> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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
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Undercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.
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.
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.
2 replies →
> 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.
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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
Don't abandon Intel Macs, then and call them Mac AI systems with NVIDIA chips. Sell them for more than the Apple Silicon Macs.
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.