I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next.
Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big seller. It's why they're investing in their own silicon. This strategy tends to yield unexpected wins, like the Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud, or the Mac Studio becoming arguably the best way to run local AI models (a nascent space that is on the cusp of becoming genuinely relevant), or the MacBook Pro becoming by far the best laptop in the world for productivity in the AI age (and it's not even close).
Your conclusion is that they're going to be left behind, but the evidence is that they're already well ahead in the areas that are core to their business. They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. Nobody else can do what they can in the fusion of hardware, software, and materials as long as they stay focused.
Where they genuinely slipped up was their marketing -- an unusual mistake for Apple. And that does indeed lie with the CEO.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
This was true maybe a decade ago, but not so now (under the watch of Tim Cook).
You listed Mac hardware becoming popular in the age of AI as examples of "unexpected wins". Maybe that's true (I don't know if it is) - but Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue. Apple has become an iPhone company (50% of revenue) that sells services (26% of revenue).
And AI can eat away at both. If Siri sucks so hard that people switch away, that would also reduce Services revenue from lost App Store revenue cuts. If Google bundles Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos storage, people might cancel their iCloud subscriptions.
I think the parent comment was making the point that Tim Cook's Apple has missed the boat and it doesn't show signs that it's going to catch the next wave.
I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscription. But in 2030, if my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting, have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting, and Siri can still only set a timer for 5 minutes, then I might actually switch.
If the Mac were its own standalone business, it would rank at no. 134 on the Fortune 500 with $33.7 billion in revenue. Also, that's a 12% increase in revenue compared to 2024.
If anything, AI has brought more attention to the Mac. Just about every major AI app is released for the Mac first. I've seen complaints about it on HN.
The latest is Claude Cowork. It was released for macOS on January 12th; it didn't ship for Windows until February 10th; it's still not available for Windows running on ARM.
It's been nearly a year since Dia launched [1], the first AI browser, and it's still not available for Windows.
We just had the frenzy over OpenClaw [2] with AI enthusiasts lining up at Apple Stores to buy a Mac mini just to run it!
The most popular AI channels on YouTube are almost exclusively using Macs. Apple seems to have enough runway until they get their act together.
Outside US, most people that buy Macs do so because they are developers targeting iDevices, or can afford Apple and want the ecosystem that comes with their iDevice.
An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
Where you live, maybe. It really depends on the country even outside the US. A lot of it is, to this day, because of things like Final Cut and Logic. Either because they dabble in it as a hobby or professionally.
A lot of the recent growth is developers in general, there's really been a huge shift there. 2010 developers using Macs vs 2026 developers using Macs, if you look at personal devices or workplaces that give them a choice. Biggest driver being Apple Silicon.
I live in one of those 70% market share Windows world region, where Apple gear is taken from a devices pool when required for project delivery, or bundled with cable TV subscriptions with credit payment scattered across several years.
> An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
For businesses and pro users, it isn't the Apple ecosystem that's the main driver.
Since Apple silicon a lot of laptops are just so far behind in battery life, speed and usability that you wouldn't get it. Often Apple ecosystem was a net negative since most things worked better on Windows but that has shifted.
Until the Apple tax goes away, most folks will put up with Windows flaws, unless Apple changes their pricing policy for countries that cannot afford G8 level salaries.
> No, as in the entire PC market for the past two decades
Is this why AI is winning? People aren't doing better. You pick a random stat and somehow make it support what you're arguing.
The link says DESKTOP. I said LAPTOP. Laptop after M1. Why are we going back 2 decades? They have >15% registered as unknown. Sure, "accurate". Cough cough. It doesn't differentiate new or old and IF (the original discussion) that Apple is gaining market share and NEW sales.
> and they're not gaining very quickly
This is just as bad as speculative stock trading e.g. with software stocks. They're losing to AI. Oh no. Dump. Oh they're actually not too bad. Buy it back. Apple doesn't have AI. Sell. Apple doesn't have AI. Buy. Are you ok?
Laptops are desktops in 2026, and without needing Apple style dongles to make out of missing ports, yet another Apple "improvement" in expensive hardware.
Tried an android phone given by my company. Gemini is at your fingertips, with a single button press.
That’s INCREDIBLE!
[everything Siri never delivered].
Put that into a headphone or headphone-enabled glasses. Plus a ring.
And the need for an advanced UI-based phone fades away for many usages.
I have a Pixel besides my iPhone (for reasons). When I got a Pixel 9 about a year ago, my feeling was the same (Gemini as at your fingertips. INCREDIBLE!). A few months later after the novelty wore off, I just found the push of AI everywhere in Pixel OS and Google apps just annoying. I now use GrapheneOS on my Pixel. One of the many reasons is that it does not try to push AI anywhere.
Now I just have a single LLM (Le Chat) isolated in its own little app sandbox, never getting in my face unless I choose to open it myself.
I’m not sure how to say it without sounding like an Apple fanboy, but Tim Cook has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Every single year people have been whining how “he’s not visionary and etc.”, but at some point you have to give him some credit. Apple of 2026 has completely different landscape versus apple of 2010/earlier. Scaling from millions to billions of sales is incredibly hard, and he’s been able to accomplish it.
Would you feel the same if in 2030, all the actions you describe, work most of the time but still produce questionable output requiring time to verify and fact check due to the probabilistic nature of the LLM engine? This is unsolvable with LLMs. I don't want an embedded or agentic AI but do give me the option to pick a model of my choice and accept the risks when I want to. I don't want tainted generated summaries, replies or code in certain critical areas.
Also, since AI will mean most are just let go, why would they need meeting minutes? AI would be so crucial as to be the make or break phone/laptop feature, but people would still have meetings?
At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.
You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone:
I'm road tripping to XYZ tomorrow, 10 am to 5 pm.
and have my phone become a guide for the day, including stops it knows I like and hotel in my price range with the amenities it knows I need. If I get hungry it just slips in a stop wherever I ask.
This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone.
If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.
The moment this is automated and overseen by an AI implementation it'll turn into a marketing game like SEO did. You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up.
It's bad enough already. But I do not want someone making decisions for me on that and booking things, which is the only uplift that an AI implementation can give over the current situation.
>You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up
...and how does your "by hand" process solve this problem? You are influenced by the same SEO crap regardless of AI intervention.
I think that sounds like an incredible feature, but like so many things my phone can already do I'd never actually use it. I just don't want to become someone who does what their phone suggests.
Plus I have a partner and friends, so unless we all want to follow my phone's instructions it's not going to work.
It should easily be able to understand a user's personality well enough to know how to manipulate them. E.g., 4 suggestions that user avoids directing user to the remaining 5th location that wasn't suggested.
How do you find those 5 locations? You open Google Maps and search for them. Too bad the app already selects 4 places to show you and hide the 5th.
So often I look for a business but Google Maps won't show it because it has no reviews. An AI assistant wouldn't change that, as long as it's still interactively programmable (i.e. give me 5 options, I'll pick 3)
I'm not arguing that the feature wouldn't be used at all, just that I believe I'm fairly typical in not using clever phone features. It'd be used by a small number of people but that wouldn't make a noticeable change in marketshare if Android had it and iOS didn't.
To be honest, there probably isn't any feature of a phone OS would make a difference these days. People have decided which camp they're in and they're not going to change.
I saw a video of a Chinese phone that did something like that. Their implementation was a privacy and security nightmare but basically it shared a active feed of your screen with an LLM and would literally tap, type and swipe to achieve your objective. Like order these oodles from this app, it would only interrupt it's actions at payment processing screens.
Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.
This is why Apple (and Google) is in a privileged position to tackle this issue at the OS level. If you currently trust your OS, then having a local agent use your apps wouldn't be terribly different (prompt injection risk aside)
After having given Openclaw a try as my "personal assistant" for a day when traveling, I 100% want this to be one possible way I can interact with my computer going forward.
Of course it's failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private (I want local inference before giving it access to anything material, or it'll indeed be a privacy nightmare), and crashes all the time, but the fact that a (not yet) walking, talking CVE can do a better job at this than one of the most wealthy corporations in the world after several years of trying should give them some serious pause.
The “failing hilariously” bit is critical for this road-tripping use case.
It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation to lose faith in simply handing over a whole day’s itinerary to an LLM. Honestly that can go so bad very easily.
We are decades into the GPS navigation era and I still don’t trust the route my vehicle suggests. I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
> I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
I heard this often but what has been the issue in practice? The worst that happened to me is Google Maps suggesting I cross a bridge that was washed away by the last typhoon, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Only in very remote places has Google Maps failed me, at least for driving directions (for trails it's another story...)
> It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation
I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.
> failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private, and crashes all the time, a (not yet) walking, talking CVE
Is actually doing a better job than not doing any of that at all? This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation. Sometimes if you can’t do it right it’s better to not do it at all. Better to wait for the full meal instead of having a “slop snack”.
I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies. Terrible. Which is more than any company can do so yay?
Some things are worse than nothing in terms of quality or liability.
Yes, it's significantly better than nobody doing any of this for me, and the important thing for the purpose of this prediction is that the error rate still seems to be going down exponentially with time.
> This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation.
That's exactly where it would make sense to try a new thing then, no?
> I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies.
Sounds like a much more high stakes activity than telling me factoids around my travel itinerary, so I agree that we shouldn't have you run the neurosurgery department yet, yes.
Disregarding for a moment whether that's what HN-greybeards want or not, being behind in this area doesn't necessarily preclude Apple from catching up later. There's enough of a market that they can buy it from one of Google's competitors if they have to.
Can you not already do nearly that right now with Gemini on any device, iOS or not? I just gave a similar prompt to Gemini. It activated Gemini's "personal intelligence" feature and gave me the kind of highly personalized itinerary and advice you just suggested. It's not quite as seamless as being built directly into the OS, but I actually prefer it this way -- it's mildly sandboxed for safety while still giving me almost everything you just described if I want it. I certainly wouldn't switch away from my iPhone just to remove that sandboxing.
It doesn't even need to be coming from a single AI vendor either. For instance, I can already use Grok's voice mode inside our Model Y to add stops along the route if we're hungry.
I get what you want, its pretty sophisticated and yes probably a huge added value if it works reliably.
And there is no fucking way I want that in my life or my family's lives, ever. I will fight this very actively, with my wallet, voting and voice. Thats far beyond 1984 and at this point, in 2026, we know all that info will be weaponized against me, will try to manipulate me into decisions I would not do otherwise, for ads and other purposes. Also, it removes a lot of joy from one's life with discovering places and just being an adult and deciding for oneself, but that can be subjective.
If I dare to speak out, if I dare to disagree with official opinions, if I dare to have higher morals than those at the power at given moment. Look at all the shit happening even former bastion of democracy - US. Do you really think this is the bottom? We/You are still far from that and who knows if you bounce back. Past performance doesnt indicate future and all that.
Even when I am well shielded in proper bastion of true democracy and freedom - Switzerland in my case, nobody is immune. EU hates additional freedoms Swiss have and push hard for their dissolution, a reminder in their heart how better a very diverse European country can be run compared to mess EU is. US, at least current gov, hates this place too based on their moves.
Its not really helpful to leave snarky comments in bad taste neither, is it. I suggest you read up a bit on this country, its history (I mean proper history not some primitive blahs on qanon level) and educate yourself, its not that hard or long if you care about the topic.
You're here, right? How much of your life is already stored on digital devices one warrant away from the state?
I read your comment as someone from the 80s complaining about digitalization and it all applied. And yet here we are, my WHOLE photo library on my phone, most of communication with everyone on my phone, and AI isn't even part of it.
Thats your phone, I have no cloud storage and no most of my photos are not on my phone. Its not my first nor second account here, I don't care about some meaningless reward points. Same goes for everything else, very little of my life is stored digitally and connected/shared to internet. I see simply no reason for that, not cruising on some paranoia.
Its a fight worth fighting or behavior to adhere to, for me. Natural and logical. You seemingly gave up, thats fine as long as you are happy with your choices and consequences.
Why would you ever want to do that? Why wont' you stop and live life for a moment?, stop delegating stuff to your phone, especially when it comes to personal trips. Really bleak, this "always optimizing stuff" thing, really, really bleak. Tech-bro culture has done a good one to mainstream culture, because I see the same mindset seeping through to mainstream life.
I travel a lot and it's extremely time consuming. I don't even do much research beforehand anymore. I really wish I got a notification like "I know you're heading that way, how about this waterfall? It only adds 15 minutes of driving."
The reality is that I do not enjoy at all sorting through tickets and booking emails and apps, I just want to ask my phone "show me tonight's booking" and then hand the phone to the hotel's front desk.
There's so much an assistant can do and Siri is just so far from it.
It doesn't, but I'd rather book a hotel with full confidence and go to a restaurant that will be actually open, given all the information that is available to me at the time of planning, than having my trip ruined by a dumb bot because it cannot tell imagination from reality. All you get is "you're absolutely right".
Yeah what I do when I'm on a holiday is just walk out and see what's around, what places look good and have a good vibe. Maybe then check their rating but usually I don't bother do do even that. I'm not a minmaxer, I care more about living in the moment.
I do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...
Even if that worked, how do you know it will choose the stops you like and not the ones that paid Apple more to be featured?
How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it?
And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that?
Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business
Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in...
One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill.
It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in.
For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things.
So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?
My take is that the future will look something like this:
- You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads.
- This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.).
- You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses.
- Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though.
For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above?
Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.
I'm personally not convinced about "next-gen form factors", although I know that's what many companies are focusing on - some type of smart glasses, or whatever kind of (screen-less?) device Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on.
Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face, and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them), so, seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
I think Apple's brand loyalty buys them some lead time in being a fast-follower, but the danger to them would be if things change so fast and profoundly that they get left behind a la Nokia. What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)? I wouldn't expect it to kill Apple overnight, but it seems that they are in effect gambling that "we can always pay for AI if we have to", and "someone will always license it to run on-device if we need to".
> Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face
Have you seen the Ray Ban meta glasses? They already look pretty close to existing fashionable sunglasses, albeit with a visible camera.
> and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them)
They already do; plenty of people carry a smart phone, a smart watch, and airpods.
> seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
People use smartphones to avoid being bored, but there are situations when it's unacceptable to use them (i.e. in a meeting); I could see smart glasses being used for that niche.
> What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)?
Knowing Google, that personal assistant would probably be shut down within a year.
> This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI
They aren’t. Mixed reality is getting little attention. It is in the “it remains a product in our line-up” phase. They are virtually all-in on AI. Their acquisitions have been AI-focused.
It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with are the same issues their competitors are dealing with and is isn’t stopping them from releasing.
> Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud
This isn’t why people are buying Mac minis. They’re buying them because that’s what the OpenClaw author was using, they’re cheap, and they run macOS, so the tools within OpenClaw can get deeper Apple API access to Calendar, iMessage, etc.
In the vast majority of cases, OpenClaw users aren’t using local models. They’re using “cloud” models like GPT and Claude.
>It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with aren’t stopping their competitors from releasing.
No, it’s a good sign that Apple has re-learned the lessons they used to take to heart but sometimes forget when they panic and scramble. Apple used to always be late to most changes but when they arrived, if it was with a cohesive answer that worked well. They’ve been scrambling instead and hopefully this is a sign they’ve realized that.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
And they’re failing at that too! I purchased an iPhone 16e thinking it would be like the iPhone SE, but what I got was worse than an SE. They used an old chip and I can tell you this phone cannot keep up with liquid glass, which they forced me to use and did not let me roll back.
And now we have the iPhone 17 suffering from chipping on the back of the phones.
The only reason Apple is succeeding is the only other thing is worse. And yes, I’m talking about android.
What? It has the same RAM size, same RAM speed, and same chip[0] (minus one (1) GPU core [6c, 4g, 16n]) as the iPhone 16 [6c, 5g, 16n] (and almost the same as the A18 Pro [6c, 5g, 16n] minus the enhanced memory bandwidth and video encoding, afaict.)
(I mean, sure, it's an old chip compared to the 17 but then it's a generation older and saying "they used an old chip" is a nonsense truism.)
>They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security.
That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.
You're not wrong, but you can also get most (or even nearly all) of that right now today on any device by just getting a Google AI subscription. Gemini already does most of that through its own personal intelligence feature. You do need to use Gmail at minimum for it to be useful, but the vast majority of iPhone users do already.
Those Macs you are talking about are still very niche and mostly used by loyal customers that do basic/common things or very vocal fanboys who always find a way to shill for whatever Apple comes up with, no matter how flawed and lackluster the product is.
Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS.
But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.
I think you’re underestimating or not understanding why Macs have taken off so much for AI. It has nothing to do with fanboys shilling for Apple. You can get a MBP today with 128GB of unified memory or a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. Then you get to run MacOS, which is vastly superior to Windows for AI productivity and far more accessible/convenient than Linux even today. There’s a reason so many AI apps are Mac native first (or exclusively). No other company offers so much memory and convenience in a consumer product for these purposes. These have become genuinely unique products with almost no competition, and by all accounts it seems Apple is just getting started in this direction.
Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.
I'm not contesting that AI will become worthwhile on local hardware at some point. With software optimization and hardware costs falling over time, that's pretty much a given.
But I'm arguing that it's not going to be worthwhile doing on Apple hardware.
GPU sharding is already a thing for PCs, and you don't need to stupidly buy multiple full computers for it to work.
Apple has put themselves into a corner with their Apple Silicon strategy. It's good for efficiency and thus quite nice for mobile usage, but it makes no sense for desktops that do not need to be power/space constrained.
Their GPUs are still weak, and their strategy of gluing 2 together gives poor results in general workloads. They are limited by the die size and the RAM bandwidth they can allocate to the whole thing because of physics.
If Apple manages to get good results by aggregating multiple computers, PCs will get even better results by using multiple GPUs in the same box, interconnected by the PCIe bus, which will always be faster than Thunderbolt no matter what, because of physics.
In fact, they could even come up with a new interconnect if need be.
There is just no realistic way for Apple to become a dominant player in AI. They cannot compete properly on the hardware side because they won't get the cash flow/key players NVidia and AMD are getting, and they cannot compete properly on software because it will always be ports of stuff made to run on better/faster hardware. They'll lose AI basically for the same reason they have lost gaming: uncompetitive performance for the price. People who actually want to do stuff care less about how things look and a lot more about how good/fast they run.
And whenever datacenters start offloading older GPUs, their price will fall, making it the cheapest way to do local AI. Apple hardware keeps a stupidly high price even when it's completely obsolete because of the status it confers; it will never be cost competitive.
It's basically a replay of their PPC mistake, where they thought they could compete by going at it alone but in the end fell pretty hard because they couldn't compete against the volume PCs were getting.
Now Apple has money but cannot attract enough talent because they have no vision, and the management style is basically mean girls running the show.
You are arguing about purchasing a solution that would cover 8 years of top-tier AI subscription. Seriously, who in their right mind would do that?
Apple hardware for AI makes no sense; either you have prosumer-level needs that are going to be served just fine with cheaper hardware (like, for example, Ryzen AI) or you have large needs, and investing in a real AI solution is going to be better because it's going to be much faster. Being able to fit large models is useless if they run too slow.
I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.
Google is not really a competitor to Apple in devices. I mean, they sell devices, but at a way lower volume. The Pixel phone is essentially a tech demo that exists to push their Android partners into making more competitive devices themselves.
The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services.
Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.
Your framing fits well for the Nexus era and even the earliest Pixel iterations, where Google’s hardware largely functioned as a reference implementation and ecosystem lever, nudging OEMs into making better devices.
However, the current Pixel strategy appears materially (no pun intended) different. Rather than serving as an “early adopter” pathfinder for the broader ecosystem, Pixel increasingly positions itself as the canonical expression of Android—the device on which the “true” Android experience is defined and delivered. Far from nudging OEMs, it's Google desperately reclaiming strategic control over their own platform.
By tightening the integration between hardware, software, and first-party silicon, Google appears to be pursuing the same structural advantages that underpin Apple’s hardware–software symbiosis. The last few generations of Pixel are, effectively, Google becoming more like Apple.
I think you're assuming that no durable or at-scale changes in compute form factor will occur, so that their success pretty much just solely comes down to differentiated iPhone software features. That seems unlikely to me. I don't see phones going away in the next decade like some have predicted, but I do think new compute form factors are going to start proliferating once a certain technological "take off" point is reached.
The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed).
https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)
PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.
Counterpoint the iPad has been brilliant with it’s software and implementation and that is the reason it essentially has the tablet market to itself, is the only tablet with a third-party ecosystem, and it continues to grow.
The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.
I agree on that they should focus on hardware, software, UX, etc.
I think the problem of current Apple management and especially Tim Cook is that they want to squeeze out as much profit as possible and they see AI as another _Services_ profit center.
A better Apple would say AI is just an app and provide extension points into the OS so that users can plug their favorite LLM, anything from ChatGPT to Mistral, but in a privacy-preserving way if the user wants.
While that would lead to less profit in the short term, Apple's moat was its UX and halo effects (cynically: social signalling). The draw to Apple may last for a bit during enshittification of the platform, but long-term the brand value is more important than short-term profits.
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers?
> They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.
If your high-profile misses become the subject of both memes and major news stories I'd say you are still the benchmark in UX, yes.
Even "Apple design has peaked" is a meme if you've been following this stuff for more than just one decade. (Sure, one day it'll most likely be true, but that doesn't make everyone predicting it now a prophet retroactively.)
I think the issue here is the public promises that were made. Jobs tended not to do that. Things were announced and released when they were ready, which gave them the time to do it right, without any delays.
Sure, there were things like AirPower and the MobileMe widgets… things that were announced, but never shipped. However, by and large, a big new thing was announced, and a week later it would ship. The iPhone was only announced 6 months early to avoid it being leaked by compliance filing (or maybe it was patents).
Cook would be wise to go back to this instead of promising the shareholders things he can’t deliver on.
I think slow playing AI is the right move for Apple. Third party apps give their customers access today, and Apple can take the time to figure out how AI fits into a large cohesive vision for their products and ecosystem… or if it fits at all. Rushing something out doesn’t do anyone any favors, and has never been Apple’s competitive advantage.
> The iPhone was only announced 6 months early to avoid it being leaked by compliance filing (or maybe it was patents).
Is there evidence of this? I think the phone and watch were announced early because Apples vertical integration strategy and quality standards require them to reveal the existence to the rest of the company so they can get everything else working well with the new product category on release. It wouldn't be possible to keep it secret after revealing it internally so they did a simultaneous internal/external reveal to control the message, to maximize impact, to deny rumor sites, etc...
Yes, or at least that’s the reason Jobs gave in the original Jan 2007 keynote:
> We’re going to be shipping these in June. We’re announcing it today because with products like this we’ve got to go ahead and get FCC approval which takes a few months, and we thought it would be better if we introduced this rather than ask the FCC to introduce it for us. So here we are.
I think comparisons between Jobs and Cook are trite and cliche by now, and also pointless. Jobs was a generational talent; everyone looked up to him when it came to defining products. Of course Cook is not able to do what Jobs did. No one can.
Apple has already been left behind by many tech shifts: web, search, social, crypto, metaverse, etc. At various times popular opinion had them left behind by netbooks, by tablets, by smart phones, by Windows, by web browsers… until they weren’t.
Apple does not have to lead all categories of tech to be a very successful company.
I'd say that after the Apple Maps launch, Tim Cook learned a lesson about allowing features that need additional work the time they need to fully bake.
Google just launched the Pixel 10 with several promised AI features broken, and could really stand to learn the same lesson.
Apple Maps is still such a sucky service, at least where I live and where I travel to.
It regularly directs me to incorrect addresses and businesses and labels places obviously incorrectly.
Every use of the search function promotes guide content for a single city I'm not currently in, with no way to configure or turn them off. Good products should go out of their way to annoy you IMHO.
They only managed to get their cycle routing for the UK and Ireland working in 2025 after years and years of complaints.
I'm not a fan of Google but I feel compelled to keep Google Maps because Apple Maps is still so unreliable.
I'd offer the balance here that I still don't enjoy using Android and generally prefer iOS to it, warts and all.
Google Maps regularly sends contractors, delivery drivers, etc to a blocked off utility "road" that has never allowed traffic. Apple Maps doesn't. I've given up reporting the problem to Google. (And besides, Google eventually took away the report feature from either desktop or mobile, I forget which, telling me their engineers don't care at all about quality.)
It's about product specification. There's no way it fits into their ecosystem without compromising it. Everyone else has compromised theirs and their customers. Apple do not want to do this. I suspect they will fail on AI but will win in the long run as competitors screw their customers over.
I suspect they'll win on AI by not investing $200Bn in CapEx and waiting 5 years until good enough models can be trained for <$1Bn and then just doing that - blocking all other AI models on their hardware beside their own (which their users seem to like) - and saving $200Bn and getting an experience that's good enough for almost everyone and spending enough on marketing to convince everyone it's 10x better.
Apple has BY FAR the best chips at this level. I don't see anything changing that in less than 5 years. That will be a pretty big advantage in the near future.
That's feasible but I think the whole thing will collapse in a heap when the obviously iffy funding structures fall apart due to a mix of lack of declinging investor interest and drunk assery by the US gov resulting in distrust and higher risk profiling of the associated investments.
At least Apple has other products that make money.
My prediction is that Apple is the hardware and platform provider (like it’s always been). We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
I think their proprietary chips and GPUs are being undervalued.
My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
Funny you should mention social media in the context of Apple, because they seem to have been attempting that with iTunes Ping[1] and then Apple Music.
iTunes Ping was a Jobs-era attempt to create a social network for music. It seems that they were trying to rely on integrating with Facebook, who pulled out of the collaboration in the last minute before Ping's release.
Apple hasn't seem to have given up on social networks for music. Apple Music presents a nascent networking feature where users can see what their friends are listening to.[2] It seems that Apple has learned their lesson from Ping and does not rely on a third-party for a social graph, which is instead powered by iOS contacts.
While social media is not Apple's bread and butter, they have maintained their interest in having presence in this market. I would assume that this stems from Apple's overall desire to maintain influence over on-the-top services that define the iOS experience. If they let third parties flourish even further, thirds parties gain leverage that they can use during negotiations with Apple. If third parties successfully negotiate for more features that creates parity with apps on non-Apple devices, Apple loses its differentiation on the device markets, thereby losing revenue.
(I think Stratechery wrote about Apple's service strategy that was motivated by its past relationships with Adobe and Spotify. Couldn't find the link.)
> We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
You're right that we haven't asked them for better on-the-top services. But it seems to be in Apple's interest to compete with third party services providers and make sure they do not supersede Apple in terms of their influence over on-the-top experiences.
Just as an aside, I do not get a social media platform for music. I don’t need a separate social network to manage, and certainly wouldn’t care what 99% of the people I know are listening to 99.9% of the time.
Of course they jumped into the race as soon as possible by mentioning ‘Apple Intelligence’ and working on it. But, I think this was more peer pressure than anything else.
Apple’s reliably late to the party most of the time, but they also reliably steal the show. I’m doubtful about OpenAI’s hardware just taking over.
I rather wait and keep using 3rd party models that keep leap frogging themselves and adding features every once in a while, than them just publicly beta testing a bunch of things on my iPhone. If this was the case, we’d see a bunch of people complaining about how terrible the product is and how Claude or GPT or OpenClaw is so much better.
All I really want from Apple is to continue perfecting their computers, phones and tablets to be the absolute best computing devices possible. As long as they keep iteratively improving those things I don’t care if they’re thought or innovation leaders in whatever hot new thing comes along.
It seems to me that people have been saying that Apple will be left behind since the Apple II. That they keep doing non-obvious things that somehow succeed is what makes them an interesting company.
I don't know that Apple will dominate AI, personally I dislike Siri and iOS, but I think Apple have a very good shot at delivering workable local AI for professionals.
If Apple can lift the inference performance of their forthcoming M5 Ultra chip I think they may become an off the shelf standard for those that want to run large models locally.
That in itself is probably enough to keep them relevant until actual useful uses of Apple Intelligence come to light.
I don’t think Apple or Microsoft (via Windows) will dominate AI. There’s just too much value in the AI being in the cloud (big powerful models vs local) and across your devices (more context on you, running on low powered edge devices like watches, glasses, smart home devices), and the idea of an OS being a decisive factor is already fading with how much work people do in a browser or cloud app.
I don’t see how AI won’t end up running on personal devices. It’s like how mainframes were the original computing platform and then we had the PC revolution. If anything, I think Apple is uniquely positioned to pull the rug on a lot of these cloud models. It might take ten or 15 years, but eventually we’ll see an arms race to do so. There’s too much money on the table, and once cloud providers are tapped out the next logical step is home users. It also makes scaling a lot easier because you don’t need increasingly expensive, complex, and power hungry data centers.
It wasn’t that long ago (ignoring the current DRAM market shenanigans) that it was unthinkable to have a single machine with over terabyte of RAM and 192 physical cores. Now that’s absolutely doable in a single workstation. Heck even my comparatively paltry 96GB of RAM would’ve been absurd in 2010, now there are single prosumer GPUs with that.
With the rate of progress (and in the opposite direction, the physical limitations Intel/AMD/TSMC/ETC are bumping into), there's no guarantees about what a machine will look like a decade from now. But, simple logic applies: if the user's machine scales to X amounts of RAM, the hyperscaler's rack scales to X*Y RAM and assuming the performance/scaling relationship we've seen holds true, it will be correspondingly far smarter/better/powerful compared to the user's AI.
Maybe that won't matter when the user is asking it a 5th grade question, but for any more complex application of AI than "what's the weather" or "turn on a light", users should want a better AI, particularly if they don't have to pay for all that silicon sitting around unused in their machine for most of the day?
This argument would sound nearly identical if you made it in the 70s or early 80s about mainframes and personal computers.
It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?*
And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows.
* (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)
It’s different because of the ubiquity of the internet and the financial incentives of the companies involved.
Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.
Companies also lean into this. Just consider Photoshop. It used to be a one-time purchase, then it became a cloud subscription, now virtually every new AI feature uses paid credits. Despite having that fast SoC, Photoshop will still throw your request to their cloud and charge you for it.
The big point still remains: by the time you can run that trillion parameter model at home, it’s old news. If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one? AI on edge devices will exist, but will forever remain behind data center AI.
Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.
Yes, this is a convenience argument, not a technical one. It's not that your PC doesn't have or could have more than enough storage -- it likely does -- it's that there are other factors that make you use Dropbox.
So now the question becomes: do we not believe that personal devices will ever become good enough to run a "good enough" LLM (technical barrier), or do we believe that other factors will make it seem less desirable to do so (social/financial/legal barrier)?
I think there's a very decent chance that the latter will be true, but the original argument was a technical one -- that good-enough LLMs will always require so much compute that you wouldn't want to run one locally even if you could.
If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one?
What people want to do changes with time, and therefore your PC XT will no longer hack it in the modern workplace, but the point is that from the point that a personal computer of any kind was good enough, people kept using personal computers. The parallel argument here would be that if there is a plateau where LLM improvement slows and converges with ability to run something good enough on consumer hardware, why would people not then just keep running those good enough models on their hardware? The models would get better with time, sure, but so would the hardware running them.
The original point that I was making was never purely a technical one. Performance, economics, convenience, and business trends all play a part in what I think will happen.
Even if LLM improvement slows, it’ll probably result in the same treadmill effect we see in other software.
Consider MS Office, Adobe Creative (Cloud), or just about any pro level software. The older versions aren’t really used, for various reasons, including performance, features, compatibility, etc. Why would LLMs, which seem to be on an even faster trajectory than conventional software, be any different? Users will want to continue upgrading, and in the case of AI, that’ll mean continuing to access the latest cloud model.
No doubt that someone can run gpt-oss-120b five years from now on device, but outside of privacy, why would they when you can get a faster, smarter answer (for free, likely) from a service?
I think there's room for multiple approaches here.
Cloud based AI obviously has a lot of advantages e.g. batched proccessing on the best hardward, low power edge devices, data sharing, etc.
There's still room for local inference though. I don't know that I want "more context on me" all the time. I want some context, some of the time and I want to be in full control of it.
I'd pay for that. I don't think it will be for everyone but a number of people would pay a premium for an off shelf product that provides privacy and control that cloud vendors by their nature just can't offer.
Definitely room for multiple approaches, including local LLMs.
But I just don't think for most users that local LLM capabilities will be a deciding factor in either hardware or OS choices.
A cloud subscription model will be the premium offering ($20 for consumers, $100 to $1000 or pay-per-token for businesses), and inevitably something ad-supported at a lower price or free for low-end consumers.
Once Joe Consumer has access to that subscription ChatGPT or free tier, are they really going to run a far-less-powerful model on their laptop? Outside of a few simple tasks like semantic search in your email, notes, photos; or localized transcription, local models will just be too far behind the curve for the public to make much use of them.
100% agreed. You speak the truth, but already the apologists are writing textbooks justifying Apple's failed strategy :)) and this is why the company thrives. Just blind loyalty to a company that couldn't care less about them.
That is a delusional take on why millions continue to purchase Apple
products and services. They expect Apple to provide services that work well and are not willing to put up with the terrible products other companies produce.
That is even more delusional than the parent comment. There is no dialectic law of business that guarantees a better experience with a competitor's product. If you traded your Nintendo Switch for a gaming iPad, for example, you'd be making a horrible mistake. The iPad's presence as a gaming machine is synonymous with online gambling.
If Apple's products and services were heads-and-shoulder above their competition, we'd know. The iPhone is the only modern example, and it relies on lock-in that is considered illegally anticompetitive in multiple jurisdictions worldwide.
Simple diversity of what people want means lots of people buy Apple because it is better for them. It isn't like anyone gets what they really want across many features, whatever they buy.
And iPad's are optimized for different uses than the switch. Those are entirely different form factors. (You can turn an iPad mini into a switch like device with controller add ons. But those are add ons so the software does not put that form factor first.)
Right or wrong, at least he takes risks. Apple Vision Pro was launched two years too early, but you can’t say that he just realized on existing products.
My point is that the product they marketed only matches the product they released recently.
In terms of something that adults want, you’re right. It would take about 10 years before the only generation who is into it, Gen Alpha, would come of age and be able to make that transition to AR/VR like how Gen X did with high speed internet.
Was he taking risks or just reactionary after Facebook going all-in on the Metaverse (and by the time the product was done, the Metaverse was pretty dead already)?
They have a software issue (I mean who doesn’t) but Cook has tried his hand in lots of products. Some worked like the airpod, airtag and watch; and a particular one flopped: vision. It’s a marvelous tech device that unfortunately had no demand.
Also the m series can be attributed to him and it’s as good as innovation can get.
The other difference between Steve and Tim is Steve would have never been caught dead giving a gold gift to a sitting president. It comes off as desperate and evil, two things Steve would have hated associating with Apple.
You're dreaming. I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Apple have an almost infinite runway to get AI right if they wanted to ... but just like they haven't invested billions to chase Search, so they'd be fine riding the AI wave getting paid billions to have third party AI put on their device.
I feel like, today, most of the other LLM providers can do what "Apple Intelligence" promised - it'll link with my email/calendar/etc and it can find stuff I ask with a fuzzy search.
That said, I don't really use this functionality all that often, because it didn't really (effortlessly) solve a big need for me. Apple sitting out LLMs means they didn't build this competency along the way, even when the technology is now proven.
I think the same thing is true was VR - except Apple did invest heavily in it and bring a product to market. Maybe we won't see anything big for a while, and Silicon Valley becomes the next Detroit.
Wait, how does that work? I've never heard of this outside of closed ecosystems (iPhone is obviously the best at this, but I guess also google crap if you're invested into gmail/gcal/etc)
Gemini can read your personal info if you use google products, obviously.
Beyond that, Claude and ChatGPT (the other major chat providers) both support integrations that let you link your email etc. to allow the chat bot to search through them.
i have said it before: the Vision Pro with Mac screen linking is a tease for a complete Mac-superior spacial interface. The new high end device from Apple for the future. An interface that levels up a MacBook Pro’s or Studio’s power and productivity.
Except no. After getting the hardware right, Tim gave us an another iOS toy / media kiosk (in 3D!) for $3500.
I would have paid $5000 if it was the new developer friendly, macOS spacial, pro software, room-scale interface machine.
I would have thought Tim Cook would have been proud to push the product line / user interface, bicycle-for-the-mind bar higher during his tour of duty. An historic computing advancement.
But I guess raising the media kiosk, novelty apps and purchases, third party creator tax, service subscriptions and scammy ads with no ad-free tier revenue bar, is what he wants to be remembered for.
Uh, I think Apple had proven themselves many times that they're the one to bring something new and advanced. It started with MacBooks, then iPhones, a digital assistant, TouchID, Airpods, FaceID, fan-less MacBooks and probably more stuff. Is it not enough?
TBH, though, if all they ever do is provide hardware that runs software designed just for that hardware ecosystem, consistently, securely and with decent UX, I'll be happy. That's better than any other consumer computing HW vendor has proven to be able to do.
I have heard of Siri, I would never expect anyone to mention Siri while enumerating "new and advanced" things Apple developed.
OP said whatever the next shift in technology, Apple will be left behind. You said Apple actually developed new advanced products, but only mentioned hardware examples. If the new big shift in technology is in software (such as AI), we have no reason to predict Apple will fare well there.
AI is not only software but also hardware. Apple were the first to develop a (good) chip specifically for AI computation (ANE), and their MacBooks are very good for running AI models locally.
Apple are not like Google or Facebook (they're mainly software, and Apple are titled more towards hardware), their vision isn't the same as theirs, but their vision will hold for a very long time.
> it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance, makes better use of AI than any other photo management app in existence. If anything, ChatGPT/Microsoft/Google/etc are absolutely crippled because they don't have access to the data people actually use on a day to day basis—instead, it's scattered across a million browser apps and private silos.
And, you don't have to use an asinine chatbot integration looking like a fool to use it.
Perhaps Google comes the closest to being able to capitalize on this, but I can't say I can remember using any AI integration they have, and I stopped giving them my data over a decade ago.
"I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance"
Have you used a Samsung? Apple's AI miserably fails in every comparison out there in the photos app.
There's also Google Photos with Gemini which helps you find any photo you want with AI better than anyone else.
I have been using Apple devices and supporting many of their users for over 20 years, and they are all extremely invested in their choice of computing device. It's really a source of pride for many of them, weirdly.
For this reason, anything Apple does is necessarily better than everything else on the market.
It's a bit pointless to argue because they come from an emotional standpoint; if you point at the many things not working properly, they always have an excuse to handwave it away.
It's really funny because I use Apple stuff, and I find many qualities in it, but I'm unwilling to be blind to the faults and weaknesses.
This sort of ego investment exists for other brands as well; I think it is a lack of emotional maturity and an inability to realize that a brand does not care if you do not fully "love" their products.
I agree completely. This sort of emotional immaturity was acceptable a decade ago. But today? They are behind everything. I have 3 Macs, 2 iPads and 1 iPhone and their software is sh*t. iPad pro is a joke. It should be illegal to use the label pro as it constitutes false marketing. It's such a dumb OS for the kind of hardware you get. What's the use if it has M3 Pro or whatever if the OS can't keep up. Half the time, it's filled with bugs. Same story for iOS. Mac OS is great..so far. But, their phones are garbage. I have to save my documents into Google drive just so they work fine. What a joke.
Most definitely Windows, but that's basically a factor of their past hegemony.
Hilariously, you are going to argue that Apple is good because they sell a lot of stuff, but somehow Microsoft is bad because they sell a lot of stuff (a lot more, in fact).
If you haven't used any of Google's services with your actual data for over a decade, there's a pretty simple explanation about why you don't remember any times you've interacted with one of their AI integrations for those services, and it has nothing do with the relative quality of them.
I got myself an iPhone 16 Pro because of the promised AI features. I had a vision in my mind of what it ought be like:
While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu.
I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot.
"I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving."
Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser!
I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts.
Think about what data and access the phone has:
1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port.
2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating.
3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu.
4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?"
5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now.
How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.
Siri on the Apple Watch is even more fun. It can never answer a question and always opens up a webpage. Then you try to read it on the teensy display and then you are rewarded for your effort by the Siri/WatchOS/whatever closing the view after just a few seconds (even when you were scrolling with the crown).
I am pretty sure they aren't doing any QA or the QA results don't get to the developers. With Pixel Watch I can still understand all the little bugs, it is well-known by now that (some of) the Pixel Watch PMs themselves use iPhones and Apple Watches. But you'd think that the Apple Watch PMs themselves use Apple Watches? The only other explanation that I can think of is that the org is pretty dysfunctional by now.
This was such a self inflicted own goal. Siri has needed work for years and every year they neglected it. When they first bought Siri it was state of the art and then it just languished. Pulling an Intel and sweating your assets until it is too late is never a good idea.
I don't doubt it, but what were they all doing? The Metaverse had 10k employees on it for multiple years and seemed to almost be a standstill for long periods of time. What do these massive teams do all day?
Have meetings to figure out how to interact with the other 9990 employees. Then try and make the skeleton app left behind by the team of transient engineers who left after 18 months before moving on to their next gig work, before throwing it out and starting again from scratch.
Exactly. What Meta accomplished could have been done by a team of less than 40 mediocre engineers. It’s really just not even worth analyzing the failure. I am in complete awe when I think about how bad the execution of this whole thing was. It doesn’t even feel real.
Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen.
Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?
At least part of the funding went to research on hard science related to VR, such as tracking, lenses, CV, 3D mapping etc. And it paid off, IMO Meta has the best hardware and software foundation for delivering VR, and projects like Hyperscape (off-the-shelf, high-fidelity 3D mapping) are stunning.
Whether it was worth it is another question, but I would not be surprised is recycled to power a futuristic AI interface or something similar at some point.
Even within the XR industry, we had no clue where all that money went. During the metaverse debacle, the entire industry stagnated. Once metaverse failed, XR adjacent shops started to fail. There was no hardware or technique innovation shared with the rest of the industry, and at the time the technology was pretty well settled.
Since then we lost all the medium players and it's basically just Facebook, Valve, and Apple.
Big company syndrome has existed for a long time. It’s almost impossible to innovate or move fast with 8 levels of management and bloated codebases. That’s why startups exist.
"It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."
Given the way current LLMs hallucinate, and given that Apple (presumably) won’t accept this behaviour in Siri, I’m skeptical that existing technology (or existing technology scaled up) can ever create the Siri Apple and its customers want.
I'll settle for "gets voice to text right most of the time". Seriously, Apple is so far behind on the cheapest table stakes at this point I highly doubt their high standards is the issue.
Oh absolutely. The amount of times I have to pause, take a deep breathe and OVER-enunciate (still with mixed success) because my voice, pulse rise and my patience decreases with every absolute butchering (like not even "close but no cigar" but "how on earth did you come up with that?") Siri does to dictated text message in CarPlay...
I don’t even bother anymore. When it reads back the text message and asks if I want to send it I just laugh heartily and say yeah. Sometimes the recipient has to read it aloud and try to phonetically guess what the original words were.
Yeah, but isn't the voice recognition (as opposed to voice comprehension) separate from the supposedly LLM powered bit of Siri? I want better voice comprehension too, but I don't think that moving to a LLM powered Siri will solve that.
I agree with the other poster and gladly converted to a paying customer of Wispr because they did this right.
Honestly, I bet your question is exactly what every team adjacent to this problem at Apple is doing. Pointing fingers at each other and saying, "This isn't my problem. This is some other team." It's so egregiously broken that obviously no one inside there considers it their problem. I think this must be rampant at Apple currently. There's just no explanation for how their software has gone so completely to shit over the last ten years.
Literally what's the difference between that and Siri now.
Siri can't understand or pronounce very well.
A few weeks ago Siri via Car Play responded to a text and sent it without me saying a word or radio on, and with the setting where it asks first before sending enabled. It responding "Why?" to a serious text was seriously inconvenient in the moment. I watched it happen in disbelief.
(Edit: Didn't see your last paragraph before writing the response below)
I think there is a distinction between Siri misunderstanding what was said (which you can see/hear), and Siri understanding what you said but hallucinating an answer. In both cases, you strictly have to check the result, but in the first case it's clear that you've been misunderstood.
The Siri experience just really really really sucks for the year being 2026. So much more frustrating than the claude and chatgpt experiences I have had in recent months.
To my Apple Watch: "Hey Siri, tell me what the time is in the central time zone right now"
"I found this on the web", watch shows a link to time.gov
The only thing I find Siri useful for is: a voice-activated timer, handy in the kitchen when my hands are full and I am juggling multiple timed process. It does that well about 80% of the time.
I don't think that's at all a safe presumption, given that AI still happily hallucinates summaries of text messages/email that is contradictory to that actual content of the message.
Apple is the only place I've ever worked where I really feel I'll get summarily fired for saying the wrong thing during a meeting or in my pod (if a manager overhears) - the culture is that draconian. So don't hold your breath waiting for someone to tell you things they're under NDA about (or just general litigation pressure).
But they can't get it right. Siri seems just the most conspicuous indicator that Apple has unlearned to do software. Everything is going to shit there.
Everyone keeps arguing that AI is not Apple’s core business and that their priorities are different. From an end-user perspective, that is irrelevant.
What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows.
At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works.
Today, I still cannot reliably:
- Dictate complex voice input without constant correction
- Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …”
- Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent
These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle.
The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.
It doesn't surprise me that Siri continues to be bad - Apple's current plan is to use a low-quality LLM to build a top-quality product, which turned out to be impossible.
What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".
From several engineer answers over a few years from inside Google, the consistent answer was that they created a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices over the years, almost none of which were capable of running the same software stack/versions, which led to an enormous mountain of technical debt and spaghetti code. There was a big effort a couple years ago to resolve this by creating a single new software version that would work on all modern devices and be supportable across future generations, but it also required (hah!) they essentially abandon (not brick, but just not really actively maintain or support) a plethora of older devices. So you have lots of consumers with either a mixed device environment where there's no consistency between their devices, or consumers who only have older devices that won't run the newer software and will be complaining about performance and reliability until they eventually give up and either abandon Google Home or buy a new device.
Indeed especially compared to chatGPT running so much better on my same iPhone where siri shits the bed. Voice transcription sucks in every aspects on my iPhone except surprise chatGPT gets what I am saying 90% of the time.
I can't even get gemini on my phone, configured as my assistant, to schedule a timer. It just googles the answer now or tells me "Gemini can't do that". 16 years ago it was doing that perfectly.
Seems weird to comment on delayed new features from Apple. Obviously if it doesn't meet the quality bar it would get pushed back, that's just how they do things.
But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context.
Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.
Are Apple AI agent delays bearish for AI agents in general? Unless something else is the issue it’s normal behavior for Apple not to implement something everyone else already has until it’s very good and solid.
Apple wants to vertically integrate. Their AI strategy until recently was to develop their own LLM models that were small enough to run on device. But massive scaling is what makes LLMs so powerful, so all their internal models were terrible and unusable.
Basically they bet that compute efficient LLMs were the future. That bet was wrong and the opposite came true.
I think to a similar point, if Apple is so picky about it that it’s still not ready… it definitely tracks with my experience using ai, it requires my review and often bungles things, I wouldn’t just turn it over to my customer yet and trust it to be reliably high quality.
This is obviously a death march project. Just delay it indefinitely until the Google Gemini based Siri chatbot is ready. Why ship something half-assed?
But it’s been a complex undertaking. The revamped Siri is built on an entirely new architecture dubbed Linwood. Its software will rely on the company’s large language model platform — known as Apple Foundations Models — which is now incorporating technology from Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini team.
> Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device.
Apple is not trying to do everything on-device, though it prefers this as much as possible. This is why it built Private Cloud Compute (PCC) and as I understand it, it’s within a PCC environment that Google’s Gemini (for Apple’s users) will be hosted as well.
Not sure whether it's a language/pronounciation issue but for 15 years since siri was released i have not seen a single person using it successfully without having to yell at it for not waking up or not understanding the request correctly
I’ve been using it a dozen times a day for the past 14 years with very few issues. Certainly not enough issues that I would ever want to go back to adding things like alarms and reminders and events by hand.
I listen to Sirius XM in my car a lot and when there are ad bumpers or hosts that say "Sirius XM", it triggers siri on my watch about 10% of the time. Fun.
i guess im a unicorn haha. I routinely control my home (shades, lights, fans), set reminders for myself, set timers while cooking, and reply to (simple) text messages.
> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said
I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it.
In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker
I think we can conclude at this point that the guy yelling at engineers to "just stick ChatGPT into Siri" doesn't understand that the result is unusable, for whatever reason. That reason might be that the UE is bad, or because it grossly violates user privacy, but it might be that Apple would loose $$$$$ because LLM inference is expensive.
Is it not impressive what xai did with Grok? It's already integrated into twitter and my Tesla. So quickly? What prevented apple from doing the same but building out their equivalent of grok?
This is not a bad example. Tesla is indeed running a custom LLM, available in their vehicles, capable of acting as a general chatbot and issuing commands to the car, developed in-house. While Grok is not up-to-par with other frontier models, it's certainly far beyond Siri.
It's hard to imagine that just killing off Siri would hurt iPhone sales. It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. The primary value of Siri is to check a box for investors, who are riding the AI wave. The same people how rode the voice assistant wave 15 years ago.
There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.
I use Siri daily for controlling HomeKit devices. She's not always on point though. I've named a light basically "Radiohouse", because that's what the designer called it, but 25% of the time she insists of playing radio instead of turning on the light. I'm not a native english speaker and communicate with Siri in Danish, but still. Siri is definitely not useless and I would love for her to become a lot better.
You may be right that the majority probably doesn't use Siri, but that's because it doesn't really make sense to use Siri on the phone. I rely on HomePod speakers to interface with it, that makes a lot more sense for me.
I used to run into this and I use Siri enough to control HomeKit that I give things really mundane names ("Upstairs Bathroom Vanity", "Guest Bedroom Front Shades") to ensure that we have no miscommunication between me and Siri.
If you name your Hue light "House Music" and you're confused when you ask to "turn on house music", you've played yourself. I am interested to see if such a light was in the LLM context window or there were memories recorded of past bad encounters if an LLM would predict better...
> It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter.
Do you drive to work?
I don't either, but I suspect anyone that does, and that's hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, would get a lot of value out of a version of Siri that can actually act as a "personal assistant", capable of doing things like booking a doctor's appointment that fits into their calendar, summarizing email, canceling subscriptions etc.
And beyond that, I suspect the main reason voice assistants haven't taken off yet is the fact that they just haven't been possible pre-LLMs. Siri has been voice dial on a prescription-free amount of steroids. Imagine what it could do with actual contextual understanding.
I drive, and right now I honestly can't trust Siri to even add a to-do item properly. Sometimes it creates a calendar entry, sometimes it randomly decides to do a web search instead. They haven't really been doing anything to fix this (until now, that is).
Just because you can't find use in a voice assistant, it doesn't mean others don't. At the very least, Siri is an important accessibility tool and everyone benefits from accessibility.
Designed my entire house around Siri with HomePods in every room. We use it to control the lights, blinds, heated floor, play music, turn on the tv, etc. Would be great if it could do more.
I've been using an iPhone since 2017 and the only times I use Siri is to set an alarm or to play Music. Setting an alarm works like 90% of the time. Playing music on the other hand is a coin toss. Most of the time it fails because it plays the wrong song, cannot understand what I say or just refuse to play and ask me to unlock the phone because I'm not using apple music.
You would be surprised I think. I know a bunch of people who use Siri, for all sorts of things. I personally regularly use the "push to activate" Siri for quickly setting up meetings et al.
And a *lot* of people want to use Siri while driving, when they can't access the phone, at least not legally.
This is an absurd take. Of course tons of people use Siri. It’s by far the fastest way to create alarms, reminders, and events. If Apple got rid of it, I would feel like a cave man, having to unlock my phone and navigate multiple screens just to do basic tasks. I’d immediately switch to Android.
Apple has spend, and will spend, billions of dollars developing Siri and you use it to create alarms, reminders and events (probably more). The question quickly becomes if that money had been better spend elsewhere, at the cost of losing a small number of customers.
Apple will remove successful phones models, because they did sell as well as expected, but they keep pumping money into software that still only does basic voice assistance? The problem for Apple is that they can't NOT invest in turning Siri into an AI product, because the stock would lose value the minute that announcement was made, regardless of how sound the financials of that decision might be.
I might be completely wrong and 80% of iPhone users use Siri, but I'd surprised if it's even 20%.
https://archive.is/2026.02.11-194917/https://www.bloomberg.c...
I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next.
Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
Just my opinion:
Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big seller. It's why they're investing in their own silicon. This strategy tends to yield unexpected wins, like the Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud, or the Mac Studio becoming arguably the best way to run local AI models (a nascent space that is on the cusp of becoming genuinely relevant), or the MacBook Pro becoming by far the best laptop in the world for productivity in the AI age (and it's not even close).
Your conclusion is that they're going to be left behind, but the evidence is that they're already well ahead in the areas that are core to their business. They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini. Nobody else can do what they can in the fusion of hardware, software, and materials as long as they stay focused.
Where they genuinely slipped up was their marketing -- an unusual mistake for Apple. And that does indeed lie with the CEO.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
This was true maybe a decade ago, but not so now (under the watch of Tim Cook).
You listed Mac hardware becoming popular in the age of AI as examples of "unexpected wins". Maybe that's true (I don't know if it is) - but Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue. Apple has become an iPhone company (50% of revenue) that sells services (26% of revenue).
And AI can eat away at both. If Siri sucks so hard that people switch away, that would also reduce Services revenue from lost App Store revenue cuts. If Google bundles Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos storage, people might cancel their iCloud subscriptions.
I think the parent comment was making the point that Tim Cook's Apple has missed the boat and it doesn't show signs that it's going to catch the next wave.
I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscription. But in 2030, if my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting, have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting, and Siri can still only set a timer for 5 minutes, then I might actually switch.
> Macs were only 8% of Apple's 2025 revenue.
If the Mac were its own standalone business, it would rank at no. 134 on the Fortune 500 with $33.7 billion in revenue. Also, that's a 12% increase in revenue compared to 2024.
If anything, AI has brought more attention to the Mac. Just about every major AI app is released for the Mac first. I've seen complaints about it on HN.
The latest is Claude Cowork. It was released for macOS on January 12th; it didn't ship for Windows until February 10th; it's still not available for Windows running on ARM.
It's been nearly a year since Dia launched [1], the first AI browser, and it's still not available for Windows.
We just had the frenzy over OpenClaw [2] with AI enthusiasts lining up at Apple Stores to buy a Mac mini just to run it!
The most popular AI channels on YouTube are almost exclusively using Macs. Apple seems to have enough runway until they get their act together.
[1]: https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...
[2]: https://builder.aws.com/content/399VbZq9tzAYguWfAHMtHBD6x8H/...
Outside US, most people that buy Macs do so because they are developers targeting iDevices, or can afford Apple and want the ecosystem that comes with their iDevice.
An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
Where you live, maybe. It really depends on the country even outside the US. A lot of it is, to this day, because of things like Final Cut and Logic. Either because they dabble in it as a hobby or professionally.
A lot of the recent growth is developers in general, there's really been a huge shift there. 2010 developers using Macs vs 2026 developers using Macs, if you look at personal devices or workplaces that give them a choice. Biggest driver being Apple Silicon.
I live in one of those 70% market share Windows world region, where Apple gear is taken from a devices pool when required for project delivery, or bundled with cable TV subscriptions with credit payment scattered across several years.
> An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.
For businesses and pro users, it isn't the Apple ecosystem that's the main driver.
Since Apple silicon a lot of laptops are just so far behind in battery life, speed and usability that you wouldn't get it. Often Apple ecosystem was a net negative since most things worked better on Windows but that has shifted.
Until the Apple tax goes away, most folks will put up with Windows flaws, unless Apple changes their pricing policy for countries that cannot afford G8 level salaries.
There is no Apple tax, but there is a price to be paid for the performance, battery life and integration of the Apple ecosystem.
Okay, so to rephrase their comment, the majority of the consumer PC audience will not invest in those things at the price Apple demands for it.
> the majority of the consumer PC audience will not invest in those things at the price Apple demands for it
Who? As in you?
But Apple is gaining market share. Apple is cheaper for what it offers in hardware ignoring the Apple ecosystem.
Are we up to date? The Apple tax is old news. With all the ram and ssd price hikes Apple is proving even more value.
> Who? As in you?
No, as in the entire PC market for the past two decades: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
> Apple is cheaper for what it offers in hardware ignoring the Apple ecosystem.
Then it sounds like their work is cut out for them. They've got a lot of market share to catch up on, and they're not gaining very quickly.
Makes me glad for businesses like Nvidia, who are very willing to ship industry-grade ARM hardware even if Apple won't.
> No, as in the entire PC market for the past two decades
Is this why AI is winning? People aren't doing better. You pick a random stat and somehow make it support what you're arguing.
The link says DESKTOP. I said LAPTOP. Laptop after M1. Why are we going back 2 decades? They have >15% registered as unknown. Sure, "accurate". Cough cough. It doesn't differentiate new or old and IF (the original discussion) that Apple is gaining market share and NEW sales.
> and they're not gaining very quickly
This is just as bad as speculative stock trading e.g. with software stocks. They're losing to AI. Oh no. Dump. Oh they're actually not too bad. Buy it back. Apple doesn't have AI. Sell. Apple doesn't have AI. Buy. Are you ok?
Laptops are desktops in 2026, and without needing Apple style dongles to make out of missing ports, yet another Apple "improvement" in expensive hardware.
And all those Radar bugs, those are priceless.
The Apple tax are the hedious margins Apple imposes into their customers.
> Siri sucks so hard that people switch away
I don’t think people choose iPhone for the Siri.
> my colleague can use their Pixel phone to record a work meeting
I think lots of startups are tackling this in this space. Hardly a native feature. Attainable an app install away
Tried an android phone given by my company. Gemini is at your fingertips, with a single button press. That’s INCREDIBLE! [everything Siri never delivered]. Put that into a headphone or headphone-enabled glasses. Plus a ring. And the need for an advanced UI-based phone fades away for many usages.
I have a Pixel besides my iPhone (for reasons). When I got a Pixel 9 about a year ago, my feeling was the same (Gemini as at your fingertips. INCREDIBLE!). A few months later after the novelty wore off, I just found the push of AI everywhere in Pixel OS and Google apps just annoying. I now use GrapheneOS on my Pixel. One of the many reasons is that it does not try to push AI anywhere.
Now I just have a single LLM (Le Chat) isolated in its own little app sandbox, never getting in my face unless I choose to open it myself.
Isn't this just Facebook's Ray-Bans in a nutshell?
Facebook is lacking access to the interesting data. If you are in the Google ecosystem then your private and business life is likely already there.
I’m not sure how to say it without sounding like an Apple fanboy, but Tim Cook has been the CEO for the past 15 years. Every single year people have been whining how “he’s not visionary and etc.”, but at some point you have to give him some credit. Apple of 2026 has completely different landscape versus apple of 2010/earlier. Scaling from millions to billions of sales is incredibly hard, and he’s been able to accomplish it.
Would you feel the same if in 2030, all the actions you describe, work most of the time but still produce questionable output requiring time to verify and fact check due to the probabilistic nature of the LLM engine? This is unsolvable with LLMs. I don't want an embedded or agentic AI but do give me the option to pick a model of my choice and accept the risks when I want to. I don't want tainted generated summaries, replies or code in certain critical areas.
> I have an iPhone 16 and I'm locked in because of all my photos being on my iCloud subscriptio
Ever heard of the Data Transfer Project? https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?sjid=95203...
I get your general point but specifically regarding :
> have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting
Slack already has this integrated and it works quite well.
Also, since AI will mean most are just let go, why would they need meeting minutes? AI would be so crucial as to be the make or break phone/laptop feature, but people would still have meetings?
At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.
How about using a 3rd party app? Gemini and chatgpt apps can already do a lot!
If my colleagues phone can do all that, great - I don’t need mine to.
> It's not core to their business
You're not thinking ahead. AI isn't just chat bots and image editing. I want to tell my phone:
and have my phone become a guide for the day, including stops it knows I like and hotel in my price range with the amenities it knows I need. If I get hungry it just slips in a stop wherever I ask.This can come as an "everything app" or it can be a "new OS". Either way it will change how people interact with their phone.
If Android becomes this OS, which it may very well happen, iOS is toast. Apple's branding moat isn't that deep.
I do this by hand and always will.
The moment this is automated and overseen by an AI implementation it'll turn into a marketing game like SEO did. You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up.
It's bad enough already. But I do not want someone making decisions for me on that and booking things, which is the only uplift that an AI implementation can give over the current situation.
It's a race to the bottom. Nothing more.
>You'll end up staying at the hotel which spends the most money on getting itself into the training data and forcing reviews on people immediately before the stay is up
...and how does your "by hand" process solve this problem? You are influenced by the same SEO crap regardless of AI intervention.
You are presented the SEO crap, but make your own decisions.
It's the difference between buying the top sponsored result on an online marketplace vs. reading reviews and deciding between products.
Because I can spot a turd a mile away.
I think that sounds like an incredible feature, but like so many things my phone can already do I'd never actually use it. I just don't want to become someone who does what their phone suggests.
Plus I have a partner and friends, so unless we all want to follow my phone's instructions it's not going to work.
You still have friends? You're going to be left behind mate, that's valuable time you could be spending talking to LLMs and vibe coding
That's the neat thing about suggestions: You don't have to follow them.
It should easily be able to understand a user's personality well enough to know how to manipulate them. E.g., 4 suggestions that user avoids directing user to the remaining 5th location that wasn't suggested.
How do you find those 5 locations? You open Google Maps and search for them. Too bad the app already selects 4 places to show you and hide the 5th.
So often I look for a business but Google Maps won't show it because it has no reviews. An AI assistant wouldn't change that, as long as it's still interactively programmable (i.e. give me 5 options, I'll pick 3)
Let’s not mince words.
If my device is “suggesting” a hotel or restaurant, or wherever, that’s advertising.
Advertising is largely self-praise.
And self praise is no recommendation.
Or perhaps I misunderstood, and you were suggesting ignoring the recommendations of one’s travel companions.
In my area lots of smaller accommodations don't show up on Google Maps already because they're not sold via OTA and Google can't earn their share.
1. Open Google Maps
2. Search "hotel"
3. Pick the first one
4. See "sponsored" just before the first link to a third party
If my phone ever starts not clearly separating "editorial content" and advertisements, it won't remain my phone for long.
There’s no “if” to it. LLM-driven features will be monetized. Investors/shareholders will insist.
You do realize that Google Maps prioritizes what's displayed on the map based on corporate relationships & money exchanged, right?
Most people do not use most of the features in their phones. But those features exist because all of the features are used by some people.
I'm not arguing that the feature wouldn't be used at all, just that I believe I'm fairly typical in not using clever phone features. It'd be used by a small number of people but that wouldn't make a noticeable change in marketshare if Android had it and iOS didn't.
To be honest, there probably isn't any feature of a phone OS would make a difference these days. People have decided which camp they're in and they're not going to change.
I saw a video of a Chinese phone that did something like that. Their implementation was a privacy and security nightmare but basically it shared a active feed of your screen with an LLM and would literally tap, type and swipe to achieve your objective. Like order these oodles from this app, it would only interrupt it's actions at payment processing screens.
Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.
This is why Apple (and Google) is in a privileged position to tackle this issue at the OS level. If you currently trust your OS, then having a local agent use your apps wouldn't be terribly different (prompt injection risk aside)
Maybe rising up against the machines will come to be what finally unites humanity.
Then we can get on with exploring the galaxy.
Butlerian jihad.
Do you actually want that built into the OS? To me, this is an app but an invasion of privacy if it’s integrated into the OS.
After having given Openclaw a try as my "personal assistant" for a day when traveling, I 100% want this to be one possible way I can interact with my computer going forward.
Of course it's failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private (I want local inference before giving it access to anything material, or it'll indeed be a privacy nightmare), and crashes all the time, but the fact that a (not yet) walking, talking CVE can do a better job at this than one of the most wealthy corporations in the world after several years of trying should give them some serious pause.
The “failing hilariously” bit is critical for this road-tripping use case.
It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation to lose faith in simply handing over a whole day’s itinerary to an LLM. Honestly that can go so bad very easily.
We are decades into the GPS navigation era and I still don’t trust the route my vehicle suggests. I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
> I have been burned so many times that we literally still compare routes from different providers for a new trip.
I heard this often but what has been the issue in practice? The worst that happened to me is Google Maps suggesting I cross a bridge that was washed away by the last typhoon, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Only in very remote places has Google Maps failed me, at least for driving directions (for trails it's another story...)
> It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation
I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.
You expect the human to do all the actual work of planning the trip, but leave the only interesting parts to the LLM?
If you are doing all that, why do you need an AI?
Are you sure a tool that a tool that
> failed hilariously in many instances, is currently not private, and crashes all the time, a (not yet) walking, talking CVE
Is actually doing a better job than not doing any of that at all? This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation. Sometimes if you can’t do it right it’s better to not do it at all. Better to wait for the full meal instead of having a “slop snack”.
I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies. Terrible. Which is more than any company can do so yay?
Some things are worse than nothing in terms of quality or liability.
Yes, it's significantly better than nobody doing any of this for me, and the important thing for the purpose of this prediction is that the error rate still seems to be going down exponentially with time.
> This isn’t a life or death situation where something is better than nothing out of desperation.
That's exactly where it would make sense to try a new thing then, no?
> I can do a terrible job at transplanting brains in robotic bodies.
Sounds like a much more high stakes activity than telling me factoids around my travel itinerary, so I agree that we shouldn't have you run the neurosurgery department yet, yes.
Disregarding for a moment whether that's what HN-greybeards want or not, being behind in this area doesn't necessarily preclude Apple from catching up later. There's enough of a market that they can buy it from one of Google's competitors if they have to.
Can you not already do nearly that right now with Gemini on any device, iOS or not? I just gave a similar prompt to Gemini. It activated Gemini's "personal intelligence" feature and gave me the kind of highly personalized itinerary and advice you just suggested. It's not quite as seamless as being built directly into the OS, but I actually prefer it this way -- it's mildly sandboxed for safety while still giving me almost everything you just described if I want it. I certainly wouldn't switch away from my iPhone just to remove that sandboxing.
It doesn't even need to be coming from a single AI vendor either. For instance, I can already use Grok's voice mode inside our Model Y to add stops along the route if we're hungry.
I get what you want, its pretty sophisticated and yes probably a huge added value if it works reliably.
And there is no fucking way I want that in my life or my family's lives, ever. I will fight this very actively, with my wallet, voting and voice. Thats far beyond 1984 and at this point, in 2026, we know all that info will be weaponized against me, will try to manipulate me into decisions I would not do otherwise, for ads and other purposes. Also, it removes a lot of joy from one's life with discovering places and just being an adult and deciding for oneself, but that can be subjective.
If I dare to speak out, if I dare to disagree with official opinions, if I dare to have higher morals than those at the power at given moment. Look at all the shit happening even former bastion of democracy - US. Do you really think this is the bottom? We/You are still far from that and who knows if you bounce back. Past performance doesnt indicate future and all that.
Even when I am well shielded in proper bastion of true democracy and freedom - Switzerland in my case, nobody is immune. EU hates additional freedoms Swiss have and push hard for their dissolution, a reminder in their heart how better a very diverse European country can be run compared to mess EU is. US, at least current gov, hates this place too based on their moves.
What is diverse about Switzerland?
Isn’t it largely made up of Swiss, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese?
Diversity of nationality isn't the only type of diversity.
It’s not real helpful to say that and also provide no examples as to what diversity could mean in this context.
Its not really helpful to leave snarky comments in bad taste neither, is it. I suggest you read up a bit on this country, its history (I mean proper history not some primitive blahs on qanon level) and educate yourself, its not that hard or long if you care about the topic.
You're here, right? How much of your life is already stored on digital devices one warrant away from the state?
I read your comment as someone from the 80s complaining about digitalization and it all applied. And yet here we are, my WHOLE photo library on my phone, most of communication with everyone on my phone, and AI isn't even part of it.
Thats your phone, I have no cloud storage and no most of my photos are not on my phone. Its not my first nor second account here, I don't care about some meaningless reward points. Same goes for everything else, very little of my life is stored digitally and connected/shared to internet. I see simply no reason for that, not cruising on some paranoia.
Its a fight worth fighting or behavior to adhere to, for me. Natural and logical. You seemingly gave up, thats fine as long as you are happy with your choices and consequences.
> and have my phone become a guide for the day,
Why would you ever want to do that? Why wont' you stop and live life for a moment?, stop delegating stuff to your phone, especially when it comes to personal trips. Really bleak, this "always optimizing stuff" thing, really, really bleak. Tech-bro culture has done a good one to mainstream culture, because I see the same mindset seeping through to mainstream life.
I travel a lot and it's extremely time consuming. I don't even do much research beforehand anymore. I really wish I got a notification like "I know you're heading that way, how about this waterfall? It only adds 15 minutes of driving."
The reality is that I do not enjoy at all sorting through tickets and booking emails and apps, I just want to ask my phone "show me tonight's booking" and then hand the phone to the hotel's front desk.
There's so much an assistant can do and Siri is just so far from it.
I don't know about you, but manually trawling trip advisor and comparing hotel pricing and quality doesn't constitute "living life" for me.
It doesn't, but I'd rather book a hotel with full confidence and go to a restaurant that will be actually open, given all the information that is available to me at the time of planning, than having my trip ruined by a dumb bot because it cannot tell imagination from reality. All you get is "you're absolutely right".
Yeah what I do when I'm on a holiday is just walk out and see what's around, what places look good and have a good vibe. Maybe then check their rating but usually I don't bother do do even that. I'm not a minmaxer, I care more about living in the moment.
I do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...
Even if that worked, how do you know it will choose the stops you like and not the ones that paid Apple more to be featured?
How much data about you does an application like that need to store? Do you really think it can be stored and processed locally or will it have to go to some server that's a secret court order away - or a bribe away - from leaking it?
And last, why do you think a LLM - which is what "AI" means this year - can do that?
Oh and last last thing, honest guv, do read the chapter in Accelerando where the main character loses his smart glasses and is basically crippled because he can't remember anything on his own. (Don't ask an "AI" for a summary because Stross books aren't as popular as React and it will make a mish mash of all he has ever published, I just checked.)
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business
Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in...
One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill.
It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in.
For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things.
So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?
My take is that the future will look something like this:
- You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads.
- This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.).
- You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses.
- Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though.
For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above?
Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.
I'm personally not convinced about "next-gen form factors", although I know that's what many companies are focusing on - some type of smart glasses, or whatever kind of (screen-less?) device Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on.
Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face, and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them), so, seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
I think Apple's brand loyalty buys them some lead time in being a fast-follower, but the danger to them would be if things change so fast and profoundly that they get left behind a la Nokia. What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)? I wouldn't expect it to kill Apple overnight, but it seems that they are in effect gambling that "we can always pay for AI if we have to", and "someone will always license it to run on-device if we need to".
Only the paranoid survive !
> Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face
Have you seen the Ray Ban meta glasses? They already look pretty close to existing fashionable sunglasses, albeit with a visible camera.
> and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them)
They already do; plenty of people carry a smart phone, a smart watch, and airpods.
> seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.
People use smartphones to avoid being bored, but there are situations when it's unacceptable to use them (i.e. in a meeting); I could see smart glasses being used for that niche.
> What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)?
Knowing Google, that personal assistant would probably be shut down within a year.
> This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI
They aren’t. Mixed reality is getting little attention. It is in the “it remains a product in our line-up” phase. They are virtually all-in on AI. Their acquisitions have been AI-focused.
It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with are the same issues their competitors are dealing with and is isn’t stopping them from releasing.
> Mac Mini suddenly becoming one of the hottest computers in the world because it turns out it's amazing for sandboxing agents if you don't want to use the cloud
This isn’t why people are buying Mac minis. They’re buying them because that’s what the OpenClaw author was using, they’re cheap, and they run macOS, so the tools within OpenClaw can get deeper Apple API access to Calendar, iMessage, etc.
In the vast majority of cases, OpenClaw users aren’t using local models. They’re using “cloud” models like GPT and Claude.
>It’s frustrating to see these delays because the issues they’re dealing with aren’t stopping their competitors from releasing.
No, it’s a good sign that Apple has re-learned the lessons they used to take to heart but sometimes forget when they panic and scramble. Apple used to always be late to most changes but when they arrived, if it was with a cohesive answer that worked well. They’ve been scrambling instead and hopefully this is a sign they’ve realized that.
Unfortunately, this does not reflect what’s going on inside the AI/ML+Siri groups. It’s missteps and internal wars and fumbles all the way down.
I’m fully expecting the stuff that was reported to supposed to show up in 26.4 being pushed to 27.4 or later. It’s that bad.
> What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
And they’re failing at that too! I purchased an iPhone 16e thinking it would be like the iPhone SE, but what I got was worse than an SE. They used an old chip and I can tell you this phone cannot keep up with liquid glass, which they forced me to use and did not let me roll back.
And now we have the iPhone 17 suffering from chipping on the back of the phones.
The only reason Apple is succeeding is the only other thing is worse. And yes, I’m talking about android.
> [the iPhone 16e] used an old chip
What? It has the same RAM size, same RAM speed, and same chip[0] (minus one (1) GPU core [6c, 4g, 16n]) as the iPhone 16 [6c, 5g, 16n] (and almost the same as the A18 Pro [6c, 5g, 16n] minus the enhanced memory bandwidth and video encoding, afaict.)
(I mean, sure, it's an old chip compared to the 17 but then it's a generation older and saying "they used an old chip" is a nonsense truism.)
[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16...
>They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security.
That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.
You're not wrong, but you can also get most (or even nearly all) of that right now today on any device by just getting a Google AI subscription. Gemini already does most of that through its own personal intelligence feature. You do need to use Gmail at minimum for it to be useful, but the vast majority of iPhone users do already.
What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.
did best. did.
Their hardware and integration between hardware and software is extremely good, still. The software on its own has gone downhill for a long time.
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
Does the management know this?
From whose point if view is it not core? I very much doubt any tech business not focusing on AI at the moment is maximising their share price.
I use Siri to set alarms on my watch, that’s it. I don’t want much more than that.
Those Macs you are talking about are still very niche and mostly used by loyal customers that do basic/common things or very vocal fanboys who always find a way to shill for whatever Apple comes up with, no matter how flawed and lackluster the product is.
Even if you want to run local AI, Macs are not really a good deal when you account for the price of soldered RAM and the limitations of AI tools on macOS. But as always, the minority is very vocal, so it looks like it's all the rage but for the most part, people doing work are still using PCs and they don't have that much time to argue about it on the internet.
I think you’re underestimating or not understanding why Macs have taken off so much for AI. It has nothing to do with fanboys shilling for Apple. You can get a MBP today with 128GB of unified memory or a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. Then you get to run MacOS, which is vastly superior to Windows for AI productivity and far more accessible/convenient than Linux even today. There’s a reason so many AI apps are Mac native first (or exclusively). No other company offers so much memory and convenience in a consumer product for these purposes. These have become genuinely unique products with almost no competition, and by all accounts it seems Apple is just getting started in this direction.
Local AI is very limited and mostly a waste of time/capital compared to subscribing to access the good stuff provided by the key players.
But by all means, throw more money at Apple for a problem they can't even solve themselves.
If AI was that good on Apple hardware, they wouldn't need to buy access from their competitors to finally make Siri not completely useless.
Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.
I'm not contesting that AI will become worthwhile on local hardware at some point. With software optimization and hardware costs falling over time, that's pretty much a given.
But I'm arguing that it's not going to be worthwhile doing on Apple hardware. GPU sharding is already a thing for PCs, and you don't need to stupidly buy multiple full computers for it to work.
Apple has put themselves into a corner with their Apple Silicon strategy. It's good for efficiency and thus quite nice for mobile usage, but it makes no sense for desktops that do not need to be power/space constrained.
Their GPUs are still weak, and their strategy of gluing 2 together gives poor results in general workloads. They are limited by the die size and the RAM bandwidth they can allocate to the whole thing because of physics.
If Apple manages to get good results by aggregating multiple computers, PCs will get even better results by using multiple GPUs in the same box, interconnected by the PCIe bus, which will always be faster than Thunderbolt no matter what, because of physics. In fact, they could even come up with a new interconnect if need be.
There is just no realistic way for Apple to become a dominant player in AI. They cannot compete properly on the hardware side because they won't get the cash flow/key players NVidia and AMD are getting, and they cannot compete properly on software because it will always be ports of stuff made to run on better/faster hardware. They'll lose AI basically for the same reason they have lost gaming: uncompetitive performance for the price. People who actually want to do stuff care less about how things look and a lot more about how good/fast they run.
And whenever datacenters start offloading older GPUs, their price will fall, making it the cheapest way to do local AI. Apple hardware keeps a stupidly high price even when it's completely obsolete because of the status it confers; it will never be cost competitive.
It's basically a replay of their PPC mistake, where they thought they could compete by going at it alone but in the end fell pretty hard because they couldn't compete against the volume PCs were getting.
Now Apple has money but cannot attract enough talent because they have no vision, and the management style is basically mean girls running the show.
You are arguing about purchasing a solution that would cover 8 years of top-tier AI subscription. Seriously, who in their right mind would do that? Apple hardware for AI makes no sense; either you have prosumer-level needs that are going to be served just fine with cheaper hardware (like, for example, Ryzen AI) or you have large needs, and investing in a real AI solution is going to be better because it's going to be much faster. Being able to fit large models is useless if they run too slow.
I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.
Google is not really a competitor to Apple in devices. I mean, they sell devices, but at a way lower volume. The Pixel phone is essentially a tech demo that exists to push their Android partners into making more competitive devices themselves.
The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services.
Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.
Your framing fits well for the Nexus era and even the earliest Pixel iterations, where Google’s hardware largely functioned as a reference implementation and ecosystem lever, nudging OEMs into making better devices.
However, the current Pixel strategy appears materially (no pun intended) different. Rather than serving as an “early adopter” pathfinder for the broader ecosystem, Pixel increasingly positions itself as the canonical expression of Android—the device on which the “true” Android experience is defined and delivered. Far from nudging OEMs, it's Google desperately reclaiming strategic control over their own platform.
By tightening the integration between hardware, software, and first-party silicon, Google appears to be pursuing the same structural advantages that underpin Apple’s hardware–software symbiosis. The last few generations of Pixel are, effectively, Google becoming more like Apple.
They are “frenemies?”
I’m sure Apple is working like mad on their own system they control, and Google is trying very hard to lock out the competition like openAI.
I think you're assuming that no durable or at-scale changes in compute form factor will occur, so that their success pretty much just solely comes down to differentiated iPhone software features. That seems unlikely to me. I don't see phones going away in the next decade like some have predicted, but I do think new compute form factors are going to start proliferating once a certain technological "take off" point is reached.
The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed).
https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)
PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.
Counterpoint the iPad has been brilliant with it’s software and implementation and that is the reason it essentially has the tablet market to itself, is the only tablet with a third-party ecosystem, and it continues to grow.
The original PDA wasn’t a mniaturized laptop or desktop, it was a new device category and the iPhone is the current flagship for that, not the iPad.
Similarly, they didn't need to solve search.
I agree on that they should focus on hardware, software, UX, etc.
I think the problem of current Apple management and especially Tim Cook is that they want to squeeze out as much profit as possible and they see AI as another _Services_ profit center.
A better Apple would say AI is just an app and provide extension points into the OS so that users can plug their favorite LLM, anything from ChatGPT to Mistral, but in a privacy-preserving way if the user wants.
While that would lead to less profit in the short term, Apple's moat was its UX and halo effects (cynically: social signalling). The draw to Apple may last for a bit during enshittification of the platform, but long-term the brand value is more important than short-term profits.
Yes, from a purely business perspective they should let others do the work for them and then pull a Sherlock down the line.
> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.
Apple's core business is providing well-crafted products and user interfaces for all kinds of interactions. Do you really think AI/LLMs won't change the way we use computers?
> They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.
I'd be willing to bet that in less than 5 years, this will sound like saying "they can trivially pay Accenture a billion a year for slightly better UX design" today.
Well-crafted products and user interfaces like butterfly keyboards, antennas, Leopard, Tahoe?
Or maybe Pippin, A/UX, OpenDoc, Copland?
If your high-profile misses become the subject of both memes and major news stories I'd say you are still the benchmark in UX, yes.
Even "Apple design has peaked" is a meme if you've been following this stuff for more than just one decade. (Sure, one day it'll most likely be true, but that doesn't make everyone predicting it now a prophet retroactively.)
Ah, then it applies to Microsoft as well.
I think the issue here is the public promises that were made. Jobs tended not to do that. Things were announced and released when they were ready, which gave them the time to do it right, without any delays.
Sure, there were things like AirPower and the MobileMe widgets… things that were announced, but never shipped. However, by and large, a big new thing was announced, and a week later it would ship. The iPhone was only announced 6 months early to avoid it being leaked by compliance filing (or maybe it was patents).
Cook would be wise to go back to this instead of promising the shareholders things he can’t deliver on.
I think slow playing AI is the right move for Apple. Third party apps give their customers access today, and Apple can take the time to figure out how AI fits into a large cohesive vision for their products and ecosystem… or if it fits at all. Rushing something out doesn’t do anyone any favors, and has never been Apple’s competitive advantage.
> The iPhone was only announced 6 months early to avoid it being leaked by compliance filing (or maybe it was patents).
Is there evidence of this? I think the phone and watch were announced early because Apples vertical integration strategy and quality standards require them to reveal the existence to the rest of the company so they can get everything else working well with the new product category on release. It wouldn't be possible to keep it secret after revealing it internally so they did a simultaneous internal/external reveal to control the message, to maximize impact, to deny rumor sites, etc...
Yes, or at least that’s the reason Jobs gave in the original Jan 2007 keynote:
> We’re going to be shipping these in June. We’re announcing it today because with products like this we’ve got to go ahead and get FCC approval which takes a few months, and we thought it would be better if we introduced this rather than ask the FCC to introduce it for us. So here we are.
He says it at 1:06:55 in the introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg&t=4017s
I think comparisons between Jobs and Cook are trite and cliche by now, and also pointless. Jobs was a generational talent; everyone looked up to him when it came to defining products. Of course Cook is not able to do what Jobs did. No one can.
Apple has already been left behind by many tech shifts: web, search, social, crypto, metaverse, etc. At various times popular opinion had them left behind by netbooks, by tablets, by smart phones, by Windows, by web browsers… until they weren’t.
Apple does not have to lead all categories of tech to be a very successful company.
I'd say that after the Apple Maps launch, Tim Cook learned a lesson about allowing features that need additional work the time they need to fully bake.
Google just launched the Pixel 10 with several promised AI features broken, and could really stand to learn the same lesson.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-pulls-daily-hu...
Apple Maps is still such a sucky service, at least where I live and where I travel to.
It regularly directs me to incorrect addresses and businesses and labels places obviously incorrectly.
Every use of the search function promotes guide content for a single city I'm not currently in, with no way to configure or turn them off. Good products should go out of their way to annoy you IMHO.
They only managed to get their cycle routing for the UK and Ireland working in 2025 after years and years of complaints.
I'm not a fan of Google but I feel compelled to keep Google Maps because Apple Maps is still so unreliable.
I'd offer the balance here that I still don't enjoy using Android and generally prefer iOS to it, warts and all.
Google Maps regularly sends contractors, delivery drivers, etc to a blocked off utility "road" that has never allowed traffic. Apple Maps doesn't. I've given up reporting the problem to Google. (And besides, Google eventually took away the report feature from either desktop or mobile, I forget which, telling me their engineers don't care at all about quality.)
So at least for me Apple Maps wins.
Not sure of that since Vision Pro needed the M5 to work as promised, instead of the blurry mess that ran on the M2
This not about leadership.
It's about product specification. There's no way it fits into their ecosystem without compromising it. Everyone else has compromised theirs and their customers. Apple do not want to do this. I suspect they will fail on AI but will win in the long run as competitors screw their customers over.
I suspect they'll win on AI by not investing $200Bn in CapEx and waiting 5 years until good enough models can be trained for <$1Bn and then just doing that - blocking all other AI models on their hardware beside their own (which their users seem to like) - and saving $200Bn and getting an experience that's good enough for almost everyone and spending enough on marketing to convince everyone it's 10x better.
Apple has BY FAR the best chips at this level. I don't see anything changing that in less than 5 years. That will be a pretty big advantage in the near future.
That's feasible but I think the whole thing will collapse in a heap when the obviously iffy funding structures fall apart due to a mix of lack of declinging investor interest and drunk assery by the US gov resulting in distrust and higher risk profiling of the associated investments.
At least Apple has other products that make money.
Supply chain optimization WAS Cook's original role. This is what made Apple the juggernaut it is today, so your observation is not totally random.
To be fair no one has solved ai assistant at consumer level yet.
I agree. It’s still being figured out.
My prediction is that Apple is the hardware and platform provider (like it’s always been). We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
I think their proprietary chips and GPUs are being undervalued.
My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
Funny you should mention social media in the context of Apple, because they seem to have been attempting that with iTunes Ping[1] and then Apple Music.
iTunes Ping was a Jobs-era attempt to create a social network for music. It seems that they were trying to rely on integrating with Facebook, who pulled out of the collaboration in the last minute before Ping's release.
Apple hasn't seem to have given up on social networks for music. Apple Music presents a nascent networking feature where users can see what their friends are listening to.[2] It seems that Apple has learned their lesson from Ping and does not rely on a third-party for a social graph, which is instead powered by iOS contacts.
While social media is not Apple's bread and butter, they have maintained their interest in having presence in this market. I would assume that this stems from Apple's overall desire to maintain influence over on-the-top services that define the iOS experience. If they let third parties flourish even further, thirds parties gain leverage that they can use during negotiations with Apple. If third parties successfully negotiate for more features that creates parity with apps on non-Apple devices, Apple loses its differentiation on the device markets, thereby losing revenue.
(I think Stratechery wrote about Apple's service strategy that was motivated by its past relationships with Adobe and Spotify. Couldn't find the link.)
> We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
You're right that we haven't asked them for better on-the-top services. But it seems to be in Apple's interest to compete with third party services providers and make sure they do not supersede Apple in terms of their influence over on-the-top experiences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
[2] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphdf490a9e9/io...
Just as an aside, I do not get a social media platform for music. I don’t need a separate social network to manage, and certainly wouldn’t care what 99% of the people I know are listening to 99.9% of the time.
>My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
That's what is happening but I don't think it was by choice. They clearly had plans to deliver a lot more and have repeatedly failed.
Of course they jumped into the race as soon as possible by mentioning ‘Apple Intelligence’ and working on it. But, I think this was more peer pressure than anything else.
Apple’s reliably late to the party most of the time, but they also reliably steal the show. I’m doubtful about OpenAI’s hardware just taking over.
I rather wait and keep using 3rd party models that keep leap frogging themselves and adding features every once in a while, than them just publicly beta testing a bunch of things on my iPhone. If this was the case, we’d see a bunch of people complaining about how terrible the product is and how Claude or GPT or OpenClaw is so much better.
They should start at getting very basic speech recognition working in cars would be a big help.
All I really want from Apple is to continue perfecting their computers, phones and tablets to be the absolute best computing devices possible. As long as they keep iteratively improving those things I don’t care if they’re thought or innovation leaders in whatever hot new thing comes along.
It seems to me that people have been saying that Apple will be left behind since the Apple II. That they keep doing non-obvious things that somehow succeed is what makes them an interesting company.
I don't know that Apple will dominate AI, personally I dislike Siri and iOS, but I think Apple have a very good shot at delivering workable local AI for professionals.
If Apple can lift the inference performance of their forthcoming M5 Ultra chip I think they may become an off the shelf standard for those that want to run large models locally.
That in itself is probably enough to keep them relevant until actual useful uses of Apple Intelligence come to light.
I don’t think Apple or Microsoft (via Windows) will dominate AI. There’s just too much value in the AI being in the cloud (big powerful models vs local) and across your devices (more context on you, running on low powered edge devices like watches, glasses, smart home devices), and the idea of an OS being a decisive factor is already fading with how much work people do in a browser or cloud app.
I don’t see how AI won’t end up running on personal devices. It’s like how mainframes were the original computing platform and then we had the PC revolution. If anything, I think Apple is uniquely positioned to pull the rug on a lot of these cloud models. It might take ten or 15 years, but eventually we’ll see an arms race to do so. There’s too much money on the table, and once cloud providers are tapped out the next logical step is home users. It also makes scaling a lot easier because you don’t need increasingly expensive, complex, and power hungry data centers.
It wasn’t that long ago (ignoring the current DRAM market shenanigans) that it was unthinkable to have a single machine with over terabyte of RAM and 192 physical cores. Now that’s absolutely doable in a single workstation. Heck even my comparatively paltry 96GB of RAM would’ve been absurd in 2010, now there are single prosumer GPUs with that.
With the rate of progress (and in the opposite direction, the physical limitations Intel/AMD/TSMC/ETC are bumping into), there's no guarantees about what a machine will look like a decade from now. But, simple logic applies: if the user's machine scales to X amounts of RAM, the hyperscaler's rack scales to X*Y RAM and assuming the performance/scaling relationship we've seen holds true, it will be correspondingly far smarter/better/powerful compared to the user's AI.
Maybe that won't matter when the user is asking it a 5th grade question, but for any more complex application of AI than "what's the weather" or "turn on a light", users should want a better AI, particularly if they don't have to pay for all that silicon sitting around unused in their machine for most of the day?
This argument would sound nearly identical if you made it in the 70s or early 80s about mainframes and personal computers.
It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?*
And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows.
* (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)
It’s different because of the ubiquity of the internet and the financial incentives of the companies involved.
Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.
Companies also lean into this. Just consider Photoshop. It used to be a one-time purchase, then it became a cloud subscription, now virtually every new AI feature uses paid credits. Despite having that fast SoC, Photoshop will still throw your request to their cloud and charge you for it.
The big point still remains: by the time you can run that trillion parameter model at home, it’s old news. If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one? AI on edge devices will exist, but will forever remain behind data center AI.
Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.
Yes, this is a convenience argument, not a technical one. It's not that your PC doesn't have or could have more than enough storage -- it likely does -- it's that there are other factors that make you use Dropbox.
So now the question becomes: do we not believe that personal devices will ever become good enough to run a "good enough" LLM (technical barrier), or do we believe that other factors will make it seem less desirable to do so (social/financial/legal barrier)?
I think there's a very decent chance that the latter will be true, but the original argument was a technical one -- that good-enough LLMs will always require so much compute that you wouldn't want to run one locally even if you could.
If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one?
What people want to do changes with time, and therefore your PC XT will no longer hack it in the modern workplace, but the point is that from the point that a personal computer of any kind was good enough, people kept using personal computers. The parallel argument here would be that if there is a plateau where LLM improvement slows and converges with ability to run something good enough on consumer hardware, why would people not then just keep running those good enough models on their hardware? The models would get better with time, sure, but so would the hardware running them.
The original point that I was making was never purely a technical one. Performance, economics, convenience, and business trends all play a part in what I think will happen.
Even if LLM improvement slows, it’ll probably result in the same treadmill effect we see in other software.
Consider MS Office, Adobe Creative (Cloud), or just about any pro level software. The older versions aren’t really used, for various reasons, including performance, features, compatibility, etc. Why would LLMs, which seem to be on an even faster trajectory than conventional software, be any different? Users will want to continue upgrading, and in the case of AI, that’ll mean continuing to access the latest cloud model.
No doubt that someone can run gpt-oss-120b five years from now on device, but outside of privacy, why would they when you can get a faster, smarter answer (for free, likely) from a service?
I think there's room for multiple approaches here.
Cloud based AI obviously has a lot of advantages e.g. batched proccessing on the best hardward, low power edge devices, data sharing, etc.
There's still room for local inference though. I don't know that I want "more context on me" all the time. I want some context, some of the time and I want to be in full control of it.
I'd pay for that. I don't think it will be for everyone but a number of people would pay a premium for an off shelf product that provides privacy and control that cloud vendors by their nature just can't offer.
Definitely room for multiple approaches, including local LLMs.
But I just don't think for most users that local LLM capabilities will be a deciding factor in either hardware or OS choices.
A cloud subscription model will be the premium offering ($20 for consumers, $100 to $1000 or pay-per-token for businesses), and inevitably something ad-supported at a lower price or free for low-end consumers.
Once Joe Consumer has access to that subscription ChatGPT or free tier, are they really going to run a far-less-powerful model on their laptop? Outside of a few simple tasks like semantic search in your email, notes, photos; or localized transcription, local models will just be too far behind the curve for the public to make much use of them.
100% agreed. You speak the truth, but already the apologists are writing textbooks justifying Apple's failed strategy :)) and this is why the company thrives. Just blind loyalty to a company that couldn't care less about them.
That is a delusional take on why millions continue to purchase Apple products and services. They expect Apple to provide services that work well and are not willing to put up with the terrible products other companies produce.
That is even more delusional than the parent comment. There is no dialectic law of business that guarantees a better experience with a competitor's product. If you traded your Nintendo Switch for a gaming iPad, for example, you'd be making a horrible mistake. The iPad's presence as a gaming machine is synonymous with online gambling.
If Apple's products and services were heads-and-shoulder above their competition, we'd know. The iPhone is the only modern example, and it relies on lock-in that is considered illegally anticompetitive in multiple jurisdictions worldwide.
There are only two real choices in mobile.
Simple diversity of what people want means lots of people buy Apple because it is better for them. It isn't like anyone gets what they really want across many features, whatever they buy.
And iPad's are optimized for different uses than the switch. Those are entirely different form factors. (You can turn an iPad mini into a switch like device with controller add ons. But those are add ons so the software does not put that form factor first.)
Right or wrong, at least he takes risks. Apple Vision Pro was launched two years too early, but you can’t say that he just realized on existing products.
2 years early? I don’t think the time for Vision is now, or even 3 years from now based on the hardware and use cases.
My point is that the product they marketed only matches the product they released recently.
In terms of something that adults want, you’re right. It would take about 10 years before the only generation who is into it, Gen Alpha, would come of age and be able to make that transition to AR/VR like how Gen X did with high speed internet.
Was he taking risks or just reactionary after Facebook going all-in on the Metaverse (and by the time the product was done, the Metaverse was pretty dead already)?
Have you used either one for long periods of time? Both are revolutionary and were worth the risk. I don’t feel it was reactionary
They have a software issue (I mean who doesn’t) but Cook has tried his hand in lots of products. Some worked like the airpod, airtag and watch; and a particular one flopped: vision. It’s a marvelous tech device that unfortunately had no demand.
Also the m series can be attributed to him and it’s as good as innovation can get.
The other difference between Steve and Tim is Steve would have never been caught dead giving a gold gift to a sitting president. It comes off as desperate and evil, two things Steve would have hated associating with Apple.
Steve Jobs had the AI vision. Siri was a (sorta) early AI. And it was acquired under his watch.
You're dreaming. I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Apple have an almost infinite runway to get AI right if they wanted to ... but just like they haven't invested billions to chase Search, so they'd be fine riding the AI wave getting paid billions to have third party AI put on their device.
I feel like, today, most of the other LLM providers can do what "Apple Intelligence" promised - it'll link with my email/calendar/etc and it can find stuff I ask with a fuzzy search.
That said, I don't really use this functionality all that often, because it didn't really (effortlessly) solve a big need for me. Apple sitting out LLMs means they didn't build this competency along the way, even when the technology is now proven.
I think the same thing is true was VR - except Apple did invest heavily in it and bring a product to market. Maybe we won't see anything big for a while, and Silicon Valley becomes the next Detroit.
You mean you don't have an everyday need to find an authentic Italian restaurant and make dinner reservations? Without actually doing it yourself?
> it'll link with my email/calendar/etc
Wait, how does that work? I've never heard of this outside of closed ecosystems (iPhone is obviously the best at this, but I guess also google crap if you're invested into gmail/gcal/etc)
Gemini can read your personal info if you use google products, obviously.
Beyond that, Claude and ChatGPT (the other major chat providers) both support integrations that let you link your email etc. to allow the chat bot to search through them.
yeah this product does not exist
i have said it before: the Vision Pro with Mac screen linking is a tease for a complete Mac-superior spacial interface. The new high end device from Apple for the future. An interface that levels up a MacBook Pro’s or Studio’s power and productivity.
Except no. After getting the hardware right, Tim gave us an another iOS toy / media kiosk (in 3D!) for $3500.
I would have paid $5000 if it was the new developer friendly, macOS spacial, pro software, room-scale interface machine.
I would have thought Tim Cook would have been proud to push the product line / user interface, bicycle-for-the-mind bar higher during his tour of duty. An historic computing advancement.
But I guess raising the media kiosk, novelty apps and purchases, third party creator tax, service subscriptions and scammy ads with no ad-free tier revenue bar, is what he wants to be remembered for.
Uh, I think Apple had proven themselves many times that they're the one to bring something new and advanced. It started with MacBooks, then iPhones, a digital assistant, TouchID, Airpods, FaceID, fan-less MacBooks and probably more stuff. Is it not enough?
You have only listed hardware, no software (I don't count "A digital assistant" because I don't know what it refers to).
TBH, though, if all they ever do is provide hardware that runs software designed just for that hardware ecosystem, consistently, securely and with decent UX, I'll be happy. That's better than any other consumer computing HW vendor has proven to be able to do.
> I don't count "A digital assistant" because I don't know what it refers to
You haven't heard of Siri?
I don't see the OP stating he only talked about software, and what I mentioned also software in it.
I have heard of Siri, I would never expect anyone to mention Siri while enumerating "new and advanced" things Apple developed.
OP said whatever the next shift in technology, Apple will be left behind. You said Apple actually developed new advanced products, but only mentioned hardware examples. If the new big shift in technology is in software (such as AI), we have no reason to predict Apple will fare well there.
It was new and advanced back then.
AI is not only software but also hardware. Apple were the first to develop a (good) chip specifically for AI computation (ANE), and their MacBooks are very good for running AI models locally.
Apple are not like Google or Facebook (they're mainly software, and Apple are titled more towards hardware), their vision isn't the same as theirs, but their vision will hold for a very long time.
> It was new and advanced back then.
Siri was bought for $200 million in 2010 from Stanford Research Institute ( hence the name ). It wasn't developed at Apple.
Apple is in a better situation now than with Gil Amelio, thanks to printing money with iDevices.
However everything else is quite similar for those of us that were around.
Except now there isn't a Be or NeXT to acquire, nor the former founder to get back.
They can buy Open AI.
First they have to buy NVidia and Microsoft into it.
> it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance, makes better use of AI than any other photo management app in existence. If anything, ChatGPT/Microsoft/Google/etc are absolutely crippled because they don't have access to the data people actually use on a day to day basis—instead, it's scattered across a million browser apps and private silos.
And, you don't have to use an asinine chatbot integration looking like a fool to use it.
Perhaps Google comes the closest to being able to capitalize on this, but I can't say I can remember using any AI integration they have, and I stopped giving them my data over a decade ago.
"I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance"
Have you used a Samsung? Apple's AI miserably fails in every comparison out there in the photos app.
There's also Google Photos with Gemini which helps you find any photo you want with AI better than anyone else.
But sure, Apple has the best AI integration
That's just the typical Apple distortion field.
I have been using Apple devices and supporting many of their users for over 20 years, and they are all extremely invested in their choice of computing device. It's really a source of pride for many of them, weirdly. For this reason, anything Apple does is necessarily better than everything else on the market. It's a bit pointless to argue because they come from an emotional standpoint; if you point at the many things not working properly, they always have an excuse to handwave it away. It's really funny because I use Apple stuff, and I find many qualities in it, but I'm unwilling to be blind to the faults and weaknesses.
This sort of ego investment exists for other brands as well; I think it is a lack of emotional maturity and an inability to realize that a brand does not care if you do not fully "love" their products.
I agree completely. This sort of emotional immaturity was acceptable a decade ago. But today? They are behind everything. I have 3 Macs, 2 iPads and 1 iPhone and their software is sh*t. iPad pro is a joke. It should be illegal to use the label pro as it constitutes false marketing. It's such a dumb OS for the kind of hardware you get. What's the use if it has M3 Pro or whatever if the OS can't keep up. Half the time, it's filled with bugs. Same story for iOS. Mac OS is great..so far. But, their phones are garbage. I have to save my documents into Google drive just so they work fine. What a joke.
And yet 2.35 billion Apple devices are in use and growing. You may be the outlier.
I guess that if I ask you for a good burger, you will point me at a McDonald's. They have so many customers, truly a marker of quality.
Ok, which system has more viruses devoted to it?
Most definitely Windows, but that's basically a factor of their past hegemony.
Hilariously, you are going to argue that Apple is good because they sell a lot of stuff, but somehow Microsoft is bad because they sell a lot of stuff (a lot more, in fact).
I'm not saying apple is perfect, but it's still more usable than android (and certainly google's web stuff) when I looked three months ago.
Samsung is just straight-up spyware infested crap that's somehow even worse than the other android options.
I'm really pulling for Huawei to rescue us at this point.
If you haven't used any of Google's services with your actual data for over a decade, there's a pretty simple explanation about why you don't remember any times you've interacted with one of their AI integrations for those services, and it has nothing do with the relative quality of them.
It's easy: make my life easier.
Instead they choose to optimize for shareholder value.
I got myself an iPhone 16 Pro because of the promised AI features. I had a vision in my mind of what it ought be like:
While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu.
I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot.
"I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving."
Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser!
I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts.
Think about what data and access the phone has:
1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port.
2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating.
3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu.
4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?"
5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now.
How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.
Siri on the Apple Watch is even more fun. It can never answer a question and always opens up a webpage. Then you try to read it on the teensy display and then you are rewarded for your effort by the Siri/WatchOS/whatever closing the view after just a few seconds (even when you were scrolling with the crown).
I am pretty sure they aren't doing any QA or the QA results don't get to the developers. With Pixel Watch I can still understand all the little bugs, it is well-known by now that (some of) the Pixel Watch PMs themselves use iPhones and Apple Watches. But you'd think that the Apple Watch PMs themselves use Apple Watches? The only other explanation that I can think of is that the org is pretty dysfunctional by now.
This was such a self inflicted own goal. Siri has needed work for years and every year they neglected it. When they first bought Siri it was state of the art and then it just languished. Pulling an Intel and sweating your assets until it is too late is never a good idea.
No amount of prior work would have achieved what anyone can now cobble together from an open weights LLM.
Siri was outdated even before the rise or LLMs.
Siri has had many, many, many engineers on it for a while.
I don't doubt it, but what were they all doing? The Metaverse had 10k employees on it for multiple years and seemed to almost be a standstill for long periods of time. What do these massive teams do all day?
Have meetings to figure out how to interact with the other 9990 employees. Then try and make the skeleton app left behind by the team of transient engineers who left after 18 months before moving on to their next gig work, before throwing it out and starting again from scratch.
Exactly. What Meta accomplished could have been done by a team of less than 40 mediocre engineers. It’s really just not even worth analyzing the failure. I am in complete awe when I think about how bad the execution of this whole thing was. It doesn’t even feel real.
Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen.
Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?
At least part of the funding went to research on hard science related to VR, such as tracking, lenses, CV, 3D mapping etc. And it paid off, IMO Meta has the best hardware and software foundation for delivering VR, and projects like Hyperscape (off-the-shelf, high-fidelity 3D mapping) are stunning.
Whether it was worth it is another question, but I would not be surprised is recycled to power a futuristic AI interface or something similar at some point.
Even within the XR industry, we had no clue where all that money went. During the metaverse debacle, the entire industry stagnated. Once metaverse failed, XR adjacent shops started to fail. There was no hardware or technique innovation shared with the rest of the industry, and at the time the technology was pretty well settled.
Since then we lost all the medium players and it's basically just Facebook, Valve, and Apple.
The sad part about this fact is that the tech is mated to a completely rotten ecosystem. If it were sold off I'd be excited to try it.
Big company syndrome has existed for a long time. It’s almost impossible to innovate or move fast with 8 levels of management and bloated codebases. That’s why startups exist.
I wish I could be assigned a project and make no progress in over a decade and still have a job.
Been there, done that, would not recommend. Working on such projects is incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.
Why would you want to be forgotten?
We will all be forgotten given enough timeframe.
"It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."
Given the way current LLMs hallucinate, and given that Apple (presumably) won’t accept this behaviour in Siri, I’m skeptical that existing technology (or existing technology scaled up) can ever create the Siri Apple and its customers want.
I'll settle for "gets voice to text right most of the time". Seriously, Apple is so far behind on the cheapest table stakes at this point I highly doubt their high standards is the issue.
Oh absolutely. The amount of times I have to pause, take a deep breathe and OVER-enunciate (still with mixed success) because my voice, pulse rise and my patience decreases with every absolute butchering (like not even "close but no cigar" but "how on earth did you come up with that?") Siri does to dictated text message in CarPlay...
I don’t even bother anymore. When it reads back the text message and asks if I want to send it I just laugh heartily and say yeah. Sometimes the recipient has to read it aloud and try to phonetically guess what the original words were.
Yeah, but isn't the voice recognition (as opposed to voice comprehension) separate from the supposedly LLM powered bit of Siri? I want better voice comprehension too, but I don't think that moving to a LLM powered Siri will solve that.
Wouldn’t it? Something like Whisper is great for recognition, and is built on a transformer architecture, like most of the SOTA voice stuff is.
I agree with the other poster and gladly converted to a paying customer of Wispr because they did this right.
Honestly, I bet your question is exactly what every team adjacent to this problem at Apple is doing. Pointing fingers at each other and saying, "This isn't my problem. This is some other team." It's so egregiously broken that obviously no one inside there considers it their problem. I think this must be rampant at Apple currently. There's just no explanation for how their software has gone so completely to shit over the last ten years.
Literally what's the difference between that and Siri now.
Siri can't understand or pronounce very well.
A few weeks ago Siri via Car Play responded to a text and sent it without me saying a word or radio on, and with the setting where it asks first before sending enabled. It responding "Why?" to a serious text was seriously inconvenient in the moment. I watched it happen in disbelief.
(Edit: Didn't see your last paragraph before writing the response below)
I think there is a distinction between Siri misunderstanding what was said (which you can see/hear), and Siri understanding what you said but hallucinating an answer. In both cases, you strictly have to check the result, but in the first case it's clear that you've been misunderstood.
The Siri experience just really really really sucks for the year being 2026. So much more frustrating than the claude and chatgpt experiences I have had in recent months.
To my Apple Watch: "Hey Siri, tell me what the time is in the central time zone right now"
"I found this on the web", watch shows a link to time.gov
The only thing I find Siri useful for is: a voice-activated timer, handy in the kitchen when my hands are full and I am juggling multiple timed process. It does that well about 80% of the time.
I don't think that's at all a safe presumption, given that AI still happily hallucinates summaries of text messages/email that is contradictory to that actual content of the message.
Unless I misunderstand your reply, I think we're agreeing.
Yeah. Apple don’t half ass things. This is why people take their products seriously.
You are in a thread complaining about the most half-assed digital assistant in the industry.
I worked at Siri (post acquisition) 13 years ago as one of the early data scientists. Let's just say I am not a bit surprised.
Say more. What did you see?
Apple is the only place I've ever worked where I really feel I'll get summarily fired for saying the wrong thing during a meeting or in my pod (if a manager overhears) - the culture is that draconian. So don't hold your breath waiting for someone to tell you things they're under NDA about (or just general litigation pressure).
I'd rather they get it right than released it unfinished.
But they can't get it right. Siri seems just the most conspicuous indicator that Apple has unlearned to do software. Everything is going to shit there.
Everyone keeps arguing that AI is not Apple’s core business and that their priorities are different. From an end-user perspective, that is irrelevant.
What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows.
At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works.
Today, I still cannot reliably:
- Dictate complex voice input without constant correction
- Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …”
- Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent
These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle.
The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.
It doesn't surprise me that Siri continues to be bad - Apple's current plan is to use a low-quality LLM to build a top-quality product, which turned out to be impossible.
What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".
From several engineer answers over a few years from inside Google, the consistent answer was that they created a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices over the years, almost none of which were capable of running the same software stack/versions, which led to an enormous mountain of technical debt and spaghetti code. There was a big effort a couple years ago to resolve this by creating a single new software version that would work on all modern devices and be supportable across future generations, but it also required (hah!) they essentially abandon (not brick, but just not really actively maintain or support) a plethora of older devices. So you have lots of consumers with either a mixed device environment where there's no consistency between their devices, or consumers who only have older devices that won't run the newer software and will be complaining about performance and reliability until they eventually give up and either abandon Google Home or buy a new device.
Whats the problem? The LLM runs on a big fat server, the devices only have to call APIs, no?
Indeed especially compared to chatGPT running so much better on my same iPhone where siri shits the bed. Voice transcription sucks in every aspects on my iPhone except surprise chatGPT gets what I am saying 90% of the time.
I can't even get gemini on my phone, configured as my assistant, to schedule a timer. It just googles the answer now or tells me "Gemini can't do that". 16 years ago it was doing that perfectly.
That's all I use Siri for. I'll be really cheesed off if this gets lost in the new version.
Seems weird to comment on delayed new features from Apple. Obviously if it doesn't meet the quality bar it would get pushed back, that's just how they do things.
But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context.
Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.
But that's not just how they do things. Apple's quality bar is basically at the floor. Liquid glass, text editing on iOS...
Are Apple AI agent delays bearish for AI agents in general? Unless something else is the issue it’s normal behavior for Apple not to implement something everyone else already has until it’s very good and solid.
Apple wants to vertically integrate. Their AI strategy until recently was to develop their own LLM models that were small enough to run on device. But massive scaling is what makes LLMs so powerful, so all their internal models were terrible and unusable.
Basically they bet that compute efficient LLMs were the future. That bet was wrong and the opposite came true.
These aren't "agent" features. they're the features announced in 2024, like ai summaries in web search and natural language image editing
I think to a similar point, if Apple is so picky about it that it’s still not ready… it definitely tracks with my experience using ai, it requires my review and often bungles things, I wouldn’t just turn it over to my customer yet and trust it to be reliably high quality.
This is obviously a death march project. Just delay it indefinitely until the Google Gemini based Siri chatbot is ready. Why ship something half-assed?
The referenced Bloomberg source (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/apple-s-i...) says this about the delayed effort:
But it’s been a complex undertaking. The revamped Siri is built on an entirely new architecture dubbed Linwood. Its software will rely on the company’s large language model platform — known as Apple Foundations Models — which is now incorporating technology from Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini team.
> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said.
Is this really a reason to delay though? It's not like the current Siri is capable of processing queries outside of "set a timer"
Do similar issues exist with Gemini on Android?
Or are these challenges very Siri/iOS specific?
Gemini can and does send everything to Google.
Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device.
Which is currently slower than the servers that others can bring to the table - because they already grab every piece of data you have.
> Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device.
Apple is not trying to do everything on-device, though it prefers this as much as possible. This is why it built Private Cloud Compute (PCC) and as I understand it, it’s within a PCC environment that Google’s Gemini (for Apple’s users) will be hosted as well.
This isn't planned to be exclusively on-device. Siri isn't exclusively on-device now, to begin with.
No they aren't, that is why Private Cloud Compute is a thing.
Not sure whether it's a language/pronounciation issue but for 15 years since siri was released i have not seen a single person using it successfully without having to yell at it for not waking up or not understanding the request correctly
I’ve been using it a dozen times a day for the past 14 years with very few issues. Certainly not enough issues that I would ever want to go back to adding things like alarms and reminders and events by hand.
I was cleaning up room today and while wiping dust from bookshelf homepod sits on, siri out of blue goes with "I thought so".
It'll be 15 years this October and I can't still use siri with my language.
I listen to Sirius XM in my car a lot and when there are ad bumpers or hosts that say "Sirius XM", it triggers siri on my watch about 10% of the time. Fun.
i guess im a unicorn haha. I routinely control my home (shades, lights, fans), set reminders for myself, set timers while cooking, and reply to (simple) text messages.
> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said
I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it.
In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker
I think we can conclude at this point that the guy yelling at engineers to "just stick ChatGPT into Siri" doesn't understand that the result is unusable, for whatever reason. That reason might be that the UE is bad, or because it grossly violates user privacy, but it might be that Apple would loose $$$$$ because LLM inference is expensive.
Damn paywalls! Sorry, I shouldn't be so negative. I'd just like to be able to read the article.
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This thread is an example how 24h news cycle hurts brain cells.
They are late with a release, they must have unlearned to build software.
It’s because the writer keeps having to parrot the same garbage he guesses over and over again to prop up his paid newsletter.
I am so tired of every Sunday when he unleashes his garbage out upon the masses and every Apple blog shits it back out as reliable info.
One of his recent “guesses” was that iOS 26.4 beta would be out soon. Like, really?
Is it not impressive what xai did with Grok? It's already integrated into twitter and my Tesla. So quickly? What prevented apple from doing the same but building out their equivalent of grok?
Grok runs on a cloud server, I think Apple are trying to do as much as possible on-device, which makes it a lot harder.
This is not a bad example. Tesla is indeed running a custom LLM, available in their vehicles, capable of acting as a general chatbot and issuing commands to the car, developed in-house. While Grok is not up-to-par with other frontier models, it's certainly far beyond Siri.
Leadership matters!
Yea no mate. Then how would Grok function at all?
I just wish they would fix the out of memory disaster on my MacBook that is ios26
It's hard to imagine that just killing off Siri would hurt iPhone sales. It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. The primary value of Siri is to check a box for investors, who are riding the AI wave. The same people how rode the voice assistant wave 15 years ago.
There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.
Anecdotal data coming in hot.
I use Siri daily for controlling HomeKit devices. She's not always on point though. I've named a light basically "Radiohouse", because that's what the designer called it, but 25% of the time she insists of playing radio instead of turning on the light. I'm not a native english speaker and communicate with Siri in Danish, but still. Siri is definitely not useless and I would love for her to become a lot better.
You may be right that the majority probably doesn't use Siri, but that's because it doesn't really make sense to use Siri on the phone. I rely on HomePod speakers to interface with it, that makes a lot more sense for me.
I used to run into this and I use Siri enough to control HomeKit that I give things really mundane names ("Upstairs Bathroom Vanity", "Guest Bedroom Front Shades") to ensure that we have no miscommunication between me and Siri.
If you name your Hue light "House Music" and you're confused when you ask to "turn on house music", you've played yourself. I am interested to see if such a light was in the LLM context window or there were memories recorded of past bad encounters if an LLM would predict better...
I have this same issue with my overcast app. I use it for podcasts and Siri insists it’s the band.
> It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter.
Do you drive to work?
I don't either, but I suspect anyone that does, and that's hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, would get a lot of value out of a version of Siri that can actually act as a "personal assistant", capable of doing things like booking a doctor's appointment that fits into their calendar, summarizing email, canceling subscriptions etc.
And beyond that, I suspect the main reason voice assistants haven't taken off yet is the fact that they just haven't been possible pre-LLMs. Siri has been voice dial on a prescription-free amount of steroids. Imagine what it could do with actual contextual understanding.
I drive, and right now I honestly can't trust Siri to even add a to-do item properly. Sometimes it creates a calendar entry, sometimes it randomly decides to do a web search instead. They haven't really been doing anything to fix this (until now, that is).
Just because you can't find use in a voice assistant, it doesn't mean others don't. At the very least, Siri is an important accessibility tool and everyone benefits from accessibility.
Designed my entire house around Siri with HomePods in every room. We use it to control the lights, blinds, heated floor, play music, turn on the tv, etc. Would be great if it could do more.
I've been using an iPhone since 2017 and the only times I use Siri is to set an alarm or to play Music. Setting an alarm works like 90% of the time. Playing music on the other hand is a coin toss. Most of the time it fails because it plays the wrong song, cannot understand what I say or just refuse to play and ask me to unlock the phone because I'm not using apple music.
I use it to run Shortcuts I’ve created daily. Just have to careful with the naming - something too short can get confused.
You would be surprised I think. I know a bunch of people who use Siri, for all sorts of things. I personally regularly use the "push to activate" Siri for quickly setting up meetings et al.
And a *lot* of people want to use Siri while driving, when they can't access the phone, at least not legally.
This is an absurd take. Of course tons of people use Siri. It’s by far the fastest way to create alarms, reminders, and events. If Apple got rid of it, I would feel like a cave man, having to unlock my phone and navigate multiple screens just to do basic tasks. I’d immediately switch to Android.
Apple has spend, and will spend, billions of dollars developing Siri and you use it to create alarms, reminders and events (probably more). The question quickly becomes if that money had been better spend elsewhere, at the cost of losing a small number of customers.
Apple will remove successful phones models, because they did sell as well as expected, but they keep pumping money into software that still only does basic voice assistance? The problem for Apple is that they can't NOT invest in turning Siri into an AI product, because the stock would lose value the minute that announcement was made, regardless of how sound the financials of that decision might be.
I might be completely wrong and 80% of iPhone users use Siri, but I'd surprised if it's even 20%.