You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race.
You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
That must be a very restrictive definition of “successful consumer hardware company”.
Apple _is_ a software company: everything it sells is based on a Mac OS X foundation.
Walk in to any Best Buy and look around. There are many. Apple is in a league of its own, however.