Apple should acquire Perplexity - it's a pretty great product and combined with some privacy enhancements it's a win, and they could likely integrate it better than Google could with Gemini.
I was gifted a pro subscription for a year and after trying it for a few weeks I instead signed up for an Anthropic Claude subscription (which I pay $20 / month for) and I use that all the time.
I signed up and I no longer use most other websites. I only use Kagi for basic searches, where I want to get to a destination and not get information.
Perplexity “does the googling for me” and summarizes or seeks for me. No more skimming and synthesizing. No more crafting search queries and comparing. Ask a question, no matter how obscure or specific, and it fetches the real time answer.
Honestly not much has ever so drastically changed how I use the internet.
As a cultural synthesizer ("create a sketch...") or translator (i.e., from human to programming) perplexity is as good as the others and maybe worse. But I like it as being an alternative semantic web search engine. Search engine because most of the time the facts are referenced at the end of the paragraphs and when it fails to insert them, I usually ask to expand. It's a new feeling after all those years of PageRank dominance. For example, It sometimes creates a paragraph with a reference to some recent research that according to the PageRank logic should be at the bottom (because almost nobody cites it). It's like the relevance was reborn. Once it was in a primitive sense of the early AltaVista, then Google killed it with PageRank, now when an engine really understands the question, the answers might become relevant in a new sense while being tangential to the reputations of the sources
+1, I bought perplexity pro annual subscription last year, and hardly use it now.
chatGPT+o3 search is much better.
My typical workflow is fire the question to Google AI mode and chatGPT+o3 at the same -- AI mode is fast but meh answer, chatGPT is slower but pretty good answer always.
I would assume basic functionality would be included but advanced functionality would require a subscription to Apple One (or whatever it's called now).
So I wouldn't describe them as kind and benevolent, more that they want to make products people will pay for.
Would I prefer Anthropic to stay independent and go on to be a real alternative to Google, Microsoft and xAI? Certainly.
While I don't believe Apple wants to be in all of Anthropic's current businesses, the crown jewels are the models and employees, which is want they want.