Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by discordance » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:55 AM UTC

hapticmonkey wrote: post #13

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 ho…

~25% of Apple's revenue came from services in FY25 (and 50% from iPhone, ~25% from other hardware). They made $415B in that year, so ~$100B from services alone!

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

#52

Post by walterbell » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:56 AM UTC

int32_64 wrote: post #28

Nvidia 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…

Nvidia-Mediatek Arm laptops will compete with Qualcomm and Apple, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/03/16/the-arm-i...

  [WSJ] sources expect.. first units in H1 2026, with GTC as the most likely unveiling stage.. NPU reportedly exceeds both Intel and AMD’s current neural processing units.. If the integrated GPU delivers RTX 5070-class performance in a thin laptop form factor, it would eliminate the need for a separate GPU die, fundamentally changing how gaming laptops are designed.

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

#53

Post by smt88 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:58 AM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #37

SoftTalker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- AirPods - Apple Watch - AirTag Those are a few that come to mind. All do multi-billions in revenue per year.

None of those are the best product in their category, and all are only huge sellers because Apple anti-competitively privileges them in its ecosystem.

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

#54

Post by TheDong » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:58 AM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #24

TheDong wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I open the app store and search "Gemini", the first result is "ChatGPT (advertisement)"

If I search for my bank, I get another bank. If I search for "Wordle", I get a bunch of ad-supported spamware (both the ad and non-ad results) before the real NYT Games app.

The app store has ads in search results. This is the primary way that my technologically inept relatives end up with the wrong app installed btw, is by searching and clicking the first result, and getting complete trash adware.

Apple should be ashamed of selling out their users.

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

#55

Post by smt88 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:59 AM UTC

eastbound wrote: post #26

grtteee wrote: post #2

This 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.

"10 years behind" would be an improvement for Siri. It's actively broken much of the time in a way that Google Assistant or Alexa never has been.

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

#56

Post by socalgal2 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:00 AM UTC

grtteee wrote: post #2

This 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.

Yea, they nailed that with the Newton, Apple Pippin, and the Apple Vision Pro

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

#57

Post by smt88 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:00 AM UTC

hapticmonkey wrote: post #13

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 ho…

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

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

#58

Post by Gigachad » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:01 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #41

amazingamazing wrote: post #22

Gemma4 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…

Local models seem somewhere between 9 and 24 months behind. I'm not saying I won't be impressed with what online models will be able to do in two years, but I'm pretty satisfied with the prediction that I won't really need them in a couple of years.

We still aren't going to be putting 200gb ram on a phone in a couple years to run those local models.

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

#59

Post by Gigachad » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:02 AM UTC

eastbound wrote: post #26

grtteee wrote: post #2

This 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.

These are software/cloud features. You can install gemini on iphone if you want to talk about towers in Chicago.

The only reason to care about it being OS integrated is to interact with functions of the OS, which siri does fine.

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

#60

Post by drBonkers » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:06 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #53

tiffanyh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- AirPods - Apple Watch - AirTag Those are a few that come to mind. All do multi-billions in revenue per year.

None of those are the best product in their category, and all are only huge sellers because Apple anti-competitively privileges them in its ecosystem.

What’s better than AirPods and AirTags? I want them