Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

adlrocha.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 402 posts

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

#91

Post by moondev »

codeptualize wrote: post #76
sidkshatriya wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will this strategy work every time ? Maybe for AI it will work (market is competitive and Apple just purchases the best model for its consumers). But this approach may not work in other areas: e.g. building electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cell technology, quantum computing etc. Essentially Apple got lucky with AI but it needs to keep investing in cutting edge technology in the various broad…

I think their M chips are a good example. They ran on intel for so long, then did the impossible of changing architecture on Mac, even without much transition pain. Obviously that was built upon years of iPhone experience, but it shows they can lag behind, buy from other vendors, and still win when it becomes worth it to them.

How is changing the architecture of a platform that only you make hardware for doing the impossible?

They could change the architecture again tonight, and start releasing new machines with it. The users will adopt because there is literally no other choice.

Every machine they release will be fastest and most capable on the platform, because there is no other option

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

#92

Post by Krutonium »

codeptualize wrote: post #76
sidkshatriya wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will this strategy work every time ? Maybe for AI it will work (market is competitive and Apple just purchases the best model for its consumers). But this approach may not work in other areas: e.g. building electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cell technology, quantum computing etc. Essentially Apple got lucky with AI but it needs to keep investing in cutting edge technology in the various broad…

I think their M chips are a good example. They ran on intel for so long, then did the impossible of changing architecture on Mac, even without much transition pain. Obviously that was built upon years of iPhone experience, but it shows they can lag behind, buy from other vendors, and still win when it becomes worth it to them.

It's also notably not the first time they switched. They did the Motorola (I think MIPS?) Archictecure, then IBM PowerPC, then Intel x86 (for a single generation, then x86_64) and now Apple M-Series.

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

#93

Post by 10keane »

there are always three elements in the equations of business model: 1. marginal cost 2. marginal revenue 3. value created

for llm providers, i always believe the key is to focus on high value problems such as coding or knowledge work, becaues of the high marginal cost of having new customers - the token burnt. and low marginal revenue if the problem is not valuable enough. in this sense no llm providers can scale like previous social media platforms without taking huge losses. and no meaning user stickiness can be built unless you have users' data. and there is no meaningful business model unless people are willing to pay a high price for the problem you solve, in the same way as paying for a saas.

i am really not optimistic about the llm providers other than anthropic. it seems that the rest are just burning money, and for what? there is no clear path for monetization.

and when the local llm is powerful enough, they will soon be obsolete for the cost, and the unsustainable business model. in the end of the day, i do agree that it is the consumer hardware provider that can win this game.

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

#94

Post by Krutonium »

socalgal2 wrote: post #56
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

The Vision Pro was a Development Kit; Just like the first generation Apple Watch. It's not meant for the consumers, it's meant for the developers among the consumers.

We will see if they ever release a new VisionOS device, but it's not the first time they did that; see also the Apple Watch.

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

#95

Post by seaal »

blitzar wrote: post #85
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…

> it’s not great at using all tools Glad it wasnt just me - i was impressed with the quality of Gemma4 - it just couldnt write the changes to file 9/10 times when using it with opencode

https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-31B-it/commit/e51e7dcd...

There was an update to tool calling 3 days ago. I haven't tested it myself but hope it helps.

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

#96

Post by trueno »

46493168 wrote: post #16

Apple 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.

i dont even care about apple intelligence. stays off, not sure anyone really cares about it who is also interested in what this ai shenanigans is about on a local device. i think people keep conflating apple intelligence with all these convos about how macs are kinda dope for joe consumer wanting to tinker with llms.

that's the other part of the story that matters, not apple intelligence. this writeup tries to touch on that, apple is uniquely positioned to do really well in this arena if/when local llm's becoming commodities that can do really impressive stuff. we're getting there a lot faster than we thought, someone had a trillion parameter qwen3,5 model going on his 128gb macbook and now people are thinking of more creative ways to swap out whats in memory as needed.

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

#97

Post by sky2224 »

Honestly, I think part of the reason Apple hasn't jumped deep into AI is due to two big reasons:

1) Apple is not a data company.

2) Apple hasn't found a compelling, intuitive, and most of all, consistent, user experience for AI yet.

Regarding point 2: I haven't seen anyone share a hands down improved UX for a user driven product outside of something that is a variation of a chat bot. Even the main AI players can't advertise anything more than, "have AI plan your vacation".

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

#98

Post by jurmous »

Gigachad wrote: post #58
colechristensen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don’t need 200gb of RAM on a phone to run big models. Just 200 GB of storage thanks to Apple’s “LLM in a flash” research.

See: https://x.com/danveloper/status/2034353876753592372

Post reply on HN