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

macrumors.com

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

#141

Post by budsniffer952 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #125
altmanaltman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, VR was very clearly useless, and yet...

Do you even know what FOMO is? The money is being spent in physical infrastructure, not the the metaverse.

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

#142

Post by eppp »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #131
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.…

Cell phones are commodities, so how does Apple maintain that cash flow? It's almost like there is more to it than that...

Cell phones arent wheat. It is a pain to switch between OS's.

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

#143

Post by GiorgioG »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #131
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.…

Cell phones are commodities, so how does Apple maintain that cash flow? It's almost like there is more to it than that...

Cell phones may be commodities, but iPhones are not.

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

#144

Post by Barbing »

btown wrote: post #127
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…

> auditably-private cloud computing

Do those of you who have read the white paper have confidence in this claim (as I’d hope)?

Blog: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

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

#145

Post by ar_lan »

satellites wrote: post #52

Maybe a dumb question, but isn't the idea that the efficiency of the models will improve with time, such that you won't be burning hundreds of dollars of tokens for most queries? Fable is great, but Opus can handle most coding tasks for a fraction of the cost, and Sonnet is good enough for average questions or word processing tasks.

In my experience Sonnet is actually pretty good at coding tasks, at least with Go.

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

#146

Post by quickthrowman »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #106
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.…

Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity? Before all the price hikes their products were already priced at the top of the market so I would assume that memory getting more expensive will impact their sales or margin quite a bit as they can’t subsidize hardware like AI companies do (they can of course eat into their own margins a bit w…

Everyone is paying more for RAM these days, I expect Apple to maintain their margins.

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

#147

Post by sodapopcan »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #57
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.

"The biggest thing we’ve learned from the large language model generation is how many people are excited to replace human beings, and how many people just don’t understand labour of any kind" Really? I think we've heard C-suite blabbermouths and borderline nontechnical tech CEOs being amplified by social media making these assertions, but boy did the weakly efficient market deliver a relatively swift correction to th…

> But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies

AI will almost certainly not be a fad for software developers, or at the very least for web developers, but it's certainly possible that other industries will look back on "experimental AI days" and chuckle.

Even if there is a financial bubble (that pops), the technology is still not going away.

As for what's next, I dunno. I've heard people talking about similar tech that doesn't use neural nets/etc, but that is out of my wheelhouse.

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

#148

Post by skippyfish »

sodapopcan wrote: post #33
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.

Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. Zitron isn't even anti-AI per se. He clearly talks out his ass at times (like AI doesn't work for developers... which he's not saying so much anymore, I don't think) but his main talking points are around numbers and profitability.

> Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples.

You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas in a pretty low-brow fashion, essentially for saying "hey folks, AI coding works and you should be using it":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/

The bottom line is that Ed Zitron, like Gary Marcus, built their entire brand on being AI contrarians; they can't say anything positive about it without qualifying it with a more damning negative. There's nothing wrong about having voices like that, but it makes them unreliable narrators. I am apprehensive about AI and its externalities, but I don't want to be caught citing either of them for that reason.

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

#149

Post by sajithdilshan »

dgellow wrote: post #120
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…

> but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash […]. 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 […] That’s the crash… that’s pretty much exactly Ed Zitron’s thesis

On device models would work for most of the use cases we have, but we would have new use cases in the future (e.g. with AR/VR glasses, humanoid robots) that would need more advanced models that cannot run on device and frontier models can provide that

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

#150

Post by budsniffer952 »

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.

75% of comments on every article you read about AI on hacker news is talking about the bubble. But everyone thinks the bubble talk is contrarian.
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