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This isn't a fair characterization, though. At least not as reductively as you're making it sound.

Google ALSO performs transcription/live captioning/speaker diarization on-device, for privacy, for instance.

The features being discussed here are the generative AI features, like Magic Editor and their heretofore not-yet-launch Video Boost mode.

I would say it's also done for copyright reasons. Google will not do assistant read aloud if the article is behind a paywall. But the new read aloud that is done on device allows for reading almost all any website.

Google has an enormous advantage over apple in data center compute. For one thing, they don't have to pay the Nvidia monopoly tax to do inference. It's silly to color this as a disadvantage.

Not that surprising really when you consider where the companies come from and what their other major successes are.

From what I understand google's hardware doesn't measure up to apple even when just comparing ML cores.