Comment by jmyeet
3 hours ago
I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected:
1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;
2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and
3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.
3. Is an interesting perspective, because it’s not at all how I see it. There really isn’t anything for Apple there right now except that they stumbled into making hardware that is perfect for the technology right now. They could a.) burn all their cash and go into massive debt chasing a big foggy question mark that may be entirely overvalued or b.) focus on the hardware right now, wait for the technology to mature and apply it judiciously as applications for it come to light, rather than racing to hamfist it in unnecessary, expensive, and ultimately broken ways.
Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.
I think there’s a happy medium between doing nothing and burning cash faster than the US military like OpenAI. If I had to pick one company who walking that line the best, it’s Google.
You can wait until improving hardware eventually solves the local LLM problem but imho that’s too passive.
What if someone cracks the problem of splitting LLM inference effectively between local device and server? Think about it. ChatGPT can do calculus. Is that useful to most people? No. Can you currently effectively modularize an LLM and load knowledge on demand? No.
I’m fairly bearish on the use cases for current AI. The biggest is actually just firing people and suppressing labor costs.
But a personas assistant, at least in theory, is something people want, even if it’s just to effectively obey voice commands. If Apple loses to Google here it’s going to be bad for Apple. I think they have to do more than they’re seemingly doing.
Aerenhart’s biggest task was combining the online store with the physical. That was my understanding of why she was hired. Before that there were many walls between the two retail arms of online and physical.
Ive was the one behind the 15k watches. He wanted the in store experience to be like a jewelry store. They also brought in his friend that had been doing hi end watches and bands to help with the watch design. Beonce got an 18kt gold link band along with her watch. You can only imagine Ive’s glee at the watches being on the cover of Vogue.
1. Flat UI is the other side of Johnny Ive’s legacy—arguably an error as well, never corrected.
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3. Agreed that Siri stagnated, was surpassed by Alexa a decade ago, and even moreso by LLMs. However, the competitive advantage of Apple Silicon has panned out and continues today—e.g., using unified memory to run ML models, instead of requiring dedicated VRAM for a separate GPU.
3. Is what I call a smart move. Sometimes the game is won by not playing, and it's increasingly obvious that the LLM race leads to nowhere (there is no moat, there is nothing unique or clever that Apple can build out of it that can't be mimicked by others, made better, with Apple looking bad as a result, the tech is flawed, with clear diminishing returns, ...). If anything worth of the Apple logo comes out of this, it will be bought for scraps after the unsustainable race has run its course.
Apple is way ahead in AI, since they are unique in offering a single switch that turns it off if you don't care for it.
Agree with you, but when was Siri ever “well-regarded”?
Its been trash since day 1.
Siri was the first of its kind on Day 1. Alexa wasn’t announced for another three years.
I suspect that long-term, 3 might not be the wrong choice.
Apple seems to be moving towards running AI on-device while the other big tech companies want to run inference on their data centers and sell AI as a service. Once those companies start enshittifying and jacking up costs, I wouldn't be surprised if people move towards preferring local AI. If that happens, Apple will be well-positioned.