Apple's "strategic vision" for AI is to add a computer use agent (AI assistant) to the OS to perform tasks on behalf of the user, plus contextually surface AI capabilities in many specific contexts they've got utility (copy editing, image generation, photo organization, translation, coding).
What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say.
If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it.
If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.
I feel that any vision needs to have some actual execution behind it, otherwise it's just a twinkle in someone's eye. "Built for Apple Intelligence" is literally the slogan for Apple's 2024 lineup. The vision is there front and center. But everything they layed out in their vision (and explicitly advertised!) has been a joke so far, falling somewhere between half-baked, trivial, or nonexistent. They've had to pull that ad showing contextually-aware interactions because that's nowhere near ready. https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/...
After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.