I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.

Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.

Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.

While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.

Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.

Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products.

Excessive greed obliterates goodwill.

You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark.

Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.

Teen iPhone ownership is up to 88% (!) in the US.

I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.

Except the little issue teens don't appear on the same rate as iPhones hit the store shelves.

Misinformed take IMO.

M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.

Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?

Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.

Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.

That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.

Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.

Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.

Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.

Vertically-integrated modems are not cool. I mean, they are to me and likely other geeks, but to the general public? Their eyes would glaze over.

Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.

You’re not thinking two or three orders out. It’s not about the modem, it’s about reducing the resource allocation of a boring component to make space for increasing the resources of other exciting components, taking the whole into account.

iPhone will get some new exciting feature and everyone will wonder how they managed to do it at the price point nobody else can.

Name some "new exciting features" iPhones gained in the last 5 years that made their way into music videos like the iPod did

I’m excited to shoot my own music videos with my iPhone now.

Last weekend my grade school friend visited and we took a boat out on Puget Sound. We followed two orca whales for 45 minutes and I shot multiple videos of them in 4k 60fps. They look beautiful and played seamlessly on my TV without any crappy ads. I shared them with our two families easily through airdrop and later through iCloud when we got back to land.

That evening my son was dancing and signing he favorite songs with my friend’s son so I shot a “music video” of them and shared it again.

Both these experiences were exciting to me. It felt insane to do such things with a pocket computer Apple hasn’t screwed up in nearly 20 years.

Like I said, it’s the whole product experience that’s the point. Apple has earned enough of my trust to believe one will come and even if not, I’m satisfied with what I have today and will have tomorrow.

I think we have different definitions of cool

Life would be rather boring if we didn’t.

Memojis and Oscar-winning movies shot entirely on iPhone

Vertical integration is what got us fanless laptops with amazing battery life. Those are cool.

Apple thinks/knows/gambles increasing vertical integration by building its own modems will make things even better.

You talk like a nerd.

Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura.

Apple is not cool.

Agree. There are probably more than a million tiny contextual data points that make a person look at something (whether it’s a tech product or a musician) and go: “cool, man.”

But those millions of data points can (rarely, briefly,) coalesce around a product or company, even though that’s mostly out of the control of those building the product or company.

EG if you asked someone in 1965 if a Jaguar E-Type was cool, or someone in 2000s London whether the Fruityloops DAW was cool, they’d say “yeah”.

I’m mostly agreeing, and it’s a super minor point, but tech specs are part of the unknowable, constantly-shifting constellation of symbols that produce “cool”, and there isn’t a reason an Apple product couldn’t, in the future, align the stars. They did before! The white iPod earbud wire did, briefly, signify cool.

> Apple is not cool.

Says who, exactly? It is very cool for most.

Doesn't make those achievements any less cool to me

> their own vertically-integrated modem

I'm kinda jazzed about this.

Integration, power, and UX improvements, sure.

But (as a noob), I imagine having their own base band (?) chip will be like having built-in software defined radios. Opening up new applications and uses cases.

I'm on a M4 with nano texture display. It's IMO the pinnacle of what a computer should be. I hate apple and their anti repair practices but wanted to chime in about how good the hardware has become.

If they push forward with local AI that can be somewhat trusted, it would be a huge win.

> I'm on a M4 with nano texture display. It's IMO the pinnacle of what a computer should be. I hate apple and their anti repair practices but wanted to chime in about how good the hardware has become. > > If they push forward with local AI that can be somewhat trusted, it would be a huge win.

How is that touch screen?

“sj placed cool first” … in what universe?

Steve placed “Steve likes it” first. Many of the things he liked were terrible.

Cool things happen(ed) at Apple in spite of executive leadership, not because of it. The better E-team players know to stand back and not get in the way.

What I’m saying is that these are all garbage opinions backed by nothing. “Cool” is “just your opinion, man.”

They layperson thinks of Apple quite positively. Nobody cares what us nerds here think is cool. The bazillion people who happily bought AirPods don’t care that a tiny group of nerds are still mad that Apple took away their dork expansion slot and dweeb ports.

Apple is more trusted than any other tech company with privacy in consumer surveys.

Apple is the smartphone company with the highest customer satisfaction ratings (over 80%).

Consumer reports ranks Apple first in computer support customer service.

These are quantitative measures.

Apple very clearly has command of their messaging and there really aren’t any cracks in their strategy.

Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging).

While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter.

Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1]

Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition.

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-322149... [2] https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smar... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...

It seems like high app store fees must in the long term ensure that the quality of third party software for any system will be reduced.

It will certainly attract less talent, so even that is slow enshittification. The sane thing would have been to use the software ecosystem to sell the platform, and have no fees.

They announced this at wwdc this year in “Foundation Models”. Developers have access to an on-device llm (not sure how good it is yet).

Yeah but they're just too small to do anything useful with yet. Like we're in this weird state where you can't easily sell usage based pricing through appstore payments (and customers don't really understand usage anyways). So you need to sell access to an agent via a subscription, but your costs are 90% usage based so it's hard to price. If appstore developers could use a quota of access tokens from a users apple intelligence subscription we could offer AI agents for $3-5/mo and they would be actually usable! But if you need to pay for inference costs it has to be $10-20/mo. It's just a lame experience and makes the web the place to build agents even though they'd be more useful on mobile devices.

Wait, usage for the on-device LLM is free, so why would you charge for it? I think that's just a mental model shift.

I mean, they’ve released a framework to access the on device model https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels

They're just too small though, maybe in the future you will be able to run a larger model on device or smaller models will become more finetuneable to be actually useful, but the current slate are pointless.

Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.

Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?

Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.

> Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money

It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall

The difference is it’s a move. Actually doing something rather than putting out internal PR.

Zuck tried and flailed with the metaverse. That was a huge waste, but he can afford it and fortune favours the brave.

You don’t think Apple makes moves?

Not everyone has to make the same move at the same time.

Apple did many - Just not the right or good ones in the past decade.

Services (icloud and music and tv)/airpods/watch/M processors and the new modem seem like good ones.

If those don’t seem like right or good moves, I can’t imagine much will impress you in this world.

The Metaverse was a waste of billions of dollars to develop a product that nobody wanted. In no world was that a smart business move, or one that should be emulated. Doing nothing is better than flushing money down the toilet.

Undercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.

> They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?

This does seem like an embarrassing fail, but even Google has not completed replacing Assistant with Gemini. There have also been lost functionality (maybe temporary) in the process.

they are not talking about perplexity; the endless rumor mill talks about perplexity. The same that has them buying everything from Disney to Porsche to Nike for decades.

> "They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?"

This is actually one of the hardest frontier problems. The "general purpose" assistant is one of the singular hardest technical problems with LLMs (or any kind of NLP).

I think people are easily snowed by LLMs' apparent linguistic fluency that they impute that to capability. This cannot be further from the truth.

In reality a LLM presented with a vast array of tools has extremely poor reliability, so if you want a thing that can order delivery and remember your shopping list and remind you of your flight and play music you're radically exceeding the capabilities of current models. There's a reason successful (anything that isn't demoware/vaporware) uses of agentic LLMs tend to narrow-domain use cases.

There's a reason Google hasn't done it either, and indeed nor has anyone else: neither Anthropic nor OpenAI have a general purpose assistant (defined as being able to execute an indefinite number of arbitrary tools to do things for you, as opposed to merely converse with you).

You split up the tasks into sub agents. This is something my company builds on top of langgraph.

Sure, go try it and evaluate it rigorously end-to-end, over a sufficient number and variety of tools.

For the purposes of the exercise, let's conservatively say, maybe ~2000 tools covering ~100 major verticals of use cases. Even that may be too narrow for a true general purpose assistant, but it's at least a good start. You can slice the sub-agents however you'd like.

If you can get recall, for real user utterances (not contrived eval utterances authored by your devs and MLEs), over 70% across all the verticals/use cases/tool uses, I'd be extremely impressed. Heck, my thoughts on this won't matter - if you can get the recall for such a system over the bar you'd have cracked something nobody else has and should actively try to sell it to Google for nine figures.

Yeah, it turns out many nerds don't consider the fact that the amazing tools we are using to do constrained tasks aren't that great for more general purpose things. Writing a spike, spitting out unit tests, or vibe coding a front end feature is not the same as planning a trip to europe, balancing accounts, or managing a schedule.

So much attention, effort, and tooling has focused on getting llms better at writing more and more code. They can grep and curl and run scripts and iterate and build things really fast, and maybe even maintain it if given enough guardrails and direction.

But it turns out we have had a _ton_ of useful training data for models to work with for software. Not just books or docs, but examples, tests, snippets and full programs for just about any language. Show me a stackoverflow with playwright scripts or API calls (hah, as if thats possible) to build itineraries from delta, aa, united, priceline, expedia, etc, .... which is one part of one piece of the ai assistant pipe-dream.

I don't think its impossible as these tools get much smarter and more generally capable that we get decent assistants in other constrained, non-software domains, but it will take very good companies focusing on it for a long time. Much like any product that try to do these sorts of things.

Its so easy for programmers in our bubble to overlook the complexity involved in automating or even _describing_ simple tasks that humans navigate everyday via habit, learning, experience, and perception...all things that llms struggle with constantly.

Just to once again bring you up to speed with where the markets at, the thing you originally called out as being difficult is a solved problem.

There’s not just one specific solution to it either, there’s a whole class of tooling for it. And I doubt google would pay 9 figures for something that’s built on top of libraries they put out using models they developed.

As of August 1st ‘we’ (as in, I personally developed with my company, and have been paid for with real dollars which are now sitting in my bank) have a F100 using this tech in production.

As for the no true Scotsman fallacy you’re putting in front of yourself, I will let you deal with that but I would like to see how you came up with the maths.

They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.

Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that.

Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.

> Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one?

Doesn't somebody (not named Nvidia) need to make a serious profit on AI before we can say that Tim Cook failed?

OpenAI and Anthropic aren't anywhere close. Meta? Google? The only one I can think of might be Microsoft but they still refuse to break out AI revenue and expenses in the earnings reports. That isn't a good sign.

I certainly don't think that profit would be required. Many of the massive tech companies that exist today went through long periods of time were they focused on growth and brand no profits for many years even post IPO.

I won't pretend to know exactly how the AI landscape will look in the future, but at this point it's pretty clear that there's going to be massive revenue going to the sector, and Moore's law will continue to crank.

I see what you're saying though. In particular is first generation gigs data centers might be black holes of an investment, considering in the not too distant future AI compute will be fully commoditized and 10x cheaper.

Yeah, I think we're on the same page on this one.

"failed to skate where the puck was headed" assumes that we know where the puck is going to be. We don't.

Everyone is skating towards that same spot while Apple is over by the blue line practicing their swizzles. They sure look like they're doomed. But large groups of people have skated to the "wrong spot" thousands of times. That's the entire point that Gretzky was making with his quote. He's not big enough, strong enough, fast enough to get in that scrum. They're all fighting it out and the puck slides away. To him. All alone.

Maybe that is Apple, maybe it's not. I mean, they're still learning to skate while everyone else is playing hockey.

Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.

Great news, but entirely lost on commercial hyperscalers and much of the PC market. Apple's recalcitrance towards supporting Nvidia drivers basically killed their last shot at real-world rackmount deployment of Apple Silicon. Now you can go buy an ARM Grace CPU that does the same thing, but cheaper and with better software support.

You really can’t. NVIDIA’s arm chip still looks nerfed compared to apple’s offering, and…I can run 40GB sized LLMs on the plane with no internet…it’s not something that you can do with any other platform.

I imagine they recognize the need for increased memory bandwidth and will bump that up significantly -- they are well positioned to do so.

Their X/OpenGL support has also been in stasis for 10 years or more. There’s not enough money taking over for SGI to move their needle.

Macs are basically a dead business. The key is somehow creating the AI equivalent of an App Store or something

Dead business?

The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit.

The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.

Don't abandon Intel Macs, then and call them Mac AI systems with NVIDIA chips. Sell them for more than the Apple Silicon Macs.

No one would buy slower hotter computers for more money. Most people who own Apple computers today are extremely satisfied with Apple silicon, and AI enthusiasts are an increasing large slice of those people (since there really isn’t anything else and getting a 3090/4099/5090 is still hard and expensive).

Some problems cannot be fixed with more money (unless to buy a stake , as Microsoft did with open ai). See Microsoft's endless failed efforts to compete with Google search or iPhone. Although looking at the recent stock price since 2020, MSFT stock was the winner anyway.

Because of Azure, Office, Game Pass, Github,....

To detriment of Windows, XBox hardware, .NET team shooting into all directions.

> there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod

That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.

Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:

> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,

That's actually very consistent for Apple. Apple doesn't generally claim to be the first to do something, but have always taken the line that they're the first to execute it well. Hence their fondness for words like 'reimagine', 'revolutionise', etc.

Yes, dominant smartphones before iPhone were BlackBerry inspired, full physical keyboard with small screen.

When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form.

Apple made the bet that they could make the full screen experience much more compelling that people would accept the trade off of losing the keyboard.

There were several slate phones before the iPhone

They had slider keyboards yeah?

True. But in this case Apple isn't only a bit late but completely lost with AI - Efforts driven towards AR for years absolutely killed their game.

> Apple doesn't generally claim to be the first to do something

Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims inventing things that have existed.

> Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims inventing things that have existed

Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims reinventing things that have existed, or revolutionising them, or reimagining them, but rarely claims to be the first, ever, without qualification.

And what exactly in your iPhone announcement quote was untrue?

It's pretty on brand for Apple, I'm surprised they hadn't pushed this narrative harder earlier.

There were smartphones before the iPhone. Consider the IPAQ and Windows Mobile 6.0.

And of course plenty of MP3 players before iPod.

I've heard the phrase "through Apple new technologies achieve their final form", possibly not official Apple but one of the Apple choir bloggers (Gruber?).

There were smartphones before iPhone, now all smartphones are black featureless rectangles. There were printers before LaserWriter, then for 20 years all printers became this. (And later disappeared.) There were wireless heaphones before Airpods, now the difference is in the shape of the stubs. There were laptops before the Macbook Air... etc

Can you source the apple PR claiming they invented the mp3 player or the smartphone?

I recall marketing comparing iPhones to blackberries. They even had iTunes running on Motorola phone

https://www.makeuseof.com/itunes-phone-before-the-iphone-exp...

Nobody claimed Apple was the first at this. They were just the best, eventually. But it’s been 20 years

They didn't, that's why I explicitly wrote "or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages".

But they sure write releases like that's implied.

> iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control iPhone with just their fingers.

Large display existed before, "just fingers" control was... always the case, the interface was quite polished, but it existed elsewhere, etc. But if you didn't know that, reading the announcement sure sounds like it's never been done before. It's the multi touch that makes the combination novel.

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762859.