Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #97

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…

Just feels like the Apple press/podcast circuit just keep trying to spin ways to frame Apples fumble of the AI era as some sort of savvy move.

AI is overhyped regardless of whether Apple exists or not. They’re getting attention only because they didn’t jump on the bandwagon, and from a purely investment standpoint their fiscal discipline is honestly astounding.

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

#252

Post by randysalami » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #236

Someone wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices Maybe. On the one hand, if there is a strong ceiling to what users are willing/able to pay for a smartphone (might not be true, with all those people making $$ on the stock market), they will have to cut prices. On the other hand, if one part gets more expensive, premium phones need smaller relative price increases than budget phones. Certainly,…

Apparently RAM and SSD costs have risen so much recently that the bill of materials on the next iPhone could exceed the entire cost of the current one just on RAM/SSD alone [1] [1] https://images.macrumors.com/t/PtKleXF2po_g3qSuA6VMOE90WEM=/...

Holy hell that’s a crazy image. Can’t even fathom how they will go forward.

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

#253

Post by 6stringmerc » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

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.

Okay, but what’s your counter argument to Jim Chanos? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one because he’s a tried and true Wall Street heavy who speaks in plain English. Ed and Jim are on the same page looking at it through different sets of prescription glasses. I hope you have your money where your mouth is, so to speak, because I certainly do (avoiding AI trade) and good luck with the SNAP paperwork in two years.

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

#254

Post by Danox » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:07 PM UTC

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…

I’m laughing right now, Apple is in a very good position and it was a grand plan because OpenAI, i.e. Sam Altman pitched Apple and got nothing, you cannot tell me going into that meeting with Tim Cook at Apple that Sam thought he could squeeze Apple for 50 billion dollars? Like he squeezed Microsoft?

And what about Google? They probably thought for sure when they met with Apple that they would wipe out that $20 billion yearly payment to Apple every year for the default search position but the best they could do was to come out with a measly $1 billion a year refund both scenarios sound like Apple took it in consideration and determined that it was not worth the price, that does sound like a plan (The Art of War type) when the rest of tech is going crazy over AI.

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

#255

Post by apercu » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:07 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #217

neaden wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as an android user myself I switch brands all the time, but the iPhone users in my life all bought iPhones 15ish years ago and have kept doing it ever since.

The good thing of the iPhone is that your next phone is just like the previous one, but faster. Some features are added, some change places and some are even removed or replaced, but it doesn't compare to, say, move from a Motorola to a Samsung - they might as well be different OSs. Last time I had to relearn how to use the camera (and I AM AN EXPERIENCED PHOTOGRAPHER!).

I’ve had a few iPhones. Own 2 right now and I completely agree with your sentiment but while the hardware gets faster the software gets slower and worse. ;)

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

#256

Post by mncharity » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

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…

> [local, but for] extremely niche or higher intelligence tasks

Access to a centralized copy of the web/literature/media, scraped and indexed/integrated, seems another non-local center of gravity. Versus a local model's last minute reaching out to "manually" search and browse.

Also mass parallelism for large ensembles. Perhaps unless/until we get those local models as 10k+ tok/s chips. Local can follow frontier because frontier is still sort of "expensive rack local". If STOA becomes massive burst-parallel ensembles, that following may get harder.

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

#257

Post by dormento » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

dan_gee wrote: post #162

HAL3000 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others are betting on AGI/almost AGI like system. It's a gamble because no one actually knows whether or when it will be possible to create it. But if their bets pay off, they could outcompete Apple. Basically, other companies are going all in on the next card, while Apple is holding back and waiting to see which cards are dealt.

IMO AGI is a bold-faced lie, backed by the age-old American fantasy of free labor. The whole concept seems quite ugly to me.

In other words, the AGI hype kinda depends on AGI never being achieved. Billionaires don't want the worlds fundamental problems solved overnight for a simple reason: there's no money in that.

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

#258

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#259

Post by dragontamer » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #163

dragontamer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Ed Zitrons argument was just corroborated by Nikkei last Friday with the new report that 1.6 Trillion in SPVs accounts for off-books debt, on top of the $1.4 Trillion of on-books debt that's in these AI companies? The main argument of Ed Zitron is just that. Huge huge amounts of debt that's due "soonish". Every SPV is different but we are fast approaching the point where this all starts to become real. Now…

If that's all Zitron wrote, I don't think he'd be as polarizing (or as dunked on). But he goes way, way past that.

It all comes down to the fact that Zitron thinks these AI companies are over levered and have significant chances of collapsing industry wide.

Yeah he uses more words to say it and bad arguments as part of it. But so did Galileo's "The tides prove that the Earth is moving around the sun" argument. Some arguments are bad, even if the overall point was correct.

I think given the new Nikkei report from last week, we are seeing more and more of Ed Zitrons arguments bear fruit, after years (literally) of him calling wolf.

It all is crazy talk until real numbers come out and prove him correct. But it seems to take a long time for those numbers to materialize.

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

#260

Post by Danox » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

njovin wrote: post #136

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…

A better way to frame this might be that Apple tried VR and quickly realized the market wasn't there and moved on. Compare that to Meta, who went all-in (so much so that they changed the company name) despite apparent overwhelming user apathy toward the product. The estimates I've seen say that Apple spent ~$10b on their VR program, whereas Meta is in for about $80b.

The Apple Vision is at least two or three generations away hardware wise, it not only has to be several times faster (M8, M9 with a R2 or R3 processors) than what it is. The battery life needs to be better a lot better and it has to be half its current size weight wise.

And the price has to be half as much with all of those improvements. And last but not least the software needs to get even better all of that sounds like iteration over what? 3-4 years.

Fortunate for Apple, the competition is even further away…