Comment by dangus
14 hours ago
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.
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.
Until the day comes that they properly break out the financials you, nor the other poster have any idea as to what the numbers are.
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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.
Isn't some of Gemini's functionality on Android on-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.