alt Hacker NewsIt is weird and disturbing that Apple has no native AI capability.
This is one of the most cash rich companies in the world and it has failed to have any position in the most critical technology development perhaps ever.
It's a clear signal that Apple became the most incredible operational/execution company under Tim Cook, but lost its innovation leadership.
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You don't stay the most cash-rich company by chasing every expensive fad and they've been equally conservative with other "THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING" tech fads such as Cryptocurrency and VR. I don't blame them for not rushing to light Billions a month on fire like the other big players; their play always seems to be to let things shake out and then deliver something refined and sophisticated.
There also doesn't seem like any real opportunity for them to Apple-ify this tech (any more than today's announcement). There's lots of rough edges and the underlying technology is fundamentally janky and extremely problematic in Apple's second differentiator of privacy.
I have been using their on define AFM models for a year - for small models they are good. Their Secure Enclave server bases AFM model is good, but not in the same class as gemini 3.5 flash or deep seek v4 flash.
They are a hardware company at heart, the do software as software is needed.
For building a competitive AI they'd have to hire the talent, which is expensive and then do a massive investment, which may still end up far behind the competition. (See there attempts with Siri)
Now they can pick the model they want and if time is right they can still build their own.
In the end they still want to sell devices. They aren't doing a search engine (while they could), they are not doing an LLM model, ...
Well it's half-and-half, why did Apple struggle for so long with Siri and its pre-LLM era technology, during the time of AlphaGo and so forth, and then after Covid why didn't Apple pivot to something like their own version of Gemini?
But there are lots of differing possible reasons for this, and I think it is premature to conclude with any one in particular.
Really I don’t think this is a strong take at all. If anything this has positioned them extremely, extremely well for when the bubble bursts and they can go with the winner to provide reasonable capabilities.
I take it as a signal they don't see any of their value being provided by the models. They're strong point was never frontier technologies. It's always been the delivery of the technology.