Apple never competed in the "AI race" in the first place, because they already knew they were already at the finish line.
This was really unsurprising [0].
Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
21–30 of 402 posts
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#22Gemma4 in my view is good enough to do things similar to Gemini 2.5 flash, meaning if I point it code and ask for help and there is a problem with the code it’ll answer correctly in terms of suggestions but it’s not great at using all tools or one shooting things that require a lot of context or “expert knowledge”
If a couple more iterations of this, say gemma6 is as good as current opus and runs completely locally on a Mac, I won’t really bother with the cloud models.
That’s a problem.
For the others anyway.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#23Apple is almost 2 years out from their announcement of Apple Intelligence. It has barely delivered on any of the hype. New Siri was delayed and barely mentioned in the last WWDC; none of the features are released in China. In other news, people keep buying iPhones, and Apple just had its best quarter ever in China. AAPL is up 24% from last year.
A lot of the people that bought iPhones are now buying Macs as well.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#24I've had it turned off since Sequoia, and this I truly appreciate. It hasn't nagged me once to turn it or Siri on, and it isn't mandatory. When I open up JIRA or Slack I am always greeted with multiple new dialogues pointing at some new AI bullshit, in comparison. We hates it precious
I don't like companies forcing their newest features on me noisily and constantly trying to ship new features and see what sticks so you can't trust whether a feature advertised one week will even be there the next. However, I have even less patience for companies forcing paid-for third-party ads down my throat on a paid product. Slack at least doesn't sell my eyeballs. Facebook, Twitter, Google's ads are worse to me…
I haven't noticed this at all and I wonder if you're mistaking curation for advertising? When I open up the App Store I get a panel written "games we love" and a listing of indie games that are clearly not paid for ads. The ads in search are visibly marked as ads, and while I don't particularly like ads in general, they are pretty easy to avoid.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#25This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.
When have they done that since the first iPhone in 2007? The watch maybe? Though not sure that's "leapfrog" better than anyone else's smartwatch, but I don't have one so maybe I'm wrong.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#26This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.
> wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing
My parents use Android to ask “What are the 5 biggest towers in Chicago” or “Remove the people on my picture” while apparently iPhone is only capable of doing “Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone”.
My iPhone is lagging a ridiculous 10 years behind. It’s just that I don’t trust Google with my credit card.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#27This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.
Quietly they are doing things on-device. The OCR + copy/paste is genuine goodness - modestly functional.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#28Nvidia restricts gamer cards in data centers through licensing, eventually they will probably release a cheaper consumer AI card to corner the local AI market that can't be used in data centers if they feel too much of a threat from Apple.
Imagine a future where Nvidia sells the exact same product at completely different prices, cheap for those using local models, and expensive for those deploying proprietary models in data centers.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#29Gemma4 in my view is good enough to do things similar to Gemini 2.5 flash, meaning if I point it code and ask for help and there is a problem with the code it’ll answer correctly in terms of suggestions but it’s not great at using all tools or one shooting things that require a lot of context or “expert knowledge” If a couple more iterations of this, say gemma6 is as good as current opus and runs completely locally o…
Yep, and to be honest we don't really need local models for intensive tasks. At least yet. You can use openrouter (and others) to consume a wide variety of open models which are capable of using tools in an agentic workflow, close to the SOTA models, which are essentially commodities - many providers, each serving the same model and competing with each-other on uptime, throughput, and price. At some point we will be able to run them on commodity hardware, but for now the fact that we can have competition between providers is enough to ensure that rug pulls aren't possible.
Plus having Gemma on my device for general chat ensures I will always have a privacy respecting offline oracle which fulfils all of the non-programming tasks I could ever want. We are already at the point where the moat for these hyper scalers has basically dissolved for the general public's use case.
If I was OpenAI or Anthropic I would be shitting my pants right now and trying every unethical dark pattern in the book to lock in my customers. And they are trying hard. It won't work. And I won't shed a single tear for them.
Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
#30Nvidia restricts gamer cards in data centers through licensing, eventually they will probably release a cheaper consumer AI card to corner the local AI market that can't be used in data centers if they feel too much of a threat from Apple. Imagine a future where Nvidia sells the exact same product at completely different prices, cheap for those using local models, and expensive for those deploying proprietary models…
Having your cake and eating it too. Consumer goodwill and printing money.