The big question is whether Apple can keep shipping new models constantly.
AFAIK the current model is on par with with Qwen-3-4B, which is from a year ago [0]. There's a big leap going from last year Qwen-3-4B to Qwen-3.5-4B or to Gemma 4.
Apple model is nice since you don't need to download anything else, but I'd rather use the latest model than to use a model from a year ago.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-...
I’m not sure why that’s a question, it’s just a downloaded file. You can even watch it download separately when you enable Apple Intelligence (it’s not tied to OS updates from what I can tell).