Not long ago, Microsoft was widely regarded as a boring and only marginally relevant company. During the Ballmer years, and especially after missing the mobile phone revolution, many predicted that Microsoft would never fully recover its dominant position in the market—or at least, never be “cool” again. However, after Satya Nadella took the reins, the company began to turn around. Today, Microsoft is thriving and once again viewed as a leader on the cutting edge of modern computing.
The same could be true of Apple. Whether it will require Tim Cook to step down, whether recent leadership changes will make a difference, or whether WWDC will demonstrate that Apple is back on track remains to be seen. Just as Microsoft managed to recover from its failures, it’s possible that Apple can recover from missing the surge in AI development. But there is also the risk that, like Microsoft’s mobile phone misstep, Apple’s delay in AI could prove more consequential than it appears. Microsoft was never able to be a player in the mobile phone space. It may be that Apple will never fully recover its leadership in the AI space. As @MacSparky put it in his May 23 The Lab Report, “There’s a ton of innovation happening right now in artificial intelligence, and Apple is responsible for none of it.”
I’m hoping that WWDC will demonstrate that, as Mark Twain is famously (if inaccurately) quoted, “The report of my death was an exaggeration”—and that Apple has stumbled, but is back up and running at the front of the pack in the AI race in a way that matters to most consumers.
I think it’s too early to tell if Apple needs to “recover”.
They certainly appear behind on AI, and time will tell if they can/should catch up in that regard. I think it will be more telling once a lot of the regulatory and legal ramifications of recent decisions play out…how much that may impact their income, etc.
I think it’s funny how many folks call for Tim Cook’s ouster right now. He made this company one of the (if not the) richest companies in the world…so people saying he has failed and needs to go are detached from reality. Where their perspective and reality coalesces, in my opinion, is if Apple’s profitability starts taking a nose dive, which it very well could. That’s why I think we aren’t quite to the time where we know if Apple needs to recover or not.
The Apple fandom is an echo chamber of everyone being mad at the same thing. Developers are getting taken advantage of, “Apple is cooked”, Vision Pro isn’t as successful as it could be because developers are mad…etc, etc, etc.
In my opinion, Apple needed to adjust some policies a while ago and now are being forced to do so. I think competition is good, and increasing competition is good.
Can Apple catch up in AI? I don’t know, but they could partner with one of the leaders in AI and continue to be competitive. They already have some of the best hardware.
I never considered Apple a leader in AI. In fact, I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning Apple and AI in the same sentence before Chat GPT was announced. They have been using machine learning/AI to improve their hardware & software. So have Samsung and Google, etc.
All I know is they purchased Siri, did little with it, then apparently put in on the back burner and forgot it to death.
When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft he abandoned the “Windows Everywhere” culture of his predecessors. Then he said, “First, we needed to obsess about our customers. At the core of our business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unmet needs with great technology.”
I remember when he introduced Microsoft Office for iPad, he said to someone off stage, “Bring me my iPad”. And I seem to recall thinking the iPad looked like someone had been using it, not a device that had been set up for a demo.
IMO, Apple needs to “obsess about their customers”, which includes their developers. Currently they appear to see everyone outside of the company as just a source of revenue.
They may need, above all else, an attitude adjustment.
I’m not sure Apple needs to “catch up” with AI. They need robust AI available on their devices, but there’s nothing inherently saying they’re the ones that need to provide it. If they offered some OS hooks and allowed the assistant to be provided by third parties, there would be massive opportunities for companies to create apps that plugged into the iPhone, Mac, etc.
Agreed. In spite of what podcasters, YouTubers, influencers, and bloggers want us to think, there is a much larger group of Apple users that are simply consumers.
The majority of consumers simply purchase on a whim and so far, they do not feel AI is an existential threat; the majority are not early AI adopters and barely know much about AI on any platform, in any shape or form.
Until Apple sales drop significantly and wall street reacts, there is really nothing to worry about in terms of Apple’s health and Tim Cook’s future.
Tim has already said he will retire at some point, right? I think he will be able to ride this out until then.
As mentioned above, Apple can always just add somebody else’s AI and blunt the negative PR for the short term and even medium term time frames.
And, as it turns out, the company has prospered anyway.
I’m the kind of Apple customer who wants good hardware built by a company who has an opinion about the operating system that powers it and enables developers to take advantage of that OS to give me powerful tools to do what needs to be done with a minimum of heartburn. What does Apple really need to do in the AI space (and AI is more than LLM chatbots) to meet that particular need?
The answer to that may be (likely is?) different than the answer for a customer who would like to ask Siri to order a pizza, or would like the Mail app to help them write better emails, or wants the Photos app to make their iPhone photos look better.
If there’s one good thing about AI it would be its nondeterministic behavior. Thus 5 AI tools that receive the same input are likely to deliver different output.
You don’t want a leader in AI. No one is going to corner the market, the best results will be AI tools that are built around specificity.
The idea that there has to be a winner or loser comes from behavior that needs to perish. Conflict attracts attention but AI is simply not a zero sum game. I get my news from mainstream media organizations, man on the street social media, forums, books. There are all sources and we humans are smart enough to retrieve, collect and balance this information. This is why the Flynn Effect exists (IQ increases over time as society evolve) . A century ago the amount of information to parse daily was significantly lower than today. For AI to me it’s “come one …come all” I have no desire to only play in Apple’s AI sandbox or Microsoft/Google/Facebook etc. Even if aforementioned companies try to stop the use of other tools it will work because they can only control their sandbox.
The initial AI stakes will reward the company that delivers the best balance of simplicity/complexity. Shooting too high will likely mean too complex and the masses will not adopt, shooting too low and AI becomes a toy that people quickly become bored with.
Unfortunately the best results for users won’t necessarily translate into the kind of buzz that generates mega-billion dollar investments in the charismatic megafauna of the AI ecosystem.
That being said, I agree that AI (as a broad category) honed to address a particular problem or suite of problems will likely generate the biggest bang for the buck at the consumer, enterprise, and academic research level.
I did both 23&Me and Ancestry Dot and I knew to expect differences given each companies collection of populations and their differences but the numbers were significantly different and I was ok with that given I understand the numbers evolve over time as population samples are updated.
AI output should become more sophisticated and stratified as we ingest the data we need into the various LLM.
Whilst it’s true Apple is behind the growth in LLM search with Siri, there is clearly a bubble in “AI”, meaning that expectation / hype far exceeds near term capabilities, and that hype doesn’t actually translate to the Use Cases of ordinary people.
I don’t think society (i.e. the Market) has not yet filtered search/image generation/
text editing, sufficiently to determine the essential Use Cases. In fact we’re far from that, just as we’re far from current LLM’s having the capabilities and reliability expected by most people. And of course when I say most people I don’t mean MPU listeners.
I use AI everyday, but it’s not via an LLM chatbot—it’s via my three photo processing tools, DXO PureRaw, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Photoshop. I don’t use Firefly (Adobe’s generative AI engine) to generate images, but I do use plenty of other AI fueled Lightroom and Photoshop tools for things like masking and distraction removal. Some kind of AI magic is behind sharpening and noise removal in DXO’s raw image processor; whatever it is, it’s terrific. Oh, and I should mention the AI-driven autofocus in my cameras themselves.
I think the various flavors of AI—e.g., generative, predictive, agentic, computer vision, etc—get scrambled together in a lot of the discourse around AI.
I’m reading a new book, Apple in China by Patrick McGee. This morning I read about a meeting with developers Steve had after he returned to Apple.
"Jobs, in faded blue jeans and signature black turtleneck, sporting long hair that swept across his forehead, said he wanted Apple to ship a computer that did away with a hard drive and instead stored everything on a server—a precursor to cloud computing. “I have computers at Apple, at NeXT, at Pixar, and at home,” he told the auditorium. “I walk up to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server, and I’ve got my stuff, wherever I am. And none of that is on a local hard disk.”
Steve might have been a few years early with that idea.
I really …really enjoyed you taking me down memories lane there. Don’t forget Apple’s web strategy is DOOOMED if they don’t create a web portal.
@WayneG I just added McGee’s book to my list last week. I’ve ALWAYS loved the idea of Network Computing. The problem when I was selling the NC is that they cost just as much as a desktop because they lacked economy of scale and infrastructure was a problem for people that did not have robust LAN.
I don’t think Apple is failing in any meaningful sense, and I don’t think that’s a realistic possibility in the near future.
There are vulnerabilities, though. Some of those are just what happens when a company becomes dominant: the only way is down or at least to restructure and find a new role or direction (like IBM or even Microsoft - you are not what you were, but you’re still trucking). Some of that, in turn, is that large, successful companies are less able to take risks. It’s much harder to risk killing the goose that lays lots of golden eggs, than to keep trying new poultry to see if one of them might be the egg-layer. Apple is paralysed by not being able to think about radically changing its dependence on the iPhone and its approach to services - knocking down the wall to its garden would probably be a disaster on lots of levels, but it must be difficult to realise that that wall is going to be knocked down and so what replaces it as a business model.
Then there is the obvious vulnerability that the world is changing - at least in terms of political approaches to globalisation, and what is considered to be essential (e.g. Artificial Intelligence) - and that is bringing Apple into conflict with some powerful forces which were previously in its favour: politically but also in terms of the developer and user community.
A classic strategy is to change the leadership - at the very top - but you need to give someone very special the freedom and power to restructure and change direction: Jobs being brought back is a classic Apple example. That’s so much easier when a company is truly in trouble and everyone (including the investors) understands that NOT making radical change is not an option. That’s much harder when the company is making billions a year in profits doing what it does. That’s exactly why (IMHO) things like iTunes/Apple Music is in such a need of a complete re-think - it ain’t broke, so why fix it? While there’s been good incremental development of Apple’s own apps, why hasn’t Apple really, deeply thought anew about how to do core tasks like Writing, storing and organising information, managing projects and tasks or keeping a record and journal of your life and leveraging its powerful hardware to do something that just feels great and works well or even better, why hasn’t it deeply invested in the developer community to ensure that such compelling things are nurtured and explored better?
There’s no simple answers and the obvious ones are almost certainly the wrong ones. I hope that Apple will rediscover the meaning behind some of its slogans and rhetoric and do the hard work to make them real.
Apple has made notable improvements to its core apps in recent years. On a “power feature” scale of 1 to 10, I would give them an aggregate score of 6 or 7. A key challenge is that Apple tends to “hide” many of its advanced features, resulting in most users never fully utilizing the capabilities built into its native applications. These apps are more powerful than many realize.
Apple designs for the “average consumer.” Given the global scale at which the company operates, this includes users from highly industrialized nations to underdeveloped ones. Their products are used by the wealthy and the poor, the technically sophisticated and the technically challenged, the tech enthusiasts and those who view their devices as mere utilities. Designing applications that meet the varied needs and expectations of such a vast and diverse user base is a challenge.
Indeed. In some cases, I think Apple’s quest for service revenue keeps it from delivering apps that are focused on the user’s needs rather than their wallets. The Books app is an example. It could be a first-class app for reading books of any kind in digital format and managing your library of titles, but instead its primary purpose is selling books. Forget editing or adding metadata. In the case of audiobooks, forget storing them anywhere but your hard drive.
