Apple Leadership Is Quietly Getting AI-Pilled, Report Claims
Apple stands out among its peer companies as the Big Tech colossus that mostly just makes stuff you can hold in your hand. This is a clear advantage in some ways; people need portals of entry into the digital world, and Apple has happily manufactured billions of them and reaped the rewards. But according to Bloomberg’s Apple leak collector Mark Gurman, the C-suite at Apple is starting to view this as a problem, and you’ll be shocked when I tell you why.
Haha, I’m just messing with you. He says it’s because of AI.In Gurman’s latest Power On column, he attempts to lay out a case against the primacy of gadgets, and then claims that, “The company’s own senior executives understand this and privately question whether Apple has the right ingredients to win in the AI-first landscape.”
Summed up, Gurman’s argument is basically that hardware itself is less important than the software experience it packages. Apple may have a massively profitable App Store, but it doesn’t have slick, AI forward hardware like, say, Meta does in the form of its line of smart glasses. Smart glasses may not be flying off the shelves, but when combined with the departure of AI boss John Giannandrea, and Apple’s recent surrender to Google in order to acquire a functional AI model when it needed one, the trends make Apple look creaky and outdated, and generally like a company that needs to get its shit together.
After all, OpenAI will release a physical product later this year that—hey, who knows?—might be really cool, even though it looks like it will at least initially just be earbuds.As for what this means product-wise, Gurman’s column is unusually short on details and is full of his own personal prescriptions.
He does, however, take the sensible position that Apple is in a better position to market a popular pair of AI-powered earbuds than OpenAI is.But aside from earbuds, Gurman claims we should expect a “patchwork approach” to AI products from Apple, including a combination of wearables, smarthome gadgets, and services involving AI, all organized around the new version of Siri expected to be unveiled later this month.
If that’s really the AI approach Apple is taking, it sounds less like Apple is worried about having the “right ingredients to win in the AI-first landscape,” and more like it’s still in wait-and-see mode. Silicon Valley fads like Moltbot may be noisy, but everyone I know is extremely wedded to traditional hardware-and-software ecosystems, many of which rely heavily on Apple’s iOS and OSX. People have responded pretty badly to, say, Microsoft’s aggressive push to get users to adopt its AI tools in Windows. In other words, the marriage between normal people and traditional electronic devices doesn’t seem headed for a divorce, which is good for the status quo at Apple.
