It’s far deeper than that and been Cooking for a long time before the AI boom, it was just less obvious because there wasn’t anyone to measure it against. But the cracks were visible and the direction obvious even 5 years ago
> The bottom line: Apple has 24 to 36 months before it has its own AOL moment, according to Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment.
That quote alone is hilarious. What a low effort article.
Do any of these people know that Apple is a hardware company and all of their services are just a side business? Apple is poised to make a fortune selling devices powered by their low power consumer chipsets that can run neural networks. There's really no competitor in that space.
Apple has plenty of time and money to watch other people flailing around trying to make AI first devices until they even really start to take it seriously. Even if someone else figures out to make a killer mobile AI app, it will absolutely support iPhones for the foreseeable future. All apple needs to do is make sure their chip pipeline supports it.
Google is the one that is facing an existential threat. Most people see their search engine as basically just a shitty ad-infested chatbot that produces worse results than chatgpt.
That's not an accurate quote. You skipped the rest of it:
> "With the cash they have on hand and the loyalty they have…there would have to be something disruptive in the marketplace that would draw away customers. It's not there yet," he says.
I take that to mean they're in a good position now, but they might start losing customers in the next 2-3 years, should stronger competitors show up. I don't disagree. I don't see Apple doing anything special that will protect them as different kinds of hardware come to market. Steve Jobs was responsible for the iPhone and iPad. Apple can only ride on his work for so long.
I really hope investors buy into this as it’ll be a great new entry point into the stock. I mean they seem to be buying into whatever without thinking so why not. AOL moment indeed.
> "With the cash they have on hand and the loyalty they have…there would have to be something disruptive in the marketplace that would draw away customers. It's not there yet," he says.
Like what, a working phone that doesn't spy on you?
[Mind, they seem to be forgetting about that lately.]
Curious of if I missed some poor privacy practices from Apple lately. I know they had the default advanced image search stuff [0], but that's all I'm aware of.
It all depends on who is going to be the loser faster. If the other companies that are spending $1T on soon-to-be-outdated infrastructure don't make money from their new super AI systems, Apple might just as well be the healthiest of them all.
There is no one challenging Apple on hardware right now. And all of these AI tools can run on Apple machines. So I am not sure that I see Apple falling from its current situation.
That said, Apple isn't really riding this wave of AI. So I feel that Apple isn't benefiting, thus it could likely be growing more than it is if it has an AI strategy that was effective.
So I don't think Apple is a "loser" but it also isn't a "winner." It is more of a spectator who is still strong in their own domain, at least for now.
Apple worries me a bit lately and by lately I mean in the last five six years. It seems Covid did a thing and all innovation and development efforts halted since 2000 or so.
The Apple Car project was a huge boondoggle. Meanwhile Xiami delivered and succeeded with the SU7 and now YU7.
Apple will finally introduce a foldable phone in late 2026, with specs rumored to be worse than today's Android flagships such as Oppo Find N5, which I use or the new Samsung Fold 7 and Honor Magic V5 etc. And let's keep in mind we are in the 7th iteration of such devices already.
Vision Pro might have been technically nice but there is no market for it, let alone for it's price point and hence barely any developers jumped on it.
The iPhone has stagnated so much I got the Oppo after having had every single iPhone since the original one in 2007. I legit cannot list a single notable thing that is new in the 16 Pro vs. the 15 Pro. The only thing that came to mind was the 48mp ultra wide sensor chip married to such a shitty lens that it legit has worse quality than my 15 Pro's old 12mp chip. I tested them back to back.
I've been a huge fanboy for decades but lately absolutely nothing from the company excites me anymore as they just can't deliver. The big new Apple Watch update that was rumored never came. Meanwhile we have so much better looking rounded OLED ones from competitors.
I think Apple turned into a "loser" when they let the MBA guy take the CEO seat from the designer guy.
Yes, short term business efficiency has increased. But other than an under-the-hood chip change (which, to be fair, was really impressive), they haven't really done anything disruptive since.
Definitely not seeing the horrendous collapse of the once mighty Apple.
That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI, and recent product releases/updates have been, uh, suboptimal. Latest Logic Pro is a disaster (e.g. unstable/crashing, removed key shortcuts killing productivity) and don't get me started on the dumbing-down of iOS.
They are for sure headed in the wrong direction, but they are just too big to fall overnight.
I don’t mind apple devices but one really frustrating thing to me is how bad Siri is. It’s always been frustrating, but the fact that they were one of the first to enter a voice assistant market that could try to do advanced natural language processing and execute tasks, never really delivered that, and despite massive gains in this space that AI has enjoyed, they’re somehow still behind there.
I am disabled and would pay buckets of money for certain things that siri obviously should be able to do but can’t. If I suffer a fall alone and yell “hey siri, I fell, call 9-11” I’m not entirely certain she can reliably do that and that’s insane to me.
> Apple "needs the AI story because that's what's being rewarded in the market,"
Okay, so it's not actually because the users need something that can only be provided by an Apple AI. It provides little to no tangible benefit to Apples customers. It's just that the stock market would like to be able to tick the "Has AI" box on the APPL stock.
Unlike the others on here - the Axios argument does make sense.
Essentially, the trade war related instability has made it's hardware story much more precarious (just like for any other consumer or enterprise hardware vendor), so some sort of a software story is needed to help cushion margins.
The issue is, aside from the App Store, Apple traditionally never had a strong software story. If Apple does not build some sort of a software story (which at this point is AI), it's harder to justify it's current valuation and it's "FAANG" status.
It's also undeniable that a LLM Chatbot player WILL make the foray into make their own bespoke hardware in order to target the consumer market, and the "chatbot as an oracle" UX does have strong traction amongst non-technical personas.
RIM, Sony, and Nokia were also on top of the world in 2007-09, but quickly saw their fortunes turn around as Apple's App Store+Hardware Design+Gated Ecosystem story helped provide some polish and a UX that the others failed to provide.
Essentially, if Apple didn't bungle Siri, they wouldn't be in the current situation today, and Apple is facing significant risks due to supply chain instability. Some diversification is needed.
Relentless gatekeeping is turning them into a loser. iOS should be the platform where users reap the benefits of all the winners of AI but instead Apple gets to decide who may have a deep integration as an auxiliary to Siri, whose only saving grace is it is permanently-entrenched as the assistant no matter how far behind it falls.
Apple Has many options to turn on AI. Their current goals (local private LLM) are too ambitious and AI has not caught up to that kind of goal. If they want to force AI, they can use a less ambitious approach: everything gets shared with Apple servers openly and AI queries that data.
But their approach is so aloof of industry development that it will take at least 2 more years for it to be Apple-grade quality. It has to be local. It has to be private. It has to be amazing. It has to work well. It has to have standard easy to use purposes. It has to be integratable into apps. It has to be intuitive.
They could just release a less ambitious Siri-Ai. Just to shut everyone up.
I'm a notorious Apple hater, so I can't say I'll shed a tear if Apple does take a sizeable hit. But then again, I'm also a big sceptic of the AI hype wave currently gripping the world. My bet is that it's the latter, not Apple, that has 24 to 36 months left to live.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] threadI see what you did there...
That quote alone is hilarious. What a low effort article.
Apple has plenty of time and money to watch other people flailing around trying to make AI first devices until they even really start to take it seriously. Even if someone else figures out to make a killer mobile AI app, it will absolutely support iPhones for the foreseeable future. All apple needs to do is make sure their chip pipeline supports it.
Google is the one that is facing an existential threat. Most people see their search engine as basically just a shitty ad-infested chatbot that produces worse results than chatgpt.
Ironically I was playing around with BasiliskII last night and was reminded how janky and tasteless the OS got before making the break to Aqua.
But now there is no “war path” Steve Jobs to come in and basically lay down their life fixing the product line up.
> "With the cash they have on hand and the loyalty they have…there would have to be something disruptive in the marketplace that would draw away customers. It's not there yet," he says.
I take that to mean they're in a good position now, but they might start losing customers in the next 2-3 years, should stronger competitors show up. I don't disagree. I don't see Apple doing anything special that will protect them as different kinds of hardware come to market. Steve Jobs was responsible for the iPhone and iPad. Apple can only ride on his work for so long.
Like what, a working phone that doesn't spy on you?
[Mind, they seem to be forgetting about that lately.]
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/122033
That said, Apple isn't really riding this wave of AI. So I feel that Apple isn't benefiting, thus it could likely be growing more than it is if it has an AI strategy that was effective.
So I don't think Apple is a "loser" but it also isn't a "winner." It is more of a spectator who is still strong in their own domain, at least for now.
The iPhone has stagnated so much I got the Oppo after having had every single iPhone since the original one in 2007. I legit cannot list a single notable thing that is new in the 16 Pro vs. the 15 Pro. The only thing that came to mind was the 48mp ultra wide sensor chip married to such a shitty lens that it legit has worse quality than my 15 Pro's old 12mp chip. I tested them back to back.
I've been a huge fanboy for decades but lately absolutely nothing from the company excites me anymore as they just can't deliver. The big new Apple Watch update that was rumored never came. Meanwhile we have so much better looking rounded OLED ones from competitors.
Yes, short term business efficiency has increased. But other than an under-the-hood chip change (which, to be fair, was really impressive), they haven't really done anything disruptive since.
That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI, and recent product releases/updates have been, uh, suboptimal. Latest Logic Pro is a disaster (e.g. unstable/crashing, removed key shortcuts killing productivity) and don't get me started on the dumbing-down of iOS.
They are for sure headed in the wrong direction, but they are just too big to fall overnight.
I am disabled and would pay buckets of money for certain things that siri obviously should be able to do but can’t. If I suffer a fall alone and yell “hey siri, I fell, call 9-11” I’m not entirely certain she can reliably do that and that’s insane to me.
AI is turning Apple into a market "loser"
Apple could have said "we are not doing any sort of AI" and they would still be worth what they are today.
Did the author forget that everyone and their grandma has an iPhone in their pocket and an Apple Watch on their wrist?
Okay, so it's not actually because the users need something that can only be provided by an Apple AI. It provides little to no tangible benefit to Apples customers. It's just that the stock market would like to be able to tick the "Has AI" box on the APPL stock.
Essentially, the trade war related instability has made it's hardware story much more precarious (just like for any other consumer or enterprise hardware vendor), so some sort of a software story is needed to help cushion margins.
The issue is, aside from the App Store, Apple traditionally never had a strong software story. If Apple does not build some sort of a software story (which at this point is AI), it's harder to justify it's current valuation and it's "FAANG" status.
It's also undeniable that a LLM Chatbot player WILL make the foray into make their own bespoke hardware in order to target the consumer market, and the "chatbot as an oracle" UX does have strong traction amongst non-technical personas.
RIM, Sony, and Nokia were also on top of the world in 2007-09, but quickly saw their fortunes turn around as Apple's App Store+Hardware Design+Gated Ecosystem story helped provide some polish and a UX that the others failed to provide.
Essentially, if Apple didn't bungle Siri, they wouldn't be in the current situation today, and Apple is facing significant risks due to supply chain instability. Some diversification is needed.
But their approach is so aloof of industry development that it will take at least 2 more years for it to be Apple-grade quality. It has to be local. It has to be private. It has to be amazing. It has to work well. It has to have standard easy to use purposes. It has to be integratable into apps. It has to be intuitive.
They could just release a less ambitious Siri-Ai. Just to shut everyone up.