Apple is the embodiment of Gunpei Yokoi (creator of the Game Boy and Game & Watch)’s philosophy.
“Withered technology, with lateral thinking”. Sure, they find ways to have bleeding edge tech, especially in terms of hardware design. But at the core, their products do not differentiate with bleeding edge software. They aim to surprise and delight by delivering things that are well understood, in a convenient and focused manner.
This mode of thinking is incompatible with shipping the latest trend instantly.
tracerbulletx · 3h ago
There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
pllbnk · 48m ago
I agree. As usual these days, the culprit for lack of innovation is AI (mostly LLMs). Apple did try to shove it to the users unsuccessfully and they had the right amount of sanity to backtrack once they realized how the users' expectations are misaligned with what LLMs have to offer, which is mostly lack of reliability; average user thinks that something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck must be a duck, but LLMs, while pretending to be human-like are not like that. On the other hand, Microsoft is still forcing it upon their users with Copilot but users are resisting. We will see which tactic will win in the long-run but I would bet on Apple.
alphazard · 3h ago
Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago.
Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.
Instead there is an incredibly expensive VR scuba mask, with relatively little adoption. It's certainly not changing the way we use physical spaces and transforming society, which is something a previous Apple could have pulled off. Users and developers need to be shown how to get value from something radically new, and Apple hasn't done that recently.
crooked-v · 2h ago
I think the Apple Silicon transition is far from something that could be expected from 'any' company. Microsoft already tried something similar with ARM Surface machines and the whole attempt was an absolute failure.
> I think that is exactly right.
I think that's entirely wrong. The hardware just isn't there yet! The AVP is the closest you can get to real "AR glasses" at the moment (as distinct from the Xreal 'non-context-aware screen overlay with a tiny FoV and fixed position'), but it turns out the hardware needed for that is >1 lb of stuff.
Kwpolska · 1h ago
Developers working for Apple platforms are used to their software being broken by Apple every once in a while, so they need to update it to match the latest OS’s expectations. In the Windows world, 30-year-old Win32 apps can still run on Windows 11, as long as they don’t use any egregious hacks. And if they stop working on an Arm PC, Microsoft will be to blame.
acomjean · 2h ago
It’s not even new. Apple transitioned from PowerPC chips to intel and basically did the same thing again. It’s a technical achievement to be sure. Apple users are unfortunately used to ditching software because backward compatibility isn’t something they strive for. Old Powerpc, 32 bit iOS/Mac osx software for example.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Even Jobs wasn’t perfect. NeXT machines were technically amazing and also beautiful but they never really found many customers. He also thought the Segway would transform society but it ended up being sort of a joke and best known for being used by fat mall cops.
nine_k · 2h ago
NeXT software though became the base of OS X.
BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
Yes but the software wasn’t selling until it was forced upon the Apple customer base. You could buy NeXTSTEP for an Intel PC in the 1990s but nobody did.
nine_k · 1m ago
The right people bought NeXT though. Carmack and his team developed Doom on NeXT computers [1], and the result has profoundly changed the mass-market PC scene.
AR has a lot of limitations, that's what they were trying to sidestep. To be able to take a frame of the environment, composite the virtual frame and the real one in unison with various blending ops at your disposal. And finally, present the user with a properly composited image that works anywhere.
Now, if you use multiple lenses, with one masking in grayscale the real frame positioned just before the lens in which you project the virtual frame, you can do some limited blending ops. But it's quite difficult to deal with parallax if the lenses aren't glued together, or even then with refraction.
Apple took a very conservative approach. And made it to market. Now look at the competition. Sure, they have concepts with good compositing, but the ones in the market right now aren't able to produce the same imagery that Apple Vision is capable of.
Maybe I'm wrong, haven't looked at the market in some months, but I always thought of the Apple Vision as a very pragmatic design trying to circumvent AR limitations by being a VR headset.
seanmcdirmid · 2h ago
> Both of these products could be expected from any well run company.
I was not expecting Apple silicon from Apple, I didn’t even realize they’d been hiring chip designers for the past decade before that.
Personal computing really sucked before the mid 2000s. You had windows computers which were cheap and fast, but had lots of bugs and were hard to use and didn’t do low energy very well, you had Linux as a powerful novelty, you had expensive well designed Mac’s that were sort of slow but with better battery life. It took Apple’s intel transition to fix all of that, and I basically thought it was finally done and personal computing all of a sudden got very boring. But today I’m running mid-sized LLM inference on a Max 3, and it’s all very exciting again.
weego · 2h ago
What is ARs 1000 songs in your pocket moment though?
There is no thing that needs the ubiquity that Jobs would have channelled the idea into.
In my opinion it would just never have seen the light of day.
appreciatorBus · 2h ago
Most generic well run companies would never take the risk & expense entailed in a platform transition like Intel => Apple Silicon.
You might argue that generic companies are doing that now as we see Windows ARM laptops finally, but I think they only got the courage to do that because Apple went first.
gonzo41 · 2h ago
isn't the VR Scuba mask dead now?
I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives.
We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland.
Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.
jcurtis · 1h ago
Podcasts were arguably mainstream back in 2014 with Serial.
Apreche · 3h ago
Facts. I switched to Mac primarily because of the CPU. Look at the state of Intel...
kllrnohj · 2h ago
Apple Silicon either followed Microsoft's direction (who pushed for ARM laptops a solid 8 years before M1) or just did a better iteration than Intel at the same time Intel was struggling.
Regardless of how you want to frame it, there clearly wasn't any grand innovative strategic vision in play there from Apple. It was just an incremental improvement to long established products with no shortage of equally significant and impressive increments improvements from others along the way.
nine_k · 2h ago
It's a bit like saying that an iPhone was not a big deal, phones were becoming smarter by the day, Apple just did a better iteration in 2007 than Nokia and Blackberry.
Making an iteration so much better is not something I'd ascribe to luck.
kllrnohj · 1h ago
iPhone was a new UI focused around capacitive touchscreens which at the time was itself an entirely new category.
What, exactly, did M1 change about anything about using a laptop? Longer battery life? Faster? Okay, same improvements as had been featured for the last 20 years. And it wasn't any thinner, depending on the model line it was substantially thicker even.
So what exactly was new about M1 that wasn't just a bog standard iteration we'd seen dozens of times by that point?
Even just considering Apple's product line surely you'd have to rank things like Intel's Core 2 as more significant, as it enabled the creation of the MacBook Air and was Apple's return to subcompact laptops. Or Intel's thunderbolt which radically changed the entire I/O story and capabilities for Apple, who fully embraced it.
cr125rider · 2h ago
Rosetta 2 was the big innovation there. Not ARM in a mobile device.
kllrnohj · 1h ago
Surely you realized the "2" in Rosetta 2 isn't just quirky branding but because it's the second time they did that very thing? How was it a "big innovation"?
ben_w · 2h ago
Was that even innovative? I mean, this is the third time they've changed chip architecture, they've had some practice here.
The first time I wrote anything for Mac OS, it was with Metrowerks' Code Warrior whatever-the-student-edition-was-called, where the compiler only targeted the 68k series chips.
eirikbakke · 3h ago
And the Apple Silicon chips even include specialized cores that allow LLMs to run locally on both iPhones and MacBooks. (See the "Foundation Models Framework".)
bigyabai · 2h ago
Which was a day late and a dollar short, even at release. Those ANEs are only really good at inference, and even then you get faster results using your Apple Silicon GPU. They're slow, incomplete, not integrated into the GPU architecture (like Nvidia's) therefore killing any chance of Apple Silicon seeing serious AI server usage.
If you want to brag about Apple's AI hardware prowess, talk about MLX. The ANE was a pretty obvious mistake compared to Nvidia's approach and hundreds of businesses had their own, even before Apple made theirs.
drewbeck · 2h ago
These chips were designed to be SoC/SiPs for consumer hardware. It feels odd to judge them for their suitability in servers.
bigyabai · 2h ago
The cores and architecture was designed for smartphones, it got put in desktops and rackmount servers anyways. I can judge it for whatever the product is, it's not a untold mystery why Apple Silicon servers aren't flying off the shelves in the AI boom.
bowsamic · 3h ago
Yeah everyone complains about how Apple don’t “innovate” but currently they are just focussing on making the best consumer hardware of all time. Don’t get me wrong I dislike them for other reasons but those reasons are mainly things Jobs pushed for decades ago. An Apple fan should love the current Apple
mingus88 · 2h ago
They also had a record breaking quarter for their services, when streaming services everywhere are bleeding out
Yeah I guess it’s been a while since their last iPhone moment but that entire decade was just one revolution after another for every segment of tech, and Apple came out on top
With their in-house chips they’re going to do fine for AI, even if they need to partner with someone else on it
nottorp · 3h ago
> focussing on making the best consumer hardware of all time
Yes, but what use is the best consumer hardware when the software is degrading?
Considering the liquid glass thing, there's no one at Apple left who understands and cares about usability, for example.
Plus the iOSification of Mac OS for no good reason... maybe to make it less attractive to developers?
amelius · 3h ago
It makes a lot of strategic sense but if you have so much money on the bank, then who wouldn't buy a silicon design firm to design your CPUs in house? I bet everyone here on HN would have suggested to do that if asked in a board meeting. The big surprise was how long it took Apple to bite the bullet.
Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
Nothing wrong with being fabless. Plus Apple could switch to inferior silicon and probably convince its userbase that they are the creme de la creme.
amelius · 2h ago
> Nothing wrong with being fabless.
Sure, if you're able to buy all the required production slots, as Apple has been doing in the past.
However, with new market pressure from AI this might not be possible in the future ...
ryanobjc · 2h ago
From a CEO pov this move makes no sense, as evidenced by the fact that literally no on else does it.
It goes against all MBA orthodoxy.
bigyabai · 2h ago
People are acting like Apple Silicon actually matters to Apple's profit margins. Since when was the Macbook a serious contribution to Apple margins?
izacus · 3h ago
That was 5 years ago and the chips themselves are much older than that. They can't skate on that forever, especially since the competition caught up.
rogerrogerr · 2h ago
Oh great, where can I buy a non-Mac with the same performance, battery life, thermals, weight, premium materials, and a trackpad that doesn’t feel like styrofoam coated in oil?
Since you say the competition has caught up, I assume it’ll be easy to send an Amazon link to the evidence.
mg74 · 2h ago
Where has the competition caught up? Arent Apple's chips still by far best-in-class from the laptop down to the watch?
Its an honest question, I would love an arm based laptop running NixOS that is competitive with the upcoming M5 Pro's but I dont see it anywhere.
Case in point: Google's newest Google TV box (released this year) is an absolute turd when compared with an 8 year old 4k Apple TV box.
ZeroConcerns · 3h ago
Well, as we speak, Apple is still one of the most valuable companies in the world, shareholder-value-wise and (most importantly) consumer-preference-wise.
So, being an absolute Apple-skeptic, I don't blame them for not having a crystal-clear future direction right now. VR/AR? Nah, probably not happening. AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows? And they've got products in all these markets, just not obviously compelling ones.
So, a holding pattern is more than warranted at this point. Will this allow anyone to bypass Apple? Possibly, but the chance/hope of Apple front-running everyone else is definitely still alive.
kllrnohj · 2h ago
Waiting until others struggle with early pains before swooping in with a polished version after the idea has been demonstrated is also Apple's consistent playbook.
They've never been innovators, that's not their strength. They're polishers.
ryanobjc · 2h ago
As a long time Mac and iPhone user, I just don't get all the complaints about innovation. Macs are as innovative as they ever have been, maybe more. Apple silicon has been an absolute powerhouse and godsend for battery life.
iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are.
When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the commenters are missing are the Jobs' pageantry and showmanship. Which I also miss. But in terms of capability, I am quite happy with what we have.
beAbU · 1h ago
Apple is a fantastic iterator and polisher. They are not innovators. What was the last apple product that was truly innovative, i.e. something no-one else has done before?
unethical_ban · 2h ago
Apple has historically been a little behind the curve in technology, but then excelling at execution and user experience.
If they could (quickly) come out with a personal assistant which was really useful for people's planning and shopping and productivity, which knew how to navigate the apps and services on a person's apples phone/computer/cloud data, and do it locally and/or privately... They'd be in a good position even if it wasn't the absolute leader of the pack.
AI is going to be so powerful in the coming years that if apple falls behind AND doesn't give the keys to some other company to integrate AI, then I could see people jumping ship.
ryanobjc · 2h ago
I think the reason why Apple hasnt come out with such a useful personal assistant AI is because the underlying technology just doesn't make this so easy.
Apple is the only company so far that seems to be unwilling to accept a poor user experience with generative AI, so their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
Of course Nadella is critical of Apple's efforts: he selling the goods! It's like a Steel CEO complementing a new bridge but then "they should have used more steel" - well duh, but since when do we trust the purveyors of components as to what should be added?
The bottom line is "Agentic AI" is just unreliable. If you thought you hated Apple Intelligence now, then if they had gone whole hog, the unreliability would be astounding.
tz18 · 3h ago
The same things Intel said 10 years ago.
ZeroConcerns · 2h ago
Intel is as similar to Apple as Tata Steel is to Ford Motors. There was a time when the former was trying to get closer to the latter, but I think the folly of that is clear by now...
kayodelycaon · 2h ago
The difference is Intel actually has direct competitors in their market.
Apple doesn’t. They created a market for products with a deep vertical integration of software and hardware. And they do it at enormous scale.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are the closest competitors but they license their software and have to compete on hardware across many products.
mrtesthah · 3h ago
Intel is not in the same business as Apple.
svaha1728 · 3h ago
I don’t see a compelling reason for Apple to jump into the AI game. The MacBook Pro M4 is a dream to work with, and it works great with Claude Code. Creating quality products is a niche market, but that strategy still has merit.
benoau · 2h ago
I think it's a combination of three things:
1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself
2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc
3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones
There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" -
> Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.”
> AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself
It threatens to do that, sure. But the reality will likely be significantly less dramatic. The most likely outcome is AI (like every other hyped technology) finds a niche and that everything else carries on as it was.
acedTrex · 3h ago
I think its moreso their siri strategy is lacking. The personal assistant on IPhone game is what everyone is talking about.
st3fan · 1h ago
the number one reason is that Siri is an embarrassment. And that has become so much clearer now with ChatGPT and Claude next to it. Everyone is simply thinking: why can't we have that. Why do we have to talk to a low quality agent that can't answer basic questions while i can also walk around with my airpods in having a full conversation with ChatGPT.
I understand it is not that easy. But Apple has been neglecting Siri, or maybe failed to improve it, for so many years. And now the perception is that there is just no excuse anymore.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
AI is being integrated with everything. Web, applications, cloud, mobile - everything. Any company that neglects this is going to be forced to license and dealmake.
Jerry2 · 3h ago
I'm convinced that Tim Cook's biggest mistake was not creating an EV. Just look at how Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and BYD have moved into the EV space and have created amazing experiences for their customers. CarPlay paired with American cars is simply few generations behind from what the Chinese companies have done. Yet Apple was early enough and had an EV team but Cook killed it. Even if the 1st gen was crap and didn't live up to the Apple's standards, they should have kept iterating. Now they have nothing new and are just iterating current product lines. Which is fine but it doesn't create new growth. You need new markets to do that.
waswaswas · 2h ago
Automaking is a capital intensive, operationally complex, and fiercely competitive (read: low profit) industry. Apple's gross margin is nearly 3x higher than Tesla's, and Tesla will face increased margin pressure as more of the industry electrifies. Even if Apple were to match Porsche as the leader in volume+profit luxury automotive, it wouldn't be nearly as lucrative as their current businesses. There are other areas in which Apple could expand to more profitably leverage its core competencies.
Aside from all the difficulties that come with self driving, I suspect Apple cancelled its car effort because they couldn't figure out how differentiate its offering at a price low enough to drive volume and a cost low enough to drive comparable profit to its other businesses.
slwvx · 2h ago
I think Tim Cook has bad product and design taste [1], and see no reason to think that there are enough good design people at Apple to make a good car. I think they likely got stuck looking at making a car version of the gold Apple Watch Edition [2] and rightly shut the project down.
What sort of backward company allows their CEO to have any design input? Gross.
ben_w · 2h ago
I'm glad they decided against it.
Apple's overall market strategy is "premium product, premium price". If you look to the 7x price ratio between AVP and Meta Quest 3 as your guide, they'd make a supercar that would cost something like USD 175k.
Sure, an Apple Car would likely have a lot of interesting and unusual but well understood design points, both positive (like liquid crystal electric tinting windows) and negative (imagine something as weird as charging a car like an Apple Magic Mouse), but hardly anyone would be able to afford them unless they were working in Big Tech.
karp773 · 2h ago
Wasn't it a self-driving car project first and foremost not just an EV? It was the self-driving part that was not working.
beAbU · 1h ago
An Apple ev would have cost 100k, and the 50kwh battery upgrade would have cost 20k extra.
encom · 2h ago
I would have loved to see an Apple iCar, just to see the soulless, sterile and inoffensive result, and the resulting magical marketing circus. Do you take it to an Apple Store to refill the windshield wiper fluid? Does it use another bullshit proprietary charging port, and will it refuse to charge if I'm not using the supplied Apple cable? Is the bonnet glued shut? Do I need to hold the keyfob just so to unlock the doors? Does the car brick itself if you install 3rd party tyres? Does the horn require an in-app purchase? So many questions.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
When you turn the car on the radio blasts a U2 track. This feature cannot be disabled.
empiko · 3h ago
Doing AI just because everybody else is doing AI is not exactly a strategic vision. Going into AI without a clear plan is exactly what they should NOT be doing.
emchammer · 3h ago
I simply don’t need a lot of AI. I would be very happy with a futuristic UNIX workstation with lots of development on the kind of things that used to get everyone excited about computers.
encom · 2h ago
What things? Apple doesn't really cater to the type of customer who's excited about computers, or even UNIX. And I'd argue that Mac OS barely qualifies as UNIX anyway. Yes, if you dig deep enough you'll get the faint smell of UNIX, but the spirit is long gone. Anyone who appreciates UNIX(likes) has much better options available.
ryanobjc · 2h ago
There was a quote recently where Nadella was trash talking the apple AI stuff, and like yes sure, but also do we not realize that Nadella isn't a random third party CEO, he's literally financially incentivized to maximize AI usage because Microsoft is selling the stuff?
It's like listening to the Intel CEO saying that the new apple silicon is alright, but what would REALLY make them go is to migrate back to Intel x86.
I'm not really upset at Nadella for this, because it's what he should do. But for everyone else to breathlessly be obsessed with his word and forget his real job as salesman in chief is what's pathetic.
no_op · 2h ago
Apple's "strategic vision" for AI is to add a computer use agent (AI assistant) to the OS to perform tasks on behalf of the user, plus contextually surface AI capabilities in many specific contexts they've got utility (copy editing, image generation, photo organization, translation, coding).
What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say.
If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it.
If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.
the_snooze · 1h ago
I feel that any vision needs to have some actual execution behind it, otherwise it's just a twinkle in someone's eye. "Built for Apple Intelligence" is literally the slogan for Apple's 2024 lineup. The vision is there front and center. But everything they layed out in their vision (and explicitly advertised!) has been a joke so far, falling somewhere between half-baked, trivial, or nonexistent. They've had to pull that ad showing contextually-aware interactions because that's nowhere near ready. https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/...
After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.
kayodelycaon · 3h ago
Apple is one of the richest companies in the world.
Technology is changing rapidly. Apple can easily afford to wait a few years for markets to appear.
kettlecorn · 2h ago
I think Apple is doing fine and is reasonably well positioned. The pre-Cook years basically established the skeleton of the company and Cook has fleshed it out with flesh and muscle. Now the company is far more of a Goliath with vast resources to help it weather strategic pivots, in addition to a loyal and trusting customer base.
Looking ahead to the next decade or so I believe what we're likely on course for is some sort of AI OS. AI will be able to vibe-code apps for you and you'll be able to manage and dispatch individual agents to do tasks. There will be a messy transitionary period that lasts a while from today's software.
Apple has a trusting customer base, they have tremendous hardware prowess, they have cross-platform cloud services, and they have design sense to figure out how to establish these new models. I think if a new form of computing emerges Apple basically gets a free first swing at it, in terms of consumer trust. We've seen that with their VR headset, that while a dud was given far more interest and attention than Facebook's and Microsoft's offerings.
I do think they show signs of vulnerability as well, even if I think they're less than their strengths. Apple's famously design focused culture seems to be cracking a bit and giving way to more Microsoft / Google style PM-led culture. That can be OK, but I think PM led cultures are sometimes almost too strategic for their own good, like someone you can tell is a salesmen not a friend, and that can result in gradual brand erosion.
A simple example of this happening is Apple's website. Like Microsoft the tabs at the top of their website now reflect the company's internal organization, not what makes the most sense to the user. In the Jobs era they insisted that there would be no separate "store" tab, a redundancy because the whole website was a store, but I suspect that changed because the "Store" division within Apple wants that extra prominence.
If Apple isn't careful with enough missteps they may dilute their brand and Google / Microsoft may seem just as appealing for early adopters of emerging AI OSs.
mmastrac · 3h ago
With that much cash on hand, Apple has at least a decade of failing before they even begin to worry.
drewbeck · 2h ago
I find it very strange to make this judgement by comparing Apple to Microsoft, nvidia, Meta. None of those companies are in the same business as Apple. If Apple fails to “beat” these companies they will still have incredibly popular consumer products and successful services.
The competition is only in the mind of business writers and pundits; it maybe matters for the stock market but Apple has never made their stock the main driver of their efforts.
cosmicgadget · 2h ago
Apple is in all of their businesses. OS ecosystem, graphics hardware, AR/VR.
They don't need to beat these companies outright, but the more they fail to provide value relative to the competition, the more they will see users leave.
Oras · 3h ago
Apple has a great chance of being the personal AI machines.
If they managed to add inference chip that competes with Groq and similar hardware, they would make much bigger wins comparing to main their own models.
Imagine being able to run 32B reasoning models with hundreds of tokens per second on your local laptop.
st3fan · 1h ago
I'm sure that is the future. But we're still pretty far away from being able to put a 32B model in memory right? The whole industry is on that trajectory. Just give it another decade and the standard for base memory will likely be 64GB or more.
Apreche · 3h ago
They put the manufacturing and supply chain expert in charge, and that’s what they excel at now. But they lost Jobs and Ive, so now they don’t have the imagination, vision, and design expertise anymore.
They did make an attempt with the vision glasses, but it obviously flopped.
They succeeded for so long with top-down direction because the top had ideas. I think the best move would be to allow for more bottom-up direction. Give the engineers and designers license to run wild a bit.
throwawa14223 · 3h ago
Apple doesn't need to be in AI because no one needs to be in AI just like no one needs to be in shitcoins.
lapcat · 2h ago
The author compares Apple to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. Broadly speaking, each company is in "tech", but looking more specifically, they are fundamentally in very different categories of tech.
Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about.
Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware.
Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta.
It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.
ryanobjc · 2h ago
Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately. This isnt obvious at the Apple bottom line because iPhone dominates, but they are growing that market segment!
The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.
lapcat · 2h ago
> Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately.
That's not really clear. Mac sales actually peaked during the pandemic, around 2022.
Apparently there was also some tariff fear-driven buying this year. Indeed, I purchased a new MacBook Pro earlier this year for that very reason.
If you compare, say, 2024 Mac revenue to 2014 Mac revenue, there was an increase of 25% over that period, but inflation increased even more over the same period. (Unfortunately, Apple no longer announces unit sales.)
serjester · 2h ago
It seems like the company has stagnated and Cook seems to consistently makes questionable decisions - fighting the app store rulings, doubling down on vision pro, focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI.
Maybe they've just calcified - the youngest person on their board is 63. At the end of the day they haven't had a credible threat in over a decade.
st3fan · 1h ago
"focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI"
Apple is like 150.000+ employees. What makes you think they have to choose between OS redesigns and AI. There is probably more than enough talent there to do all the things.
benoau · 3h ago
> While he has achieved growth, innovation has tanked. The iPhone’s design has barely changed since 2019
The rules for iPhone software are almost unchanged since 2009!
nine_k · 2h ago
Should it have changed? Does an iPhone have known pain points not fixed for years and years? Something that makes users migrate to Android in anger?
Safety razor blades did not change a lot either since the time they were invented; the seem to be in a deep local optimum. Maybe the iPhone is in a somehow similar situation.
benoau · 2h ago
Yes it should have changed, but I disagree with your metric on measuring how change is required.
By very-rarely revisiting these ~17 year old policies they avoided naturally-increasing their specs to foster and keep-up with more demanding software, and subsequently in the last two generations had to play catch-up and rush to upgrade their entire product line to a higher baseline of memory to support AI and increase their thermal capacities to support their foray into AAA games, leaving billions of active iOS devices as unsupported.
devmor · 3h ago
I think Apple’s strategic vision bas been pretty great.
What they’re lacking is quality control. They need a hard-ass that will scream at them when they try to release stuff like liquid glass.
It’s been too long since Jobs death and they’ve gotten comfortable pushing out poor quality features.
st3fan · 1h ago
This is a funny comment. I think quality control should be mostly about undisputable bugs and hardware errors. But something like liquid glass is HIGHLY subjective. Lots of people love it. Others hate it. It has nothing to do with quality. Maybe you mean taste. But that is also super subjective and nobody gets it right for everyone.
david38 · 2h ago
Wow. This whole comment section is full of armchair CEOs saying how the iPhone, ARM laptops. tablets, and AirPods are just inevitable outcomes.
Yet nobody else was able to do it. Microsoft, for all its power and money, couldn’t make it happen. Samsung+Google have come closest, but even then, Apple dominates the profits.
braum · 2h ago
Tim Cook being replaced is long LONG overdue!
k310 · 2h ago
When you're that big, you're allowed to make mistakes without major damage. Microsoft did it for ages. Remember Zune?
But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem.
And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later"
As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine.
"Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.
jmclnx · 1h ago
Boo Hoo, Apple not doing AI. To me not doing AI is a major plus.
objektif · 3h ago
Mr. Apple you know what you need to do. Buy Anthropic.
Der_Einzige · 3h ago
Not sure why the correct answer is being downvoted...
wasabi991011 · 2h ago
Because it is not substantive
objektif · 2h ago
Let us say it is rather concise. It is just that you do not like the idea.
drewbeck · 2h ago
It is concise and it is not substantive.
objektif · 1h ago
It is very very substantive. I am sure just looking at my post you realized that my proposal had significance and was meaningful. May be you are unhappy I did not list down the reasons why. But you already know that if you have slightest clue in this topic.
“Withered technology, with lateral thinking”. Sure, they find ways to have bleeding edge tech, especially in terms of hardware design. But at the core, their products do not differentiate with bleeding edge software. They aim to surprise and delight by delivering things that are well understood, in a convenient and focused manner.
This mode of thinking is incompatible with shipping the latest trend instantly.
Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.
Instead there is an incredibly expensive VR scuba mask, with relatively little adoption. It's certainly not changing the way we use physical spaces and transforming society, which is something a previous Apple could have pulled off. Users and developers need to be shown how to get value from something radically new, and Apple hasn't done that recently.
> I think that is exactly right.
I think that's entirely wrong. The hardware just isn't there yet! The AVP is the closest you can get to real "AR glasses" at the moment (as distinct from the Xreal 'non-context-aware screen overlay with a tiny FoV and fixed position'), but it turns out the hardware needed for that is >1 lb of stuff.
BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Engine
Now, if you use multiple lenses, with one masking in grayscale the real frame positioned just before the lens in which you project the virtual frame, you can do some limited blending ops. But it's quite difficult to deal with parallax if the lenses aren't glued together, or even then with refraction.
Apple took a very conservative approach. And made it to market. Now look at the competition. Sure, they have concepts with good compositing, but the ones in the market right now aren't able to produce the same imagery that Apple Vision is capable of.
Maybe I'm wrong, haven't looked at the market in some months, but I always thought of the Apple Vision as a very pragmatic design trying to circumvent AR limitations by being a VR headset.
I was not expecting Apple silicon from Apple, I didn’t even realize they’d been hiring chip designers for the past decade before that.
Personal computing really sucked before the mid 2000s. You had windows computers which were cheap and fast, but had lots of bugs and were hard to use and didn’t do low energy very well, you had Linux as a powerful novelty, you had expensive well designed Mac’s that were sort of slow but with better battery life. It took Apple’s intel transition to fix all of that, and I basically thought it was finally done and personal computing all of a sudden got very boring. But today I’m running mid-sized LLM inference on a Max 3, and it’s all very exciting again.
There is no thing that needs the ubiquity that Jobs would have channelled the idea into.
In my opinion it would just never have seen the light of day.
You might argue that generic companies are doing that now as we see Windows ARM laptops finally, but I think they only got the courage to do that because Apple went first.
I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives.
We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland.
Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.
Regardless of how you want to frame it, there clearly wasn't any grand innovative strategic vision in play there from Apple. It was just an incremental improvement to long established products with no shortage of equally significant and impressive increments improvements from others along the way.
Making an iteration so much better is not something I'd ascribe to luck.
What, exactly, did M1 change about anything about using a laptop? Longer battery life? Faster? Okay, same improvements as had been featured for the last 20 years. And it wasn't any thinner, depending on the model line it was substantially thicker even.
So what exactly was new about M1 that wasn't just a bog standard iteration we'd seen dozens of times by that point?
Even just considering Apple's product line surely you'd have to rank things like Intel's Core 2 as more significant, as it enabled the creation of the MacBook Air and was Apple's return to subcompact laptops. Or Intel's thunderbolt which radically changed the entire I/O story and capabilities for Apple, who fully embraced it.
The first time I wrote anything for Mac OS, it was with Metrowerks' Code Warrior whatever-the-student-edition-was-called, where the compiler only targeted the 68k series chips.
If you want to brag about Apple's AI hardware prowess, talk about MLX. The ANE was a pretty obvious mistake compared to Nvidia's approach and hundreds of businesses had their own, even before Apple made theirs.
Yeah I guess it’s been a while since their last iPhone moment but that entire decade was just one revolution after another for every segment of tech, and Apple came out on top
With their in-house chips they’re going to do fine for AI, even if they need to partner with someone else on it
Yes, but what use is the best consumer hardware when the software is degrading?
Considering the liquid glass thing, there's no one at Apple left who understands and cares about usability, for example.
Plus the iOSification of Mac OS for no good reason... maybe to make it less attractive to developers?
Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.
Sure, if you're able to buy all the required production slots, as Apple has been doing in the past.
However, with new market pressure from AI this might not be possible in the future ...
It goes against all MBA orthodoxy.
Since you say the competition has caught up, I assume it’ll be easy to send an Amazon link to the evidence.
Its an honest question, I would love an arm based laptop running NixOS that is competitive with the upcoming M5 Pro's but I dont see it anywhere.
Case in point: Google's newest Google TV box (released this year) is an absolute turd when compared with an 8 year old 4k Apple TV box.
So, being an absolute Apple-skeptic, I don't blame them for not having a crystal-clear future direction right now. VR/AR? Nah, probably not happening. AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows? And they've got products in all these markets, just not obviously compelling ones.
So, a holding pattern is more than warranted at this point. Will this allow anyone to bypass Apple? Possibly, but the chance/hope of Apple front-running everyone else is definitely still alive.
They've never been innovators, that's not their strength. They're polishers.
iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are.
When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the commenters are missing are the Jobs' pageantry and showmanship. Which I also miss. But in terms of capability, I am quite happy with what we have.
If they could (quickly) come out with a personal assistant which was really useful for people's planning and shopping and productivity, which knew how to navigate the apps and services on a person's apples phone/computer/cloud data, and do it locally and/or privately... They'd be in a good position even if it wasn't the absolute leader of the pack.
AI is going to be so powerful in the coming years that if apple falls behind AND doesn't give the keys to some other company to integrate AI, then I could see people jumping ship.
Apple is the only company so far that seems to be unwilling to accept a poor user experience with generative AI, so their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
Of course Nadella is critical of Apple's efforts: he selling the goods! It's like a Steel CEO complementing a new bridge but then "they should have used more steel" - well duh, but since when do we trust the purveyors of components as to what should be added?
The bottom line is "Agentic AI" is just unreliable. If you thought you hated Apple Intelligence now, then if they had gone whole hog, the unreliability would be astounding.
Apple doesn’t. They created a market for products with a deep vertical integration of software and hardware. And they do it at enormous scale.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are the closest competitors but they license their software and have to compete on hardware across many products.
1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself
2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc
3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones
There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" -
> Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.”
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...
It threatens to do that, sure. But the reality will likely be significantly less dramatic. The most likely outcome is AI (like every other hyped technology) finds a niche and that everything else carries on as it was.
I understand it is not that easy. But Apple has been neglecting Siri, or maybe failed to improve it, for so many years. And now the perception is that there is just no excuse anymore.
Aside from all the difficulties that come with self driving, I suspect Apple cancelled its car effort because they couldn't figure out how differentiate its offering at a price low enough to drive volume and a cost low enough to drive comparable profit to its other businesses.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/07/31/ep-428
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edit...
Apple's overall market strategy is "premium product, premium price". If you look to the 7x price ratio between AVP and Meta Quest 3 as your guide, they'd make a supercar that would cost something like USD 175k.
Sure, an Apple Car would likely have a lot of interesting and unusual but well understood design points, both positive (like liquid crystal electric tinting windows) and negative (imagine something as weird as charging a car like an Apple Magic Mouse), but hardly anyone would be able to afford them unless they were working in Big Tech.
It's like listening to the Intel CEO saying that the new apple silicon is alright, but what would REALLY make them go is to migrate back to Intel x86.
I'm not really upset at Nadella for this, because it's what he should do. But for everyone else to breathlessly be obsessed with his word and forget his real job as salesman in chief is what's pathetic.
What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say.
If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it.
If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.
After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.
Technology is changing rapidly. Apple can easily afford to wait a few years for markets to appear.
Looking ahead to the next decade or so I believe what we're likely on course for is some sort of AI OS. AI will be able to vibe-code apps for you and you'll be able to manage and dispatch individual agents to do tasks. There will be a messy transitionary period that lasts a while from today's software.
Apple has a trusting customer base, they have tremendous hardware prowess, they have cross-platform cloud services, and they have design sense to figure out how to establish these new models. I think if a new form of computing emerges Apple basically gets a free first swing at it, in terms of consumer trust. We've seen that with their VR headset, that while a dud was given far more interest and attention than Facebook's and Microsoft's offerings.
I do think they show signs of vulnerability as well, even if I think they're less than their strengths. Apple's famously design focused culture seems to be cracking a bit and giving way to more Microsoft / Google style PM-led culture. That can be OK, but I think PM led cultures are sometimes almost too strategic for their own good, like someone you can tell is a salesmen not a friend, and that can result in gradual brand erosion.
A simple example of this happening is Apple's website. Like Microsoft the tabs at the top of their website now reflect the company's internal organization, not what makes the most sense to the user. In the Jobs era they insisted that there would be no separate "store" tab, a redundancy because the whole website was a store, but I suspect that changed because the "Store" division within Apple wants that extra prominence.
If Apple isn't careful with enough missteps they may dilute their brand and Google / Microsoft may seem just as appealing for early adopters of emerging AI OSs.
The competition is only in the mind of business writers and pundits; it maybe matters for the stock market but Apple has never made their stock the main driver of their efforts.
They don't need to beat these companies outright, but the more they fail to provide value relative to the competition, the more they will see users leave.
If they managed to add inference chip that competes with Groq and similar hardware, they would make much bigger wins comparing to main their own models.
Imagine being able to run 32B reasoning models with hundreds of tokens per second on your local laptop.
They did make an attempt with the vision glasses, but it obviously flopped.
They succeeded for so long with top-down direction because the top had ideas. I think the best move would be to allow for more bottom-up direction. Give the engineers and designers license to run wild a bit.
Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about.
Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware.
Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta.
It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.
The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.
That's not really clear. Mac sales actually peaked during the pandemic, around 2022.
Apparently there was also some tariff fear-driven buying this year. Indeed, I purchased a new MacBook Pro earlier this year for that very reason.
If you compare, say, 2024 Mac revenue to 2014 Mac revenue, there was an increase of 25% over that period, but inflation increased even more over the same period. (Unfortunately, Apple no longer announces unit sales.)
Maybe they've just calcified - the youngest person on their board is 63. At the end of the day they haven't had a credible threat in over a decade.
Apple is like 150.000+ employees. What makes you think they have to choose between OS redesigns and AI. There is probably more than enough talent there to do all the things.
The rules for iPhone software are almost unchanged since 2009!
Safety razor blades did not change a lot either since the time they were invented; the seem to be in a deep local optimum. Maybe the iPhone is in a somehow similar situation.
By very-rarely revisiting these ~17 year old policies they avoided naturally-increasing their specs to foster and keep-up with more demanding software, and subsequently in the last two generations had to play catch-up and rush to upgrade their entire product line to a higher baseline of memory to support AI and increase their thermal capacities to support their foray into AAA games, leaving billions of active iOS devices as unsupported.
What they’re lacking is quality control. They need a hard-ass that will scream at them when they try to release stuff like liquid glass.
It’s been too long since Jobs death and they’ve gotten comfortable pushing out poor quality features.
Yet nobody else was able to do it. Microsoft, for all its power and money, couldn’t make it happen. Samsung+Google have come closest, but even then, Apple dominates the profits.
But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem.
And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later"
As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine.
"Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.