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

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

#91

Post by adolph » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

d4ng wrote: post #36

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…

Why is on-device AI the future? What is your reasoning behind this? Look at the proportion of things we compute on someone else’s computer relative to what we compute on our own device. Why would this change for LLMs?

I think the reasoning is similar to why Amazon notification emails are very generic: user data is used for various purposes that a growing number of users and 3rd parties have concerns about.

In addition to on-device, Apple is making efforts to secure computations that need to occur off-device, see: https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

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

#92

Post by 1234letshaveatw » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #14

One big difference I have with Ed Zitron is I look at companies suddenly getting worried that they're spending millions of dollars on tokens and think "wow those AI vendors are going to make SO MUCH MONEY". The best price for a product is what I call the "suck air through your teeth" price. You want your customers to suck air through their teeth... and then pay the full amount anyway. Uber set their per-developer tok…

Very true and I don't think you can completely discount the end consumer market either. A large number of the people not currently paying for a subscription are becoming dependent on AI enabled search results. I imagine monetization of those users is in its infancy and will rival the search result ad business eventually

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

#93

Post by a1o » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

dan_gee wrote: post #45

sodapopcan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a C++ developer, AI does not work well for software development in my experience. Maybe LLM developer tools work better if you write React or HTML/CSS, but they have been inadequate for my use case since their arrival.

I find it bad for generating code but alright for review, I put it as a tool to run along static analysis to catch if I missed something on a code change or merge request (being specifically about C++)

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

#94

Post by KaiserPro » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:15 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…

Thats great but this is like when 3g came out. Sure it was the future, but it was half baked, impersonal, expensive, unreliable and required a culture shift to be adopted.

Onboard decent LLM performance thats _power efficient_ is at least two/three hardware generations away. (assuming linear performance)

but, the valuations, with debt trade and private credit obscuring exposure is a recipe for disaster.

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

#95

Post by 59percentmore » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #59

59percentmore wrote: post #27

His 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…

Tim Cook was probably mostly disinterested because it didn't seem like a real business opportunity. Wherever AVP fell on the VR/AR spectrum, VR (while having other opportunities) was mostly a niche for high-end gamers and AR, whatever the possibilities in some future idealized form with fashionable glasses that give you lots of information about what/who you're looking at is a long way from reality.

I think it's the opposite. None of the players in XR wanted to be Apple'd, least of all Apple. That is, create a base product that someone else would refine in order to drink their milkshake. Apple delayed the AVP multiple times hoping to avoid getting sniped by Meta and Google et al., each time requiring a partial rebuild as the underlying tech advanced. They would have loved to have been able to get something out when Robert Scoble was initially raving in the late 2010s, but everyone was on the same page about not wanting to sink billions into development only to have to cede the market to someone responding to your strategy. So, instead, they all dragged their feet.

If XR companies had been as "reckless" with their product strategies as mobile companies in the 90s and 2000s, AVP would have had its iPod moment 6 years ago and we'd be hurtling towards the facephone. The market suffered because of the entrenchment of incumbents with all-too-clear memories.

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

#96

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

I generally agree. Xserve didn't work out for Apple and they dropped it pretty quickly--think I still have an A/UX coffee cup. Wasn't really in their DNA even if there was an argument before Linux took off. For better or worse, they're basically a client company and barely a software (OK and basically a software services) one--although they spend a fair bit on (roughly) user experience.

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

#97

Post by whywhywhywhy » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

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.

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

#98

Post by dan_gee » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #71

epistasis wrote: post #24

> If Anthropic and OpenAI believed customers would actually pay the real cost of AI tokens, they wouldn't have to give away 20 to 40 times the amount of tokens to subscribers. One logical gap in the SemiAnalysis 40x cost of tokens versus subscription: I don't know anybody actually maxing out their account limits. Sure, if you're somehow always running stuff, you can max it out, but subscriptions like this allow peopl…

I'm of the opinion that the market will need to expand, horizontally. That's what's happening, with low-cost LLMs. I already know lots of "regular folks" that are totally hooked on LLMs (mostly ChatGPT, at the "regular mensch" level). They usually use the free tier, but a lot of them are doing the $20/month Pro tier. If anyone is in my age group, they remember when ATMs were free. It was the "heroin dealer" business…

> Think of all the shops that will soon be composed of people that simply can't even get out of bed, if their LLM is not available.

I'm biased because I don't use AI, but I don't understand why you wouldn't fire these LLM-addicted people and replace them with people who can code or write an email without the use of an AI assistant.

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

#99

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

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

Like so many things in life, It Depends (tm).

Some developers work better with LLMs in their workflows than others. Some problems are easier for LLMs to generate a reasonable solution for than others. Some folks prompt minimally and see what the vibes bring. Others start with a detailed architecture and implementation plan.

The individual results will depend quite a lot on the person, the problem, and the approach. It's not a guaranteed winning formula for everyone.

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

#100

Post by sodapopcan » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

dan_gee wrote: post #45

sodapopcan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a C++ developer, AI does not work well for software development in my experience. Maybe LLM developer tools work better if you write React or HTML/CSS, but they have been inadequate for my use case since their arrival.

Casey Muratori, who doesn't use AI, made this point on a podcast. Specifically he said that he doesn't blame web developers for wanting to use AI because it's such a mess of an ecosystem and impossible to keep everything you need to know to be successful in your head.

I'm a web developer to myself who has done zero game or systems programming so I can't speak to that side of it, but you reminded me of it!