alt Hacker NewsApple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending
Comments
FWIW, AI is not entirely locked down in the Apple ecosystem. Sure, they control it but they've already built the foundation of a major opportunity for developers.
There's an on device LLM that is packaged in iOS, iPadOS and macOS 26 (Tahoe) [1]. They even have a HIG on use of generative AI [2]
Something like half of all macs are running macOS 26 [3] already, so this could be the most widely distributed on-device LLM on the planet.
I think people are sleeping on this, partly because the model is seen as under powered. But I think we can presume it won't always be so.
I've just posted a Show HN of app for macOS 26 I created that uses Apple's local LLM to summarize conversations you've had with Claude Code and Codex. [3]
I've been somewhat surprised at the quality and reliability of Apple's built-in LLM and have only been limited by the logic I've built around it.
I think Apple's packaging of an LLM in its core operating systems is actually a fast move with AI and even has potential to act as an existential threat to Windows.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286/
[2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
I think one of Apple's strengths since Tim Cook took over is their ability to avoid "gimmicks". As much criticism as people have of apple for not innovating on the iPhone, I appreciate their ability to not screw products up.
I'm not saying AI is a gimmick, but the caution they show is a good quality I think
It might as well be the visualization of the two strategies:
- Everyone else: "We mainly build huge AI compute clusters to process large amount of data and create value, at high cost for ramp-up and operation."
- Apple: "We mainly build small closed-down AI compute-chips we can control, sell them for-profit to individual consumers and then orchestrate data-processing on those chips, with setup and operational cost all paid by the consumer."
I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.
No matter what they do, they will sell hundreds of millions compute devices for the foreseeable future. They use this to build out AI infrastructure they control, pre-paid by the future consumers.
THIS is their unique strength.
Seems that this is apples modus operandi since the app store, their last "thing" they've made really.
Hype about self driving cars -> apple chases it with apple car -> investors pleased they kept up with the joneses -> apple car is behind or not good enough or whatever -> quietly cancelled -> investors pleased they culled the deadweight.
You can replace apple car with vision pro or soon apple intelligence and it will play out the same formula. Luckily it allows investors to profit.
The core of Apple's problem boils down to apathy towards their product quality. I just recently switched from using Siri to Google Gemini in my car. The experience is dramatically better.
And this is the case across the board.
My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.
Third and final example is how bad Apple's native dictation engine is. I can run OpenAI Whisper models on my Mac and get dramatically better output.
As a long time Apple fan who's had everything since before the first iPhone, I feel this apathy towards product quality cannot be disguised as some strategic decision to fast follow with AI.
This is the thing I've found amazing about people's complaints about Apple and AI.
Historically the strength of Apple was that they didn't ship things until they actually worked. Meaning that the technology was there and ready to make an experience that was truly excellent.
People have been complaining for years that Apple isn't shipping fast enough in this area. But if anything I think that they have been shipping (or trying to ship) too fast. There are a lot of scenarios that AI is actually great at but the ones that move the needle for Apple just aren't there yet in terms of quality.
The stuff that is at a scale that it matters to them are integrations that just magically do what you want with iMessage/calendars/photos/etc. There are potentially interesting scenarios there but the fact is that any time you touch my intimate personal (and work) data and do something meaningful I want it to work pretty much all the time. And current models aren't really there yet in my view. There are lots of scenarios that do work incredibly well right now (coding most obviously). But I don't think the Apple mainline ones do yet.
Sooner or later, everyone will realize Apple isn't building another ChatGPT - they don't need to. They're working on the world's largest distributed inference network. With hundreds of millions of Apple Silicon devices, they are the only ones who can afford to run AI features at zero marginal cost to themselves - using the user's electricity and hardware. While Google and Microsoft burn billions on data centers, Apple is simply offloading the compute to our pockets. In the long run, when AI becomes a commodity, the winner will be whoever has the lowest transaction cost - and in that game, Apple simply has no competition
> Shares of Apple Inc. were battered earlier this year as the iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an artificial intelligence strategy.
Everyone’s shares were battered earlier this year, and it had nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with tariffs.
This is from a financial market perspective.
From a user perspective it may not be a strength: users / customers may expect certain functionality that works accurately and responsively.
I genuinely never understood why there was a narrative that Apple is "falling behind" when it comes to AI. They make phones, computers and an ecosystem of services to lock you in. None of this stuff is threatened by AI; with the right integration, it would enhance them!
I am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a free API call is transparently made to a secure computed environment on Apple’s servers that are documented to preserve privacy.
A problem is that even though it is super simple to write Swift / SwiftOS apps to use the system model, I don’t see much evidence that many developers are using the model in their apps.
A good candidate for second mover advantage.
Let everyone else pay for the research and make the mistakes, find out what works and what doesn't. Apple already has the consumers, they might as well save a few (hundred?) bn in the process and later deploy something which doesn't tell you to glue your cheese to your pizza.
Apple doesn’t own a search engine either, and gets $20B per year from Google to direct search queries to them.
I hope they adopt the same model with AI - leverage whatever frontier model is best and provide their own privacy infrastructure in front.
At some point Apple will figure out a way to provide the right info from your calendar, messages, email etc as context and couple this with a bunch of secure tools for creating calendar entries, etc. Agentic AI will then be something I personally benefit from.
And I think we're all weary of the whining about Apple being "behind on AI."
Consumers of Apple's core businesses do not stand to gain much, if anything, from so-called "AI." The failure of pundits and "analysts" to recognize and call that out just testifies to their laziness. They can never say exactly WHY or HOW this "behindness" is hindering Apple or its user base.
It's sad that Apple has capitulated to them at all by even talking about "AI."
Apple's phones are responsible for most of their revenue. The phones are designed to pretty much exclusively interact with social media and take photos. AI doesn't really add anything to that experience since advertisement consumption by humans is the ultimate objective. That's why even though Apple's Siri has been about the most useless assistant in existence for years, Apple isn't in a rush to replace it. It simply doesn't have a big impact on their revenue.
Microsoft has been criticized for investing in AI heavily. But it actually makes sense for Microsoft if you consider the nature of their business. The problem is not with the investment per se but with what they got out of it. Unfortunately, Microsoft sucks at product management, so instead of creating useful stuff that users want and are ready to pay for, they created stuff that no one understands, no one can use, and no one wants to pay for. Github copilot is an exception of course. I'm talking more about their Office 365 AI.
I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone. Apple is famous for watching peanut butter and chocolate makers and swooping in with Reece's Peanut Butter cups while everyone scratches their head because they've had better chocolate and better peanut butter so what's the deal?
When and if Apple pulls the plug on AI, we can declare it dead for this cycle. See you all again in 2040.
For anyone thats been around for more than one hype cycle, this is not a surprise.
Apple clearly takes a 'Measure Twice, Cut Once' approach.
It seems to me that tech and business analysts mostly supply uninformed nonsense opinions around whatever the popular rhetoric of the day is to generate more clicks :-/
How many times do we have to listen to tech and business analysts talking about lacklustre iPhone releases and how Apple hasn't done anything interesting since the original iPhone? But yet the iPhone 17 is flying off the shelves in China.
Or, since the stock market is an emotional game (hear me out): Apple hasn't announced anything in the past year which caused comparable excitement and resulted in (further) overvaluation of their company like it happened on Microsoft, nVidia, etc.
Now, after a few months (!), reality sets in and those hyped-up investors realize that it's not as much of a short-term game as they told themselves it would be...
All I really want from Apple is to be able to talk to Siri as effectively as I can with ChatGPT via advanced voice chat.
Is that so much to ask?
My beloved boomer dad’s windows laptop died the other week. After being on the fence about buying him a macbook (which I have and love) because I know he will struggle to switch user interfaces, I ended up pulling the trigger after seeing yet another news article about more aggressive copilot integration. I’m not letting him anywhere near an agent which can control his laptop, not from Microsoft which has huge incentive to recover their ai bet in whatever way possible
Wasn’t it the same with covid hiring? While others over hired, Apple was modest in this position. Then everyone needed to significantly downsize, when Apple didn’t.
So, basically Apple will be victorious in the AI Wars by sheer inaction;)
Looking at how others stuff AI into everything they can, user experience be damned, I’m kind of glad Apple was perfunctory in its jump on the bandwagon.
They could be selling shovels and be making a killing
Letting the market sort itself out then maybe buy whoever's left and aligns the most with their products is pretty obvious strategy.
This is a weird claim considering Apple has the best price/perf consumer grade hardware for AI
Companies with strong distribution have an option to be the "last" player in a market and simply force their way in. If Apply makes a "default" LLM which is as good or better than all premium LLM options... then you would obviously choose to use that over paying for a ChatGPT subscription. Apple could probably upcharge the phone by $200 for this privilege. Alternatively, they may do what they did with search and just get paid not to add an LLM chat functionality.
A lot of people here are assuming Apple has chosen to sit out the AI race, but I don't believe that's the case.
Trying and failing to make a SoTA foundational model is not a strategic move. It's similar to Amazon and Meta, they also have tried and not succeeded.
Apple didn't over-hire like other big tech and it didn't have to do the huge layoffs unlike others. This has similar smell - It won't win big in any ways, but the damage of bubble burst can be much less significant to them than to the peers.
Being behind in AI is not the same thing as not spending a lot on AI.
Sounds like a broken clock gone right. That only happens once every 43200 seconds
neither indus nor levantine, the last holdouts
It's telling that one of the leaders in ai, Google, also can't seem to ship an assistant that is better than Siri. Maybe it's not the ai that's the problem.
I'm bullish on Apple in the long term for AI. Don't get me wrong, they will always suck at it. But it seems obvious to me that we're sailing up to an enshittification cliff in the very near future. Every provider is going to start trying to prove they are making money from consumers and that means one thing: ads, ads ads. Or worse, invisible influence you can't even tell is there. There is going to be a trust crisis and that's going to send people flocking to on-device / local / trustworthy AI that will land right in Apple's lap.
Meanwhile in China....
Lmao their "slow AI pace"? After they banged out uncooked AI features that generated fake headlines and messages for people?
> Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its shares tumbled 18% through the end of June. That has reversed since then, with the stock soaring 35%, while AI darlings like Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. slid into the red and even Nvidia Corp. underperformed. The S&P 500 Index rose 10% in that time, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index gained 13%.
Why do papers do this. I can achieve any numbers by cherry picking the date for the random brownian motion.
lol
lmao, even
They are flat-out incompetent. Siri has somehow regressed over the years and visual intelligence only works in demos. They have the most abominable integration with ChatGPT imaginable.
At least the MLX team has been shipping an impressive product.
Apple: $60b in cash.
The revenue from AI is growing at a much slower rate than recurring capex and depreciation is accumulating. This will create distress opportunities that cash-rich companies like APPL may seize. Might be a private equity deal, might be in the public markets as some of the players dip hard after IPO.
As this plays out, APPL's silicon has unified memory, power consumption and native acceleration that gives it an edge running SLMs and possibly LLMs at scale. Wouldn't shock me to see APPL introduce a data-center solution.
Apple is probably going to be an AI consumer and not an AI producer and that is fine. Not everyone needs to be openai or anthropic.
swetenning the pill of a lost train
Ah, the benefits of having a sober old CEO. And a business model that doesn't need to be buoyed nor stabilized by spinning and hyping a succession of hot new trends.
I mean also, AI is still just a "confident idiot". Even the latest iteration of models are wrong more than half the time.
I just wish Siri fucking worked for just fucking ONCE when I actually fucking need it.
Has it ever, for anyone?
I would bet significant money that, within two years, it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company.
I can explain more in-depth reasoning, but the most critical point: Apple builds the only platform where developers can construct a single distributable that works on mobile and desktop with standardized, easy access to a local LLM, and a quarter million people buy into this platform every year. The degree to which no one else on the planet is even close to this cannot be understated.