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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Pushback from the HN crowd? I'll say it anyway, Apple should double down on AI.

As loopy as the news of the purchase of Jony Ives company (?) that made the rounds lately, I am pretty sure that what I want to carry around in my pocket from here on out is an AI assistant that rivals OpenAI's or Anthropic's. Whether it can be feathered in to Apple's existing xOS and put into the iPhone, or it requires writing a new platform is yet to be seen. But it's clear to me at least that this is the future.

In fact, if a new AI initiative required a new chip from Apple (A19? A20?) it would make a wild selling point to get some of us to buy new hardware just so we could get the new AI features (Yep, still on my iPhone 12 Mini I bought just before I retired).

(And here I didn't even use the word "agent" — whoops, I just did.)

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Today on my Linux machine I can prompt an agent and have it run shell commands directly. Until Apple is able to reproduce this on their devices they're behind the curve and I'm nearly certain their leadership is afraid of giving users that much control.

This is the beginning of their decline.

I don't think running shell commands is the achilles heel of Apple's ecosystem. I am quite sure most Apple customers are happy not to be running shell commands; they've done pretty good job so far without any shell access ability (unless you're strictly speaking about MacOS — and here too most of their customers have no doubt never launched Terminal).

The agent part may be important — but that's also the thing most likely to land in a future xOS.

The agent needs a shell. Canned integrations are doomed to be underwhelming.

Apple themselves published a recent paper pointing out that LLMs are very bad at sticking to algorithms (similar to how they're bad at arithmetic.) So if you want an agent to do anything complex it needs to generate a program to do it.

> Today on my Linux machine I can prompt an agent and have it run shell commands directly. Until Apple is able to reproduce this on their devices they're behind the curve

You can do that on a Mac today as well:

https://steipete.me/posts/2025/claude-code-is-my-computer

Sorry what point are you making exactly? There are plenty of apps that make API calls to LLMs. I don’t think that’s the problem statement.

> I am pretty sure that what I want to carry around in my pocket from here on out is an AI assistant that rivals OpenAI's or Anthropic's.

Well, good thing you bought a phone from the genius minds that brought us Siri!

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