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

Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 370 posts

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#121

Post by orangecat »

s0ss wrote: post #40
sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

This is quite a short sighted analysis. I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. The future of AI would be on-device models which are as powerful as current frontier models and also I can imagine companies have their own deployments of inference of…

How's it "quite short sighted"? Are you saying the math _does_ make sense? if so, how?

Back of a very tiny envelope: suppose there are 100 million jobs that benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. That's a trillion in annual revenue; at a 30% margin that's $300 billion in profits, which can easily support $6 trillion in valuation.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#122

Post by nemomarx »

GTP wrote: post #88
ofjcihen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I have yet to hear a solid argument against his arguments that use half as much evidence as he does. That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense. If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.

I don’t have numbers, but I would like to point out that he's missing a crucial number as well. The fact that maxing out a subscription's limit makes a user generate an amount of tokens that costs much more than the subscription itslef isn't enough to back his claim. What we need to know, is the average use of subscriptions. Think about Gyms. My gut feeling is that, if we run the numbers, we see that by maxing out a…

You do really need to see the useage numbers for this. Movie pass famously thought they could price movie tickets like gym memberships - I assume they looked at how often the average person watched movies in theaters at the start - but then found out having a subscription to see movies for free / cheap any time you want changed that rate substantially and they ran out of vc money.

Having a subscription might make people run agents overnight, or casually generate images for fun, or start more coding projects. The reason gym memberships work is that people like the idea of going to the gym a lot but don't really enjoy actually doing it very much and fall off over time, leaving the gym for the rare person who's really into fitness to use it cheaply.

is AI like that where most users will get bored? or is it like movies where they'll try to get their money's worth?

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#123

Post by Jackpillar »

awakeasleep wrote: post #12
bananamogul wrote: post #2

I don't know if Ed Zitron is right about allhis analysis, but it's nice to have an alternative, well-argued narrative to the gushing torrent of AI company propaganda.

Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did. Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.

Let me guess, you disagree with his views on the utility of Ai (which he's pretty bad about) and you use that as cover and/or to negate his real journalism that is based in facts (Ai being an unprecedented & unrecoupable bubble littered with unprofitable companies thats likely to crash our economy unless these Ai conglomerates cozy up lawmakers to situate themselves for a bail out)

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#124

Post by satvikpendem »

anthonyrstevens wrote: post #42
dan_gee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A resolute anti-AI perspective is a breath of fresh air compared to the middle-of-the-road "AI made me 10x more productive BUT"-style comments. My professional opinion is that LLM technology doesn't work very well for software development and I'm not interested in hemming and hawing over its supposed benefits any longer.

>> LLM technology doesn't work very well for software development This comment is so obviously false (in my experience) I'm wondering what sort of niche environment you're working in

As I mentioned in this thread the other day, it's not worth debating AI skeptics anymore in 2026, with step changes like Fable and Sol. Maybe it was the case in 2025 and before but the field has improved rapidly that it doesn't make sense to listen to people with AI experiences prior to that who haven't touched it since. Does AI make mistakes, sure, but increasingly fewer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051369

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#125

Post by cmiles8 »

altmanaltman wrote: post #113
cmiles8 wrote: post #78

Apple looks better and better as every day passes. Other players going deeply into debt to build out massive infrastructure, VCs pumping up the model ecosystem that is now a total commodity. Apple’s just been sitting there with solid cashflow waiting for all this to implode and then have on-device models with their own chips. Apple will own the end device while the rest of the world is fighting over a pure commodity.…

No Apple was not sitting there and waiting as if its some grand plan. They tried their VR device which they don't even talk about now. They were late to AI and yes if the bubble bursts they will be at a better position but it's not some grand master strategy. Even inside apple there's been a lot of talk about how badly the company handled AI. As for laughing all the way to the bank, I am sure memory manufacturers and…

VR wasn’t AI.

As for the rest, they’re the only major tech company to not have a serious case of AI FOMO and dumping all their cash into that FOMO. Thats not an accident.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#126

Post by drcongo »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #20
scrlk wrote: post #10

> While people get some sort of benefit out of AI-generated code, these tools actually end up making them slower Curious that he references a METR study from July 2025, before the leap in model and harness performance towards the end of 2025/early 2026.

Welcome to Ed Zitron. There is a reason this man doesn't heavily short the same companies he criticizes. Be wary of anyone that won't put their money where their mouth is.

Not everybody is into gambling, some of us find it more troubling than smoking or drinking.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#127

Post by btown »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #51

That article is a bit incoherent. I think it is pretty clear at this point that Apple has gone all-in on being the ideal edge silicon for AI. This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out. They are in one of the only parts of the obvious future AI market where there isn't really a fight for greenfield turf with other…

Here's an interview with the senior product manager of Apple Silicon that more-or-less says the same thing: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/06/apple-silicon-exec-expl...

> He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens. However, Brooks envisions a hybrid future in which agents decide what runs on-device and what gets sent to the cloud.

And coupled with their efforts in auditably-private cloud computing, that's a strong pitch.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#128

Post by KaiserPro »

d4ng wrote: post #48
twister2920 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a reason this man doesn't heavily short the same companies he criticizes yes, because in order to take a short position you have to predict exactly when the bubble is going to pop, which is different from predicting that at some point it will

Not quite. You could buy a long-dated put if implied vol and current rates are amenable. This protects you against the underlying going up significantly. You might also predict that it won’t go up too much, and just short the underlying with a stop loss.

> You could buy a long-dated put

What leveraged? yeahnah thats not going to be profitable.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#129

Post by satvikpendem »

simonw wrote: post #108
jayd16 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well hold on. "They" also thought tokenmaxxing was a good idea, until they didn't. Whether companies pay will come down to the bottom line once the hype around the country club dies down a bit and for that it's still TBD on the actual product cost impact.

Yeah, tokenmaxxing was obviously stupid. Setting a limit is what happens when the adults in the room stop being stupid.

Not sure about that. As I replied elsewhere, it's a forcing function:

> People misunderstand the point of the tokenmaxxing time period, it was to force people to use AI so as to not have them stuck in their way, as some people are, and then to evaluate how it can help the company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047448#49047826

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#130

Post by dan_gee »

Silamoth wrote: post #112
cortesoft wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an example I use Claude code heavily for every day development and Opus 4.8 was already good enough for my use cases and never used Fable. I think the flaw in this logic is thinking about how AI is currently used only. Yes, Opus is good enough for the task you are asking it to do, but that doesn't mean that is all you will ever need. As AI gets better and better, it will open up new use cases that require the be…

You don’t “need” any LLMs to do software development. Plenty of us were productively writing code for years before these models were released, and many of us continue to do so. The “AI” companies want to sell you hype. But you don’t “need” them - not if you’re a legit, professional programmer.

Thank you for your comment.

The narrative that LLMs are essential to the future of the trade often feels like an assault on my professional expertise.

Whatever your experience is, mine is that LLMs don't work well for software development. I wish people who use AI would be more willing take that perspective seriously.

Post reply on HN