I think apple is fine. When AI works without 1 in 5 hallucinations then it can be added to their product. Showing up late with features that exists elsewhere but are polished in apple presentation is the way.
Using ChatGPT voice mode and Siri makes Siri feel like a legacy product.
I do think that kernel level access is not needed as this is some good amount of automation though I assume what apple can make do however is actually not require another laptop connected to automate your mobile but rather the npu?/gpu? inside your phone.
I am surprised by why they haven't done it already.
In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full)
That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it.
Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.
One went too far in one direction and the other went too fair in the opposite direction. And it seems that you want to be somewhere in the middle?
So not just in how much AI there is, but what AI, where it's applied and where we can turn it off, and what context it has access to and where it's off bound.
Then again, they've always been way better at making track pads than mice. They have probably the best track pad in the business, and also the Magic Mouse, which everyone hates.
Things can be good and they can still be a bubble just as how the internet was cool but the dot net bubble existed
They become bubble when economically things stop making sense.
AI ticks this checkbox.