alt Hacker NewsAI is a technology not a product
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Steve already gave away the secret [1] (must watch) a long time ago:
"You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products.
Agreed.
The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language.
The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does not like AI for its own sake or the weirdos who ramble about putting them into a permanent underclass. The user likes messaging their friends and playing music.
To much of this hype cycle has no user in mind.
I totally agree - the phone as a form factor is not going away. People are always going to want to have a mobile communicator/computer, and want one with a screen and all-day battery life. The phone is not going to be replaced by smart glasses or some other wearable or screen-less pocket device.
It may well be that the user interface of your "phone", and how you use it, changes over time as we progress toward AGI, but as long as Apple keep to the Job's aesthetic of making well designed products that get out of the way and just "do the thing", they should be fine. Of course Apple will eventually fall, as all companies do, but I don't think the reason for it will be that the "phone" market was rendered obsolete by AI.
Perhaps if phones becomes more of a "pocket assistant" than a device to run discrete apps, then they will becomes harder to differentiate based on software, and more of a generic item rather than a status/luxury one ... who knows? Anyone else have any theories of how Apple may eventually fall?
There is one potential AI risk to Apple, that they are at a disadvantage due to not having their own frontier models and datacenters to run them on, but I think there will always be someone willing to sell them API access, and they will adapt as needed. Good enough AI is only going to get cheaper to train and serve, and Apple not trying to compete in this area may well turn out to have been a great decision, just as Microsoft seem to be doing fine letting OpenAI take all the risk.
GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America.
To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.
Anything is a product if you can sell it.
AI is a political ideology masquerading as technology https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/
This is a similar argument to "Dropbox is a feature, not a product" and it definitely rings true in this instance too. I remember the litany of applications that only supported sync through Dropbox. It had no ecosystem, it's saving grace was that no one yet was operating a service similar at that scale.
All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get away with it for a while, but only insofar as hardware prevents advanced use. Once we get that hardware[1] there will only be two types of AI companies: hardware manufacturers, and labs. Just like sync became trivial and ancillary, so will AI inference.
[1] https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/