They dragged their feet on a host of technologies that other
| handset makers adopted, released and subsequently improved.
|
| - USB C charging
|
| - 90hz, 120Hz refresh rates
|
| - wireless charging
|
| - larger batteries (the iPhone 17 still lags behind Samsung and
| Google)
|
| I'm not sure what happened, but the iPhone used to have the
| most fluid, responsive experience compared to Android. Now,
| both Google and Samsung have surpassed them in that regard.
|
| I've used both Android and have owned several iPhones and it
| just seems like its not an issue of releasing something that
| isn't ready, but more about them not being capable enough to
| release phones to compete with other phones that are regularly
| beating them in the specs race.
| culi wrote:
| This isn't necessarily a counterargument. Apple's always been
| conservative with their specs but their tight link between
| software and hardware has meant they've been able to do more
| with less. Batteries are a good example of that. Apple has
| always had a much smaller battery than flagship competitors
| but has had similar or better battery life than, say, Samsung
| hinkley wrote:
| What people hate about Apple is that they ship things other
| people couldn't get to capital-W Work, and they're seen as
| 'stealing' the idea instead of perfecting them.
|
| Great artists steal.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship
| things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology
| was there and ready to make an experience that was truly
| excellent.
|
| ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini are already working.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| It might as well be the visualization of the two strategies:
|
| - Everyone else: "We mainly build huge AI compute clusters to
| process large amount of data and create value, at high cost for
| ramp-up and operation."
|
| - Apple: "We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we
| can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and
| then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and
| operational cost all paid by the consumer."
|
| I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and,
| most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's
| strategy.
|
| No matter what they do, they will sell hundreds of millions
| compute devices for the foreseeable future. They use this to
| build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future
| consumers.
|
| THIS is their unique strength.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Sometimes doing nothing is the winning move.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| ...as I wrote, they don't do "nothing".
|
| They roll out hardware to consumers they can use for AI once
| their service is ready, with users paying for that rollout
| until then.
|
| Meanwhile they have started to deploy a marketplace ecosystem
| for AI tasks on iOS, where Apple has the first right-to-
| refuse, allowing the user to select a (revenue-share-vetted)
| 3rd party provider to complete the task.
|
| So until Apple is ready, the user can select OpenAI (or soon
| other providers) to fulfill an AI-task, and Apple will
| collect metrics on the demand of each type of task.
|
| This will help them prioritize for development of own models,
| to finally make use of their own marketplace rules to direct
| the business away from third parties to themselves.
|
| My guess is that they will offer a mixed on-device/cloud AI-
| service that will use the end-users hardware where possible,
| offloading compute from their clouds to the end-users
| hardware and energy-bill, with a "cheap" subscription price
| undercutting others on that AI-marketplace.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Assuming that Apple take 30% rev-share from other AI-
| service providers on their AI-marketplace, once they are
| ready they can easily offer a lower pricing than anyone
| else and still retain a higher profit-margin.
|
| But for this to make economic sense, the "AI-bubble" may
| need to burst first, forcing the competitors to actually
| provide their services for-profit.
|
| Until then it might be more profitable to just forward AI-
| tasks to OpenAI and others and let them burn more money.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > once they are ready they can easily offer a lower
| pricing than anyone else
|
| Do you have any evidence _whatsoever_ that could back-up
| this claim? It feels like you 're just saying this
| because you want it to be true, not because you have any
| concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up
| this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because
| you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete
| proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.
|
| Sorry, I didn't mean to state that Apple A/M-series will
| be competitive on inference performance compared to other
| solutions. There is no sufficient data for this at the
| moment. But this is not the competition I expect to
| happen.
|
| I expect them to stiffle competition and setting
| themselves up as the primary player in the Apple
| ecosystem for AI services, simply because they are making
| "Apple Intelligence" an ecosystem orchestration layer
| (and thus themselves the gatekeeper).
|
| 1. They made a deal with OpenAI to close Apple's
| competitive gap on consumer AI, allowing users to upgrade
| to paid ChatGPT subscriptions from within the iOS menu.
| OpenAI has to pay at least (!) the usual revenue share
| for this, but considering that Apple integrated them
| directly into iOS I'm sure OpenAI has to pay MORE than
| that. (also supported by the fact that OpenAI doesn't
| allow users to upgrade to the 200USD PRO tier using this
| path, but only the 20USD Plus tier) [1]
|
| 2. Apple's integration is set up to collect data from
| this AI digital market they created: Their legal text for
| the initial release with OpenAI already states that all
| requests sent to ChatGPT are first evaluated by "Apple
| Intelligence & Siri" and "your request is analyzed to
| determine whether ChatGPT might have useful results" [2].
| This architecture requires(!) them to not only collect
| and analyze data about the type of requests, but also
| gives them first-right-to-refuse for all tasks.
|
| 3. Developers are "encouraged" to integrate Apple
| Intelligence right into their apps [3]. This will have
| AI-tasks first evaluated by Apple
|
| 4. Apple has confirmed that they are interested to enable
| other AI-providers using the same path [4]
|
| --> Apple will be the gatekeeper to decide whether they
| can fulfill a task by themselves or offer the user to
| hand it off to a 3rd party service provider.
|
| --> Apple will be in control of the "Neural Engine" on
| the device, and I expect them to use it to run inference
| models they created based on statistics of step#2 above
|
| --> I expect that AI orchestration, including training
| those models and distributing/maintaining them on the
| devices will be a significant part of Apple's AI
| strategy. This could cover alot of text and image
| processing and already significantly reduce their
| datacenter cost for cloud-based AI-services. For the
| remaining, more compute-intensive AI-services they will
| be able to closely monitor (via above step#2) when it
| will be most economic to in-source a service instead of
| "just" getting revenue-share for it (via above step#1).
|
| [1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-
| ios-app-...
|
| [2] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-
| extensio...
|
| [3] https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
|
| [4] https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-
| apple-ho...
| stefan_ wrote:
| You are just making things up in this grand AI strategy you
| have imagined for Apple. I cannot "fulfill an AI-task" with
| my phone because the overpaid idiots building it in
| Cupertino have years ago bought into the trainwreck that is
| Siri. So now I cannot "select my favorite AI provider" from
| the "marketplace ecosystem for AI tasks" to "fulfill an AI-
| task" nor will a meddling middle manager in the Loop
| collect metrics on the demand for "my AI tasks".
| rickdeckard wrote:
| And now they are converting Siri into an orchestrator to
| "broker" between the user and the AI-providers for a
| revenue-share, because they are not ready to compete in
| that space themselves...
|
| see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210481
| musictubes wrote:
| It isn't clear to me that Apple will ever pursue their own
| chatbot like Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. There's lots of
| potential for on device AI functions without it ever being
| a general purpose agent that tries to do everything. AI and
| LLMs are not synonymous.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| From UX perspective they already have Siri for that
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Look at Magic Cue in this year's Android update
|
| > Magic Cue - Magic Cue proactively surfaces relevant info
| and suggests actions, similar to how Apple's personalized
| Siri features were supposed to work. It can display flight
| information when you call an airline, or cue up a photo if a
| friend asks for an image.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-ai-
| feat...
|
| Google shipped it, despite it not working.
|
| > I spent a month with the Pixel 10's most hyped AI feature,
| and it hasn't gone well
|
| https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-
| cue-o...
|
| Likewise Daily Hub didn't work but was shipped anyway.
|
| > In our testing, Daily Hub rarely showed anything beyond the
| weather, suggested videos, and AI search prompts. When it did
| integrate calendar data, it seemed unable to differentiate
| between the user's own calendar and data from shared
| calendars. This largely useless report was pushed to the At a
| Glance widget multiple times per day, making it more of a
| nuisance than helpful.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-
| hu...
|
| Apple announced that the Siri uodate didn't work well enough
| to ship, and didn't ship it.
| twsted wrote:
| "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
| pzo wrote:
| > We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can
| control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then
| orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and
| operational cost all paid by the consumer
|
| I wish they did but they don't. They have been for decade so
| stingy on RAM for iPhone and iPad. There are at current point
| that only small percent of their userbase have iPhone or iPad
| with 8GB RAM that somehow can run any AI models even open
| source and be of any use. Not mentioning they don't compare to
| big Models.
|
| They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger RAM.
| iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air also
| can have max 32 GB RAM.
|
| And for the current price of cheap online AI where e.g.
| perplexity provides so many promo for PRO version for like less
| $10 per year and all ai providers give good free models with
| enough rate limit for many users I don't see apple hardware
| like particularly bought because of AI compute-chips - at least
| not non-pro users.
|
| If the loose AI though and because of that won't have good AI
| integrations they will loose also eventually in hardware. e.g.
| Polish language in Siri still not supported so my mum cannot
| use it. OSS Whisper v3 turbo was available ages ago but apple
| still support only few languages. 3rd party keyboard cannot
| integrate so well with audio input and all sux in this case
| because platform limitation.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Their strategy is not to sell you a device that _YOU_ can use
| for AI, they sell you a device that _THEY_ can use for AI.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Some lot of good that's done them. The Neural Engine is
| dark silicon on most devices I've seen, and now we're
| getting _another_ product segment with M5 's matmul GPUs.
|
| To me, it feels like Apple should have supported CUDA from
| the start. Sell the ARM-hungry datacenter some rackmount
| Macs with properly fast GPUs, and Apple can eventually
| bring the successful inference technology to cheaper
| devices. Apple's current all-or-nothing strategy has
| produced nothing but redundant hardware accelerators, while
| Nvidia's vertical integration only gets stronger.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Maybe. But Apple tried the server business and found that
| they can't compete there.
|
| Not because of Engineering deficiencies, but because
| datacenters buy based on facts, not fluff.
|
| Now their ARM silicon is top-notch, no doubt about that.
| But will they earn a higher margin if they put it in a
| datacenter instead of a consumer device which is then
| used to consume Apple Services? I don't think so.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > But will they earn a higher margin if they put it in a
| datacenter
|
| Nvidia is a five trillion dollar business right now. The
| total sum of Apple's profits from services, hardware and
| servicing/repair costs _all_ fail to crest Nvidia 's
| total addressable market. We've been past the point of
| theorizing for almost two years now.
|
| Apple has the means to break into that market, too. They
| don't need the silicon (iPhone/iPad are way overpowered,
| Vision Pro and Mac are low-volume), they have thousands
| of engineers with UNIX experience, and hundreds of
| billions of dollars in liquid cash waiting to be spent.
| If the China divestment and monopoly case happen, Apple
| needs a game plan that guarantees them protection from US
| politicians and secures an easy cash flow.
|
| From the consumer perspective, it seems simple; stop
| shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone. Nobody uses
| it. They're not playing AAA-games or inferencing the
| latest AI models, and the efficiency gains haven't been
| noticable for a decade. You don't need TSMC 2nm to browse
| the App Store, or watch AppleTV. The only opportunity
| cost comes from selling consumers hardware they can't
| appreciate.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > The Neural Engine is dark silicon on most devices I've
| seen
|
| At the very least it's used by the Photos app[1]. Likely
| other Apple apps too.
|
| [1]
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-
| peopl...
| buildbot wrote:
| I have a little rust script that uses the built in vision
| toolkit to do ocr of pdfs, it spins up the ANE to a full
| 1W compared to 0 as measured by the power profiler. So it
| is used!
|
| IMO, It's a very apple strategy, stuff just works and is
| slowly more accelerated/lower power.
| amelius wrote:
| > Their strategy is not to sell you a device that YOU can
| use for AI, they sell you a device that THEY can use for
| AI.
|
| How will that work out with the battery?
|
| I mean, they could have mined crypto on our phones but that
| would have been a bad idea for the same reason.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > They don't even provide option to sell iPhone with bigger
| RAM. iPad can have max 16GB RAM. Those mainstream macbook air
| also can have max 32 GB RAM.
|
| That's a selective list. High RAM Macs are available. MBPro
| goes up to 128GB. Mac Studio goes up to 512GB. Not cheap, but
| available.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| The existential hope that all the other players have is that AI
| will drive adoption of a form factor that replaces the phone.
| Because if in 5 years the dominant device is still the phone,
| Apple wins.
|
| Consumer hardware chips will be plenty powerful to run "good
| enough" models.
|
| If I'm an application dev, do I want to develop something on
| top of OpenAI, or Apple's on device model that I can use as
| much as a I want for free? On device is the future
| rickdeckard wrote:
| In 5 years, the dominant form-factor will still be a phone.
| This is not the risk.
|
| The existential FEAR of the smartphone ecosystem players
| (Apple, Google) is, that another ecosystem (!) may come
| along, one that is tighter integrated into the daily lives,
| is more predictive of the users' needs, requires less
| interaction and is not under THEIR control.
|
| Because this is not about devices, it's about owning the
| total userbase of that OS-ecosystem.
|
| Replacing the Smartphone has been attempted numerous times in
| the past decade, but no device was able to replace it as a
| consumption device. Now technology has reached a level of
| maturity that Smart Glasses may have a shot at this. AND they
| come along with their own ecosystem as well.
|
| Whatever happens, they won't replace all phones within 5
| years. But it's possible that such a device would become a
| companion to an iOS/Android phone and within 5 years
| gradually eases off users of their phones into that other
| ecosystem.
|
| And that's scary for Apple and Google.
|
| Because this is not a device-war, this is an ecosystem-war.
| jpace121 wrote:
| How late do you think Apple can come to that party and
| still wind up winning in the end?
|
| Having piles of money when everyone else is lighting it on
| fire and a brand that would require quite the mistake to
| ruin gives you a long runway.
|
| Is anyone really profiting from AI yet? I know Google
| basically saved their search monopoly but any one else?
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Is anyone really profiting from AI yet?
|
| ...Nvidia? Did you just step out of a cryogenic chamber
| from 2008?
|
| The datacenter business is booming right now, cutting-
| edge and efficient hardware is needed more than ever.
| Nvidia and Apple are the _only two companies in the
| world_ with the design chops and TSMC inroads to address
| that market. Nvidia 's fully committed and making money
| hand over fist; Apple is putting 2nm silicon in the iPad
| Pro and asking _fucking consumers_ to pay $1,500 for it.
| Do you not see the issue with this business model?
|
| People will say Apple can't crack the datacenter market,
| I say bullshit. Apple drafted OpenCL. Every dollar Nvidia
| makes is money Apple pissed away on trinkets like
| smartwatches and TikTok tablets.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > How late do you think Apple can come to that party and
| still wind up winning in the end?
|
| In my view Apple is positioning themselves (once more) to
| win without the need of competing on fair grounds. They
| are late to this party, but their biggest asset is the
| control over the data and spending of their users.
|
| The users WANT to use those services, and Apple is not
| ready to offer anything. But as long as they can be the
| "broker" between the user and such services (and most of
| all the deciding party!), they can sell the consumption
| of their entire userbase for revenue-share to the
| service-providers.
|
| Their biggest risk (beside of stock-market impacts) is,
| that Apple users start to engage directly with such
| services without Apple being an intermediary party (using
| a browser or another device).
|
| So their highest priority will be to keep the user
| entertained so they can continue profiting from their
| consumption until they themselves have arrived at the
| party.
|
| Once they have arrived, they will start diverting
| profitable AI-tasks from 3rd parties back to their own
| services, leaving unprofitable ones to the then-
| integrated 3rd party providers
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, as I said in another thread a few days ago: Apple's
| strength is in making personal computing endpoint devices for
| consumers. That's what's in their DNA. They have not done well
| at anything else.
| qzw wrote:
| While that's definitely true, I think it's maybe more fair to
| say that their actual strength has always been to take a
| personal computing technology that's just about "ready-for-
| prime-time" and make it as accessible and _fashionable_ as
| possible. Almost all of their failed products have been
| errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass
| adoption.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that those personal computing devices
| have enabled them to make bank on cloud services.
| asdff wrote:
| Yeah and part of that specifically came by sacrificing a
| personal computing endpoint product they used to sell,
| networked storage, at the sacrificial alter.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| The funny thing is that Time Machine still works, and
| works better than any local backup solution for Windows
| that I'm aware of (let alone what comes with Windows
| itself).
| platevoltage wrote:
| Not to mention, they are generous enough to allow it to
| work with a non-apple NAS setup. I feel like that would
| be a different story if they were still in the NAS
| business.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| They do great at consumer services as well. Worth noting that
| no other company in the world has more credit cards on file
| than Apple.
| bigyabai wrote:
| That will look just _great_ alongside the other monopoly
| abuse evidence.
| amelius wrote:
| Like they say: "In a goldrush, sell vendor locked shovels."
| eastbound wrote:
| May I remind that iPhone can't remove the crowds from tourism
| photos, so all Android users have memories without crowds.
| So, in a goldrush, sell dirt.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Although I am an Android user, I am not enough of a
| narcissist to need to remove the crowds from my tourism
| photos. So, not all Android users have photos without
| crowds.
| causal wrote:
| Yeah I mean... I take a lot of joy in the random yet
| specific faces in those places I visited long ago. It's
| an important part of the memory for me.
| ares623 wrote:
| Having a clear background used to be difficult/expensive,
| so a photo where you appear to have exclusive access to
| the area is a high social signal.
|
| Now that it's cheap and easy, those kind of photos will
| lose its signal.
|
| Everyday Syndrome is proven right.
| platevoltage wrote:
| There's a thing I didn't know I was missing.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I would say that's what Nvidia is doing.
|
| I'm not sure how Apple is enabling anything interesting
| around AI right now.
|
| That's what this bland article is not even touching on. Yes,
| having missed the boat is great if the boat ends up sinking.
| That doesn't make missing boats a great strategy.
|
| Building huge models and huge data centers is not the only
| thing they could have done.
|
| They had some interesting early ideas on letting AI tap app
| functionality client-side. But that has gone nowhere, and now
| everything of relevance is happening on servers.
|
| Apple's devices are not even remotely the best dumb terminals
| to tap into that. Even that crown goes to Android.
| hopelite wrote:
| I agree that this is a reasonable perspective, but from my
| cursory understanding of the "shakeup" at Apple, I am not sure
| it is seen that way by the Board and Cook.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Yes, I also see what you mean.
|
| I don't want to imply that this is their only play or that it
| will even work out.
|
| The EU (and others) already identified this general scheme of
| stiffling competition by "brokering" between the consumer and
| the free market, so outside of the US I'm not even sure how
| much Apple will be able to rely on such a strategy (again)...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how
| and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider
| Apple's strategy.
|
| I'm not sure where you position Samsung or Xiaomi, Oppo etc.
| They're competitive on price with chipsets that can handle AI
| loads in the same ballpark, as attested by Google's features
| running on them.
|
| They're not vertically integrated and don't have the same
| business structure, but does it matter regarding on-device AI ?
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Vertical integration matters for sure, but people often
| underestimate the scale in which this market is already
| skewed.
|
| - Apple owns more than 50% of this market-segment, the annual
| sales of iPhones is roughly 200 Million units. In comparison,
| Samsung Galaxy S-series sits at roughly 20-25 Millions.
|
| - Apple's is alone in the iOS ecosystem, while Samsung,
| Xiaomi and Oppo have to compete within the Android space
| every year. iOS is extremely sticky, which makes a certain
| volume of iPhones almost guaranteed to sell every year, at a
| lofty profit margin.
|
| In comparison, Samsung always has to consider that the next
| BAD Galaxy-S might only sell a fraction of the previous one,
| because users might move horizontally to another Android
| brand (even to Pixel, a first-party product of their
| ecosystem provider). So Samsung cannot even make bets based
| on the sale of 20 million units, they are already at risk to
| make bets on the initial shipment-volume (~5 millions)
| because if the device doesn't sell they will have to PAY
| money to the carriers to get them into the market.
|
| Apple has a much lower risk here. If the next iPhone is not
| catching on, Apple will likely still sell 200mn iPhones in
| that year, because the ecosystem lock-in is so strong that
| there is little risk of losing customers to anything else
| than ANOTHER (then more-profitable) iPhone.
|
| So even when assuming a _MASSIVE_ annual drop of 25% in
| Sales, Apple can still make development bets based on a
| production forecast of 150 _MILLION_ units.
|
| For their supply-chain that's still an average production
| output of ~400k units _per DAY_ for each component. With that
| volume you can get entire factories to only produce for you.
|
| That's why I can't think of any company in a comparable
| position. Apple can add hardware to their device and sell the
| resulting product to the consumer for profit _before_
| delivering any actual value with it.
|
| If any competitor in the Android space attempts that, just
| the component costs alone will risk the device to be dead-on-
| arrival just because "some other Android device" delivers the
| same experience at lower cost.
| wiesbadener wrote:
| I recently tried to figure out what their offerings currently
| are. I'm hoping for `efficent but performant AI compute-chips`
| by Apple ever since they kicked out Nvidia in 2015 (for the ML
| Models / Exploration parts bellow). It will be interesting to
| see how good their products will feel in this fast-paced
| environment and how much legroom (RAM + Compute) will be left
| non-platform offerings.
|
| To my understanding, they market their ML stack as four layers
| [1]:
|
| - Platform Intelligence: ready-made OS features (e.g., Writing
| Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground) that apps can adopt with
| minimal customization.
|
| - ML-powered APIs: higher-level frameworks for common tasks--
| on-device Foundation Models (LLM), plus Vision, Natural
| Language, Translation, Sound Analysis, and Speech; with
| optional customization via Create ML.
|
| - ML Models (Core ML): ship your own models on-device in Core
| ML format; convert/optimize from PyTorch/TF via coremltools,
| and run efficiently across CPU/GPU/Neural Engine (optionally
| paired with Metal/Accelerate for more control).
|
| - Exploration/Training: Metal-backed PyTorch/JAX for
| experimentation, plus Apple's MLX for training/fine-tuning on
| Apple Silicon using unified memory, with multi-language
| bindings and models commonly sourced from Hugging Face.
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/360/
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control,
| pre-paid by the future consumers._
|
| I'm not following. What infrastructure? Pre-paid how?
|
| Apple pays for materials and chips _before_ it sells the
| finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid.
|
| And what infrastructure? The inference chips on iPhones aren't
| part of any Apple AI infrastructure. Apple's not using them as
| distributed computing for LLM training or anything, or for
| relaying web queries to a complete stranger's device -- nor
| would they.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > Apple pays for materials and chips before it sells the
| finished product to consumers. Nothing is pre-paid.
|
| The AI-capabilities of the devices will be pre-paid, as they
| will come with the product without delivering any significant
| value yet. The end-user will bear the cost for that before he
| is getting anything meaningful in return, because Apple's
| production volume is at such a scale that they can offset
| those investments without risking to lose any meaningful
| sales volume.
|
| Other players can't do that because they don't sell 200mn
| units per year. If they would add on-device inference chips,
| they would have to significantly increase the device-price,
| risking to not sell any product
| yatopifo wrote:
| Apple's phones are responsible for most of their revenue. The
| phones are designed to pretty much exclusively interact with
| social media and take photos. AI doesn't really add anything to
| that experience since advertisement consumption by humans is the
| ultimate objective. That's why even though Apple's Siri has been
| about the most useless assistant in existence for years, Apple
| isn't in a rush to replace it. It simply doesn't have a big
| impact on their revenue.
|
| Microsoft has been criticized for investing in AI heavily. But it
| actually makes sense for Microsoft if you consider the nature of
| their business. The problem is not with the investment per se but
| with what they got out of it. Unfortunately, Microsoft sucks at
| product management, so instead of creating useful stuff that
| users want and are ready to pay for, they created stuff that no
| one understands, no one can use, and no one wants to pay for.
| Github copilot is an exception of course. I'm talking more about
| their Office 365 AI.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Apple: $60b in cash.
|
| The revenue from AI is growing at a much slower rate than
| recurring capex and depreciation is accumulating. This will
| create distress opportunities that cash-rich companies like APPL
| may seize. Might be a private equity deal, might be in the public
| markets as some of the players dip hard after IPO.
|
| As this plays out, APPL's silicon has unified memory, power
| consumption and native acceleration that gives it an edge running
| SLMs and possibly LLMs at scale. Wouldn't shock me to see APPL
| introduce a data-center solution.
| quesera wrote:
| Nit: stock ticker symbol is AAPL.
|
| APPL was the Type Code[0] for an Application, in classic MacOS
| (1984).
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork#Types
| torginus wrote:
| This is a weird claim considering Apple has the best price/perf
| consumer grade hardware for AI
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| A lot of people here are assuming Apple has chosen to sit out the
| AI race, but I don't believe that's the case.
|
| Trying and failing to make a SoTA foundational model is not a
| strategic move. It's similar to Amazon and Meta, they also have
| tried and not succeeded.
| vadepaysa wrote:
| The core of Apple's problem boils down to apathy towards their
| product quality. I just recently switched from using Siri to
| Google Gemini in my car. The experience is dramatically better.
|
| And this is the case across the board.
|
| My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
|
| Third and final example is how bad Apple's native dictation
| engine is. I can run OpenAI Whisper models on my Mac and get
| dramatically better output.
|
| As a long time Apple fan who's had everything since before the
| first iPhone, I feel this apathy towards product quality cannot
| be disguised as some strategic decision to fast follow with AI.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
|
| That's odd because I've used both, along with a bunch other
| wearables (e.g. Whoop), and I wouldn't give up my Apple Watch
| for anything. Massively useful, can take calls, make payments,
| stream music from my Apple playlists, read and reply to
| messages, and a ton of other things.
| serf wrote:
| The wearos devices can do all that stuff too, and fitbit is
| kind of getting blended into those devices piece by piece --
| so after years of Fitbit use I can say that the best fitbit
| device i've had is ... a Pixel Watch 4.
|
| I mention this because , at least for the functionalities
| that you mention, I think the pixel watches are catching up
| nicely.
|
| ... but they still haven't been able to make me feel less
| stupid talking into a watch for phone calls like some off-
| brand James Bond wannabe, even if it works great.
| browningstreet wrote:
| You're arguing about product quality by using product
| availability examples.
|
| Siri isn't competing with Gemini, yet.. Siri is old tech,
| Gemini is the new tech.
|
| Same with dictation.
|
| Siri hasn't been updated generationally with SOTA to compete
| with Gemini yet.. it simply hasn't been updated. This is part
| of the "slow pace" that the post is talking about (part of, not
| entirely the slowness though).
|
| For example, Amazon updated my old Echo dots with Alexa+ beta,
| and it's pretty good. I have Grok in my Tesla, and though I
| don't like Grok or xAI, it's there and I use it occasionally.
|
| Apple hasn't done their release of these things yet.
| vadepaysa wrote:
| How so? Their brand new Siri _is_ available. I am using their
| Apple intelligence on my new iPhone. They even have half
| baked ChatGPT integrations everywhere. They got into lot of
| trouble last year for running ads for overselling what their
| new siri can do.
|
| Overselling abilities is for sure a lack of quality.
| browningstreet wrote:
| The new Apple Intelligence version of Siri isn't out yet.
| It's scheduled to arrive with iOS 26.4 in early/mid 2026.
|
| My assertion is that Apple hasn't yet released a
| generational complement to Gemini or ChatGPT voice modes.
| That's a problem, but one specifically of availability and
| release, which.. again (and despite the downvoters)..
| matches the assertion of the post ("slow AI pace").
|
| If/when new Siri in 26.4 comes out and it sucks, then
| that'd be an issue of quality.
|
| Reference:
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/10/30/apple-
| intelligenc...
| eastbound wrote:
| No, when I bought my first iphone, Siri could start a
| chronometer. Then it couldn't for 5 years, and today it can
| again. It's a big flaw for a product which can barely do
| anything else.
|
| I only have Apple product because it's good build quality.
| But it's quite bad products.
|
| I think Apple secretly doesn't want more market share, to
| avoid anticompetitive accusations.
| yandie wrote:
| > My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
|
| My husband has a Fitbit and it's so buggy he left it sit on the
| shelf most of the time - the only times he'd wear it is for
| exercise.
|
| Siri is bad though, but I have found Google Voice Assistant and
| Alexa both really have become bad over time, to the point of us
| just giving up on them completely. My husband is on Android and
| I'm really surprised how bad voice assistant is despite all the
| Gemini launches! (mind you he has an Australian accent)
| fennecbutt wrote:
| I have a Kiwi accent and it's fine...probably best to ensure
| you set correct language in settings too.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
|
| I went through three FitBits. After the third failed just
| outside warranty I got an Apple watch, which has outlasted all
| three FitBits.
| didibus wrote:
| I'll have to disagree on Fitbit being better.
|
| But for everything else, you literally just said, the handful
| of AI features are better on Google products... That seldom
| makes the product as a whole better.
| nunez wrote:
| The Fitbit is great until it bricks itself. Which it will.
| Probably in a year or two.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in
| iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google
| Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a
| free API call is transparently made to a secure computed
| environment on Apple's servers that are documented to preserve
| privacy.
|
| A problem is that even though it is super simple to write Swift /
| SwiftOS apps to use the system model, I don't see much evidence
| that many developers are using the model in their apps.
| bredren wrote:
| Hey Mark, I posted about this in another comment [1] but I also
| think the LLM is decent, and beyond its quality the scale of
| distribution is a big deal.
|
| I had pondered practical implementations of the model since it
| was announced and have just released today a new native macos
| application that uses it to summarize Claude Code and Codex
| conversations as they occur. [2]
|
| If you use either of these CLI agents and have time to try the
| app out and provide feedback, I'd appreciate it! I'm at
| rob@contextify.sh.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209975
|
| [2] https://contextify.sh
| bredren wrote:
| FWIW, AI is not entirely locked down in the Apple ecosystem.
| Sure, they control it but they've already built the foundation of
| a major opportunity for developers.
|
| There's an on device LLM that is packaged in iOS, iPadOS and
| macOS 26 (Tahoe) [1]. They even have a HIG on use of generative
| AI [2]
|
| Something like half of all macs are running macOS 26 [3] already,
| so this could be the most widely distributed on-device LLM on the
| planet.
|
| I think people are sleeping on this, partly because the model is
| seen as under powered. But I think we can presume it won't always
| be so.
|
| I've just posted a Show HN of app for macOS 26 I created that
| uses Apple's local LLM to summarize conversations you've had with
| Claude Code and Codex. [3]
|
| I've been somewhat surprised at the quality and reliability of
| Apple's built-in LLM and have only been limited by the logic I've
| built around it.
|
| I think Apple's packaging of an LLM in its core operating systems
| is actually a fast move with AI and even has potential to act as
| an existential threat to Windows.
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286/
|
| [2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-
| guideline...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209081
| fennecbutt wrote:
| There is no major opportunity for developers on Apple's
| platforms when they can just rug pull you as they please.
| leftouterjoins wrote:
| I can second this. I am nearing launch on an app that uses both
| the new SpeechAnalyzer and on device LLM and it has met or
| exceeded my expectations. A longer context would always be nice
| but then I remember its running on a phone.
| bredren wrote:
| Thanks for the follow-on anecdote. I'd be happy to try out
| your app. Please email me when it is available:
| rob@contextify.sh.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Are you using to for speech-to-text/text-to-speech? I have
| been using SpeechRecognizer & SpeechSynthesizer and they have
| been pretty underwhelming.
| AJRF wrote:
| How are you evaluating it against your expectations?
| cheschire wrote:
| Lick your finger before you stick it in the air. Amplifies
| the signal.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I'd like to know this too. Whisper is hard to beat.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Don't a lot of Android devices come with Gemini Nano on the
| device?
|
| Probably not as many out there as there are Apple devices
| because it is only the high end ones at the moment. I don't
| think they are that far behind in numbers though.
| bredren wrote:
| I'd be curious to see an estimate on the google side.
|
| Here are some real rough estimates in Apple's ecosystem:
|
| For macos alone the install base is something like 110-130
| million, and only Apple Silicon macs can run the new model,
| so maybe 45 million active macs are updated to macos 26 and
| can run their model.
|
| There are a bunch of details but of the iPhones out there
| that are new enough to run Apple Intelligence and have iOS
| 26, something like 220 million can.
|
| For iPad same conditions but for iPados its something like 60
| million.
|
| So, something like 325 million active devices are out there
| ready to run LLM completion requests.
| seydor wrote:
| Sounds like a broken clock gone right. That only happens once
| every 43200 seconds
| asdff wrote:
| Seems that this is apples modus operandi since the app store,
| their last "thing" they've made really.
|
| Hype about self driving cars -> apple chases it with apple car ->
| investors pleased they kept up with the joneses -> apple car is
| behind or not good enough or whatever -> quietly cancelled ->
| investors pleased they culled the deadweight.
|
| You can replace apple car with vision pro or soon apple
| intelligence and it will play out the same formula. Luckily it
| allows investors to profit.
| jerf wrote:
| You know I would be happy to offer this service to investors
| for a mere tens of millions of dollars. I'll send you photos of
| our weekly money bonfire, built with your money, and when
| you're tired of pictures of your money on fire, I'll simply...
| stop.
|
| Heck, in accordance with the several zeitgeists of our age,
| I'll even do you the solid of fraudulently generating the
| money-on-fire pictures with AI, so when you get tired of seeing
| your money on fire I'll even hand, say, 25% of it back to you,
| as the result of my tireless efforts to bring value to my
| shareholders. That's a better return than you'll get from most
| of these investments!
| johnfn wrote:
| How does the Vision Pro not qualify as a "thing" Apple made?
| segfaultex wrote:
| Or the Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, iPad, etc.
|
| They've made plenty of things. I liken them to the Lexus of
| consumer electronics; expensive for what they are,
| thoughtfully designed, and conservative in their approach to
| adopting new trends.
| asdff wrote:
| >Apple watch
|
| Iphone on your wrist. Most people I know with one have it
| for two years then once the battery goes they throw it in a
| drawer and don't buy another one. Most were actually gifted
| it.
|
| > airpods
|
| They just took the same old earpods they used to give you
| for free due to ewaste concerns and forced you to buy the
| disposable bluetooth version if you want to charge your
| phone and listen to music at the same time.
|
| >homepod
|
| I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple
| doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its
| basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with
| one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air
| filter, absolutely no signature design language.
|
| >ipad
|
| No one knows why they need one. They get one because
| there's hype. They use it for three years to look at
| instagram then its put in a drawer forever. "ipad for
| education" is a scam/failure; just give kids macbook airs
| so I don't have to teach new hires what a file is anymore.
|
| All of this is a farcry from the ipod and I feel like
| apologists like you understand that too.
| ebbi wrote:
| It sounds like a lot of your opinions are formed within a
| very niche bubble.
|
| Airpods for example - I see them everywhere, and every
| person I know that uses them, love them! Especially
| Airpods Pro 2.
|
| iPad - I think the sales figures speak for themselves. It
| may not be popular among tech people, given they're used
| to a desktop environment, but I know many people that use
| iPads and love them.
|
| Apple Watch, I admit is more of a mixed bag among the
| people I know and spoken to. But I'd say the majority
| like it, and have bought another one after their first
| one gave out/upgraded. Again, the sales figures speak for
| themselves.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| The parent is living in a different reality. They are all
| hugely popular products, just because he doesn't like
| them doesn't make it not true. And their introduction
| made a massive impact. Maybe not on the level of the
| iPhone but pretty impressive. The vision pro thing is a
| major flop. Nobody wanted one before it came out and
| nobody wants or needs one now and it's too expensive.
| It's a shame, because like e readers they are massively
| underused as a technology.
| ebbi wrote:
| TBF, The Vision Pro failed from a sales perspective, no
| doubt, but after getting a demo at an Apple Store last
| year, I can see how it is promising tech once they make
| it a smaller form factor and cheaper.
| hinkley wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm still here trying to make Shure happen.
| Their next bluetooth model will be amazing, I just know
| it!
| acdha wrote:
| This sounds like you need to do some homework before
| derailing the thread. You're very confidently saying
| there's no use for things which millions of people keep
| buying, so consider the possibility that you might have
| missed something.
| vablings wrote:
| > Apple watch
|
| Bit like marmite, some people love it some people hate
| it, my wife did not like hers so she got a new gpu
| instead.
|
| > Airpods
|
| I have used airpods almost every day since they came out
| including the 1st gen, the pros and the usb-c pros. I
| will continue to buy them as they are first class
| experience on iOS
|
| > homepod
|
| didn't even know this existed lol
|
| > ipad
|
| This one is a bit difficult for me. When I was in school
| I did two years of work using just an IPad, some text
| books and my Apple Pencil, all my notes were taken on
| notability and synced with my google cloud AND my iCloud.
| Any homeworks I could request a PDF copy and fill out
| easily and submit via email. Now as a software engineer i
| really really really really wish that you could program
| on the IPad (Swift does NOT count) and it was more like a
| slightly smaller mac, it would crush the laptop market to
| shreds and nobody would buy a macbook air anymore if that
| was the case
| aczerepinski wrote:
| As a musician, I read my music from an iPad. A phone or a
| laptop monitor would be impossibly small for this.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| iPad: i have thousands of music scores on it running
| ForScore, which I can annotate with an Apple Pencil (the
| cheap $99 one), I flip pages using a foot controller I
| built with an ESP32, and I run multiple audio and music
| apps on it that are extremely useful.
|
| And it just ...works. It sits on my music stand, doesn't
| call attention to itself, and does the job I ask it too.
|
| Could I do all that with some Android thing? Probably
| most of it. Truly differentiated tech is rare in the
| consumer space. It's the experience that counts, and
| that's what the iPad has.
| yunwal wrote:
| Airpods are by far the best mass-market headphones in
| existence for apple device owners. The noise cancellation
| is unparalleled (which is huge if you use public transit
| or use them in the gym). The audio quality is also among
| the best you can get for a wireless headphone. This is
| true of both the Airpods Pros and the Max
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Airpods are a joke. Apple killed the headphone jack for
| no reason, then sold the "solution", and people ate it
| up. Great business strategy for them to screw their
| customers for cash, but an abjectly terrible product.
| They are worse than wired headphones in every way except
| "they are wireless", which isn't actually a benefit.
| jborean93 wrote:
| Maybe to you, I enjoy the fact that
|
| > I don't knock it out of my head by having the wire
| catching on something > Dealing with the cable and having
| to pack it back up when I'm done > It auto connects to
| both my phone and laptop 99% of the time > It easily swap
| between the 2 as I change the focus
|
| Now they aren't perfect, charging can be a bit fiddly
| over time but they certainly are nicer than the normal
| headphones. Maybe you just aren't the target audience but
| clearly they are popular enough for most people.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| > >homepod
|
| > I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does.
| Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its
| basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with
| one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air
| filter, absolutely no signature design language.
|
| Ahh, man! I'm a HomePod (mini) fan. I've got 4 of the
| little things scattered around my house. I use 2 as
| speakers for my TV, which sounds excellent compared to
| similarly-priced soundbars. Then, yea, it's got Siri for
| setting timers in the kitchen, can intercom to other
| rooms' HomePods, can recognize who's talking to do things
| like send / read text messages, set reminders, etc. For
| $99, they're actually incredible little devices.
| hinkley wrote:
| Hank Green mentioned in passing the other day how ungodly
| much money Apple is making off of airpods. I still have
| managed not to get one. But the watch and iPad definitely
| counts as something after the app store.
|
| Which they didn't really invent the app store either. What
| they did was break the stranglehold cellphone carriers had
| on cellphone software, and we should kiss their butts every
| single week for that. Most people didn't work in mobile
| prior to the app store and holy shit.
| guywithahat wrote:
| They completely revolutionized laptop processors, were the
| first to put meaningful health data in watches, and created
| the first good bluetooth earbuds, but I guess they don't do
| things anymore.
| ajross wrote:
| > They completely revolutionized laptop processors
|
| Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply
| can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and
| a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that
| games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while
| the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the
| windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
|
| Apple absolutely ran ahead of the industry technically, by
| a shocking amount. But in a commoditized field that isn't
| sensitive to quality metrics, that doesn't generate sales.
|
| There's a reason why the iPhone remains the dominant
| product but macs are stuck at like 9% market share, and
| it's not the technlogy base that is basically the same
| between them.
|
| Laptops are done, basically. It's like arguing about brands
| of kitchen ranges: sure, there are differences, but they
| all cook just fine.
| ebbi wrote:
| You're kidding, right??
| acdha wrote:
| > Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply
| can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air
| and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce
| that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!),
| and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares
| because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
|
| This wildly, comically untrue in my experience: all of
| the normal people I know loooooove how fast it is and
| charging a few times a week. It was only the people who
| self-identify as PC users who said otherwise, much like
| the Ford guys who used to say Toyotas were junk rather
| than admit their preferred brand was facing tough
| competition.
| ajross wrote:
| Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group
| is "PC users". You're measuring the 0.1%! (Which, fine,
| is probably more like 15% or whatever. Still not a
| representative sample.) You're likely also only sampling
| US consumers, or even Californians, and so missing an
| awful lot of the market.
|
| Again, real normal people can't tell the difference. They
| don't care. And that's why they aren't buying macs. The
| _clear ground truth_ is that Macintosh is a lagging brand
| with poor ROI and no market share growth over more than a
| decade. The _challenge_ is explaining why this is true
| despite winning all the technical comparisons and being
| based on the same hardware stack as the world-beating iOS
| devices.
|
| My answer is, again, "users don't care because the laptop
| market is commoditized so they'll pick the value
| product". You apparently think it's because "users are
| just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Historically that
| analysis has tended to kill more companies than it saves.
| acdha wrote:
| > Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other
| group is "PC users"
|
| No. Remember that Apple sells devices other than Macs:
| they were all non-IT people who liked their iPhones and
| figured they'd try a Mac for their next laptop and liked
| it. One thing to remember is that Windows is a lot less
| dominant when you're looking at what people buy
| themselves as opposed to what an enterprise IT department
| picked out. There are a ton of kids who start with
| ChromeOS or iPads, got a console for gaming, and don't
| feel any special attraction to Windows since everything
| they care about works on both.
|
| > You apparently think it's because "users are just too
| dumb to buy the good stuff".
|
| Huh? Beyond being insulting, this is simply wrong. My
| position is that people actually do consider fast,
| silent, and multi-day battery life as desirable. That's
| not the only factor in a buying decision, of course, but
| it seems really weird not to acknowledge it after the
| entire PC industry has spent years in a panic trying to
| catch up.
| dangus wrote:
| Name one ASUS laptop with zero cooling fans.
| ajross wrote:
| I believe the whole Vivobook Go line is fanless,
| actually.
|
| But again, the point isn't to get into a shouting match
| over whose proxied anatomy is largest. It's to try to
| explain why the market as a whole doesn't move the way
| you think it should. And it's clearly not about fans.
| Marsymars wrote:
| The ASUS BR1204?
|
| That's kind of a weird one because the PC market has
| notably regressed there over the past few years. Other
| than the Surface Pro 12 there've been no fanless PC
| laptops released since 2022-ish, when there used to be
| dozens.
|
| On a technical basis, fanless PC laptops released now
| would be better than the ones in 2022 just on the basis
| of 2022 lineup having a moribund lineup of CPUs
| (Snapdragon SQ1, Amber Lake, etc.) You could release a
| lineup now that would be broadly competitive with the M1
| at least, but it doesn't seem to be a market segment that
| PC OEMs are interested in.
| dangus wrote:
| Right, so, a K-12 education-oriented PC with an Intel
| N-series chip, about 1/3 as fast as what you get with an
| M4 (or worse).
|
| When I asked my snarky question I'm really talking about
| "fanless laptops that someone would actually want to use
| and get some serious use out of."
|
| The regression of the PC market is because the PC market
| didn't see the ARM train coming from a million miles away
| and just sat there and did nothing. They saw smartphones
| performing many times more efficiently than PCs and
| shrugged their arms at it.
|
| Meanwhile, Apple's laptop marketshare has purportedly
| doubled from 10% to 20% or perhaps even higher since the
| M1 lineup was released.
|
| I say this as someone who actually moved _away_ from
| Apple systems to a Linux laptop. Don 't get me wrong,
| modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively
| efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences,
| but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is
| really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a
| MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black
| Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time
| finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as
| nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life).
| guywithahat wrote:
| I didn't even think about that, fans are the bane of my
| existence
| 1stranger wrote:
| Best I can tell you're arguing that 9% market share by
| units sold is some kind of failure. Now go look at who
| has the highest market share by revenue. Hint: it's a
| fruit company.
| dangus wrote:
| This whole take might make sense if Apple didn't double
| their laptop market share from like 10% to 20% when the
| M1 series came out, which actually happened.
| kulahan wrote:
| Because 8 people worldwide own one, and it will stop
| receiving support shortly, if it hasn't already.
|
| OP doesn't _literally_ mean they haven 't made _anything_ ,
| he means that they've made nothing of real substance - which
| holds true when their biggest recent release is already
| completely forgotten by the public writ large.
| wat10000 wrote:
| "If it hasn't already"? They released a new model not even
| two months ago.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| it's dead in the water
| wat10000 wrote:
| What an odd reply.
| dangus wrote:
| You're being combative, but it's true. Yes, a new low-
| effort refresh came out recently. But the product is
| really going nowhere.
|
| Apple's next Vision product is almost certainly going to
| be more of a Meta glasses clone leaning more into Apple's
| fashion pedigree where they've had massive success with
| the Apple Watch.
|
| But even then, eyewear has the limitation that not
| everyone is interested in wearing eyewear at all.
| neom wrote:
| Tim Cook did comment on it to a degree:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/01/tim-cook-comments-
| on-ap...
| wat10000 wrote:
| We'll see where it goes, and it may well end up being
| nowhere, but it's not _currently_ "dead in the water"
| when the company is actively refreshing hardware and
| supporting it.
|
| I'm not being "combative," I'm correcting obvious
| exaggerations about the state of the product.
| shmoogy wrote:
| I dont think it's safe to say that a multi-billion dollar
| revenue product line, even if underperforming
| expectations is dead in the water.
| dmix wrote:
| Especially one bound to a future vision they have for
| computing. Companies are betting way more on a similar
| future vision with AI than Apple has with Vision.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Is it even underperforming expectations? At that price
| point, I can't imagine they expected to sell millions.
| platevoltage wrote:
| How do the sales numbers stack up to the first gen iPod?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| One could say it has a Newtonian gravity about it..
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Google's headline new AI feature for this year's Pixel phone,
| Magic Cue, shipped despite not working.
|
| > "The right info, right when you need it." That's how Google
| describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features
| on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial
| intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest
| helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps
| without you having to lift a finger.
|
| However, the keyword there is "supposed" to... even when going
| out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn't work or
| does so little that I'm amazed Google made as big a deal about
| the feature as it did.
|
| https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
|
| I'd rather see companies admit that a promised feature isn't
| ready for prime time than hype it up only to ship it broken.
| losvedir wrote:
| It actually popped up and was useful for me yesterday when I
| was calling a hotel I had booked. I was kind of surprised
| because I had forgotten about the feature, but it _is_ there
| and does occasionally offer helpful info.
| themafia wrote:
| > Luckily it allows investors to profit.
|
| That's not lucky. That's sad. They never ask the question
| "could we have earned _more_ profits with a better strategy?"
|
| The market is not rational.
| hinkley wrote:
| Split adjusted, I bought AAPL for $6 a share. They also pay
| dividends. This investor is feeling just fine about their
| stock price.
| themafia wrote:
| "Number goes up. I don't care how. I don't even like asking
| questions."
|
| The referenced lack of rationality on perfect display.
|
| Thank you.
| hinkley wrote:
| Your dismissive tone is really discouraging me from
| replying with a legitimate answer to your concerns.
|
| So you only get: people have been predicting the imminent
| demise of Apple every year for the last 20 and they are
| still the most valuable non-bubble stock in existence by
| a country mile.
|
| Keep whining, I'm going to retire early on your whining.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Lmao their "slow AI pace"? After they banged out uncooked AI
| features that generated fake headlines and messages for people?
| arisAlexis wrote:
| swetenning the pill of a lost train
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Shares of Apple Inc. were battered earlier this year as the
| iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an
| artificial intelligence strategy.
|
| Everyone's shares were battered earlier this year, and it had
| nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with tariffs.
| willis936 wrote:
| I think it was mostly Buffett's dumping. He's a smart guy and
| the world's best investor, but I think this was a mistake. The
| winning play is long on Apple, short on Microsoft.
| 827a wrote:
| I would bet significant money that, within two years, it will
| become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI
| story among any tech company.
|
| I can explain more in-depth reasoning, but the most critical
| point: Apple builds the only platform where developers can
| construct a single distributable that works on mobile and desktop
| with standardized, easy access to a local LLM, and a quarter
| million people buy into this platform every year. The degree to
| which no one else on the planet is even close to this cannot be
| understated.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will
| make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. All the
| fun stuff is running on servers at the moment.
|
| From there, AI integration is enough of a different paradigm
| that the existing apple ecosystem is not a meaningful
| advantage.
|
| Best case Apple is among the fast copies of whoever is actually
| innovative, but I don't see anything interesting coming from
| apple or apple devs anytime soon.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device
| will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke.
|
| Until the first Cambridge Analytica-sized privacy story hits
| a major cloud LLM provider, maybe.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment.
|
| With "Apple Intelligence" it looks like Apple is setting
| themselves up (again) to be the gatekeeper for these kind of
| services, "allow" their users to participate and earn a
| revenue share for this, all while collecting data on what
| types of tasks are actually in high-demand, ready to in-
| source something whenever it makes economic sense for them...
| 7952 wrote:
| Outside of fun stuff there is potential to just make chat
| another UI technology that is coupled with a specific API.
| Surely smaller models could do that, particularly as
| improvements happen. If that was good enough what would be
| the benefit of an app developer using an extra API?
| Particularly if Apple can offer an experience that can be
| familiar across apps.
| energy123 wrote:
| Also why would you want it sucking your battery or heating
| your room when a data center is only 20 milliseconds away and
| it's nothing more than a few kilobytes of text. It makes no
| sense for the large majority of users' preferences which
| downweight privacy and the ability to tinker.
| 827a wrote:
| People said the same things about mobile gaming [1] and
| mainframes. Technology keeps pushing forward. Neural
| coprocessors will get more efficient. Small LLMs will get
| smarter. New use-cases will emerge that don't need 160IQ
| super-intellects (most use-cases even today do not)
|
| The problem for other companies is not necessarily that data
| center-borne GPUs aren't technically better; its that the
| financials might _never_ make sense, much like how the
| financials behind Stadia never did, or at least need Google-
| levels of scale to bring in advertising and ultra-enterprise
| revenue.
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-
| evil-3/id1640630077
| gowld wrote:
| Grammar-check and clip-art work fine locally. There are
| local use-cases, but the powerful use-cases are very
| important.
| atonse wrote:
| As a sibling poster has said, I don't know how much on-device
| AI is going to matter.
|
| I have pretty strong views on privacy, and I've generally
| thrown them all out in light of using AIs, because the value I
| get out of them is just so huge.
|
| If Apple actually had executed on their strategy (of running
| models in privacy-friendly sandboxes) I feel they would've hit
| it out of the park. But as it stands, these are all bleeding
| edge technologies and you have to have your best and brightest
| on them. And even with seemingly infinite money, Apple doesn't
| seem to have delivered yet.
|
| I hope the "yet" is important here. But judging by the various
| executives leaving (especially rumors of Johnny Srouji
| leaving), that's a huge red flag that their problem is that
| they're bleeding talent, and not a lack of money.
| scrollop wrote:
| You don't have to abandon privacy when using an eye - use a
| service that accesses enterprise APIs, which have good
| privacy policies. I use the service from the guys who create
| the This day in AI podcast called smithery.ai -we are access
| to all of the sota models so we can flip between any model
| including lots of open source ones within one chat or within
| multiple chats and compared the same query, using various
| MCPs and lots of other features. If you're interested have a
| look at the discord to simtheory.ai (I have no connection to
| the service or to the creators)
| ebbi wrote:
| Johnny Srouji sent out an email to his team confirming he is
| staying.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I'm much more optimistic on device-side matmul. There's just
| _so much of it_ in aggregate and the marginal cost is _so
| low_ especially since you need to drive fancy graphics to the
| screen anyway.
|
| Somebody will figure out how to use it--complementing Cloud-
| side matmul, of course--and Apple will be one of the biggest
| suppliers.
| ph4rsikal wrote:
| On-device moves all compute cost (incl. electricity) to the
| consumer. I.e., as of 2025 that means much less battery life,
| a much warmer device, and much higher electricity costs.
| Unless the M-series can do substantially more with less this
| is a dead end.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Battery isn't relevant to plugged-in devices, and in the
| end, electricity costs roughly the same to generate and
| deliver to a data center as to a home. The real cost
| advantage that cloud has is better amortization of hardware
| since you can run powerful hardware at 100% 24/7 spread
| across multiple people. I wouldn't bet on that continuing
| indefinitely, consumer hardware tends to catch up to HPC-
| exclusive workloads eventually.
| fn-mote wrote:
| You could have an AppleTV with 48 GB VRAM backing the
| local requests, but... the trend is "real computers"
| disappearing from homes, replaced by tablets and phones.
| The advantage the cloud has is Real Compute Power for the
| few seconds you need to process the interaction. That's
| not coming home any time soon.
| gowld wrote:
| My Sun Ray is back in style! $30 on eBay!
| ph4rsikal wrote:
| One of the costs I see at the end of a month. The other I
| don't.
| WatchDog wrote:
| For the occasional local LLM query, running locally
| probably won't make much of a dent in the battery life,
| smaller models like mistral-7b can run at 258 tokens/s on
| an iPhone 17[0].
|
| The reason why local LLMs are unlikely to displace cloud
| LLMs is memory footprint, and search. The most capable
| models require hundreds of GB of memory, impractical for
| consumer devices.
|
| I run Qwen 3 2507 locally using llama-cpp, it's not a bad
| model, but I still use cloud models more, mainly due to
| them having good search RAG. There are local tools for
| this, but they don't work as well, this might continue to
| improve, but I don't think it's going to get better than
| the API integrations with google/bing that cloud models
| use.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4508
| ph4rsikal wrote:
| I used Mistral 7B a lot in 2023. It was a good model
| then. Now its not anywhere near where SOTA models are.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Apple runs all the heavy compute stuff overnight when your
| device is plugged in. The cost of the electricity is
| effectively nothing. And there is no impact on your battery
| life or device performance.
| veunes wrote:
| That's fair for brute force (running a model on the GPU),
| but that's exactly where NPUs come in - they are orders of
| magnitude more energy-efficient for matrix operations than
| GPUs. Apple has been putting NPUs in every chip for years
| for a reason. For short, bursty tasks (answer a question,
| generate an image), the battery impact will be minimal.
| It's not 24/7 crypto mining, it's impulse load
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the
| companies that previously attempted to monetize data center
| based voice assistants lost massive amounts of money.
|
| > Amazon Alexa is a "colossal failure," on pace to lose $10
| billion this year... "Alexa was getting a billion interactions
| a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands
| to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't
| monetizable.
|
| Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google
| Assistant business model last month. There's an inability to
| monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want
| to make, and all of Google's attempts to monetize assistants
| with display ads and company partnerships haven't worked. With
| the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser,
| Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the
| division.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...
|
| Moving to using much more resource intensive models is only
| going to jack up the datacenter costs.
| Animats wrote:
| > Those questions aren't monetizable. ... There's an
| inability to monetize the simple voice commands most
| consumers actually want to make.
|
| There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the
| wrong way:
|
| _I 'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from
| our sponsor..._
|
| Technically, this will eventually be solved by some
| hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems
| with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass
| a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at
| that, and the ones that are require substantial resources.
|
| What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask
| for help.
|
| Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1]
|
| [1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135
| hightrix wrote:
| This type of response has been given by Alexa from an echo
| device in my house. I asked, "play x on y", the response
| was something like "ok, but first check out this new...". I
| immediately unplugged that device and all other Alexa
| enabled devices in the house. We have not used it since.
|
| This is the monetization wall they have to figure out how
| to break through. The first inkling of advertising is
| immediate turn off and destroy, for me.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Even worse than ads, mine keeps trying to jam "News" down
| my throat. I keep disabling the news feeds on all my
| devices and they kept re-enabling against my wishes.
| Every now and then I'll say something to Alexa and she'll
| just start informing me about how awful everything is, or
| the echo show in the kitchen will stop displaying the
| weather in favor of some horrific news story.
|
| Me: "Alexa, is cheese safe for dogs?"
|
| Alexa: "Today, prominent politician Nosferatu was accused
| by the opposition of baby-cannibal sex trafficking.
| Nosferatu says that these charges are baseless as global
| warming will certainly kill everyone in painful ways by
| next Tuesday at exactly 3pm. In further news, Amazon has
| added more advertisements to this device for only a small
| additional charge..."
|
| If I wanted to feel like crap every time I go to the
| kitchen I'd put a scale in there. /s
| jmye wrote:
| > LLMs still aren't good at that
|
| I find this a really interesting observation. I feel like
| 3-4 trivial ways of doing it come to mind, which is sort of
| my signal that I'm way out of my depth (and that anything
| I've thought of is dumb or wrong for various reasons). Is
| there anything you'd recommend reading to better understand
| _why_ this is true?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| You are asking why someone don't want to ship a tool that
| obviously doesn't work? Surely it's always better/more
| profitable to ship a tool that at least seems to work
| fn-mote wrote:
| GP means they aren't good at knowing when they are wrong
| and should spend more compute on the problem.
|
| I would say the current generation of LLMs that "think
| harder" when you tell them their first response is wrong
| is a training grounds for knowing to think harder without
| being told, but I don't know the obstacles.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Are you suggesting that when you tell it "think harder"
| it does something like "pass a question to a bigger
| system"? I have doubts... It would be gated behind more
| expensive plan if so
| jmye wrote:
| No? I'm interested in why LLMs are bad at knowing when
| they don't know the answer, and why that's a particularly
| difficult problem to solve.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Because people make them and people make them for profit.
| incentives make the product what it is.
|
| an LLM just needs to return something that is good enough
| for average person confidently to make money. if an LLM
| said "I don't know" more often it would make less money.
| because for the user this is means the thing they pay for
| failed at its job.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| In part because model performance is benchmarked using
| tests that favor giving partly correct answers as opposed
| to refusing to answer. If you make a model that doesn't
| go for part marks, your model will do poorly on all the
| benchmarks and no one will be interested in it.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how
| Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM
| providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has
| gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers,
| telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a
| subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have
| bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was
| like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole
| economy is mortgaged on this?
| gedy wrote:
| This is probably why there's so much attention on LLM
| powered coding tools, as it's one of the few use cases that
| seem like people would actually pay for it. Ironically
| mostly developers, who are being marketed as being replaced
| by AI.
| dangus wrote:
| It's also a use case where you already have a user of
| above-average intelligence who is there correcting
| hallucinations and mistakes, and is mostly using the
| technology to speed up boilerplate.
|
| This just doesn't translate to other job types super
| well, at least, so far.
| delecti wrote:
| I'm extremely bearish on AI, but I'm not sure I agree with
| the framing "not even Amazon could..." All of the
| advertising around Alexa focused on the simple narrow use
| cases that people now use it for, and I'm inclined to
| assume that advertising is part of it. I think another part
| is probably that voice is really just not that fantastic of
| an interface for any other kind of interactions. I don't
| find it surprising that OpenAI's whole framing around
| ChatGPT, of it being a text-based chat window (as are the
| other LLMs), is where most of the use seems to happen. I
| like it best when Alexa acts as a terse butler ("turn on
| the lights" "done"), not a chatty engaging
| conversationalist.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything
| with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for
| ages and ages.
|
| I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that
| I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant
| to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it
| "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and
| turns it on.
|
| Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right
| set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no
| problem with the UI on my phone.
|
| I don't fear a future where computers can do every task
| better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged
| robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy
| to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I had an annoying few weeks where, after years of working
| properly, Google assistant started misinterpreting
| "navigate home" as "navigate to the nearest Home
| Depot(tm)".
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| not really limited to their AI products; Android just
| sometimes randomly decides that pressing play on BT
| receiver in my car should totally start playing the song
| directly from my phone instead of the BT it connected to
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| "Alexa Play SpongeBob on youtube" is met with a sabrina
| carpenter hit every time. no idea why
|
| Alternative it is hit with
|
| "Would you like Spongebob, Spongebob Sponge on the Run,
| the spongebob squarepants movie, or Bob Espanja
| Pantalones Cuadrados
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I really wonder if Google has _any_ reasonable QA people
| still working on this stuff.
| bdangubic wrote:
| in the "AI age" QA is automated :)
| Terr_ wrote:
| IMO the root cause has more to do with vendor lock-in,
| near monopolies, freemium/advertising models, etc.
|
| The desperate wish to believe that AI is a silver bullet
| is fuel on a fire that was already going.
| faidit wrote:
| QA is the spouses of engineers. Management is a revolving
| door of the "smartest people" who are thinking about what
| to eat or their next job. Voices of reason get lost in
| the noise.
| fragmede wrote:
| Siri decided "home" was some random place several miles
| from me that. Couldn't get it fixed other than by
| changing phones.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| At least you didn't have to move...
| thinkindie wrote:
| > I don't fear a future where computers can do every task
| better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged
| robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too
| lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
|
| THIS!
| shalmanese wrote:
| Rename the name of the light to "the".
| slg wrote:
| I feel like you're getting at something different here, but
| my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of
| wanting to monetize each interaction.
|
| Almost every company today wants their primary business model
| to be as a service provider selling you some monthly or
| yearly subscription when most consumers just want to buy
| something and have it work. That has always been Apple's
| model. Sure, they'll sell you services if need be, iCloud,
| AppleCare, or the various pieces of Apple One, but those all
| serve as complements to their devices. There's no big push to
| get Android users to sign up for Apple Music for example.
|
| Apple isn't in the market of collecting your data and selling
| it. They aren't in the market of pushing you to pick brand X
| toilet paper over brand Y. They are in the market of selling
| you devices and so they build AI systems to make the devices
| they sell more attractive products. It isn't that Apple has
| some ideologically or technically better approach, they just
| have a business model that happens to align more with the
| typical consumers' wants and needs.
| dangus wrote:
| I know you're saying that Apple's business model is selling
| devices but it's not like they aren't a services
| juggernaut.
|
| Where I think you are ultimately correct is that some
| companies seem to just assume that 100% of interactions can
| be monetized, and they really can't.
|
| You need to deliver value that matches the money paid or
| the ad viewed.
|
| I think Apple has generally been decent at recognizing the
| overall sustainability of certain business models. They've
| been around long enough to know that most loss-leading
| businesses never work out. If you can't make a profit from
| day one what's the point of being in business?
| slg wrote:
| >it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut.
|
| It depends. I guess you can argue this is true purely
| from scale. However, we should also keep in mind there
| are a lot of different things that Apple and tech
| companies in general put under "services". So even when
| you see a big number under "Service Revenue" on some
| financial report, we should recognize that most of that
| was from taking a cut of some other transaction happening
| on their devices. Relative to the rest of their business,
| they don't make much from monthly/yearly subscriptions or
| monetizing their customers' searches/interactions. They
| instead serve as a middleman on purchase of apps, music,
| movies, TV, and now even financial transactions made with
| Apple Card/Pay/Cash. And in that way, they are a service
| company in the same way that any brick and mortar store
| is a service company.
| dangus wrote:
| I'm confused at what you're trying to say here. Why
| exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For
| some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically
| similar to a brick and mortar store?
|
| Apple's services revenue is larger than Macs and iPads
| combined, with a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40%
| for products (hardware).
|
| Yeah, they serve as a middleman...an incredibly dominant
| middleman in a duopoly. 80% of teenagers in the US say
| they have an iPhone. Guess what, all that 15-30% app
| store revenue is going to Apple. That's pretty much the
| definition of a service juggernaut.
|
| I also don't agree with you about the lack of selling
| Apple services to non-Apple users. TV+ is a top-tier
| streaming service with huge subscriber numbers, and their
| app is on every crappy off-brand smart TV and streaming
| stick out there. Yes, there really are Android users who
| subscribe to Apple Music - 100 million+ downloads on the
| Google Play store, #4 top grossing app in the music
| category.
| slg wrote:
| >Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again?
| For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically
| similar to a brick and mortar store?
|
| You seem to operating under the notion that anything that
| isn't a device sold is a service. I think that definition
| is too broad to have any real value and that we should
| look at the actual business model for a product to
| determine its categorization. I'm not sure what else to
| say if you're just going to dismiss that as "pedantic".
|
| But either way, it should be obvious that "services"
| (however they are defined) are a smaller part of Apple's
| business than they are for Microsoft, Google, Meta,
| Twitter, Oracle, Open AI, Anthropic, and most other
| players in both the general tech and AI spaces.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| It's really interesting to consider an area where they
| are being successful with their AI, the notification
| summaries work pretty well! It's an easy sell to the
| consumer bombarded with information/notifications all
| over the place that on-device processing can filter this
| and cut out clutter. Basically, don't be annoying. I
| think a lot of people don't really know how well things
| like their on-device image search works (it'll OCR an
| upside-down receipt sitting on a table successfully), I
| never see them market that strength ever judging by the
| number of people with iphones that are surprised when I
| show them this on their own phones.
|
| HOWEVER, you would never know this though given the Apple
| Store experience! As I was dealing with the board swap in
| my phone last month, they would have these very
| loud/annoying 'presentations' every like half hour or so
| going over all the other apple intelligence features.
| Nobody watched, nobody in the store wanted to see this.
| In fact when you consider the history of how the stores
| have operated for years, the idea was to let customers
| play around with the device and figure shit out on their
| own. Store employee asks if they need anything explained
| but otherwise it's a 'discovery' thing, not this dictated
| dystopia.
|
| The majority of people I heard around me in the store
| were bringing existing iphones in to get support with
| their devices because they either broke them or had
| issues logging into accounts (lost/compromised passwords
| or issues with passkeys). They do not want to be told
| every constantly about the same slop every other company
| is trying to feed them.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut
|
| Apple doesn't have a paid tier for Apple Intelligence.
|
| It's a feature and a free API developers can utilize, not
| a service.
| dangus wrote:
| Right, but Apple sells a bunch of _way more profitable_
| services, to the tune of being more revenue than Macs and
| iPads combined.
|
| Apple's services have a 75% profit margin, compared to
| under 40% for products (hardware).
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I feel like you're getting at something different here,
| but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach
| of wanting to monetize each interaction.
|
| Personally, Google lost me as a search customer (after 25
| years) when they opted me into AI search features without
| my permission.
|
| Not only am I not interested in free tier AI services, but
| forcing them on me is a good way to lose me as a customer.
|
| The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has an
| easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for
| it.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has
| an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care
| for it.
|
| Not even only that, but the setup wizard literally asks
| if you'd like it or not. You don't even have to
| specifically opt-out of it, because it's opt-in.
| tyre wrote:
| You can ad block the AI summary and have the same
| experience
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yes, there are always ways to deal with companies who
| make their experience shitty. The point is that _you
| shouldn 't have to_, and that people will leave for an
| alternative that doesn't treat them like that.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Google is currently going full on Windows 10, for
| 'selected customers', with Gemini in Android. '(full
| screen popup) Do you want to try out Gemini? [Now]
| [Later]' 2 hours later... Do you want to...
|
| This sort of nagging and spam should be illegal.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| I feel like this is 5 or so years out of date. The fact
| that they actually have an Apple Music app for Android is a
| pretty big push for them. Services is like 25% of their
| revenue these days, larger than anything except the iPhone.
| slg wrote:
| As I said elsewhere, it really depends on the definition
| of "service". Subscriptions make up a relatively small
| minority of that service revenue. For example, 30 seconds
| of searching suggests that Apple Music's revenue in 2024
| was approximately $10b compared to the company as a whole
| being around $400b. That's not nothing, but it doesn't
| shape the company in a way that it's competitors are
| shaped by their service businesses.
|
| The biggest bucket in that "service" category is just
| Apple's 30% cut of stuff sold on their platform (which it
| also must be noted, both complements and is reliant on
| their device sales). That wouldn't really be considered a
| "service" from either the customer perspective or in the
| sense of traditional businesses. Operating a storefront
| digitally isn't a fundamentally different model than
| operating a brick and mortar store and no one would call
| Best Buy a "service business".
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Call me a naive fanboy, but I believe that Apple is still
| one of the very few companies that has an ideologically
| better approach that results in technically better
| products.
|
| Where everyone else sells you stuff to make money, they
| make money to create great stuff.
| yunwal wrote:
| > There's an inability to monetize the simple voice commands
| most consumers actually want to make
|
| In my experience none of these voice assistance are accurate
| enough to trust with my money
| parliament32 wrote:
| > With the product sucking up server time
|
| This is the part that hasn't made much sense to me. Maybe
| just.. have a better product?
|
| As you quoted above, "most of those conversations were
| trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Why
| does any of this need to consume provider resources? Could a
| weather or music command not just be.. a direct API call from
| the device to a weather service / Spotify / whatever? Why
| does everything need to be shipped to Google/Amazon HQ?
| danaris wrote:
| From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to _try_ doing
| any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the
| speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven
| 't _heard_ of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing
| for Alexa or Assistant.)
|
| So there's no way for them to do _anything_ without sending
| it off to the datacenter.
| delecti wrote:
| Alexa actually had the option to process all requests
| locally (on at least some hardware) for the first ~10
| years, from launch until earlier this year. The stated
| reason for removing the feature was generative AI.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I had a group of students make a service like this in 2021,
| completely local, could work offline, did pretty much
| everything Alexa can do, _and_ they made it connect to
| their student accounts so they could ask it information
| about their class schedules. If they can do it, Amazon
| certainly can. That they don 't says they think they can
| extract more value from monitoring each and every request
| than they could from selling a better product.
| ghaff wrote:
| Voice assistants that were at the level of a fairly mediocre
| internet-connected human assistant might be vaguely useful.
| But they're not. So even if many of us have one or two in our
| houses or sometimes lean on them for navigation in our cars
| we mostly don't use them much.
|
| Amazon at one point was going to have a big facility in
| Boston as I recall focused on Alexa. It's just an
| uninteresting product that, if it were to go away tomorrow I
| wouldn't much notice. And I certainly wouldn't pay an
| incremental subscription for.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| nuance seems to have done ok with datacenter based voice
| assistants.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Acquisit.
| ..
| jordanb wrote:
| The assistant thing really shows the lie behind most of the
| "big data" economy.
|
| 1) They thought an assistant would be able to operate as an
| "agent" (heh) that would make purchasing decisions to benefit
| the company. You'd say "Alexa, buy toilet paper" and it would
| buy it from Amazon. Except it turns out people don't want
| their computer buying things for them.
|
| 2) They thought that an assistant listening to everything
| would make for better targeted ads. But this doesn't seem to
| be the case, or the increased targeting doesn't result in
| enough value to justify the expense. A customer with the
| agent doesn't seem to be particularly more valuable than one
| without.
|
| I think that this AI stuff and LLMs in particular is an
| excuse, to some extent, to justify the massive investment
| already made in big data architecture. At least they can say
| we needed all this data to train an LLM! I've noticed a
| similar pivot towards military/policing: if this data isn't
| sufficiently valuable for advertising maybe it's valuable to
| the police state.
| acdha wrote:
| > Except it turns out people don't want their computer
| buying things for them.
|
| I think this also hits an interesting problem with
| confidence: if you could trust the service to buy what
| you'd buy and get a good price you'd probably use it more
| but it only saves a couple of seconds in the easy case
| (e.g. Amazon reorders are already easy) and for anything
| less clear cut people rightly worry about getting a mistake
| or rip-off. That puts the bar really high because a voice
| interface sucks for more complex product comparisons and
| they have a very short window to give a high-quality
| response before most people give up and use their
| phone/computer instead. That also constrains the most
| obvious revenue sources because any kind of pay for
| placement is going to inspire strong negative reactions.
| overfeed wrote:
| Some features are not meant to be revenue sources. I'd lump
| assistive technology and AI assistants into the category of
| things that elevate the usefulness of one's ecosystem, even
| when not directly monetizable.
|
| Edit: IMO Apple is under-investing in Siri for that role.
| blackoil wrote:
| The difference is previous version of alexa wasn't good
| enough to pay for it. Now it is good enough that millions of
| users are paying $10-100 for these services.
| veunes wrote:
| That is exactly why Apple's on-device strategy is the only
| economically viable one. If every Siri request cost $0.01 for
| cloud inference, Apple would go bankrupt in a month. But if
| inference happens on the Neural Engine on the user's phone,
| the cost to Apple is zero (well, aside from R&D). This solves
| the problem of unmonetizable requests like "set a timer,"
| which killed Alexa's economics
| bayindirh wrote:
| On top of it, on-device models increase response times and
| can be really private if the developer decides.
| lopis wrote:
| The greed to lock customers in early on for cheap or free,
| in hopes to force them on a subscription, absolutely ruined
| the previous era os assistants. It could have been great
| with offline inference and foster competition. Instead we
| got mediocre assistants, thst got worse each year.
| notatoad wrote:
| i'd have a lot more respect for apple's "cautious" approach to
| AI if they didn't keep promising and then failing to deliver
| siri upgrades (while still calling out to cloud backends,
| despite all the talk about local LLM), or if they hadn't
| shipped the absolute trash that is notification summaries.
|
| i think at this point it's pretty clear that their AI products
| aren't bad because it's some clever strategy, it's bad because
| they're bad at it. I agree that their platform puts them in a
| good place to provide a local LLM experience to developers, but
| i remain skeptical that they will be able to execute on it.
| gowld wrote:
| They can buy a local LLM from an expert provider.
| rubiquity wrote:
| Local AI sounds nice but most of Apple's PCs and other devices
| don't come with enough RAM for a decent price needed for good
| model performance and macOS itself is incredibly bloated.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Depends what you are actually doing. It's not enough to run a
| chatbot that can answer complex questions. But it's more than
| enough to index your data for easy searching, to prioritise
| notifications and hide spam ones, to create home automations
| from natural language, etc.
|
| Apple has the ability and hardware to deeply integrate this
| stuff behind the scenes without buying in to the hype of a
| shiny glowing button that promises to do literally
| everything.
| gowld wrote:
| That might work well for Apple to be the consumer
| electronic manufacturer that people use to connect to
| OpenAI/Anthropic/Google for their powerful creative work.
| veunes wrote:
| That's true for current LLMs, but Apple is playing the long
| game. First, they are masters of quantization optimization
| (their 3-4 bit models perform surprisingly well). Second,
| Unified Memory is a cheat code. Even 8GB on M1/M2 allows for
| things impossible on a discrete GPU with 8GB VRAM due to data
| transfer overhead. And for serious tasks, there's the Mac
| Studio with 192GB RAM, which is actually the cheapest way to
| run Llama-400B locally
| cma wrote:
| I don't know, I feel like Apple shot themselves in the foot
| selling 8GB consumer laptops up until around 2024 while packing
| them with advanced AI inference, and usually had lower RAM on
| their mobile and ipads.
|
| On the other hand all devs having to optimize for lower RAM
| will help with freeing it up for AI on newer devices with more.
| wiesbadener wrote:
| I'd loved to see a strong on-device multi-modal Siri +
| flexibility with shortcuts. Besides the "best consumer AI
| story" they could additionally create a strong offering to SMBs
| with FileMaker + strong foundation models support baked in.
| Actually rooting for both!
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't think so.
|
| Consumers don't care about whether an LLM is local, and one
| that runs on your phone is always going to be vastly worse than
| ChatGPT.
|
| I see zero indication that Apple is going to replace people
| going to chatgpt.com or using its app.
|
| All I see Apple doing is eventually building a better new
| generation of Siri, not much different from Google/Alexa.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| An LLM on your phone can know everything else that is on your
| phone. Even Signal chat plaintexts are visible on the phone
| itself.
|
| People definitely will care that such private data stays
| safely on the phone. But it's kind of a moot point since
| there is no way to share that kind of data with ChatGPT
| anyway.
|
| I think Apple is not trying to compete with the big central
| "answer machine" LLMs like Google or ChatGPT. Apple is aiming
| at something more personal. Their AI goal may not be to know
| everything, but rather to know _you_ better than any other
| piece of tech in the world.
|
| And monetization is easy: just keep selling devices that are
| more capable than the last one.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Gemini can know everything in my Google account, which is
| basically synonymous with everything that's on my phone,
| except for text messages. And I use an iPhone. And then
| Gemini will work just as well on the web when I use my
| laptop.
|
| So I don't see what unique advantage this gives Apple.
| These days people's data lives mostly in the cloud. What's
| on their phone is just a local cache.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| How much, at what odds, who will decide if they do, and who
| will hold the money?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Make a poly market bet, you will lose. Siri has been horrible
| for a decade, no way they fix that in two years.
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| Nah it's going to be Google by most measures
| 827a wrote:
| I said "Consumer AI". Even Apple is likely beating Google in
| consumer AI DAUs, today. Google has the Pixel and
| gemini.google.com, and that's it; practically zero strategy.
| createaccount99 wrote:
| > I would bet significant money that,
|
| You can do that right now, on the stock market. Sometimes it's
| good to put your money where your mouth is, that forces you to
| correct your world view.
| aurareturn wrote:
| it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best
| consumer AI story among any tech company.
|
| I love my Macbooks and think they can be great for local LLMs
| in the future. But the vast majority do not care and they do
| not want to setup complicated local LLMs. They want something
| that just works on the computer, tablets, and phones - ideally
| all synced together.
|
| Local LLMs will never be better than cloud LLMs. They can close
| the gap if/when cloud LLM progress stalls.
|
| Let's not conflate Apple's failure in cutting edge transformer
| models with good strategy.
| lumost wrote:
| Companies with strong distribution have an option to be the
| "last" player in a market and simply force their way in. If Apply
| makes a "default" LLM which is as good or better than all premium
| LLM options... then you would obviously choose to use that over
| paying for a ChatGPT subscription. Apple could probably upcharge
| the phone by $200 for this privilege. Alternatively, they may do
| what they did with search and just get paid _not to_ add an LLM
| chat functionality.
| rconti wrote:
| Being behind in AI is not the same thing as not spending a lot on
| AI.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-
| worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its
| shares tumbled 18% through the end of June. That has reversed
| since then, with the stock soaring 35%, while AI darlings like
| Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. slid into the red and
| even Nvidia Corp. underperformed. The S&P 500 Index rose 10% in
| that time, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index gained 13%.
|
| Why do papers do this. I can achieve any numbers by cherry
| picking the date for the random brownian motion.
| mvkel wrote:
| It's telling that one of the leaders in ai, Google, also can't
| seem to ship an assistant that is better than Siri. Maybe it's
| not the ai that's the problem.
| darknavi wrote:
| And the bar is pretty low isn't it?
|
| Now days with "Apple Intelligence" enabled, half of a siri
| response is "I found this with ChatGPT, verify important
| information".
|
| As far as user experience goes, it reminds me of those stupid
| warnings every time you start a car that basically says "drive
| safe!"
| mvkel wrote:
| It's infuriating. What's worse, we're part of the problem,
| with Apple shipping record units each quarter.
| elfbargpt wrote:
| I think one of Apple's strengths since Tim Cook took over is
| their ability to avoid "gimmicks". As much criticism as people
| have of apple for not innovating on the iPhone, I appreciate
| their ability to not screw products up.
|
| I'm not saying AI is a gimmick, but the caution they show is a
| good quality I think
| culi wrote:
| Their latest OS design shows they are _quite_ capable of
| falling for gimmicks
| piskov wrote:
| The guy responsible is fortunately out of Apple
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That would be fine if he was a lone wolf and nobody
| supported his vision, or if his whole org moved out with
| him.
| outside1234 wrote:
| I have no idea what's going on but Apple is an extremely
| top down place. Its entirely possible that Apple pivots
| on a dime after the departure of the baffoon.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Several of his "lieutenants" are following, actually.
|
| His successor Stephen Lemay has exactly the kind of
| pedigree a person who cares about UI could ask for.
| There's a lot to be optimistic about.
| https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
| some-guy wrote:
| I work in UI in enterprise, where slight color shade
| differences between releases can cause uproar. I cannot
| imagine the thought process behind liquid glass in any sense.
|
| OSX's Aqua was also an insanely bold UI with a lot of
| gimmicks, but was still usable for the most part. I'm so very
| curious about the internal discussions around this.
| copperx wrote:
| It was a different time, too. I remember being starstruck
| after seeing the UI. Windows looked overwhelmingly grey in
| comparison.
| g-mork wrote:
| I was going to link you the Apple Vision Pro as a counterpoint,
| but after clicking the link and being reminded of what that
| product actually looks like, I really don't know what to say
| any more. I'm literally dumbfounded anyone could make your
| comment at all
| willis936 wrote:
| I ran into an AVP recently and it actually is a great piece
| of hardware. It only has two issues: price and software. The
| former is forgivable because it really is an amazing piece of
| hardware and the price is justified. The latter is not and is
| the original sin that has killed it.
|
| There's an unfulfilled promise of spatial computing. I wish I
| could load up my preferred CAD program and have wide and deep
| menus quickly traversable with hand gestures. Barring that
| the least it could do is support games. Maybe if some
| combination of miracle shims (fex emu, asahi, w/e) were able
| to get onto the platform it might be savable. The input
| drivers alone would be a herculean task.
| culi wrote:
| To their credit, they specifically decided not to make a big
| deal out of AR like Meta did and keep production small and
| expensive. They realized the tech wasn't ready for a mass
| adoption campaign. I'd say Apple, overall, has been pretty
| cautious with AR. I wouldn't be surprised if they even have
| the guts to cancel that project entirely like they did with
| self-driving cars
| bigyabai wrote:
| That's not credit at all. If your strongest defense of AVP
| is "at least they're not Meta" then you've stopped making
| grounded observations and gone straight to ad-hominem.
|
| I'd also go as far as to say that Apple _knew_ they could
| have made the Vision Pro better. It should be running a
| real computer operating system like the headset Valve is
| making, and Apple knows that. The arbitrary insistence on
| iPad-tier software in a _$3,500 headset_ guaranteed it was
| unlovable and dead-on-arrival.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| They're being sued over an Apple Intelligence gimmick in an ad
| campaign that turned out to be vaporware at this very moment!
|
| https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/apple-suit-false-advertisin...
| mrtksn wrote:
| Apple could have avoid that by released it half arsed like
| all the AI stuff, claim that it does all those things and
| write somewhere "AI may make mistakes".
| platevoltage wrote:
| AI isn't a gimmick, but a huge portion of the way it's
| presented to consumers is, especially given the fact that it
| never really was meant for consumers. As an Apple user, I'm
| thrilled at how "behind" they are.
|
| But also, their tendency to "not fall from gimmicks" sometimes
| makes it so we didn't get a 2nd mouse button for decades.
| Ultimately, the way they implemented this was super cool, but
| still.
| ssharp wrote:
| The balancing act of figuring out what you can reasonably
| rely on from an LLM and what you need to be skeptical or
| dismissive of is not the type of experience an iPhone user
| should be expected to navigate.
| blcknight wrote:
| Gemini, grok, etc all have 100x better experiences with voice.
| Apple is bad at this.
|
| I'm an hour from Cambridge, MA. Ask the weather? I always get
| Cambridge, UK. Siri is terrible.
|
| They can't even make a functional keyboard anymore. The text
| prediction and autocorrect is worse now than it was in 2010!
|
| These are all solved problems in 2025.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Why would it not assume you meant the best Cambridge?
| dmix wrote:
| They haven't really updated Siri though? That's still in the
| pipeline. So not a very fair comparison. The article states
| that they are behind and I think everyone knows that
| blcknight wrote:
| They have though, they added the "ask ChatGPT" thing which
| is friggin useless
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Coincidentally, in macOS and iOS design and functionality -
| especially since Tahoe and 26 - it rather feels like the slop
| has taken over.
|
| quality sacrificed for speed, resulting in mediocre, buggy
| software.
|
| The classic AI business manager formula.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| I have been needing to hard restart my fully juiced up mac
| mini more often than ever.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| The AI "features" Apple advertise are largely gimmicky. The
| Apple Vision Pro is a gimmicky product. The MacBook touchbar
| was gimmicky.
|
| Cook might be _less_ susceptible to gimmickery than some of his
| peers. But he 's definitely got an imperfect batting average,
| here.
| billti wrote:
| It was disappointing to see one of the most advertised Apple
| "AI" features was "Genmoji", which falls squarely in the
| "gimmick" category for me.
| adrr wrote:
| If its a gimmick to have a functioning Siri, please give me
| gimmicks. Siri is a generation behind Alexa and Hey Google.
| Siri is next to worthless.
| w-ll wrote:
| gimmicks like a sock for your phone?
| aurareturn wrote:
| ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude are gimmicks?
|
| Having to license Gemini from Google and Qwen from Alibaba for
| Siri isn't Apple falling severely behind?
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I'm bullish on Apple in the long term for AI. Don't get me wrong,
| they will always suck at it. But it seems obvious to me that
| we're sailing up to an enshittification cliff in the very near
| future. Every provider is going to start trying to prove they are
| making money from consumers and that means one thing: ads, ads
| ads. Or worse, invisible influence you can't even tell is there.
| There is going to be a trust crisis and that's going to send
| people flocking to on-device / local / trustworthy AI that will
| land right in Apple's lap.
| 6510 wrote:
| Meanwhile in China....
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200819
| Razengan wrote:
| I just wish Siri fucking worked for just fucking ONCE when I
| actually fucking need it.
|
| Has it _ever,_ for anyone?
| slater wrote:
| Yes.
| Razengan wrote:
| 3 AM. Watching a video on the Mac.
|
| I'm on bed, the Mac's on the desk.
|
| iPhone and iPad charging next to the Mac.
|
| "Hey Siri, put the Mac to sleep"
|
| iPhone blares up with a cacophony loud enough to wake the
| graveyard several blocks over, even though it's set to
| silent:
|
| "IT LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVEN"T SET UP ANY SMART HOME ACCESSORIES
| BLAHABHLABHALDHFLDSFHELWRHWELRHWELHROUWEHROWEHRQWLR$P#@U4"
|
| Fuck you Tim Cook.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| Indeed, the only winning move is not to play.
| sgroppino wrote:
| Nice quote from Joshua, the epic AI in War Games, followed by
| "How about a nice game of chess?"
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Letting the market sort itself out then maybe buy whoever's left
| and aligns the most with their products is pretty obvious
| strategy.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone. Apple is famous
| for watching peanut butter and chocolate makers and swooping in
| with Reece's Peanut Butter cups while everyone scratches their
| head because they've had better chocolate and better peanut
| butter so what's the deal?
|
| When and if Apple pulls the plug on AI, we can declare it dead
| for this cycle. See you all again in 2040.
| ebbi wrote:
| I disagree with that analogy. Apple as the 'Reece's Peanut
| Butter Cups' in this analogy just screams of some bias.
| firecall wrote:
| For anyone thats been around for more than one hype cycle, this
| is not a surprise.
|
| Apple clearly takes a 'Measure Twice, Cut Once' approach.
|
| It seems to me that tech and business analysts mostly supply
| uninformed nonsense opinions around whatever the popular rhetoric
| of the day is to generate more clicks :-/
|
| How many times do we have to listen to tech and business analysts
| talking about lacklustre iPhone releases and how Apple hasn't
| done anything interesting since the original iPhone? But yet the
| iPhone 17 is flying off the shelves in China.
| SilentM68 wrote:
| So, basically Apple will be victorious in the AI Wars by sheer
| inaction;)
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| And I think we're all weary of the whining about Apple being
| "behind on AI."
|
| Consumers of Apple's core businesses do not stand to gain much,
| if anything, from so-called "AI." The failure of pundits and
| "analysts" to recognize and call that out just testifies to their
| laziness. They can never say exactly WHY or HOW this "behindness"
| is hindering Apple or its user base.
|
| It's sad that Apple has capitulated to them at all by even
| talking about "AI."
| drdaeman wrote:
| The part about not gaining much is questionable.
|
| "AI" is a semi-meaningless misnomer, of course, but e.g. a
| natural language interface is something Apple had tried since
| forever (Siri) and always failed to get functional and useful.
| So this part of "not gaining much" is probably false.
|
| Paired with every vendor's love to tweak things at random -
| including Apple, a natural language (if done right) _could_ be
| a meaningful solution to UI consistency ("Hey Siri, I dunno
| where the goddamn toggle is located this time but stop making
| music auto-play every other time phone connects to CarPlay" -
| real use case with real value). Yet, as usual, Siri lacks in
| intelligence and capabilities.
|
| I'm pretty sure it's not some genius wisdom of Tim, or whoever.
| Apple simply didn't do any user-facing useful shit (they did
| some interesting stuff for developers, but that's a different
| story), plastered some generative emojis to tick the "AI"
| checkbox, and now people praise them for that.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| They could be selling shovels and be making a killing
| flakiness wrote:
| Apple didn't over-hire like other big tech and it didn't have to
| do the huge layoffs unlike others. This has similar smell - It
| won't win big in any ways, but the damage of bubble burst can be
| much less significant to them than to the peers.
| bibimsz wrote:
| neither indus nor levantine, the last holdouts
| maxaw wrote:
| My beloved boomer dad's windows laptop died the other week. After
| being on the fence about buying him a macbook (which I have and
| love) because I know he will struggle to switch user interfaces,
| I ended up pulling the trigger after seeing yet another news
| article about more aggressive copilot integration. I'm not
| letting him anywhere near an agent which can control his laptop,
| not from Microsoft which has huge incentive to recover their ai
| bet in whatever way possible
| veunes wrote:
| Sooner or later, everyone will realize Apple isn't building
| another ChatGPT - they don't need to. They're working on the
| world's largest distributed inference network. With hundreds of
| millions of Apple Silicon devices, they are the only ones who can
| afford to run AI features at zero marginal cost to themselves -
| using the user's electricity and hardware. While Google and
| Microsoft burn billions on data centers, Apple is simply
| offloading the compute to our pockets. In the long run, when AI
| becomes a commodity, the winner will be whoever has the lowest
| transaction cost - and in that game, Apple simply has no
| competition
| aurareturn wrote:
| Nah. Local LLMs won't be big until maybe 10-20 years later.
| Phone devices will never run a model better than what ChatGPT
| runs in the cloud. People want to use the best models.
|
| By the time local LLMs are good enough, OpenAI will already
| have an iPhone competitor.
| mock-possum wrote:
| All I really want from Apple is to be able to talk to Siri as
| effectively as I can with ChatGPT via advanced voice chat.
|
| Is that so much to ask?
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