Apple and the AI Divide | Hacker News Reader

Apple and the AI Divide

anderegg.ca

28 pointsGavinAnderegg46 comments

> Apple seems to be pressured to play catch-up on AI technology, and I feel like this is being driven by activist shareholders instead of people who are focused on products.

I get the same sense. When Apple announced their AI features last year, the stock started moving up.

Apple has stopped being product driven. Sadly.

It's all about maximising short term profits (see iPhones of the last years) or things top down from the CEO that make little sense (Vision Pro)

Apple seems ecosystem driven. At the product level, there’s not a big difference between an iPhone and Android phone, except the iPhone integrates well with the Apple Watch, iPad, AirPods, Apple TV, and MacOS. The resulting user experience is good, as is being able to drop into an Apple Store in case of a problem.

I see Apple pursuing a long term vision where product integration and privacy are pillars in a seamless, trusted ecosystem.

The problem is that the shareholders in these kind of companies want exponential growth not matter what, being profitable isn't enough.

Since there is a limited amount of people on the planet that can afford Apple at Apple's prices, this eventually hits a ceiling.

You don't see Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen, and similar brands, expecting an exponential growth in sales, year after year.

AirPod Pros are $160 on sale, regularly, and $200 otherwise.

M3 Air 16GB/512GB is $1,100 at Costco, and $800 for an M2 (which is probably good enough for at least 50% of laptop users).

iPhones might be a few hundreds more than a Galaxy competitor phone, but the amortize the extra cost over the number of hours people use their phone and it is negligible.

Apple TV is a $120 or so, Apple Watch is a few hundreds, HomePods are maybe a couple hundred. I don’t see how anyone can put Apple in a pricing league with

> Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen

Very large portions of the population can afford Apple products.

Indeed, those lucky to live in tier 1 countries.

Many folks across the globe don't even reach $200 a month!

I think that GP meant it relative to the other mentioned luxury products.

But honestly, I think many people buy Apple products they can't reasonably afford and end up in trouble because of that. A new iPhone is luxury. You can't really live without a smartphone these days (not just in "tier 1" countries!), but a $200 device covers your basics just as well as a $1000 iPhone.

And before someone tells me they can live without a smartphone. I guess you can, but that may actually be the ultimate luxury, that is, it is more expensive to live without a smartphone than to live with one. It is telling that most of the homeless have smartphones, usually Android.

You can walk into a mobile phone store anywhere in the world and buy an iPhone SE for ~ hundred bucks

Which is about one month salary in many places.

Those 3 companies are having a hard time financially right now.

Yes, because in hard economical times, even not targeting exponential growth doesn't help much when people are unemployed.

> I see Apple pursuing a long term vision where product integration and privacy are pillars in a seamless, trusted ecosystem.

Privacy is clearly not what Apple is doing: simply read the 90s texts from the cypherpunk scene to get an idea what privacy really means. Also consider that a lot of features that make life a lot more comfortable ("seamless") are very privacy-invading. Thus going for privacy would make the (in this case Apple) product quite uncomfortable to use.

Why not both? It is possible to achieve comfort with privacy.

Not how Apple and others are doing. Internet access and cloud accounts are not a requirement to integration. You need standards and conventions. Now, eveyone is doing its own thing and company wants to control your devices to the point they can brick them within a few years.

Explaining this in sufficient detail would make a really long text, so I'll just give one very isolated point:

Bascially, the internet is a dark forest. A lot of things "ordinary" people do all the time is insanely privacy-violating (just to give one example: if you send a message to a person who is not insanely privacy-conscious and capable (meaning very knowledable about technology) of preserving your privacy, malicious entities can spy on you).

So, for the product/OS to be capable of keeping your privacy, it will have to prevent you from doing an insane amount of things against your reflexes, comfort and what you learned about politeness.

Apple is a hardware product driven company that pulls customers into their ecosystem. There has not been revolutionary products introduced (like iPhone) in a long while. They mostly riffed off of concepts that came out of PARC and there aren't many more things to do from there - e.g. tablets were conceptualized there are now are common place consumer items.

AI could be revolutionary but its not a product by itself, its more like internet search back in the day. Now every web product has a search bar, but search is not the actual consumer product. The features Apple has advertised as leveraging AI are not groundbreaking or life changing. Apple's AI features are things that would save me literally seconds. I think their UX designs (which are good) make it hard for consumers to need AI to help them.

So true. Especially those who watched Apple from near bankruptcy then Steve Jobs came back, iMac, iPod and then iPhone.

Apple used to leave money on the table, just saying no to a lot of good ideas. Now it is clear everything is measured in profits making. The hardware quality is still there, but the company is not as coherence as before. Execution speed has also slowed down despite having 5 - 10 times of people.

I continue to think how Steve Jobs managed to squeeze out so much productivity with so little resources is honestly extraordinary.

Highly doubt it. It’s not activist shareholders. It’s incompetent leadership. Same at pretty much every company.

Apple has a market cap of $3.7 trillion at the moment I’m writing this comment. I wouldn’t say that they’re incompetent.

You may not like the products they currently put out or the direction they are heading, but there is no doubt that Tim Cook and the rest of the leadership team at Apple are very competent business people. In fact, they’re probably the best that Apple has ever had as a whole.

The reality is that a lot of people are clamoring for AI. Microsoft and Google are completely on board the AI hype train. If Apple doesn’t offer a solution they will be seen as being left behind.

Apple, Amazon, and Google are examples of companies that struck an absolute gold mine to the point at which it doesn’t really matter how badly they fuck up, they’ll be fine.

Google and Apple have been flopping for years. They’re poorly run. They’re going to continue do great despite that.

The M series move seems to be wildly popular and has revitalized their until then tepid MacOS offerings.

They're almost in complete control of their stack, that is an impressive achievement that no other company has ever achieved in the markets they have.

How has Apple been flopping for years and what would you prefer they be doing?

The M1s were briefly popular but they’re now back to exactly where they were before.

There are exactly zero developers with intel laptops at the extremely large financial institution I work for...

That’s great but sales data is much more clear than your anecdote

I can imagine both are true: developers everywhere are on m series MacBooks and also, Apple has not grown their market share in the past few years

Anecdotally my 2021 MacBook is doing fine and I see no reason to replace it anytime soon

Their market share has significantly declined

By what metric is Apple poorly run other than some HN commenters personal opinions about their products?

Apple Vision Pro was a flop, iPhone sales have been weak for years, the Apple car got canceled after ten billion dollars, Apple TV has largely flopped considering the insane spending, and they are blatantly at risk from non compliance the digital markets act and similar legislation for their platform gate keeping.

They didn’t really have to do anything to be really successful. Most of their big investments have not yielded anything. By my back of the envelope calculations, 30-50% of their net income comes from just taxing software distribution on the App Store. The M1s are cool but frankly a niche audience.

Apple will continue to do very well (unless regulation actually starts kicking hard). It’s not because of savvy leadership. Their leadership sucks. Google’s is even worse.

Let's not forget 8gb ram 256gb gimped SSD as the default low end in macbook airs in 2024. It was insulting to do this in 2018 and even worse now.

Yes, it means good margins. It also means Apple clearly hates their customers by giving them hilariously under-provisioned hardware for doing anything. If their customers ever grew a spine, they'd make it hurt apples pocket book.

For a lot of the ways I see friends and family use Mac products, 256gb is often good enough.

I'd argue for people that care about storage space the default acts as a price anchor.

That's what people said about IBM in the 1980s -- that it didn't matter that they were just playing catch up with more innovative companies because they were so huge. Things caught up to them, and while they still exist (primarily as consultants similar to Accenture), they are a far cry from when they dominated the tech scene.

This isn’t even remotely true. Nokia, Palm, Blackberry, Alta vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, hundreds of online retailers lost to history, etc… Your comment is untethered from reality.

When even Mozilla is introducing AI summarization services, I find it's really hard to blame Apple.

I’d say this is a very general article that isn’t well sourced or referenced.

I'm curious what additional sources or references you would like to see added.

Apple is pretty conservative in their AI approach or am I out of touch? I mean for comparison just look at google, samsung or microsoft.

I think that’s because Apple has been playing the long game on AI. They introduced the neural engine with the A11 processor on the iPhone 8. They can do a lot of things on device that their competitors have to do in the cloud.

Many of their AI features focus on practical everyday use cases instead of big flashy demos and constantly in your face things like Microsoft Copilot.

I wonder why AI is used for these random things that nobody needs, instead of immediately useful things like calibrating microphone volume. I'm so tired of constantly redoing the echo tests, because the software is forgetting what microphone I used last time. Then there are also people who don't bother with the echo tests (I used to be that guy) and you can't understand what they are saying because of volume clipping.

>There’s a group of the population that is disgusted by anything related to LLMs or generative AI.

I feel genuine concern for this group of people, a group which includes some of my own family members. I worry that they're going to be left behind.

> I feel genuine concern for this group of people, a group which includes some of my own family members. I worry that they're going to be left behind.

Such people should simply invest the time that other people waste hyping AI to learn complicated important topics. As soon as the AI bubble bursts, this decision will (hopefully) pay off.

Is there a learning curve for shutting off your brain and letting the tech giants tl;dr your thinking for you with their version?

During the CES keynotes for AMD and Nvidia yesterday the number of times the phrase "AI" was said was in the thousands. "Disgusted" is the right word. "Embarrassed" is how I felt second-hand for the obvious pandering to the stock market.

Smoke and mirrors.

> Blockchains are slow, expensive databases masquerading as a social revolution while functionally being a get-rich-quick scheme.

If you consider a blockchain to be (mostly) a "competitor" to a database, you use it wrong. Blockchains and in particular consensus algorithms for blockchains are a solution to a hard problem: reaching a consensus when not all participants can be trusted.

For any application that needs this problem solved, blockchain algorithms are to my best knowledge basically the only game in town. These applications are rare, but they do exist - for these blockchain and blockchain consensus algorithms are a godsend.

If you have another problem to solve, a blockchain will insanely likely not be the proper solution.

Can the majority be trusted? 100% of the time? (50 + epsilon)% of blockchain participants can’t be wrong?

If I can’t trust someone to pay me I just take payment up front, if they don’t trust me to deliver a product we just don’t do business, no problem.

What blockchain solves for is “I don’t trust my peers to agree on what transactions have occurred” which is only a problem for people avoiding banks.

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