Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base. In particular, I interpret their AI failures as the innovator's dilemma. They have loads of highly paid people designing and creating beautiful UIs. A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping. But that would put most of their employees out of work. So instead they are going to milk a…
Apple hasn’t been much of an innovator for decades. They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition. It is possible they won’t pull it off for “AI,” of course. But we won’t know until when somebody finds a profitable consumer-facing application for these models.
I’m inclined to think of that as innovation. To your point, not a single, earth shattering kind (inventing the first mp3 player), but by 100 lesser improvements in a single product.
But yeah, all their stuff is that way. They didn’t invent smartphones, or satellite messaging in a phone, or rich mobile messaging, or end to end encryption of data on your cloud services, or biometrics and secure enclaves, etc. They just usually execute better than others.