Well, as we speak, Apple is still one of the most valuable companies in the world, shareholder-value-wise and (most importantly) consumer-preference-wise.
So, being an absolute Apple-skeptic, I don't blame them for not having a crystal-clear future direction right now. VR/AR? Nah, probably not happening. AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows? And they've got products in all these markets, just not obviously compelling ones.
So, a holding pattern is more than warranted at this point. Will this allow anyone to bypass Apple? Possibly, but the chance/hope of Apple front-running everyone else is definitely still alive.
Apple has historically been a little behind the curve in technology, but then excelling at execution and user experience.
If they could (quickly) come out with a personal assistant which was really useful for people's planning and shopping and productivity, which knew how to navigate the apps and services on a person's apples phone/computer/cloud data, and do it locally and/or privately... They'd be in a good position even if it wasn't the absolute leader of the pack.
AI is going to be so powerful in the coming years that if apple falls behind AND doesn't give the keys to some other company to integrate AI, then I could see people jumping ship.
I think the reason why Apple hasnt come out with such a useful personal assistant AI is because the underlying technology just doesn't make this so easy.
Apple is the only company so far that seems to be unwilling to accept a poor user experience with generative AI, so their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
Of course Nadella is critical of Apple's efforts: he selling the goods! It's like a Steel CEO complementing a new bridge but then "they should have used more steel" - well duh, but since when do we trust the purveyors of components as to what should be added?
The bottom line is "Agentic AI" is just unreliable. If you thought you hated Apple Intelligence now, then if they had gone whole hog, the unreliability would be astounding.
> their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
That does feel like the ultimate goal with many of these AI initiatives. I have a suspicion that a lot of the negativity thrown towards Apple's AI integration comes from people hoping Apple will legitimize their product, not from people wanting their phone to be better.
As a long time Mac and iPhone user, I just don't get all the complaints about innovation. Macs are as innovative as they ever have been, maybe more. Apple silicon has been an absolute powerhouse and godsend for battery life.
iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are.
When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the commenters are missing are the Jobs' pageantry and showmanship. Which I also miss. But in terms of capability, I am quite happy with what we have.
Apple is a fantastic iterator and polisher. They are not innovators. What was the last apple product that was truly innovative, i.e. something no-one else has done before?
That is not what ”innovate” means, you’re mixing it up with ”invent”. You could argue that they never invented anything, but not that they haven’t had, and continue to have, plenty of innovations the past decades.
Think every product that was one way, then Apple did it differently and suddenly every product on the market looked like theirs. That’s a long list of both hardware and software.
On the other hand, when was the last time any mass market tech product was _invented_ by that definition (something no one else has done before)? Most products are incremental improvements, even innovations are rare when it comes to mass market products.
Waiting until others struggle with early pains before swooping in with a polished version after the idea has been demonstrated is also Apple's consistent playbook.
They've never been innovators, that's not their strength. They're polishers.
That’s a little shortsighted I think. How many patents does Apple hold?
This whole conversation feels like a zero sum discussion, as “if Apple isn’t the most innovative then they’re not innovative on any level.
They did have usable file system search decades ahead of Windows.
I mean.. Does window have it now?
Debatable at best..
Everything (the program for Windows) gives Windows very good search, and it's not really doing any magic. It's just taking the NTFS journal and putting a decent GUI around it. File content search is optional and much slower, and indexing of other file systems is done the manual way (by actually searching through the entire file system). The fact that Windows hasn't done what Everything has already done goes to show it's not that Microsoft can't, but rather that they don't want to, unless every single Win32 developer over there has either kicked the bucket or moved on to better pastures.
> They're polishers.
UX innovators then
> AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows?
This is a really cool take that actually aligns with Apple's walled garden. They've built the garden wall (their hardware), they've prepped the soil (marketing, sometimes not great), and now it's time for them and their partners to start releasing local apps that take full advantage of the M2/M3's power to execute LLMs locally.
Apple has made bets like this before, both on the CPU and peripheral side. Historically, for better or for worse, they've done the whole "build the hardware (AltiVec, Thunderbolt, even USB-A) and the software will come" thing. With their latest ARM CPUs they're doing that with AI & LLMs, and it's a huge chance to change the direction of this tech from SaaS centric to user-owned. I too am not an Apple fan but I think they are going to come out of this looking pretty good.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that Apple "built" USB-A, just saying that when they released the iMac it relied heavily on USB-A and people were pretty surprised at the investment they made in that tech.
I think the key here is the ability to focus on the privacy-first nature of local LLMs. A cloud-based service will always be more powerful (and markedly so), but Apple is very cautious about pursuing cloud-based solutions when user data is involved - privacy is a selling point of their products, after all. This is a double-edged sword, as you get to sell your services as privacy-friendly, but your offerings can be significantly less capable than your competitors' (see the iOS messages summary debacle, for example). The advantage of waiting is that smaller AI models are becoming much more powerful all the time.
Of course, Microsoft is also at this with its Copilot programme for laptops, where an onboard Neural Processing Unit has to be a particular speed to qualify. This lets you do local AI things like content-aware image snipping, text summaries and...er, Recall.
As to whether Apple will come out of this looking good or not, I think they're currently regretting rolling out a shitty initial AI offering, and will get better with the next release. It'll be like Apple Maps. Or the butterfly keyboard. Or any number of other broken version 1 Apple things.
An interesting question is to whether Apple Intelligence can be cancelled or pared back now the landscape is so AI dominated, i.e. will the lack of AI offerings be seen as a competitive disadvantage, or are people so sick of AI by now that it isn't a factor.
The same things Intel said 10 years ago.
Intel is as similar to Apple as Tata Steel is to Ford Motors. There was a time when the former was trying to get closer to the latter, but I think the folly of that is clear by now...
The difference is Intel actually has direct competitors in their market.
Apple doesn’t. They created a market for products with a deep vertical integration of software and hardware. And they do it at enormous scale.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are the closest competitors but they license their software and have to compete on hardware across many products.
Intel is not in the same business as Apple.