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