Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

What I think was a wasted opportunity was not bringing the xserve back, being one of the few e2e solutions out there at scale.

Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware.

Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the hood and computed locally. Hence their chips. I don’t see what Apple have to gain by building a competitor to what OpenAI has to offer.

Apple will just drip feed locally running models that enable minor conveniences. They will probably drop the Apple Intelligence label later and just have things with their own names like "magic eraser".

> Then Stargate Texas was cancelled, OpenAI and Oracle couldn’t agree terms, and the demand that had justified Micron’s entire strategic pivot simply vanished. Micron’s stock crashed.

Well.. no. The Stargate expansion was cancelled the orginally planned 1.2MW (!) datacenter is going ahead:

> The main site is located in Abilene, Texas, where an initial expansion phase with a capacity of 1.2 GW is being built on a campus spanning over 1,000 acres (approximately 400 hectares). Construction costs for this phase amount to around $15 billion. While two buildings have already been completed and put into operation, work is underway on further construction phases, the so-called Longhorn and Hamby sections. Satellite data confirms active construction activity, and completion of the last planned building is projected to take until 2029.

> The Stargate story, however, is also a story of fading ambitions. In March 2026, Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had abandoned their original expansion plans for the Abilene campus. Instead of expanding to 2 GW, they would stick with the planned 1.2 GW for this location. OpenAI stated that it preferred to build the additional capacity at other locations. Microsoft then took over the planning of two additional AI factory buildings in the immediate vicinity of the OpenAI campus, which the data center provider Crusoe will build for Microsoft. This effectively creates two adjacent AI megacampus locations in Abilene, sharing an industrial infrastructure. The original partnership dynamics between OpenAI and SoftBank proved problematic: media reports described disagreements over site selection and energy sources as points of contention.

https://xpert.digital/en/digitale-ruestungsspirale/

> Micron’s stock crashed. [the link included an image of dropping to $320]

Micron’s stock is back to $420 today

> One analysis found a max-plan subscriber consuming $27,000 worth of compute with their 200$ Max subscription.

Actually, no. They'd miscalculated and consumed $2700 worth of tokens.

The same place that checked that claim also points out:

> In fact, Anthropic’s own data suggests the average Claude Code developer uses about $6 per day in API-equivalent compute.

https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-why-is-clau...

I like Apple's chips, but why do we put up with crappy analysis like this?

I think a lot of people are not hype about AI in their toaster, but... I don't think people are generally turned off form deeper integration in their OS itself. Especially when for some people this is representing ideas similar to how programmer-types get excited about Shortcuts.

Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff