Apple makes 75% of its money, directly or indirectly, from selling iPhones. But iPhone sales have been relatively flat since 2021. AI is the hot new thing and, IMO, it doesn’t matter to most people if Apple creates a new Siri in house, or spends some money to “hire” an existing digital assistant that actually works.
Buybacks and promises of future inventments aren’t going to get us to upgrade our iPhone more often or attract new customers. Maybe AI will.
I think is just noise. Developing useful GenAI models is hard and time consuming. Apple is a few years behind for well documented reasons.
However, we can already see that GenAI is commoditizing. Look at DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. Open Source models (strictly speaking - Open Weights), are appearing all over the place. Aside from a small paying user base, I can’t see what competitive advantage OpenAl or Anthropic have in the long run. I also can’t imagine why Meta is spending so much money, talent.
(Sidebar - I can’t see how LLMs are going to create the “super intelligence” that Sam Altman keeps talking about. We’re already seeing a slowing in the rate of progress.)
How this will play out, is going to take years and individual departures won’t matter over that time frame.
“Maybe” …?
THAT is not the guidance smart people at the top of one of the strongest global companies should follow.
I’m glad you don’t have Tim Cook’s ear and that Cook continues Apple’s practice of not jumping on the latest trend.
Yes. I don’t expect the majority of iPhone users will upgrade early to a new iPhone to get the latest Apple Intelligence regardless of its features. Maybe because some people don’t want or need AI.
I won’t because I already have access to ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI models on my iPhone 16. So does my old iPhone 11 and anyone with a half decent Android device, because some of the most power AI applications available can be run from a browser today.
That’s not advice, just one person’s opinion.
Following the news on AI is liking watching the craps game going on at the corner down the block – from the 45th floor. Betting on the outcome is not a great deal. Time will come when Meta and the others apologize to their investors for all the money wasted, since there will be more losers than winners.
Katie
