There have now been two AI episodes in a row. Granted, one of them is being touted as a feedback episode, but most of the conversation centers on AI and Siri AI.
The AI Stack is Changing
iOS 27 Beta Features and Siri AI
As you can probably tell, I’ve become inundated and overwhelmed with the discussion about AI and how it will change your lives. Quite frankly, I don’t think it will change our lives that much unless we can figure out a way to make it work for us and help us profit. Otherwise, big tech companies will profit not just because we are paying to use their platforms and services, but also because they will sell our data, which we will freely give them.
I wanted to suggest a new type of guest, the MacintoshLibrarian, who discusses vintage Macintosh and other topics in a unique and creative way. I only suggested it because it seems like topics are being repeated, and the variety and creativity the show possesses are dwindling.
You haven’t discussed unique workflows in quite some time. Anyway, this is just my opinion. I understand that I don’t have to watch/listen to the show.
Have you thought about listening to some of the show’s archive? There’s lots of good stuff there if you are hankering for old stuff. I occasionally listen to the show where David announced he was becoming an ex-lawyer.
The biggest change AI will mean for my life is increased costs of Apple (and other) products. And AI and bug fixes seem to be almost the entirety of changes in the upcoming xOS 27 releases.
My oldest Apple devices are only two years old, so I don’t plan to replace any of them for another two or three years. And I will continue using my current third party AI software and services whether Siri AI works as advertised or not. But it would be nice if I didn’t have to manually launch an app to perform every task.
My question is how does Apple plan to make additional services revenue from Apple Intelligence?
AWS, Google, and Microsoft are growing . Google alone has a backlog of $462 Billion in customer contracts that have not yet been recognized as revenue. And has contracted with SpaceX for additional compute to meet customer demand, instead of building additional datacenters at this time.
OTOH, it appears AI will probably continue to be an expense for Apple, whether they use Google or build out their own PCC.
AFAIK Apple started reselling cloud storage from AWS, and Microsoft, as iCloud from the start. And later replaced MS with Google. It seems to me that they will want/need to do something similar with AI expenses.
They are going to sell it in exactly the same way that they sell iCloud storage. If you need more than what the free local model that works on your device can deliver, you will need to pay for access to the capabilities available via private cloud compute. You’ll definitely pay for more than a modest baseline of camera image processing. I think they’re betting that their users would rather pay Apple to have agentic AI on their devices to avoid the hassle (and potential pitfalls) of spinning up a third-party system.
Based on news reports claiming everybody else is operating at a massive loss, Apple might be the first company in the world to figure out how to actually make money from selling access to AI.
I think Apple’s real differentiator could be selling local access in a world of cloud access.
I hope the tradeoff for more expensive devices is having these tools available at our fingertips, without the ChatGPT subscription. I don’t doubt Apple’s ability to create new streams of Services revenue, but if I were John Ternus, I would be using Apple’s edge on unified memory and computational efficiency to package and ship these features built directly into the products. The Mac Mini is already the default “AI device” for people who run their own; all Apple needs to do is package it for non-techies.
I am assuming if this is why they are skipping M6 in favor of the M7 line.
Regarding the Google partnership, my (interested but limited) understanding is that Gemini is (by a good margin) the most efficient family of models, which would also dovetail nicely with a goal of putting more and more capability on smaller and smaller devices.
I’ve become inundated and overwhelmed with the discussion about AI and how it will change your lives.
I agree and because I work with AI professionals all day and do active research on the topic, I skip podcasts about it because it’s too much of a busman’s holiday for me.
It’s a shame as I’ve ended up unsubscribing from most Mac and tech podcasts in recent weeks because of them talking and talking about AI and nothing else. I miss tech podcasts across the board talking about more fun topics.
I’ve gone back to traditional magazines for all my information (I’ve started using Apple News much more), as a lot of the professional Apple journalists still stay on the topic they are experts on and they only talk about AI when it’s relevant to something Apple is doing; it’s usually not the focus of their articles. Online amateur news sites have been reduced to either AI evangelising or reposting reworded versions of Apple’s marketing materials, neither of which I want to be exposed to.
I only subscribe to 3 Apple related podcasts and frequently skip entire episodes or listen at 1.5X. But I also subscribe to podcasts that cover subjects like security, AI in heathcare & law, and the tech industry in general. Consumer AI gets most of the attention but it isn’t what is changing the world.
My other podcasts cover current events, etc. And many of them report the same thing so “Hey Siri, skip” may now be my most used command.
After years of trying Apple News from time to time, and dropping it after one month, I’ve decided to stay subscribed. One reason was I discovered a news source in AN that I was paying for separately. The other was the purchase of an excellent ad blocker.
No doubt you know this, but you can “train” news to surface more of what you want and less of what you don’t. You can also follow news from various sources and locations. I have found that after a year of training and blocking sources, it is a useful source for news and for journals such as The Atlantic, WSJ, and more.
And the most restrictive option (which I use) is in Settings > News: “Restrict stories in Today”, which only shows stories from channels your explicitly follow.
This turns my Apple News into a strictly MacRumors + New Yorker + WSJ + Bloomberg Businessweek app, plus some local stuff. And audio
Sure, you can say that. I was just saying that two weeks in a row the focus was AI and Siri AI. And not discussing guests, daily driver tech or unique workflows just name a few. But today they had a great episode. I shared this post because I was feeling some AI fatigue.
I guess it depends on how you think about it. You can have ‘losses’ because your business is going under, or losses because your sales orders have gone so high that you can’t meet the demand and have to jack up your capex to try and catch up. Both are technically losses, but only one of them is a red flag…
From Yahoo! Finance:
The four companies are citing increasingly long backlogs of committed customer spending. Across the largest cloud providers, remaining performance obligations and backlog now total roughly $2.3 trillion, the BofA analysts said, noting “increased hyperscaler appetite to continue investing in capacity, backed by customer commitments.”
“We expect the aggregate annual FCF (free cash flow) of hyperscalers to well exceed prior average of ~$200-250bn+/yr once these AI infra are fully at work, and do not view the recent fundraising activities as a signal for financial stress or inadequate free cash flow generation,” the analysts wrote.
“A key risk remains execution … but we see surging demand outpacing the capacity being built resulting in sustainably strong demand in the mid-term.”
The latter isn’t what I’ve been seeing. I’ve been seeing numerous sites claiming that the Claude (as an example) is underwater per subscription at the $20/$100/etc. levels. The claims are that they’re providing thousands of dollars of compute to each person on these low-priced plans, and they’re underwater.
I have no idea whether that’s true or not. But it’s something that keeps popping up.
