I totally think the AI companies are very overvalued, I feel that's obvious. But I don't understand why apple should have such a high run in the last year. Sure, it avoided the pitfall of overinvesting in AI -- but what did it do for positive development? Avoiding waste isn't (imo) enough to warrant increased price. What's going on, what's the bull case for apple?
Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
111–120 of 370 posts
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#112This 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…
> 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.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#113Apple 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 Nvidia was definitely join them regardless of what happens.
Also comparing Apple (literally one of the largest companies in the world) to a company burning VC money makes no sense.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#114I 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.
I find it weird/funny you are getting so many hate responses towards Ed, still no counter-arguments at all. When asked why he is wrong, they vanish. From the outside it looks like a coordinated campaign to try to discredit him.
Happy to read why is he wrong, and change my mind, as long as the arguments provide the same level of analysis he provides.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#115Unless Apple figures out AI software execution and opens up their walled garden a bit, their hardware edge won't matter.
In 2020 I could write audio apps that worked incredibly well on a Pixel: despite LLMs! I still can get Siri to put tasks in the right todo app 70% of the time.
I updated to iOS 27 beta hoping something had changed, but nope: the biggest change is a massive black orb search bar.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#116Earlier 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…
I gotta say that if their best bet is “people forget to use it” I don’t think that that’s going to drive the adoption they need.
Especially if part two of your theory comes to fruition and they have to raise prices. I might of forgotten my Netflix subscription when it was 10 dollars a month but certainly not if it was 200 you know?
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#117Apple 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…
Yes it does impact all hardware makers and they raised prices as a result. But again remember the financial reality here… DRAM is in short supply because of the demand for models propped up by VC subsidies and infrastructure providers going deeply into debt to buy all this stuff just as folks are realizing we’re on track to over build capacity. So yes Apple gets impacted a bit in the short term but in the long term they’ll gleefully watch it all burn.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#118Apple 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…
> 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?
I'd qualify this with for now. It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed so deeply across the US economy that I can't think of a single industry that won't be impacted, including agriculture.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#119His read on the Apple Vision Pro (both the circumstances of its creation and its path forward) are incorrect in quite the discouraging manner for me. AVP wasn't released early (late, if anything), and it wasn't a dud because of Tim Cook's disinterest. I also think it's irresponsible to not broach the obvious implication of "PC components becoming prohibitively expensive" + "untold amounts of compute sitting in comput…
> AVP wasn't released early (late, if anything), and it wasn't a dud because of Tim Cook's disinterest.
Depends on what you mean by early.
WAs it released before the market was proven? yes.
Was the whole user experience up to scratch before it was released? no.
As someone who worked on the Quest pro/3 ecosystem, We were shitting our selves, because we knew that apple would only release something when the user experience was right.
Oculus just shat out features as and when performance cycles needed juicing.
Sure the UX was good, but it was less good than I expected. The headset was bulky and surprisingly off balance. It wasn't an all day wearable (i mean the quest pro was actually comfortable by comparison)
The resolution wasn't that great and the only thing you could do with it was either look like a twat recording video or have spreadsheets pasted everywhere. I was expecting an OS where we could put things on work tops, create augmentations to my room, decorate or be creative. Instead we got OSX XR.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#120This 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