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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

[1]: https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...

[2]: https://builder.aws.com/content/399VbZq9tzAYguWfAHMtHBD6x8H/...

An independent Mac business that doesn't have such tie-ins, would sell much less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The Apple tax are the hedious margins Apple imposes into their customers.

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

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.

> 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.

At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.

Ever heard of the Data Transfer Project? https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?sjid=95203...

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.

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. 

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.

Plus I have a partner and friends, so unless we all want to follow my phone's instructions it's not going to work.

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.

1. Open Google Maps

2. Search "hotel"

3. Pick the first one

4. See "sponsored" just before the first link to a third party

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)

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.

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.

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 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.

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...)

> 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.

> 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.

Looked really cool and like the AI I've always imagined.

Then we can get on with exploring the galaxy.

Butlerian jihad.

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.

Isn’t it largely made up of Swiss, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese?

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.

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.

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.)

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 do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...

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.

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.

...and how does your "by hand" process solve this problem? You are influenced by the same SEO crap regardless of AI intervention.

It's the difference between buying the top sponsored result on an online marketplace vs. reading reviews and deciding between products.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Or maybe Pippin, A/UX, OpenDoc, Copland?

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.)

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.)

[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16...

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.

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.

did best. did.

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.

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?

- 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.

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 !

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.

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.

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.

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.