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AI is turning Apple into a "loser"

36 points by elsewhen 1y ago

whywhywhywhy 1y ago
It’s far deeper than that and been Cooking for a long time before the AI boom, it was just less obvious because there wasn’t anyone to measure it against. But the cracks were visible and the direction obvious even 5 years ago
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Almost 5 years ago, Apple introduced a laptop that blew everyone away.
  - Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    Include me out, please.
  - walthamstow 1y ago
    Blew everyone in tech away, myself included. Nobody else noticed. From what I can gather they sold a few million units of the M1 Air. It's not a very big market.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - mcphage 1y ago
      Fair enough, but it was still enough of a technical marvel that to say Apple 5 years ago was already broken, was silly.
  - whywhywhywhy 1y ago
    Yeah after the 5 years where their main laptop model had a keyboard that became unresponsive within weeks, had a charger and power system that couldn’t even cold boot the machine it needed to sit there and pre-charge before it could boot itself, ran hot, ran slow, ran noisy. I know we all love the post-M1 MacBooks but it’s increasingly obvious that machine is the exception to the decline of everything else including the laptop line until M1 redesign saved it.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      While they definitely had or have organizational problems (which organization does not?), it seems quite hyperbolic to state >decline of everything else They were still pumping out very usable AirPods/Apple TV/Watch/Phone/Macbook Airs/Air Tags. Siri sucks (always has), and they have had some big misses, but the stuff that 90% of the population uses 90% of the time chugs along perfectly fine.
- bhouston 1y ago
  No one comes close to Apple's ecosystem of hardware. It is amazing and it isn't a simple matter for another company to approach it in the near term.
- taco_emoji 1y ago
  > Cooking I see what you did there...
rcore 1y ago
Might as well turn them into a winner.
bluetidepro 1y ago
> The bottom line: Apple has 24 to 36 months before it has its own AOL moment, according to Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment. That quote alone is hilarious. What a low effort article.
- evklein 1y ago
  Most financial news is basically pure speculation with a few quotes thrown in from people who are "absolutely certain" about their holding position.
- empath75 1y ago
  Do any of these people know that Apple is a hardware company and all of their services are just a side business? Apple is poised to make a fortune selling devices powered by their low power consumer chipsets that can run neural networks. There's really no competitor in that space. Apple has plenty of time and money to watch other people flailing around trying to make AI first devices until they even really start to take it seriously. Even if someone else figures out to make a killer mobile AI app, it will absolutely support iPhones for the foreseeable future. All apple needs to do is make sure their chip pipeline supports it. Google is the one that is facing an existential threat. Most people see their search engine as basically just a shitty ad-infested chatbot that produces worse results than chatgpt.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    Someone should let the shareholders and whoever writes Apple's quarterly reports know then.
  - dzhiurgis 1y ago
    > low power consumer chipsets that can run neural networks In 2040s
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    > Apple is a hardware company A hardware business cannot demand a P/E ratio in the 30s range, especially given that supply chain disruptions are going to eat heavily into their margins.
sd9 1y ago
Shorting AAPL would probably be a bad idea
nottorp 1y ago
> "With the cash they have on hand and the loyalty they have…there would have to be something disruptive in the marketplace that would draw away customers. It's not there yet," he says. Like what, a working phone that doesn't spy on you? [Mind, they seem to be forgetting about that lately.]
- jjice 1y ago
  Curious of if I missed some poor privacy practices from Apple lately. I know they had the default advanced image search stuff [0], but that's all I'm aware of. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/122033 https://support.apple.com/en-us/122033
  - nottorp 1y ago
    Maybe I was referring to "working". I use my phone too little to have an opinion, but I have two macs, one running Sonoma and one running Ventura, and the latter - and older - is the most stable.
coliveira 1y ago
It all depends on who is going to be the loser faster. If the other companies that are spending $1T on soon-to-be-outdated infrastructure don't make money from their new super AI systems, Apple might just as well be the healthiest of them all.
bhouston 1y ago
There is no one challenging Apple on hardware right now. And all of these AI tools can run on Apple machines. So I am not sure that I see Apple falling from its current situation. That said, Apple isn't really riding this wave of AI. So I feel that Apple isn't benefiting, thus it could likely be growing more than it is if it has an AI strategy that was effective. So I don't think Apple is a "loser" but it also isn't a "winner." It is more of a spectator who is still strong in their own domain, at least for now.
- htk 1y ago
  Unfortunately, this measured (and IMHO very reasonable) opinion doesn't generate clicks.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Apple tried to ride the wave of AI and failed (Apple Intelligence?) Apple has recently released a paper which says AI is all maths but a lot of people are saying that they are just "coping" with them losing the AI race. Apple is one of the largest companies, with I guess a lot of cash and just power. So if they still can't win/compete effectively in the AI race when they had gone all in once does raise some questions about what really is happening within Apple.
  - bhouston 1y ago
    > Apple tried to ride the wave of AI and failed (Apple Intelligence?) It was a crappy product, I agree. I keep it disabled. > Apple has recently released a paper which says AI is all maths but a lot of people are saying that they are just "coping" with them losing the AI race. It is a single paper and not reflectively of company strategy. > Apple is one of the largest companies, with I guess a lot of cash and just power. So if they still can't win/compete effectively in the AI race when they had gone all in once does raise some questions about what really is happening within Apple. Apple has to compete with other hardware vendors primarily right? Samsung mostly. And they are doing that effectively. Everyone's models are being obsoleted 6 months after they are released. It is a capital intensive market and it isn't clear anyone is actually profitable. I am not sure that Apple needs to get involved in this race, especially when there is little that is proprietary for more than a few months. That said, if Apple did need to get into this race, they should just buy Anthropic. It is a no drama company that just delivers. It would match Apple's corporate style and it would likely deliver a lot of key features into the various OSes.
ulfw 1y ago
Apple worries me a bit lately and by lately I mean in the last five six years. It seems Covid did a thing and all innovation and development efforts halted since 2000 or so. The Apple Car project was a huge boondoggle. Meanwhile Xiami delivered and succeeded with the SU7 and now YU7. Apple will finally introduce a foldable phone in late 2026, with specs rumored to be worse than today's Android flagships such as Oppo Find N5, which I use or the new Samsung Fold 7 and Honor Magic V5 etc. And let's keep in mind we are in the 7th iteration of such devices already. Vision Pro might have been technically nice but there is no market for it, let alone for it's price point and hence barely any developers jumped on it. The iPhone has stagnated so much I got the Oppo after having had every single iPhone since the original one in 2007. I legit cannot list a single notable thing that is new in the 16 Pro vs. the 15 Pro. The only thing that came to mind was the 48mp ultra wide sensor chip married to such a shitty lens that it legit has worse quality than my 15 Pro's old 12mp chip. I tested them back to back. I've been a huge fanboy for decades but lately absolutely nothing from the company excites me anymore as they just can't deliver. The big new Apple Watch update that was rumored never came. Meanwhile we have so much better looking rounded OLED ones from competitors.
- EmptyCoffeeCup 1y ago
  Only matters for people who care; that is not even the majority of apple users. It is well established that upgrading every year is a waste of funds; A lot of users buy a phone every 5-8 years (or after a destructive event) - IOS is nice to use. That's all that matters to a huge proportion of the market. Me? I'll keep my 13 Mini until it dies, or until a new "Mini" is released - phones don't need to be massive.
  - BuckRogers 1y ago
    iPhone 12 mini lover and user checking in here. The haters will berate us for our choice stating that "no one wants a small phone", but that's a lie. Normal sized phones were never going to be instant day-one hits. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to launch them during Covid, offer them 2 years, and say no one wants them. Give them a permanent place in the lineup, treating phones like every other very personal device meant for humans. Small, medium, and large. If you do that, and give people time to see exactly why 5.42 screens are superior to 6.1"+ sizes, then I think the numbers will start to change from what we saw with the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini, which were both launched when people were less on the go than in 100 years.
saubeidl 1y ago
I think Apple turned into a "loser" when they let the MBA guy take the CEO seat from the designer guy. Yes, short term business efficiency has increased. But other than an under-the-hood chip change (which, to be fair, was really impressive), they haven't really done anything disruptive since.
mitchitized 1y ago
Definitely not seeing the horrendous collapse of the once mighty Apple. That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI, and recent product releases/updates have been, uh, suboptimal. Latest Logic Pro is a disaster (e.g. unstable/crashing, removed key shortcuts killing productivity) and don't get me started on the dumbing-down of iOS. They are for sure headed in the wrong direction, but they are just too big to fall overnight.
- bhouston 1y ago
  > That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI I am reminding when Android phablets were really cutting into the marketshare of Apple a decade ago. Apple was reluctant to release larger phones for a couple years and it was an opening. But then all of a sudden Apple did release larger phones and the capabilities gap disappeared and then Apple's phone quality + CPU speeds + surrounding ecosystem of devices made the Android competitors pretty irrelevant.
- msgodel 1y ago
  The problem will come when LLM driven assistants become more popular. There's no way to have a nice one on iOS without Apple giving up more control than they're willing to.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Also, the lost time iterating. Apple should remember from its Maps debacle that it's difficult to make up years of product tuning overnight, no matter how talented a team you have. Time >> talent Because everyone has talent within the same order of magnitude, but no one has invented a time machine.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    Apple will make an exception if it's in their own interest. They also have enough money to just buy out a company and airlift them in. If there's one company that could stumble around for 20 years and still have enough money to continue without much worry, it's them.
JohnMakin 1y ago
I don’t mind apple devices but one really frustrating thing to me is how bad Siri is. It’s always been frustrating, but the fact that they were one of the first to enter a voice assistant market that could try to do advanced natural language processing and execute tasks, never really delivered that, and despite massive gains in this space that AI has enjoyed, they’re somehow still behind there. I am disabled and would pay buckets of money for certain things that siri obviously should be able to do but can’t. If I suffer a fall alone and yell “hey siri, I fell, call 9-11” I’m not entirely certain she can reliably do that and that’s insane to me.
taco_emoji 1y ago
They'll be fine. Investors have a boner for AI right now but that won't last.
- xnx 1y ago
  Overhyped in the short term. Underhyped in the long term.
FabHK 1y ago
Has Axios changed the headline? It's now: AI is turning Apple into a market "loser"
_fat_santa 1y ago
Big LOL on this one. Apple could have said "we are not doing any sort of AI" and they would still be worth what they are today. Did the author forget that everyone and their grandma has an iPhone in their pocket and an Apple Watch on their wrist?
- bobosha 1y ago
  So did everyone and their grandma also have blackberries.
  - exitb 1y ago
    Is there a phone out now, or at least on the horizon, that can do significantly more due to better integrated AI?
    - mathiaspoint 1y ago
      Yes. Android today can run programs generated by AI assistants locally and the new Linux VM means they can be provided with very complete MCP servers.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      Whatever OpenAi is trying to cook up.
  - geodel 1y ago
    No. Blackberries were in pockets of executives and business people.
  - empath75 1y ago
    No. Blackberry _never_ had the market penetration that apple had. They were an enterprise first company and barely had a foothold in the consumer market. Apple wiped out blackberry in the enterprise market after it dominated the consumer market and it _barely even tried_.
  - biker142541 1y ago
    No, not really. Peak Blackberry was both tiny compared to iPhone usage today and in a very different context, with very little of the economy or daily lives invested directly into a rich ecosystem dependent on the phones.
benguild 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519452 I just posted that the Foundation Models aren’t really delivering much confidence
mrweasel 1y ago
> Apple "needs the AI story because that's what's being rewarded in the market," Okay, so it's not actually because the users need something that can only be provided by an Apple AI. It provides little to no tangible benefit to Apples customers. It's just that the stock market would like to be able to tick the "Has AI" box on the APPL stock.
CodingJeebus 1y ago
[dead]
zaphod420 1y ago
This is just a dumb article. Comparing Apple to AOL is insane.
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  Right? They should be compared to Compaq or.. what's the name of that phone company that was really big before the iPhone came out?
rthrfrd 1y ago
Or maybe it’s like Toyota and EVs.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Toyota at least invested in building a battery supply chain with Idmetsu Kosan years ago, and is working on battery tech national projects within Japan. Apple hasn't done the same kind of homework yet, as Siri has largely been moribund nor will Apple be the reciever of significant state funding and subsidizes for R&D the same way Toyota is.
  - rthrfrd 1y ago
    Well if you want to continue the analogy, I could say: Apple at least invested in a SoC architecture years ago has already put it in a different league as far as AI capabilities go. So to say they haven't done "the same kind of homework yet" seems quite presumptive. Only Google has done anything remotely similar with TPUs and certainly not on the deployment scale that Apple has done. FWIW I don't care either way, I don't get emotionally attached to corporations, I just think the entire framing of the original post is very reactionary and naive, and I continue to think that the comparison with Toyota is an apt way to illustrate that.
antfarm 1y ago
AI for AI's sake might as well be a losing strategy. Apple will probably be fine.
alephnerd 1y ago
Unlike the others on here - the Axios argument does make sense. Essentially, the trade war related instability has made it's hardware story much more precarious (just like for any other consumer or enterprise hardware vendor), so some sort of a software story is needed to help cushion margins. The issue is, aside from the App Store, Apple traditionally never had a strong software story. If Apple does not build some sort of a software story (which at this point is AI), it's harder to justify it's current valuation and it's "FAANG" status. It's also undeniable that a LLM Chatbot player WILL make the foray into make their own bespoke hardware in order to target the consumer market, and the "chatbot as an oracle" UX does have strong traction amongst non-technical personas. RIM, Sony, and Nokia were also on top of the world in 2007-09, but quickly saw their fortunes turn around as Apple's App Store+Hardware Design+Gated Ecosystem story helped provide some polish and a UX that the others failed to provide. Essentially, if Apple didn't bungle Siri, they wouldn't be in the current situation today, and Apple is facing significant risks due to supply chain instability. Some diversification is needed.
- empath75 1y ago
  > It's also undeniable that a LLM Chatbot player WILL make the foray into make their own bespoke hardware in order to target the consumer market, and the "chatbot as an oracle" UX does have strong traction amongst non-technical personas. I am sure that there are going to be a bunch of these and almost all of them will suck, and if apple tried to make one now, it would also suck. Apple didn't invent the mobile phone, or the laptop, or the mp3 player, etc. They'll let someone else figure out if there is a market for it and then they'll refine it.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    > They'll let someone else figure out if there is a market for it and then they'll refine it. The same was said about Nokia, RIM, Sony, and Microsoft, yet they failed. The current iteration of leadership at Apple doesn't have a strong history of successfully launching monetizable software plays other than the App Store, and that is a fairly distinct muscle. More critically for Apple and the target personas who read Axios, Apple will not be able to justify it's current P/E ratio, because it's growth story has become difficult and it's margins are weaker now. That is why Apple is "turning" into a loser. > Apple didn't invent the mobile phone, or the laptop, or the mp3 player, etc Apple in the 2000s also didn't have a PE ratio in the 30s, which gave it more breathing room as it's product was it's products, not it's stock. Apple became a victim of it's success, as it is now treated as a blue chip - and by blue chip standards it is one of the less diversified ones (similar to Tesla imo)
benoau 1y ago
Relentless gatekeeping is turning them into a loser. iOS should be the platform where users reap the benefits of all the winners of AI but instead Apple gets to decide who may have a deep integration as an auxiliary to Siri, whose only saving grace is it is permanently-entrenched as the assistant no matter how far behind it falls.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Exactly this. Apple has to kill their baby if they want to continue and they don't have a leader with the will to do that.
nashashmi 1y ago
Apple Has many options to turn on AI. Their current goals (local private LLM) are too ambitious and AI has not caught up to that kind of goal. If they want to force AI, they can use a less ambitious approach: everything gets shared with Apple servers openly and AI queries that data. But their approach is so aloof of industry development that it will take at least 2 more years for it to be Apple-grade quality. It has to be local. It has to be private. It has to be amazing. It has to work well. It has to have standard easy to use purposes. It has to be integratable into apps. It has to be intuitive. They could just release a less ambitious Siri-Ai. Just to shut everyone up.
jaza 1y ago
I'm a notorious Apple hater, so I can't say I'll shed a tear if Apple does take a sizeable hit. But then again, I'm also a big sceptic of the AI hype wave currently gripping the world. My bet is that it's the latter, not Apple, that has 24 to 36 months left to live.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I'm also a big Apple hater for their closed approach to everything and the broad impact that has had on the market (now everything is moving that way), and would not be sad at all if they took a big hit (it was a slow evolution over many years, but that's where I am now), but I agree I think Apple is actually fine. They have a ton of options (ranging from acquisition or integration with existing providers) and all the money they could possibly need to get any or all of those done. The majority of normal people are just using AI for chatgpt-style stuff anyway, and that stuff all works perfectly fine on the iPhone. Maybe once Gemini is fully empowered to drive Android as a digital assistant Apple might need a good answer, but I think we're still a ways off from that point.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tuesdaynight 1y ago
I disagree with the article, but one thing that I learned is that HN is horrible with market predictions. I remember vividly how common was the prediction that Meta was going down here, 3 years ago. TikTok and Metaverse would kill it. Maybe Apple is really turning into a "loser".
jaredcwhite 1y ago
Completely absurd and ridiculous "analysis" with no basis in factual reality. Consumers are actually down on AI now. There's increasing negative sentiment whenever a company advertises it now has "AI" in its products. They are trusted less, not more, and viewed with suspicion. Apple is actually better positioned the more it relegates genAI to smaller local models which are good for a much more tightly-constrained number of key tasks for which LLMs aren't too horrifying.
josefritzishere 1y ago
This is absurd. I am not an Apple fan whatsoever but they're very successful bordering on dominant. AI is a fad, and overhyped. It will come abd go and Apple will still be the "A" in FAANG.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I guess if Netflix is still in FAANG, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to be as well
npc_anon 1y ago
Apple is late but has the resources to catch up in AI. And if not, they can just partner with the AI providers. They'll even get paid for it, similar to Google handing over billions per year to Apple just to be the default search provider. What is unfortunate for them though is that their AI miss is happening at the same time window in which smartphones seem close to done. They've produced 3 models in a row with zero memorable innovations. You can call Apple a hardware company but it's above all an iPhone company.
wendy4151 1y ago
[dead]
dep_b 1y ago
Apple would be in big trouble if their hardware mobile and desktop wasn't so much better, Windows wasn't a train wreck and Android was offering something more than a slightly less sucky version of Siri. In the mean while most of its competitors are burning towers of money on AI products that they charge their consumers about 1/10th of the real cost for. While Apple goes for on-device agents that are essentially free to run.

36 points by elsewhen 1y ago

It’s far deeper than that and been Cooking for a long time before the AI boom, it was just less obvious because there wasn’t anyone to measure it against. But the cracks were visible and the direction obvious even 5 years ago

lotsofpulp 1y ago
Almost 5 years ago, Apple introduced a laptop that blew everyone away.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago
  Include me out, please.
- walthamstow 1y ago
  Blew everyone in tech away, myself included. Nobody else noticed. From what I can gather they sold a few million units of the M1 Air. It's not a very big market.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcphage 1y ago
    Fair enough, but it was still enough of a technical marvel that to say Apple 5 years ago was already broken, was silly.
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  Yeah after the 5 years where their main laptop model had a keyboard that became unresponsive within weeks, had a charger and power system that couldn’t even cold boot the machine it needed to sit there and pre-charge before it could boot itself, ran hot, ran slow, ran noisy. I know we all love the post-M1 MacBooks but it’s increasingly obvious that machine is the exception to the decline of everything else including the laptop line until M1 redesign saved it.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    While they definitely had or have organizational problems (which organization does not?), it seems quite hyperbolic to state >decline of everything else They were still pumping out very usable AirPods/Apple TV/Watch/Phone/Macbook Airs/Air Tags. Siri sucks (always has), and they have had some big misses, but the stuff that 90% of the population uses 90% of the time chugs along perfectly fine.
bhouston 1y ago
No one comes close to Apple's ecosystem of hardware. It is amazing and it isn't a simple matter for another company to approach it in the near term.
taco_emoji 1y ago
> Cooking I see what you did there...

rcore 1y ago

Might as well turn them into a winner.

bluetidepro 1y ago

> The bottom line: Apple has 24 to 36 months before it has its own AOL moment, according to Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment. That quote alone is hilarious. What a low effort article.

evklein 1y ago
Most financial news is basically pure speculation with a few quotes thrown in from people who are "absolutely certain" about their holding position.
empath75 1y ago
Do any of these people know that Apple is a hardware company and all of their services are just a side business? Apple is poised to make a fortune selling devices powered by their low power consumer chipsets that can run neural networks. There's really no competitor in that space. Apple has plenty of time and money to watch other people flailing around trying to make AI first devices until they even really start to take it seriously. Even if someone else figures out to make a killer mobile AI app, it will absolutely support iPhones for the foreseeable future. All apple needs to do is make sure their chip pipeline supports it. Google is the one that is facing an existential threat. Most people see their search engine as basically just a shitty ad-infested chatbot that produces worse results than chatgpt.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Someone should let the shareholders and whoever writes Apple's quarterly reports know then.
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  > low power consumer chipsets that can run neural networks In 2040s
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > Apple is a hardware company A hardware business cannot demand a P/E ratio in the 30s range, especially given that supply chain disruptions are going to eat heavily into their margins.

sd9 1y ago

Shorting AAPL would probably be a bad idea

nottorp 1y ago

> "With the cash they have on hand and the loyalty they have…there would have to be something disruptive in the marketplace that would draw away customers. It's not there yet," he says. Like what, a working phone that doesn't spy on you? [Mind, they seem to be forgetting about that lately.]

jjice 1y ago
Curious of if I missed some poor privacy practices from Apple lately. I know they had the default advanced image search stuff [0], but that's all I'm aware of. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/122033 https://support.apple.com/en-us/122033
- nottorp 1y ago
  Maybe I was referring to "working". I use my phone too little to have an opinion, but I have two macs, one running Sonoma and one running Ventura, and the latter - and older - is the most stable.

coliveira 1y ago

It all depends on who is going to be the loser faster. If the other companies that are spending $1T on soon-to-be-outdated infrastructure don't make money from their new super AI systems, Apple might just as well be the healthiest of them all.

bhouston 1y ago

There is no one challenging Apple on hardware right now. And all of these AI tools can run on Apple machines. So I am not sure that I see Apple falling from its current situation. That said, Apple isn't really riding this wave of AI. So I feel that Apple isn't benefiting, thus it could likely be growing more than it is if it has an AI strategy that was effective. So I don't think Apple is a "loser" but it also isn't a "winner." It is more of a spectator who is still strong in their own domain, at least for now.

htk 1y ago
Unfortunately, this measured (and IMHO very reasonable) opinion doesn't generate clicks.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Apple tried to ride the wave of AI and failed (Apple Intelligence?) Apple has recently released a paper which says AI is all maths but a lot of people are saying that they are just "coping" with them losing the AI race. Apple is one of the largest companies, with I guess a lot of cash and just power. So if they still can't win/compete effectively in the AI race when they had gone all in once does raise some questions about what really is happening within Apple.
- bhouston 1y ago
  > Apple tried to ride the wave of AI and failed (Apple Intelligence?) It was a crappy product, I agree. I keep it disabled. > Apple has recently released a paper which says AI is all maths but a lot of people are saying that they are just "coping" with them losing the AI race. It is a single paper and not reflectively of company strategy. > Apple is one of the largest companies, with I guess a lot of cash and just power. So if they still can't win/compete effectively in the AI race when they had gone all in once does raise some questions about what really is happening within Apple. Apple has to compete with other hardware vendors primarily right? Samsung mostly. And they are doing that effectively. Everyone's models are being obsoleted 6 months after they are released. It is a capital intensive market and it isn't clear anyone is actually profitable. I am not sure that Apple needs to get involved in this race, especially when there is little that is proprietary for more than a few months. That said, if Apple did need to get into this race, they should just buy Anthropic. It is a no drama company that just delivers. It would match Apple's corporate style and it would likely deliver a lot of key features into the various OSes.

ulfw 1y ago

Apple worries me a bit lately and by lately I mean in the last five six years. It seems Covid did a thing and all innovation and development efforts halted since 2000 or so. The Apple Car project was a huge boondoggle. Meanwhile Xiami delivered and succeeded with the SU7 and now YU7. Apple will finally introduce a foldable phone in late 2026, with specs rumored to be worse than today's Android flagships such as Oppo Find N5, which I use or the new Samsung Fold 7 and Honor Magic V5 etc. And let's keep in mind we are in the 7th iteration of such devices already. Vision Pro might have been technically nice but there is no market for it, let alone for it's price point and hence barely any developers jumped on it. The iPhone has stagnated so much I got the Oppo after having had every single iPhone since the original one in 2007. I legit cannot list a single notable thing that is new in the 16 Pro vs. the 15 Pro. The only thing that came to mind was the 48mp ultra wide sensor chip married to such a shitty lens that it legit has worse quality than my 15 Pro's old 12mp chip. I tested them back to back. I've been a huge fanboy for decades but lately absolutely nothing from the company excites me anymore as they just can't deliver. The big new Apple Watch update that was rumored never came. Meanwhile we have so much better looking rounded OLED ones from competitors.

EmptyCoffeeCup 1y ago
Only matters for people who care; that is not even the majority of apple users. It is well established that upgrading every year is a waste of funds; A lot of users buy a phone every 5-8 years (or after a destructive event) - IOS is nice to use. That's all that matters to a huge proportion of the market. Me? I'll keep my 13 Mini until it dies, or until a new "Mini" is released - phones don't need to be massive.
- BuckRogers 1y ago
  iPhone 12 mini lover and user checking in here. The haters will berate us for our choice stating that "no one wants a small phone", but that's a lie. Normal sized phones were never going to be instant day-one hits. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to launch them during Covid, offer them 2 years, and say no one wants them. Give them a permanent place in the lineup, treating phones like every other very personal device meant for humans. Small, medium, and large. If you do that, and give people time to see exactly why 5.42 screens are superior to 6.1"+ sizes, then I think the numbers will start to change from what we saw with the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini, which were both launched when people were less on the go than in 100 years.

saubeidl 1y ago

I think Apple turned into a "loser" when they let the MBA guy take the CEO seat from the designer guy. Yes, short term business efficiency has increased. But other than an under-the-hood chip change (which, to be fair, was really impressive), they haven't really done anything disruptive since.

mitchitized 1y ago

Definitely not seeing the horrendous collapse of the once mighty Apple. That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI, and recent product releases/updates have been, uh, suboptimal. Latest Logic Pro is a disaster (e.g. unstable/crashing, removed key shortcuts killing productivity) and don't get me started on the dumbing-down of iOS. They are for sure headed in the wrong direction, but they are just too big to fall overnight.

bhouston 1y ago
> That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI I am reminding when Android phablets were really cutting into the marketshare of Apple a decade ago. Apple was reluctant to release larger phones for a couple years and it was an opening. But then all of a sudden Apple did release larger phones and the capabilities gap disappeared and then Apple's phone quality + CPU speeds + surrounding ecosystem of devices made the Android competitors pretty irrelevant.
msgodel 1y ago
The problem will come when LLM driven assistants become more popular. There's no way to have a nice one on iOS without Apple giving up more control than they're willing to.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Also, the lost time iterating. Apple should remember from its Maps debacle that it's difficult to make up years of product tuning overnight, no matter how talented a team you have. Time >> talent Because everyone has talent within the same order of magnitude, but no one has invented a time machine.
- freedomben 1y ago
  Apple will make an exception if it's in their own interest. They also have enough money to just buy out a company and airlift them in. If there's one company that could stumble around for 20 years and still have enough money to continue without much worry, it's them.

JohnMakin 1y ago

I don’t mind apple devices but one really frustrating thing to me is how bad Siri is. It’s always been frustrating, but the fact that they were one of the first to enter a voice assistant market that could try to do advanced natural language processing and execute tasks, never really delivered that, and despite massive gains in this space that AI has enjoyed, they’re somehow still behind there. I am disabled and would pay buckets of money for certain things that siri obviously should be able to do but can’t. If I suffer a fall alone and yell “hey siri, I fell, call 9-11” I’m not entirely certain she can reliably do that and that’s insane to me.

taco_emoji 1y ago

They'll be fine. Investors have a boner for AI right now but that won't last.

xnx 1y ago
Overhyped in the short term. Underhyped in the long term.

FabHK 1y ago

Has Axios changed the headline? It's now: AI is turning Apple into a market "loser"

_fat_santa 1y ago

Big LOL on this one. Apple could have said "we are not doing any sort of AI" and they would still be worth what they are today. Did the author forget that everyone and their grandma has an iPhone in their pocket and an Apple Watch on their wrist?

bobosha 1y ago
So did everyone and their grandma also have blackberries.
- exitb 1y ago
  Is there a phone out now, or at least on the horizon, that can do significantly more due to better integrated AI?
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    Yes. Android today can run programs generated by AI assistants locally and the new Linux VM means they can be provided with very complete MCP servers.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Whatever OpenAi is trying to cook up.
- geodel 1y ago
  No. Blackberries were in pockets of executives and business people.
- empath75 1y ago
  No. Blackberry _never_ had the market penetration that apple had. They were an enterprise first company and barely had a foothold in the consumer market. Apple wiped out blackberry in the enterprise market after it dominated the consumer market and it _barely even tried_.
- biker142541 1y ago
  No, not really. Peak Blackberry was both tiny compared to iPhone usage today and in a very different context, with very little of the economy or daily lives invested directly into a rich ecosystem dependent on the phones.

benguild 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519452 I just posted that the Foundation Models aren’t really delivering much confidence

mrweasel 1y ago

> Apple "needs the AI story because that's what's being rewarded in the market," Okay, so it's not actually because the users need something that can only be provided by an Apple AI. It provides little to no tangible benefit to Apples customers. It's just that the stock market would like to be able to tick the "Has AI" box on the APPL stock.

CodingJeebus 1y ago

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zaphod420 1y ago

This is just a dumb article. Comparing Apple to AOL is insane.

readthenotes1 1y ago
Right? They should be compared to Compaq or.. what's the name of that phone company that was really big before the iPhone came out?

rthrfrd 1y ago

Or maybe it’s like Toyota and EVs.

alephnerd 1y ago
Toyota at least invested in building a battery supply chain with Idmetsu Kosan years ago, and is working on battery tech national projects within Japan. Apple hasn't done the same kind of homework yet, as Siri has largely been moribund nor will Apple be the reciever of significant state funding and subsidizes for R&D the same way Toyota is.
- rthrfrd 1y ago
  Well if you want to continue the analogy, I could say: Apple at least invested in a SoC architecture years ago has already put it in a different league as far as AI capabilities go. So to say they haven't done "the same kind of homework yet" seems quite presumptive. Only Google has done anything remotely similar with TPUs and certainly not on the deployment scale that Apple has done. FWIW I don't care either way, I don't get emotionally attached to corporations, I just think the entire framing of the original post is very reactionary and naive, and I continue to think that the comparison with Toyota is an apt way to illustrate that.

antfarm 1y ago

AI for AI's sake might as well be a losing strategy. Apple will probably be fine.

alephnerd 1y ago

Unlike the others on here - the Axios argument does make sense. Essentially, the trade war related instability has made it's hardware story much more precarious (just like for any other consumer or enterprise hardware vendor), so some sort of a software story is needed to help cushion margins. The issue is, aside from the App Store, Apple traditionally never had a strong software story. If Apple does not build some sort of a software story (which at this point is AI), it's harder to justify it's current valuation and it's "FAANG" status. It's also undeniable that a LLM Chatbot player WILL make the foray into make their own bespoke hardware in order to target the consumer market, and the "chatbot as an oracle" UX does have strong traction amongst non-technical personas. RIM, Sony, and Nokia were also on top of the world in 2007-09, but quickly saw their fortunes turn around as Apple's App Store+Hardware Design+Gated Ecosystem story helped provide some polish and a UX that the others failed to provide. Essentially, if Apple didn't bungle Siri, they wouldn't be in the current situation today, and Apple is facing significant risks due to supply chain instability. Some diversification is needed.

empath75 1y ago
> It's also undeniable that a LLM Chatbot player WILL make the foray into make their own bespoke hardware in order to target the consumer market, and the "chatbot as an oracle" UX does have strong traction amongst non-technical personas. I am sure that there are going to be a bunch of these and almost all of them will suck, and if apple tried to make one now, it would also suck. Apple didn't invent the mobile phone, or the laptop, or the mp3 player, etc. They'll let someone else figure out if there is a market for it and then they'll refine it.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > They'll let someone else figure out if there is a market for it and then they'll refine it. The same was said about Nokia, RIM, Sony, and Microsoft, yet they failed. The current iteration of leadership at Apple doesn't have a strong history of successfully launching monetizable software plays other than the App Store, and that is a fairly distinct muscle. More critically for Apple and the target personas who read Axios, Apple will not be able to justify it's current P/E ratio, because it's growth story has become difficult and it's margins are weaker now. That is why Apple is "turning" into a loser. > Apple didn't invent the mobile phone, or the laptop, or the mp3 player, etc Apple in the 2000s also didn't have a PE ratio in the 30s, which gave it more breathing room as it's product was it's products, not it's stock. Apple became a victim of it's success, as it is now treated as a blue chip - and by blue chip standards it is one of the less diversified ones (similar to Tesla imo)

benoau 1y ago

Relentless gatekeeping is turning them into a loser. iOS should be the platform where users reap the benefits of all the winners of AI but instead Apple gets to decide who may have a deep integration as an auxiliary to Siri, whose only saving grace is it is permanently-entrenched as the assistant no matter how far behind it falls.

msgodel 1y ago
Exactly this. Apple has to kill their baby if they want to continue and they don't have a leader with the will to do that.

nashashmi 1y ago

Apple Has many options to turn on AI. Their current goals (local private LLM) are too ambitious and AI has not caught up to that kind of goal. If they want to force AI, they can use a less ambitious approach: everything gets shared with Apple servers openly and AI queries that data. But their approach is so aloof of industry development that it will take at least 2 more years for it to be Apple-grade quality. It has to be local. It has to be private. It has to be amazing. It has to work well. It has to have standard easy to use purposes. It has to be integratable into apps. It has to be intuitive. They could just release a less ambitious Siri-Ai. Just to shut everyone up.

jaza 1y ago

I'm a notorious Apple hater, so I can't say I'll shed a tear if Apple does take a sizeable hit. But then again, I'm also a big sceptic of the AI hype wave currently gripping the world. My bet is that it's the latter, not Apple, that has 24 to 36 months left to live.

freedomben 1y ago
I'm also a big Apple hater for their closed approach to everything and the broad impact that has had on the market (now everything is moving that way), and would not be sad at all if they took a big hit (it was a slow evolution over many years, but that's where I am now), but I agree I think Apple is actually fine. They have a ton of options (ranging from acquisition or integration with existing providers) and all the money they could possibly need to get any or all of those done. The majority of normal people are just using AI for chatgpt-style stuff anyway, and that stuff all works perfectly fine on the iPhone. Maybe once Gemini is fully empowered to drive Android as a digital assistant Apple might need a good answer, but I think we're still a ways off from that point.

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tuesdaynight 1y ago

I disagree with the article, but one thing that I learned is that HN is horrible with market predictions. I remember vividly how common was the prediction that Meta was going down here, 3 years ago. TikTok and Metaverse would kill it. Maybe Apple is really turning into a "loser".

jaredcwhite 1y ago

Completely absurd and ridiculous "analysis" with no basis in factual reality. Consumers are actually down on AI now. There's increasing negative sentiment whenever a company advertises it now has "AI" in its products. They are trusted less, not more, and viewed with suspicion. Apple is actually better positioned the more it relegates genAI to smaller local models which are good for a much more tightly-constrained number of key tasks for which LLMs aren't too horrifying.

josefritzishere 1y ago

This is absurd. I am not an Apple fan whatsoever but they're very successful bordering on dominant. AI is a fad, and overhyped. It will come abd go and Apple will still be the "A" in FAANG.

freedomben 1y ago
I guess if Netflix is still in FAANG, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to be as well

npc_anon 1y ago

Apple is late but has the resources to catch up in AI. And if not, they can just partner with the AI providers. They'll even get paid for it, similar to Google handing over billions per year to Apple just to be the default search provider. What is unfortunate for them though is that their AI miss is happening at the same time window in which smartphones seem close to done. They've produced 3 models in a row with zero memorable innovations. You can call Apple a hardware company but it's above all an iPhone company.

wendy4151 1y ago

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dep_b 1y ago

Apple would be in big trouble if their hardware mobile and desktop wasn't so much better, Windows wasn't a train wreck and Android was offering something more than a slightly less sucky version of Siri. In the mean while most of its competitors are burning towers of money on AI products that they charge their consumers about 1/10th of the real cost for. While Apple goes for on-device agents that are essentially free to run.