> The transition Apple and Tim Cook announced today is entirely different. No one’s hand was forced.

I don't follow Apple very closely, but given this is coming right after the AI leadership shakeup and at a time where Apple's AI story is being debated, the thought did pop into my mind...

This reminds me of Ballmer leaving Microsoft. Strictly by the numbers, he was a very good steward of the company at the time, but for various reasons (in his case, at least partially related to optics) he was considered unsuitable to lead Microsoft in its cloud era, and so he left and cleaned up a lot of house in the process.

I honestly don't know what the best AI story is for Apple, but I appreciate that they are pushing the envelope on on-device inference, however under-utilizied it may be at the moment. I think this is going to be essential to keep AI widely accessible in the long term, because everyone else is incentivized to try to lock it up in their data centers.