[wyager]

Apple has completely dropped the ball on every single detail of AI rollout for the last 5 years - why do you think they will suddenly stop now? My prior is that the new siri stuff is just as vaporware as the previous "apple intelligence" rollout

[JumpCrisscross]

> Apple has completely dropped the ball

Apple has sat out a capital-allocation shitshow. Its investors and likely customers are better off for their patience.

[boringg]

Jury is out on that one -- will have to see what happens in the next couple of years. I don't think you can say better off with full confidence right now. Very possible you could say that in the future..

[JumpCrisscross]

> will have to see what happens in the next couple of years. I don't think you can say better off with full confidence right now

We can't say for confidence they'll find a niche in the AI world. But we can say they probably sat out some value-destroying capital investment. Like, I don't think Apple is going to wind up strategically worse off than Meta. But it won't have blown a metaverse on this.

[boringg]

Well I think those are different.

Most everyone outside of a core believer knew metaverse was a bad investment and total value destruction.

Im not sure that Apple's strategy will pay out -- they may avoid the heavy capex lift but if that strategy is successful they ill have missed the strategic upside. Thats the part the jury is out on.

They've taken a more deliberate approach which might be the winning one ... tbd. We should re-check this in 3-5 years to re-assess.

[lelanthran]

> I don't think you can say better off with full confidence right now.

Of course we can - they managed to avoid spending 100s of billions while still giving their users AI...

There is no future in which the entire world is beholden to the current VC-backed companies for AI. IOW, there is no moat.

[wyager]

That would be a valid explanation if they hadn't totally oversold and underdelivered on "apple intelligence". In reality, this explanation is just cope

[MattDamonSpace]

Ehhh if you squint, everything they announced today was announced in 2024.

Doesn’t seem like they changed their ideas much (I’m sure some iteration occurred but still) and the issue was the tech didn’t took 2 years to become workable

Feature set is borderline identical

[JumpCrisscross]

> this explanation is just cope

I'm not saying they played 5D chess. Maybe they got lucky. But they're coming out of this infrastructure boom with the second-highes P/E ratio in the Magnificent 7 [1], dividend intact, and tens of billions of cash on balance sheet unburned (and their stock and balance sheet unincumbered by new debt or stock sales).

[1] https://dividend.watch/lists/magnificent-7-stocks

[arcfour]

But it seems likely that in the coming years, people will expect Apple's products to include the latest cutting edge AI (I don't mean useless AI shoved into every possible thing, I mean something closer to a useful Siri). Giving everyone else a 10+ year head start on you is not a good position to be in.

If you choose to outsource your AI to OpenAI/Anthropic/whomever, now you're beholden to another (risky), and for a critical feature of your ecosystem that your customers have grown accustomed to and to expect. And it's not just that they might jack up prices on you, but they can just... get acquired, or go bankrupt, or fall behind on model development...

[s1artibartfast]

Why would Apple even want to be a big player? They aren't major players in search or advertising, so it seems less likely to disrupt them if they sit it out. There are reasons why shareholders might want companies to stay out radically different Technologies unless they are at risk of losing their business model.

It's not an existential risk to them unless they make it one by going all in.

[bombcar]

Apple is pretty famous for dropping the ball for years on various things, and then coming out with a "slick version" so good that everyone forgets how late they were to the party.

The most famous would be the iPod, but there are others.