Comment by grtteee
16 hours ago
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
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Apple's Neural Engine and the CoreML framework to leverage it are almost a decade old now.
Apple Intelligence was a rebrand, and Apple has made some unique decisions rolling it out.
For instance, the new chatbot version of Siri's hallucinations were seen as unacceptable, so its release was delayed.
Is a chatbot that provides false information regularly really an advancement?
Apple chose not to do photorealistic generative images, so they can't be used for deepfakes.
Apple chose not to add a feature to write text for you, just one to clean up what you write, because they don't want to help kids in school cheat.
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.
Quietly they are doing things on-device. The OCR + copy/paste is genuine goodness - modestly functional.
This feature has been around since iOS 16 (2022) though - no relationship to Apple Intelligence (2024) or the current LLM hype (2023 onwards).
That's also literally years behind the competition. https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/09/android-ps-new-rece...
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.
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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.
But everyone talks about it like it was Apple, and isn’t that what matters (to Apple)?
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Remember when Google added Car Crash Detection to Pixel in early 2020? Nobody does.
But when Apple added it in iPhone 14 (2022)...
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Yea, they nailed that with the Newton, Apple Pippin, and the Apple Vision Pro
How amazing is that Apple car
It has an excellent reputation of having no reported accidents!
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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.
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Apple learned to hang back from plowing the unsold Lisa's into a landfill.
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.
You can explain away every failed product launch with "it's a developer product", not meant for consumers.
This wasn't like HoloLens or Google Glass. They marketed these devices to consumers and then sold these devices to consumers.
The Vision Pro is the best AR/VR product ever created.
All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't come up with a killer app.
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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.
Their own chips, vertically integrating.
- AirPods
- Apple Watch
- AirTag
Those are a few that come to mind. All do multi-billions in revenue per year.
None of those are the best product in their category, and all are only huge sellers because Apple anti-competitively privileges them in its ecosystem.
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> 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.
These are software/cloud features. You can install gemini on iphone if you want to talk about towers in Chicago.
The only reason to care about it being OS integrated is to interact with functions of the OS, which siri does fine.
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.
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Siri does not do it fine, it's literally the example the above commenter showed.
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Siri is one step below that for me, it still doesn't understand my accent, I feel like its voice recognition didn't improve from 2010...
"10 years behind" would be an improvement for Siri. It's actively broken much of the time in a way that Google Assistant or Alexa never has been.
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.
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I want the reverse version of this, if Apple can promise me to 'lag behind' for another ten years I'll buy my first Apple device in ten years
Apple waited on smartphones?
I thought the original iPhone was basically first.
Do you count blackberry and palm pilot as Apple waiting to see?
> Apple waited on smartphones?
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.
Yes
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
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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.
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>wireless modems
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.
But Apple doesn't just try to do everything.
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.
Didn't they rush to integrate ChatGPT into their OS back in 2024? Reality doesn't seem to align with your description.
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.
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.
How do you know Gemini is losing money on inference?
> How do you know Gemini is losing money on inference?
It's not. People make this claim with zero evidence.
But Google made around $20B profit on Google search in 2025 Q4, and that includes AI search.
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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.
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Is there any evidence of any company making money in inference?
Apples advantage was that they did everything in house and had the marketing and distribution capabilities. And now you’ve got the ecosystem lock in.
In hindsight it’s obvious why they pulled it off - nobody else could do it. They all had pieces missing.