This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.
Pretty much it. That said, they did try to appease the markets by announcing 'Apple Intelligence' so they didn't appear to be behind everyone.
They did do the smart thing of not throwing too much capital behind it. Once the hype crumbles, they will be able to do something amazing with this tech. That will be a few years off but probably worth the wait.
For consumers AI has anti hype right now. It's off-putting to see consumer products slapped with a hundred AI labels. I see people talk about how you can turn off all of Apple Intelligence with one toggle rather than hundreds on Samsung.
Firefox is also marketing how easy it is to disable AI.
I think a lot of people are not hype about AI in their toaster, but... I don't think people are generally turned off form deeper integration in their OS itself. Especially when for some people this is representing ideas similar to how programmer-types get excited about Shortcuts.
Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff
> Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff
Sure, but is this actually happening? Last time I tried, Atlassian's heavily-pushed AI couldn't even turn a Jira ticket number of Confluence into a clickable link. Similarly, Windows has been actively moving away from providing locally-installed applications in the Start menu search towards offering random internet garbage.
I'm all for using a LLM to make something like Siri able to understand both "Siri, turn off the lights" and "Siri, make it dark!" - but that's not what's being pushed onto consumers, because there is no way anyone is going to pay $100/month for any version of that.
Unfortunately companies seem to be in panic mode about making ANY offering to not become irrelevant that they're giving AI overall a bad reputation. Everyone made a mad dash and didn't spent enough time making that product well thought out. Some got burned by it such as Microsoft.
Everyone seems well convinced AI can just replace 90% of software out there but I've yet to see any evidence of that. Sure it can stand up a blog, get a simple app together pretty quick but once you get into larger scale software it's not capable of doing it by itself and you still need teams of developers working together.
People like features, benefits, and outcomes. AI isn't a feature, it's a technology that can enable features. But it's being marketed as the only thing that matters.
The user does not give two shits if the new laptop "has AI". This is how Apple has been killing it lately, they market the macbooks being powerful, cheap, with long batteries, and a premium feel. Things the user cares about. Most of the stuff marketers are just blanket labeling "AI" will eventually be shuffled to the background and rebranded with a more specific term to highlight the feature being delivered rather than the fact it's
AI".
I reckon most humans never learn the valuable lessons of the past.
As you put it - nobody cares about the technology in and of itself. They care about “ok cool what’s in it for me?”. That’s what determines their decision to purchase/use a thing.
You're right, there is plenty of space for features that require AI to work but that are undistinguishable from "classical" feature. Better autocompletion is a proven one for example.
That is definitely true, but some time ago Apple’s marketing team has also put out some pretty cringey commercials to the contrary. It’s wild how they seemed to be encouraging people to cheat and hide their ineptitudes, rather than just being honest about it.
As far as I'm concerned, I would rather see the industry prioritize AI that doesn't provide false information over pushing slop out as quickly as possible.
Hell, there are chatbots out there trying to convince kids that suicide is a great idea.
How is prioritizing pushing out slop as quickly as possible with no consideration of the consequences acceptable?
Yeah exactly the Apple Intelligence thing was pure BS to shut people up who kept saying apple was going to get disrupted by missing out.
Apple seems to follow the values that Steve laid out. Tim isn’t a visionary but he seems to follow the principles associated with being disciplined with cash quite well. They haven’t done any stupid acquisitions either. Quite the contrast with OAI.
The competition has also attached it to a toxic brand and heavily integrated it with actively user-hostile applications. It doesn't matter if your tech is years ahead when people expect using it will mean your image content info will be sold to anyone willing to pay a cent for it.
It's more that nontechnical users prefer luxury brands over utility brands. A much smaller issue, which you alluded to, is that some technical users aren't technical enough to know real privacy vs. marketed privacy. This feature exists in base Android, which doesn't require any Google services.
LOL at the risk of sounding like a shill, I think Apple was right on time with these features. They added it after on-device CPU/neural engine was finally powerful and efficient enough. These features arrived at once on macs, iphones and ipads, and they arrived at the same time on your friends' devices.
IMO Android suffers from not controlling it's hardware. I can't ever be sure if the hyped new feature will come to my phone because I'm not using a Pixel or a Samsung.
I would have, and I work in tech. I'd guess that most people who use iOS have zero idea of what Android can and can't do, because they never use it and probably never will so what's the point of trying to find out.
Seconded. I never knew Android had this—but then again I couldn't care less about what Android can do. There is so much stuff fundamentally off-putting for me about the entire Google ecosystem that I'd never consider switching anyway.
The text from images feature launched as a Pixel 2 series-only feature.
There's a lot clearer message to consumers on iPhone, since so many features are available on "every phone made in the last five years, once you update the software."
On Android, that feature might be bound to an OS version, or might be rolled out in a Play Store update, it might be specific to just Google or Samsung, or even just to one of their phones. There's much less word of mouth "have you tried this new thing?"
In french we talk about "le savoir-faire" vs "le faire-savoir" (Know-how vs making it known") and the importance of good communication. Apple are the bestest at it. Remember the iPod shuffle and the lack of screen marketed as a feature to spice up your life.
My regular tow truck driver tells me he sees all sorts; fords, audis, mercedes, teslas, even the odd exotic car like a lambo - but never once an apple car would you believe it.
Depending on price I would or would not buy an Apple car; but I am quite interested in options for a car that (1) is electric; (2) doesn't spy on me and sell my data; (3) doesn't take video of me and my passengers and do weird things with it; and (4) doesn't support Republicans / white supremacists / Elon Musk.
And I imagine that like-minded consumers are a pretty large market.
The Vision Pro was a Development Kit; Just like the first generation Apple Watch. It's not meant for the consumers, it's meant for the developers among the consumers.
We will see if they ever release a new VisionOS device, but it's not the first time they did that; see also the Apple Watch.
> Chicken and egg problem, if no-one buys it, no-one will develop any killer apps.
Disagree on this. Going back as far as VisiCalc, it's about a device making space for a killer app, and that killer app selling devices. Apple has torched so much developer good-will that even a lower price wouldn't make the space for a killer app.
When was the last time a new, mobile-first killer app came out?
When have they done that since the first iPhone in 2007? The watch maybe? Though not sure that's "leapfrog" better than anyone else's smartwatch, but I don't have one so maybe I'm wrong.
The parent poster is saying (and I agree) that Airpods and Airtags are only superior because Apple anti-competitively privileges their integration with iPhones. It's not that they are better at the hardware level by itself.
And since iPhones form the largest single company's device network in the rich countries, that is a pretty big advantage.
Bad take. Each of these offered novel user experience improvements at launch. Yes they leveraged ecosystem (and yes I agree ecosystem lock-in does move devices) but thats also exactly what unlocked the better UX.
In your other thread you mentioned people don't necessarily want iPhones but they buy them to not be excluded from iMessage. I think you vastly underestimate how much regular people want low-bullshit tech experiences and are willing to pay for that.
> wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing
My parents use Android to ask “What are the 5 biggest towers in Chicago” or “Remove the people on my picture” while apparently iPhone is only capable of doing “Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone”.
My iPhone is lagging a ridiculous 10 years behind. It’s just that I don’t trust Google with my credit card.
Apple's AI stuff also uses cloud features, though you can't use them on other platforms. The problem with Apple's new cloud features is that they generally just suck. I'm surprised iCloud works so well with how hard they're fumbling basic stuff like this.
Knowing the building heights around Chicago is not an OS feature. Even if Siri was perfect, they still aren't going to ship a wikipedia object graph on every phone.
Likewise, the phone does not understand removing people from a photo. It is a feature specific to the photo app, and Siri allows you to wire in commands for the features in your app just fine and has for years. If Google decided for competitive reasons to not ship this feature to non-Pixel or non-Android users, thats not a Siri fault. That Apple did not integrate this as a voice command into their Photos app is also not a Siri fault (is it really common to remove all people from a photo, vs specific people?)
> Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone
Is what I was referring to, Siri often fails at even opening apps which is an OS feature. Regardless, even for your examples at a certain point an AI assistant not being able to do certain things while others can does become the fault of that AI.
I would argue that they are as bad as each other. I have to repeat most voice commands to Siri and Alexa than getting it right first time. No experience with Google.
Voice assistants were going to be this revolutionary new category. I think Amazon was going to populate a whole office tower in Boston with Alexa engineers at one point. There have been incremental improvements here and there but, to a first approximation, none of it has really worked out.
Will this strategy work every time ? Maybe for AI it will work (market is competitive and Apple just purchases the best model for its consumers).
But this approach may not work in other areas: e.g. building electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cell technology, quantum computing etc.
Essentially Apple got lucky with AI but it needs to keep investing in cutting edge technology in the various broad areas it operates in and not let others get too far ahead !
Their focus is investing in areas where they see something being a competitive differentiator, or where the market has failed to create a competitive environment.
They do not make their own screens because they can source screens from multiple sources and work with those manufacturers to create screens with the properties they want. Same thing with them relying on others for electric batteries - there are plenty of manufacturers to provide batteries to Apple's spec.
They created their own wireless modems because there's only one company they were able to purchase modems from, and those modems did not necessarily have the features Apple wanted.
Apple hasn't announced any interest in selling electric cars, solar cell technology, or quantum computing platforms. I wouldn't expect them to do so until they had a consumer product ready for sale. I doubt they are planning to come out with products in any of these categories soon.
It works often enough for the company to be wildly successful. They can simply cut their losses and withdraw from industries where it hasn't, such as EVs.
I think their M chips are a good example. They ran on intel for so long, then did the impossible of changing architecture on Mac, even without much transition pain.
Obviously that was built upon years of iPhone experience, but it shows they can lag behind, buy from other vendors, and still win when it becomes worth it to them.
How is changing the architecture of a platform that only you make hardware for doing the impossible?
They could change the architecture again tonight, and start releasing new machines with it. The users will adopt because there is literally no other choice.
Every machine they release will be fastest and most capable on the platform, because there is no other option
Exactly this! Rosetta + the whole app developer community who really quickly released builds for M chips (voluntary or forced, but it did happen).
I had the initial m1 air, and it was remarkable how useable it was. You'd expect all sorts of friction and issue but mostly things just worked (very fast). Even with some Rosetta overhead it was still fast compared to intel macs.
Rosetta 1 delivered 50-80% of the performance of native, during the PPC->Intel transition. It turns out, you can deliver not particularly impressive performance and still not ruin your app ecosystem, because developers have to either update to target your new platform, or leave your platform entirely.
You can also voluntarily cut off huge chunks of your own app ecosystem intentionally, by giving up 32bit support and requiring everything to be 64bit capable.
...because users have no other choice when only one vendor controls the both the hardware+software. They can either use the apps still available to them, or they can leave. And the cost of leaving for users is a lot higher.
Yes. Apple put custom hardware support in the M series chips based on the needs of Rosetta 2. The x86_64 performance on Rosetta 2 was often higher at launch than the prior generation of Intel chips running those same binaries natively.
Microsoft and Qualcomm already knew the performance of x86 app emulation on windows was killing the ARM machine lineup, so Qualcomm was working on extensions to their chips and Microsoft on having Windows support them already, but ARM64EC and Prism didn't launch for two years after the M1 shipped.
It's also notably not the first time they switched. They did the Motorola (I think MIPS?) Archictecure, then IBM PowerPC, then Intel x86 (for a single generation, then x86_64) and now Apple M-Series.
They (Apple) bought out intel's wireless modems and are using them instead of Qualcomm's chips. IIRC, they aren't the best in class when it comes to raw throughput, but quite good in terms of throughput vs power consumption.
They do the things they think they can do very well.
Why would they try to build electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cells, or quantum computers, if their R&D hadn't already determined that they would likely be able to do so Very Well?
It's not like any of those are really in their primary lines of business anyway.
They were not waiting for smartphones, but they did wait for the technology to enable them. They had been working on prototypes for a couple of years before releasing the first iPhone, and smartphones were not really a new thing at that point. What made it possible is improvements in digitisers and batteries (and they were not the first users of the capacitive digitisers in the first iPhones, they were the first to use it at that scale for a full screen), as well as progress on the software side, which took some effort.
It was the same for the first iPod. They jumped when they got a hard drive they thought was small enough to fit in a product they believed was good.
So yeah, they tend to wait and see, but they consider technologies, not only final products.
I would absolutely count blackberry and palm pilot, along with windows ce-based phones. Just because Apple leap-frogged them (and they all eventually folded those lines of business) doesn't mean they weren't existing products in the market.
The difference, if any, was focus. The premium on smartphones before Apple hit the market was on business/professional users who could afford the high premium. Apple instead targeted making a premium consumer product - that professionals then started to jump to over time, depending on how addicted they were to their blackberry keyboard.
Apple was considered very late to the smartphone game at the time.
Windows CE was introduced on PDAs around 1996, and was on phones by 2003, so the iPhone was arguably between four and eleven years late depending on how you define the space.
Microsoft’s dominance was a safe bet because they had never really failed to dominate any market at that point in history. Also nobody imagined that the size of the mobile market would eclipse laptops, so “Windows CE already won” wasn’t an absurd statement at all.
I guess it's just hard for me to consider those even "smartphones" with such small screens without capacitive multi-touch and with web browsers that didn't work properly on so many websites, at least compared to safari on the iPhone.
And even other factors like the music and videos was so poor, granted they were built for business use which didn't really need a good media consumption experience.
I suggest you watch the original iPhone video launch - Steve compares the iPhone with the existing smartphones of the time.
You’re taking for granted that we know how things panned out in hindsight. A complete touch screen phone with no fixed buttons at that time seemed nuts.
I wouldn't describe it as 'rushed'. Its integrated pretty much exactly the way they said it would be, as a fall-back from Siri when you ask world knowledge questions.
The part that doesn't work is having Siri locally smart enough to use it as a tool.
I used "rushed" because they decided to add it while everyone was still figuring out what it was for. That behaviour goes against the OP's claim that Apple "waits to understand what the thing is capable of doing" before acting.
It feels like we're rewriting history. There was a lot of blowback at the time.
They certainly announced they were going to. I've yet to meet someone who actually used that integration. Like many of these things, it seems to have been a sop to the investors who were accusing apple of ignoring the AI wave
It’s even more superpowered than previous implementations of this strategy.
When they made the iPhone, iPod, and Apple Watch they had no specific hardware advantage over competitors. Especially with early iPhone and iPod: no moat at all, make a better product with better marketing and you’ll beat Apple.
Now? Good luck getting any kind of reasonably priced laptop or phone that can run local AI as well as the iPhone/MacBook. It doesn’t matter that Apple Intelligence sucks right now, what matters is that every request made to Gemini is losing money and possibly always will.
This is especially true in 2026 where Windows laptops are climbing in price while MacBooks stay the same.
All three of those products launched with custom hardware made by partnered manufacturers.
At iPhone launch, I seem to remember Apple still having quite a bit of the flash ram market tied up from their exclusive iPod contracts - Apple basically helped finance new factories to be spun up in return for exclusive access to their production.
The Apple Watch had the S1 system on package, which included an Apple custom CPU. There were a number of miniaturization techniques and custom parts Apple used which I remember competitors lagging on being able to replicate due to the broader market tendency to integrate off the shelf products (but I don't have more part examples or timelines).
Since they try to stay secretive about upcoming products, competitors may only get hints about what Apple is doing through your typical industrial espionage channels until the product comes out. That creates quite a bit of lag then you are starting a new product design cycle based on a product your competitor just hit the market with.
I think we can’t overestimate how lucky Apple got with the success of the iPhone. It really wasn’t a guaranteed hit by any means, and despite the success of the iPod it was launched by a much more modest company than today’s Apple.
Samsung literally makes flash memory and was one of the primary competitors of the iPhone along with its Microsoft Windows Mobile/Phone and/or Android products of that era.
Are you saying that iPhone competitors couldn’t have made similar investments in factories and couldn’t have secured flash chips? These were all mega-corporations like Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Nokia.
Android had been in negotiations with companies like Samsung and LG in 2005 before Google acquired them. In a very slightly alternate universe, Android could have been acquired by a powerhouse phone OEM like Samsung rather than Google, who I would argue squandered Android’s potential. To this very day Google struggles to make competitive hardware with their platform.
The iPhone launched as one of the most expensive smartphones on the market. The iPhone launched from a company with zero experience in selling cellular devices and a very small list of cellular networks who would even work with them.
Their competitors had ample opportunity to respond, but simply could not execute. In a very very slightly alternate universe, something like the Nokia/Microsoft partnership would have obliterated Apple.
The Apple Watch had no hardware advantage in the sense that it had no special capabilities above competitors. Yes, Apple custom-designed the SoC, but it wasn’t considered ahead of its competition. The LG G Watch and Moto 360 were available contemporaneous or earlier than the Apple Watch and the Apple Watch had no specific advantage in terms of performance, battery life, etc.
What made the Apple Watch a lot different from the iPhone was the ecosystem that Apple had built up to this point, Apple’s focus on watches as a fashion purchase and failure of competitors to recognize the same, and Apple’s arguably-illegal restriction of competing smartwatch devices on their dominant mobile platform (which the EU is forcing them to open up on now).
They can't break it out because it is embedded in other services.
But to quote:
> Overall, we’re seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board.
and
> Revenue from AI solutions built by our partners increased nearly 300% year-over-year, and commitments from our top 15 software partners grew more than 16X year-over-year.
Operating margin has been declining since approximately 3/2025 at Alphabet.
You think Google has no ability to tell us whether a traditional search makes more revenue than an AI Summary search? I think we would be naive to assume they don't know that.
They're talking about free inference like Android and Google Home devices. No one is paying subscription fees for these and they're running their inference in the cloud. Apple Intelligence, for the most part, is running on the device.
