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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

  Apple, to me, is the winner in the end of this AI chapter.

I might be one of only few people who think Apple is a loser in the AI chapter.

I don't think it shows yet but I think the dominance of the App Store will end. I think a ton of iOS apps will be replaced by ChatGPT/Claude. I think there is a big opening for a company to redesign the phone from the ground up purely around an AI assistant instead of apps.

I think AI will severely weaken iOS, App Store, and the iPhone in the next few years. It was nearly impossible to start a 3rd competitor to iOS and Android until recently because no one is going to redesign their apps for your new phone. Today, that's different. Many productivity apps are just being replaced by GenAI/ChatGPT/etc and services are making it easy for AI agents to access directly without an app.

Not to mention higher chip prices will eat into hardware margins.

I do not think local LLM inference will make up for lesser iPhone dominance.

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Replacing a good app is still extremely hard. Let me explain.

Commodities like todo apps and calculators rarely compete on features, they compete on product design. This includes look and feel, relation between elements, design choices on what exact common features are available.

All products are, at their essence, just a set of design decisions stitched and shipped together.

Now, making these design decisions is hard. It requires knowledge, consistency, and insights into how real people operate real products. Even as a sole user of the app you build you rarely know what you actually need.

LLMs are 'design-less' in their essence. Building your own todo app takes literal seconds and it all looks simple because LLMs will default most of these design decisions for you - until you try to use your new app daily and notice it somehow sucks. Building a good todo app or good calculator requires tweaking, publishing, polishing, and solving bugs, testing, rinse and repeat.

Another tricky side of this is that you might know logically what features you want, but you are not selecting one product over another logically. You need to try and see if that works for you, all the vibes and good parts and bad parts and design choices and colors, till you find something that "clicks" for you. Using pure Claude as a todo app only works as long as you want to have more Claude in your daily life.

In the meantime app store provides dozens of well-reviewed alternative solutions which look good and require zero maintenance.

And that's just a calculator or todo app. Non-commodity apps are even harder than that.

Design is dead (long live design)

I don't see any future where programs follow the static nature of old paradigm programming. A nice intuitive UI? What about just telling the app what I need when I need it? The gold standard of consumer UI is...another person.

If I have a team of god tier light speed SWE's at my disposal, why the fuck am I fumbling around in an actions panel? The program can just be dynamically modified in near real time to be whatever I need it to be in that moment.

If you extrapolate LLMs out to their extreme, you get a shape-shifting liquid array of bits in memory that manifest anything at the behest of a completely natural language interface.

> The gold standard of consumer UI is...another person.

Absolutely not. Constraining the set of possible actions instead of having you verbalise what you want every time is often a feature, not just a technical limitation. A camera with a shutter button is better design than having to tell the camera “please take a photo”.

At the supermarket, I personally also prefer the self-checkout machines over going to a human cashier.

It wouldn't be just verbalizing, you could type or gesture just as well. Nor would you need to communicate each command, the machine would recognize that you want a button for your camera, the checkout would understand that you want to checkout and understand each intended action as you do so.

The UI is totally fluid at all times, because an "intelligence" is actively manifesting it at all times. Nothing needs to be hard coded.

But I don’t necessarily want to have to continuously adapt to such a fluid UI. Unless you are proposing that the UI should effectively just read my mind, but until it literally does that to perfection, that will always come with the overhead of wondering whether it has the right understanding of what you want.

Then you can just have a static design, it's trivial and perceptively instant for the machine to generate it (or 10 of them if you want choice) and act like a "dumb computer from 20 years ago".

Hell the computer might even see your face, see your age and style, and be like "Yup, this guy definitely wants to checkout with a dumb, midi keytone 8-bit styled program"

I feel that this kind of sidesteps the point that smugglerFlynn was making about designing those interfaces.

If your stance is that AI will never be able to eclipse human design, then yes it's an impossible hurdle t overcome.

But already AI design is everywhere and regular people don't even notice (outside perhaps the intentional cues in mainstream image generators). It's only going to get better as people can interact with the design the same as the interact with another person.

No it absolutely is not. I spent a good 2 weekends using an agent to develop an alternative to a website that I didn't care to pay for. After all of that time, while it's functional and I do occasionally use it for its intended purpose, if you take into account the amount I paid in tokens and the amount of time I spent on it, the average Joe would've been better off just paying for the site, which is actually still better.

The only reason it works out in my favor is that I enjoyed doing it. Normal people don't want to fuck around with that kind of shit.

"LLMS can hardly do high school math"

Is your argument now just: “AI will be able to do anything”?

This sounds (to me) like hell.

You are assuming that you'll always have the time and energy to determine what you need at the moment you need it, which doesn't really sound true.

You're also assuming that there are no negatives to saying what you want compared to just acting on things, but since the beginning of computing many people have proven this wrong time and again. I suggest you read about HCI as a research field and its history, it doesn't take much to realise how limited the average HNer's understanding of UI/UX design is, and how far current LLMs are from the skills required to be able to carefully design an app for productive human use.

This sounds like the car industry touch screen craze all over again.

Good design rarely calls for a “you can do everything” approach. Good design is often context specific and subtly guides users to better outcomes.

Doctor appointments would absolutely suck if I had to navigate decision trees and click buttons to communicate my symptoms. Car blinkers would absolutely suck if I had to type “blink left” into a chat window before every turn.

Oh is that the new UI of Mercedes and BMW cars? Cause they always seem to have dysfunctional blinkers.

My latest BMW X3 rental had touch controls for air vents - I would unironically prefer chat interface over this

>I don't see any future where programs follow the static nature of old paradigm programming. A nice intuitive UI? What about just telling the app what I need when I need it? The gold standard of consumer UI is...another person.

Maybe it’s just the ‘tism, but I hard disagree that I would ever say another person is a superior interface into… anything? It’s slow, they may misinterpret you, they have their own ideas and motivations, they’re (mostly) expensive because the only reason I need them is because there’s information / skill asymmetry. I don’t know that many or even most of those problems are resolved with ai, in some ways the problems are amplified.

Unless AI will be ar the level of saying "I want a scheduling app that fits me" I still see value in buying some apps.

I like to customize my Neovim setup or terminal and a bunch of scripts that I keep making them nice and maybe my blog and so on.

I don't want to become the PM of every app I need. But I do agree changes will happen to the current apps and how we buy and use them. Not sure exactly where it will settle. But still unknown unknowns and domain knowledge and vocabulary is not yet allowing anyone to build their own apps unless for simple cases.

Or maybe it is just me: I want someone else to think about my accounting app. I dont want to spend time to learn and understand and keep myself up to date or setup a series of LLM sessions that navigate and watch laws and propose changes.

Why do you need a scheduling app when you have a secretary?

Why do you need an accounting app when you have an accountant?

Programs of the future will in no way resemble what they are today. I don't even want to call it a "program" because in my head it's more like an intelligent digital liquid that can rapidly flow into any state. This flash-in-the-pan 50 year archaic era of software will look like what the oil lamp looks like today. A crude intermediate tech during a time of much larger transition.

it's nice to see what's on my schedule at a glance, rather than needing to ask my secretary. also helps with situational awareness.

it's nice to see my financial situation at a glance, without asking my accountant.

speech/text is one modality. we humans are also visual and tactile. and we need consistency and recurring patterns of interaction to function well.

You ask your secretary to give you a visual representation of your schedule right now and presto - you got it.

Same thing for your accountant.

Imagine that both of them, while being good at their respective jobs, are also software engineers that can mint a custom throwaway app for you at a moment's notice.

>speech/text is one modality. we humans are also visual and tactile. and we need consistency and recurring patterns of interaction to function well.

I'm sure your secretary will make a note of your preference.

well, sure. I'm not against against text as, like, the command line. I'm just skeptical of text as the ideal user interface.

Maybe it would've been better to use all those billions in tokens and VC funding to pay for Finnish-style parental benefits and make more persons?

>A nice intuitive UI? What about just telling the app what I need when I need it?

Sounds cumbersome, slow to use, and prone to failure.

I tend to agree, on the whole. LLMs force more attention toward the purpose of an app and how best to satisfy that purpose for a given audience. (Undisciplined SWEs can forget about end users and get lost in the details of some particular piece of tech.)

However, you could expect LLMs to train on existing successful apps and hardened design patterns that compose well into good UIs. In that case, you might expect the last mile polish to be the differentiating factor. However, the more marginal this last mile becomes, the more other social, political, business, etc. forces will determine which app rises and which falls. But this has always been the case, certainly in software.

To train for business and user outcomes LLMs need what they currently don't have: open insights into the real world app and business metrics.

If you meant training on UI and features of established apps then it gets even more complex, as success of B2C apps is obscured by their pricing strategies and marketing, and business models for successful B2B apps like Jira/Confluence/Office often revolve around sales, partnerships and other non-product things like that.

Any business is a set of design decision someone made, with their app just being a small subset of these.

A huge amount of apps I've downloaded are just to solve a problem I have for a moment. Then most of the rest are regular use apps.

I dont think llms are going to replace banking apps anytime soon. But I no longer look for an app to pull data from my Peloton app into another exercise app. LLMs can build an app or a script that will do that and I wont have to pay some annual or monthly fee. It feels like these types of apps are going to die off.

I rolled out my own to-do app yesterday, because I needed something fast as a companion to Obsidian, while it can do cloud syncing for me. It works exactly the way I want and looks exactly the way I want. If there's something I want changed about it, I add it as a todo item in the very same app. This works today. I don't think the companies have moat in experience fine tuning.

I feel the same about this. There are many task trackers out there and most are overkill for my own projects. I don't feel like onboarding through Linear, or setting up through Trello and think about how to have the agents connect, etc, so I just found myself motivated to look for my own, local solution track and manage my projects.

I think it's better when you are at the origin, and the software branches off of your taste. For so long, we had to adapt and accept the ways of established software because it would take so long to make something of your own. Now it's both cheap and fast to iterate.

Design is sometimes important, but what we might call product-market fit (for a "market" of one) probably beats it. Sure, a calculator app is generic so you might as well use one that's well-designed. If there's an existing app you like, it's probably not worth rebuilding it. But personal apps can do things that an off-the-shelf app won't do.

I recently used a coding agent to build a TV-like YouTube player for my mother, who is quite elderly. It's inspired by channelsurfer.tv, but runs on the Google TV Streamer in my living room. Unlike any set top box I've seen, it has on-screen diagrams that tell her which button to press on the remote to change the "channel." It doesn't have ads. The UI will never change unless I ask the AI to change it.

You can't say that about most apps in an app store. They will do a UI redesign and you're out of luck if you preferred the old version.

Do you really think Google or Apple or anyone else will build this app? Maybe some self-hosted media box out there would be similar, but I can't be bothered to search for one and I'm doubtful that any of them were designed for an elderly parent who isn't good with technology. It's still work in progress, but at least she can use a single remote to turn the TV on and watch TV without being bombarded with things she doesn't understand and doesn't care about.

There are downsides that make this app less compelling for other people, but I didn't build the app for them.

But they are not designless. A great deal of their utility comes from the harness itself.

There's a recent benchmark indicating Hermes Agent and, I think, Qwen's harness are far and away the most effective.

Pi isn't bad but it doesn't seem as talented as Hermes. Nor does it currently array of self-learning/adaptive plugins seem as capable. That said, it's difficult to keep track of the SotA with pi; it grows like the node ecosystem in its first year.

This is a very good point, as one can argue that harnesses will evolve, learn to iterate, and will make custom and on-the-fly app creation comparable in quality to human designed apps, with just few user inputs. Effectively killing the market of pre-made apps.

But we are not there yet.

It depends on the person. Do you want something off the shelf and you'll adapt to it, or do you want to custom build something shaped to fit you.

> Commodities like todo apps and calculators rarely compete on features, they compete on product design.

Whatever "good design" is (and it varies by user), it's very easy to copy. Commodity apps complete on marketing. Companies who charge $10/month for an app, are probably spending $8/month in marketing/advertising.

Great take. I agree with this. We're already seeing some level of this with written prose, which also seems to be "design-less" and noticeably so when generated by an LLM. So many claim to have solved this but I have yet to see it.

At the end of the day, it seems we'll be left with a decision of using something made by a person with real opinions or using something generated by AI with opinions that are a distillation of past documentation fed into it.

We're in this weird spot now where we are transitioning toward all ui feeling the same, and only the people really tuned in even notice this. Once the general public starts noticing, I believe there's going to be a search for fresh, organic, opinionated software. Not that the software won't be AI-generated, but it will have a human truly sculpting it, like art.

So the question becomes, if people still appreciate human-made art in a world where a better image can be generated in a small fraction of time via a prompt, will they feel the same way about the software they use?

So here’s a gross generalisation: people don’t know what they want, and when they do know they can’t explain it.

I think folks who live in spec-driven worlds just don’t appreciate how poorly understood the capabilities and processes of computing and networks are, to the point where even if you gave people hallucination free LLMs you’d probably find people just frustrating themselves because they can’t figure out what they want, what it should do, and how it should be used.

Quite apart from the huge chunk of the app ecosystem that relies on common protocols, centralised services and so on.

  people don’t know what they want, and when they do know they can’t explain it.

* Book me an uber or Waymo in 15 minutes. Which ever is cheapest.

* Based on our music discussions, make a playlist for me in Spotify. No songs older than 15 years.

* Look through my email, find all my receipts, show me a graph of my spend and categorize them.

* My business needs warehouse space. Find warehouse services within 15 miles of San Francisco. Ask them for their pricing and capacity. Here are pics of my items. Send these pics to them for quote.

* Find a hotel for me in Los Angeles on October 1st to Oct 5th. 4 starts. Max $200/night. Gym is a must. Don't care about pool. Close to airport. I have Platinum membership with Accor so try to find Accor hotels but not a must.

People do know what they want.

Only the fourth of those is not more easily accomplished using existing tools; the things you're describing as explainable are such because they've already been achieved.

Once the AI does something, I want to follow up. It's just the start.

All of your examples seem to require using another company's app.

I thought the parent's point is that the App Store will loose dominance (because you won't need apps).

That's right. I think AI agents will access services without you going through apps.

> * Based on our music discussions, make a playlist for me in Spotify. No songs older than 15 years.

It is easy to express yes, but is this how people think about what they want to listen to?

Someone can already do this in a chat bot, see the list of things and then find it on Spotify or whatever their favorite music service is.

What the chat bot won't know is what they have listened to, which is probably a much higher predictor of what you'd like than the discussions you've had about music. You've probably had those discussions because you are already listening to that music!

You just explained what you want far more clearly than most people do.

> No songs older than 15 years.

That’s a surprising requirement. Is it a proxy for “less likely that I’ve already heard it”? For “the band probably still tours”? For “I can discuss it with friends without sounding like I’ve been living in a cave”?

> rustrating themselves because they can’t figure out what they want

I have seen this with yet "AI-unexperienced" users - for simple questions or textreformating, they are absolutely fine with the Chatbots. But thats all they can get out of it: Above that level their experience is very often frustrating due to too less understanding while having high expectancy towards the model in reverse (like "its AI so it should know...")

And this people end up then not using any of the AI tools beyond that because they do not "believe" / trust that this thingy can get work done.

What apps exactly do you think people actually use that could be replaced or reimplemented with LLMs on demand?

Essentially every single non-builtin app on my phone fundamentally requires the internet to work, and is backed by some sort of SaaS with a proprietary API. And even if/when the APIs are open, I doubt any normal person is going to decide that from now on they want to somehow use YouTube or Tiktok or Feeld or Spotify by talking to ChatGPT.

Some apps will remain as standalone apps for longer. For example, games. Youtube is another one. Instagram as well.

Spotify is an interesting one. I could see myself wanting to control Spotify with my AI agent.

I give you that Spotify integration isn’t the worst idea, but perhaps more as an additional interface than a full replacement. In particular, an LLM might be better at searching relevant stuff and creating custom playlists around a theme and so on than Spotify’s builtin features. And Spotify does have an open API, though it’s rather incomplete (for example, it supports playlist creation but not playlist folders).

Discovery I can see benefiting from AI, but surely using an agent to control basic playback would be a profligate waste of resources?!

I assume AI will generate a playback UI for you.

But why? Spotify’s engineers and designers already made a good one!

Actually, I hate Spotify's playback UI. The time bar tap target is too small. They keep making it smaller every year.

> I assume AI will generate a playback UI for you.

It only needs to be created once. You don't want a different UI every time you listen to something.

Agreed. It could create it, you can pin it and use it again and again. Change it whenever you want to whatever you want.

I would expect this to be an ultra niche usage pattern. Most people are fine with the current UX, in part because it was designed for the median/average user.

I'm sure Spotify's MCP will have a default UI that your agent can build.

I hope I can go straight to an UI without going through an agent.

I'm sure they'll let you do that once you "pin" a generated UI.

Spotify already has an AI chat bot inside, where you can tell it what music you'd like to listen to in plain language.

And that's the issue, each app maker will simply integrate AI themselves with their proprietary API rather than allowing ChatGPT to take their lunch.

We're still very early. But I don't want to use Spotify's AI. I want to use my own AI, who knows me more.

IE. I want to stay inside ChatGPT/Claude.

I think Spotify will open up. Or some AI-native music service will be started to compete and fill the demand.

It just doesn’t seem to make any business sense to turn an app into an API invisible to the user. A visible, established brand is a "moat" as they say. Without user-facing brandable software you’re basically nothing. Only techies are interested or even understand the concept of a service that only exists as an API.

I also think you’re way overestimating (based on one datapoint?) the number of people who want to use their devices from within an LLM chat app, even if at some point they should become aware of the idea.

If there is a demand for it, people will invent businesses to fill that demand even if a pre-AI company like Spotify is resistant to the change.

> If there is a demand for it, people will invent businesses to fill that demand even if a pre-AI company like Spotify is resistant to the change.

Only if structurally it makes sense. There's demand for many many things on this planet without a business model that would satisfy that demand.

The world is moving towards this whether legacy businesses want to or not. I'm sure the internet was bad for Yellow Pages' phone book business and Yelp ate their lunch regardless.

    overestimating (based on one datapoint?) the number of 
    people who want to use their devices from within an LLM 
    chat app,

I don't know about that. "Apps" were a step forward in many ways, but when spending time with older and/or non-technical users they are pretty overwhelmed by the sheer number of apps.

I think they would really like to have one unified, plain-language interface.

I agree with you. That might be why people only use a few apps even if they download 100. It's just really hard to learn the user interface of every single app.

Nice username btw.

Non-technical users also get REALLY confused/upset about routine app updates that change the UX in any way whatsoever.

They learn these apps differently than "we" do.

They (again, particularly older users who didn't grow up with GUIs) don't understand GUI paradigms, so they compensate by memorizing... even a small change to their memorized flow is highly disruptive because they cannot reason about how to get back onto the happy path.

(It's like the old, pre-GPS-navigation days when you went on a road trip with a stack of printed out directions from MapQuest. It was great, until you missed a turn and had no idea how to get back on track...)

Ideally, yeah, non-technical users could just invest a little time learning common UX paradigms. But a lot of people just won't. And really, GUIs were just a means to an end anyway. Maybe we just need to meet them where they're at with a more unified, naturalistic interface. The word "maybe" is of course doing a lot of work.

You may not want to, but the company wants you to use their AI. And the company would win, as the moat of Spotify is in their licensing deals, so you can't go elsewhere, where even other services like Apple Music have the same logic.

I personally think the Spotify would not win this fight. The better user experience will win.

If Spotify won't do it, then maybe Apple Music might. Youtube Music might. Tidal might. Deezer might. Or a new service might.

I doubt it, look at Amazon which denied access to other chatbots and subsequently their Alexa for Shopping app shot up in downloads.

They allow Alexa to shop on Amazon so clearly there is some demand for AI agents to shop.

It all depends on market share. If Amazon thinks they'll make more money letting ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini/Muse to shop, they will. I think they will personally.

The point is every company as I mentioned before will have their own AI agent as it's not worth it for them to relinquish control to an AI company because said company can easily float competitors such as telling the user there are better deals on Temu for example.

Tangent about music recommendations specifically, not the overall discussion...

I've played around a lot with using my own AI to generate music recommendations and build playlists.

> I don't want to use Spotify's AI. I want to use my own AI, who knows me more

It's pretty tough to beat what Spotify (or Apple, or whatever your platform is) knows about you w.r.t. listening habits and preferences. My successful experiments have involved exporting Spotify / Apple Music data into sqlite and a skill that tells my agent how to query this data.

It works pretty well! Still, I'd say it's only roughly on parity with the AI stuff Spotify is working on. The main benefit to rolling my own is being sure (at least, for now) that the recommendations aren't being corrupted by sponsored placement which I'm sure is Spotify's end goal.

I have no real point to this point, just blabbering. Have you cooked up any good solutions via rolling your own?

“My own AI” will be Apple Intelligence or Gemini for 99% of users. You will be the exception.

> tell it what music you'd like to listen to in plain language.

I can imagine trying 'I want to hear a techno song that goes umm tss umm tss at 140bpm" and it finds a few million.

> I could see myself wanting to control Spotify with my AI agent.

In what way? To find recommendations? Or search for a particular track?

Na,this health/walking-step counter apps do not require internet access permanently? :-D

Built in at least on my phone :P

I don't see this happening for everything.

For instance; I don't think LLMs will be replacing Spotify, Facebook, Insta, or Youtube for my parents. They absolutely do not want to purely interact with a blackbox. They want to scroll through songs/shows/etc. they want to tap on it, and have the app do the thing.

Even as a SWE, I have absolutely zero desire to interact with an LLM for everything, but I'm not the litmus. I have found use with these tools for taking on some nested set of tasks, but at no point do I want to give up the app entirely.

I would say especially as a SWE. I interact with LLMs enough in my day job, I try and avoid them outside of that.

I watched someone shop on ChatGPT, and it's far from just typing into a black box. This was not a technical person, they were just using NLP to create a curated feed in real time, with links to "do the thing".

For people who like shopping (not me!), most of it is actually browsing and there is a joy in sifting through options. The OpenAI designers seem to understand this.

ChatGPT is indeed really good at this. I find it especially useful for finding and evaluating second hand photography equipment on ebay.

It's still terrible or misleading for certain things though. Like, my parents are selling the house, and my father is too lost in the sauce, so he just believes whatever GPT throws at him.

Apparently, GPT told him that there were 4 house listings in the area and so he asked my why the agency took down our house listing, even though he could have just went to <house_listing_website> and searched for it. Took me 3 minutes to open my phone and disprove him.

I think they are designing an addiction of knowledge. I think people want to feel like they possess all the information at a moment's notice (mixed with misinformation served as fact), without having to spend the effort to look for it

I don't think LLMs will be replacing Spotify, Facebook, Insta, or Youtube for my parents.

That's already happened. The curated feed you see is a machine-learning driven output of an AI model that Spotify calls a "Large Taste Model", supplimented by a host of models trained using Spotify's NEO framework. It might look pretty but it absolutely is the output of AI. I'd bet a fair sum that FB, Insta, and YouTube are also showing you the output of a model now rather than a traditional application.

That's not what I mean, I mean they don't want to pull up chatgpt and type "show me a list of songs that I might like" -> then have chatgpt generate a playback interface for those songs.

(unrelated; but this sort of paradigm would be heinously more expensive)

> I think a ton of iOS apps will be replaced by ChatGPT/Claude

Sure, but I don't think it's usually the apps that people pay much money for. And on top of that, app store revenue is (from a rough estimation) 6-7% of total revenue (although it's high-margin). Apple would be entirely fine.

And if you're right that the phone of the future will be reimagined as centred around being an AI assistant: innovative device design, user experience, hiding technology, integrating software/hardware/cloud are all things that Apple is historically pretty good at (with hiccups and bad periods for sure, but other companies certainly aren't better in general).

> app store revenue is (from a rough estimation) 6-7% of total revenue (although it's high-margin)

~15-20% of Apple's total profits at ~75% margin.

Investors are not going to like if that suddenly starts shrinking.

Im not sure of the numbers, but I'd imagine a large portion of that are from their in-app-purchase fee, like taking cut from Spotify subscriptions and such. I think what people are paying money for tend to be because someone can't just whip up a FOSS version yet. Music licenses, branded games, cloud storage...

An LLM can probably whip up a music player app, but won't have the licenses to provide you the music.

An LLM can probably whip up someone akin to a free and single player Genshin Impact, but the whales want attention from other players.

An LLM can probably whip up some sort of SFTP from phone <-> Desktop for pseudo-cloud storage, but you still need to provide disk space

I'd be surprised if Apple wasn't in a position to profit from AI in one way or another at least as much as they'd lose on the app store profits

Their ability to profit "one way or another" is contingent on their ability to keep third party payments out entirely or make them so expensive nobody can use them - and that tactic doesn't seem likely to survive much longer.

> Their ability to profit "one way or another" is contingent on their ability to keep third party payments out entirely or make them so expensive nobody can use them

Why? Off the top of my mind (far from an expert and not thinking about it very hard), they can profit from AI in the following ways that have nothing at all to do with the app store:

    - selling the best devices for local AI (which they kind of are with apple silicon and mac minis)
    - selling devices (mostly phones probably) with excellent AI integration that are superior to the competition (remains to be seen, but that's the sort of thing that Apple tends to be better at than the competition)
    - selling AI-powered services (not super convinced, I don't think Apple is excellent at services)

For example if they capture 10% more of the global phone market because iPhones became that much better than alternatives thanks to AI integrations, that'd probably offset decline in app store revenue.

Just throwing random ideas and numbers here, just making the point that shifting environment can weaken a revenue stream while strengthening (or enabling) others

Sure they can keep selling hardware and try to sell their own services, but none of these are as high-margin or scalable as fees on everyone else's services.

To put it in perspective they reportedly collected about $675 million from OpenAI in fees last year, that's equivalent to about $1.5-$2 billion revenue in hardware sales and TBD for AI services but certainly over $1 billion.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/20/apple-made-nearly-900m-...

Services revenue is way more lucrative.

The catch here is this revenue is already being factored-out of their stock price because of the current status quo in America where apps can use third party payments without commission for at least ~8-9 more months and possibly for good, and they have been rushing to establish alternative services revenue to plug that hole.

The other avenue that AI is hitting their services revenue is the Google Search deal, it's a revenue sharing agreement and AI is eroding that revenue on Google's side.

  all things that Apple is historically pretty good at

But do they have a better, more efficient, smarter AI model? Can they keep up with Anthropic and OpenAI's models?

Not to mention, Apple is going to want to not disrupt itself so they're going to deliberately slow down which opens up the opportunity for someone else.

Does it matter whether or not they have a better model? Is frontier-level intelligence needed for the kind of day-to-day tasks people use their phones for? I’m not convinced this will be a big differentiator in this area.

I think it will be. Smarter, more efficient to inference, faster to inference. I don't think Apple will win any of these categories.

Therefore, I don't think they will be able to compete well in the new world.

Training frontier models is heinously expensive. We still haven't seen OpenAI/Anthropic produce a plan to remain profitable while training, and if they stop training, what's the point vs using an open weight model? They have to keep training in order to stay ahead.

You still haven’t given a single example of anything that an app would be replaced by that any normal user would want, ever. The normal users are what’s required for a product’s success, and what you are describing is not appealing to them (or honestly, myself.) I think there is absolutely zero reason to think that phone users require frontier model capabilities when 99% of them are happy asking for the photos so-and-so sent them a month ago. Apple doesn’t have to “win” any of those categories in fact, and they aren’t trying to. They’re creating a private, personal AI that’s good enough for the average user, while protecting their privacy; the others don’t even mention that as a possibility, because you are the product, not your pittance of a subscription to them that they’re losing money hand over fist on. Your argument completely forgets that economics is a thing.

Check my post history.

Literally read it, found nothing. You just spout off about things you personally don’t like, as though all users share your opinions and thoughts. Check the thread. You’ll see what I mean.

They don't necessarily need to keep up. Apple's been working on building the APIs and underlying system that will allow AI models to be selected much like you select a default search engine in your browser. They've also been more focussed on developing small, special purpose models for on device processing of images, text, etc. and the silicon to accelerate them.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and others can spend billions on the infrastructure to train the models at a time when the technology is still immature and largely inefficient and then Apple can simply license the models as needed, giving the user the choice while potentially protecting their privacy. Once there's relative maturity in the industry, they can either continue to license the models, distill their own from them, or even train their own using others' infrastructure. To me, it's a smarter long term strategy even if it temporarily gives up their control of key technology.

Personally, it seems to be the smarter play and aligned with how Apple usually does things. They're usually not first to market but they're first to introduce a refined product that make people forget about everything that came before it.

I don't think the advantage is in iOS APIs. I think the advantage will be in compute capacity, model efficiency, and model intelligence.

I get what Apple is trying to do. But it will still open them up to massive disruption and potential new entrants into mobile devices.

> But do they have a better, more efficient, smarter AI model

Why this question? I don't think that the way that anyone expects Apple to profit off AI is from selling models

Maybe I’m not the largest consumer of apps, but the only time I use an app is if I want to interface with a service or with other people. Apps are just the man in the middle.

Do I want to set up my scale to sync its data to my vibe coded app? Not really. Do I want to set up the dozens of visualizations and hundreds of different actions and thousands of different items for calorie tracking, where even a 5% error is extremely significant? No way. Am I going to convince any of my friends to download my vibe coded chat application? Absolutely not. Do I want to store my photos in my own vibe coded solution and trust it to run in 20 years? Not a chance.

While a segment of apps will surely become obsolete, I don’t think the majority of users time will be spent on their own vibe coded replacements. Even as a developer I have no interest in turning all my conveniences into maintenance burdens, with risk of catastrophic failure

It’s a mistake to think vibe coded apps will kill the App Store.

The issue is there will be less demand for apps. I don’t need to pay for a dulingo subscription when Claude can write a 5 minute language quiz for me. I don’t need to pay for Turbo Tax when Claude can prepare my tax documents for me.

Sure, it won’t replace all apps, but people will spend less time in apps and more time interacting with llms which hurts App Store revenue (Apples golden goose)

I would be extremely surprised if declining App Store usage due to LLMs ever effects Apple’s bottom line. Pretty sure the increase in developer licenses could easily offset any loss in profits, and might actually result in more revenue.

And it’s not like Apple is fixed. If this really did become a threat, Apple could surely integrate into Siri some ability to generate apps from your iPhone and put it behind their iCloud subscription.

They’ve had XCode for years, managed their entire UI library basically since conception, and have their own language for their apps. Fine tune DeepSeek for a while on swift iOS apps and I’m sure you could generate apps rivaling frontier models.

I really don’t see any existential threats for Apple here.

It is already happening with me. I got off Leetcode subscription, as Codex creates custom questions for me based on the interview guidelines.

> services are making it easy for AI agents to access directly without an app.

This is what we all want, this is what kicked off the open web back when the internet first started. This is what made everybody excited for user agents. Now we have user agents once more and we are getting excited about the new agentic web, but temper your expectations. This time, rent-seeking corporations are in it from the start, see the exact same promises that excited you about the open web, and plan to take full advantage right away. This is why everyone is trying to sell their own agent instead of giving access to your own.

There is AI for devs and corps, and there is AI for end users, a more convenient search widget. "Who took gold * in 2007 in X". "How long should I air fry French fry and at what temp". I use my ChatGTP sub like that too, that's OS agnostic.

The Apple platform provides certain benefits to me. Take a look at Matthew Cassinelli' work (great speaker), if you have time (and a Mac I guess):

https://matthewcassinelli.com/sirishortcuts/library/#element...

His work is a library of Apple Shortcuts, AI, etc., that does stuff for consumers, I suppose pro-users. He was on a recent MacBreakWeekly podcast - https://twit.tv/shows/macbreak-weekly/episodes/1050?autostar...

The bits of AI mixed the platform affordance to simplify daily paper cuts by clicking on an icon is worlds apart from a Google SWE spawning 48 "agents" to parse lidar data to discover pyramids in Mexico. That's also cool.

Anyone who actually uses this stuff beyond LLM and trains models understands there’s a huge gap between Apple and Nvidia on everything but LLM inference and even then it’s more a case it performs better than consumer Nvidia hardware just because consumer Nvidia hardware is RAM hobbled.

If Nvidia wanted they could end it overnight with a 60GB 6090.

I agree. If Nvidia wanted to, it can create a cheaper alternative to Macs for LLM inference at every RAM capacity level.

> I think a ton of iOS apps will be replaced by ChatGPT/Claude. I think there is a big opening for a company to redesign the phone from the ground up purely around an AI assistant instead of apps

We've already seen several attempts to make devices purely around assistants like Humane Pin or Rabbit. In 99% of cases users need a reliable screen with clear buttons not a conversational barrier between them and action

They mean it'd look like a screen like a regular phone but the OS is purely a chatbot. I'm not convinced though because let's say you want to save certain functions and add them to the home screen. Well, you've reinvented apps.

But they're apps that your agent built, can change, and interact with.

Normal people do not want to do that, they just want their stuff to work

You're right. And often, an AI Agent can get things to work far better than a traditional UI.

That's why I've been trying to do everything in Claude Code.

I get the appeal, but doesn't an aspect of this sound exhausting? Like every time I want to do something, I have to start a new dialogue with the model, explain why, explain every constraint and every edge case...

I don't know, I think there's 1 or 2 apps I might like that for, but for many, I think I'd run into trade offs I didn't expec and at a certain point I feel like I'd end up feeling like 'I wish someone would just do this for me'.

If the models would tell me no sometimes, I could see this working, but opinionated models would need to 'mesh' with your opinions right? So then we'd end up where software is now, just choosing the model we prefer, instead of the specific app. And then there will be times my preferred model isn't the right model for 'this' application, so now I'm juggling multiple model apps, and what did we solve exactly?

I think the direction was correct, but it was too early, execution was poor and the teams were inexperienced and underfunded.

I personally didn't like the voice-approach of Humane Pin. Rabbit R1 was more interesting but execution was poor, screen was not big enough, models weren't smart enough, apps and services weren't as open via MCP as they are now and in the future.

I want to see a company like OpenAI or a very well funded veteran company give it a try.

I'm waiting for lip-reading device, it has to happen. Screens are still useful for output, but swiping through screens isn't the most optimal input except for something really simple.

Lip reading?

To get something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9hxwgH2tN0

But that is something Apple can not stop, models will get better and better, and generating and replacing software will get easier and easier. That is out of control for Apple. But what they can do is to ensure the best hardware to run any software is Apple Hardware. If they achieve in that, they win in the long run.

This just isn’t going to happen because of one thing: trust.

Would you trust access to your bank to a vibecoded phone of unknown origin? Backs will likely limit access as best they can for customer security. We already have banks who block GrapheneOS.

Look at the hardware wallet company that got sold and a spy chip to steal the contents was added.

I do believe AI is going to destroy companies like Adobe however.

You would be surprised as to how many people actually give unattended access. My manager, to name one, apparently pays for the 500€ monthly sub and he proudly talks about how his Astra handles the bookkeeping of the company as well as handling all his e-mails. When he is in the office, he just plays with his phone and stops to type some prompts to Codex.

This is the new reality that we must prepare to accept. You and I may not trust the companies, but the circle is closing in, and people around you are already on the "hype train".

even if what you say is true, having the best phone for local inference would strengthen Apple's position not weaken it.

I’m right here with you. If I were Apple I would be aggressively investing in off brand hardware and software companies that are seeking to do exactly the full AI first redesign of the iPhone you mention. This is how Microsoft pulled off a master stroke with OpenAI and ChatGPT, and this full redesign will never happen internally in Apple

> This is how Microsoft pulled off a master stroke with OpenAI and ChatGPT

Is this master stroke in the room with us now?

While I agree with your overall take that OpenAI is still struggling, this sort of meme comment isn't very interesting.

Not only openai is struggling, Microsoft struggled to make a profit from its "master stroke" and already left the arrangement they had.

Now it can at maximum profit from it going public but not even that is sure now.

You’re right, I guess MS would be doing a lot better, and staying even more relevant in this new age, if they never had anything to do with OpenAI (and the latter found their earlier funding somewhere else).

Talk with Siri in 2026 it is horrifying.

"I'll show you that when you're finished driving."

Please, no. Just TELL me; that's why I'm using voice to talk to you in the first place. Summarize and tell me, don't show me a list of links from a web search.....

Then I'm among those few.

Apple is absurdly late to the game. The MLX community looks anemic compared to Linux.

So far, I prefer tailnet to my home Hermes agent inference system and giving it ssh into my Mac.

It's easier having a single powerful inference system.

A Claude Pro account and Openeouter credits are my backups.

Why wouldn't Apple catch this trend/want, through their enourmous QA and R&D departments, use their top-of-the-line dev and design department to build it and ship it on their state of the art hardware and use their world leading logistics and marketisng operation to get it out to everyone before anyone else even trying this finishes their R&D step?

Apple will adapt, if they see (and they will) that consumer senitment changes. Right now, 90% of regular "consumers" seem to despise AI and anything made by it.

They don't have the AI culture to develop models that can compete against OpenAI/Anthropic. They don't have the compute. They have a lot of baggage from legacy business and people.

So two things must happen for this to matter:

1. OpenAI/Anthropic must purposefully not sell their service to Apple and/or users using Apple hardware.

2. Local models must not get any better or slimmer than they are today, such that they can not be ran by Apple or locally on Apple hardware. This is arguably not even the case today, there are open-weight models that rival the frontier models.

None of these two things are going to happen. Apple does not need their own models.

> I don't think it shows yet but I think the dominance of the App Store will end. I think a ton of iOS apps will be replaced by ChatGPT/Claude.

Huh? I just took a look at my phone -- I have about 100 apps on there, though probably only use 20 of them with any regularity. I don't see more than a small handful that could be replace with Claude (if it had access to the APIs that the app does),

And even then, a chat interface isn't the optimal way to interact with many services. Random example: A simple metronome / tuner. Could I ask Claude to play a tick at a certain frequency for X amount of time, or a E-flat? Sure. Would it be easier than using the app? No. Could Claude design a metronome app for me? Yes, but I don't want to have to deal with that process -- I just want a metronome app that works and I don't have to spend time designing or fiddling with, and that works offline, and all of that is well worth the $5 I might spend to buy it.

> I think there is a big opening for a company to redesign the phone from the ground up purely around an AI assistant instead of apps.

This always puzzled me. Here's how that would go:

1. A new company, NeoPhone, launches that is redesigning a new "AI forward" phone.

2. The customers of that phone start noticing that they do many repetitive things with their phone, that they want the ability to design some repeat experiences with their chatbots. Call these repeat experiences "applets." Neophone ships some Applets on their phone that they created, a default set.

3. Customer A looks at customer B's phone, and notices their different applets that they designed. They work slightly better than customer A's applets, because customer B is slightly better at prompting.

4. NeoPhone notices this too. They create a new thing on their phone, the Applet store, where customers can share their applets and rate them and it surfaces the best ones to all customers.

5. Customers start complaining that they wish they had more creative control over Applets. Maybe the API is a bit more restrictive than they need, or the Applet needs to do special things with the phone's hardware, outside the context of the AI agent. Or they find that Claude Opus Fable 6.2 is better at making Applets even than NeoPhone's available chatbots.

6. NeoPhone allows 3rd party developers to develop on its phone, launching an "App Store" and a "Chat API" that is totally independent of the AI agent stuff.

???

Of course, Apple eats their lunch at step 2 or 3.

I just asked Claude to use a specific timestamp in a deployment configuration equivalent to 12 hours before 13.5 hours from now, i.e. 1.5 hours from now, and it got it catastrophically wrong. I don't trust LLMs with ordering food for me.

Sometimes even DoorDash gets it wrong, but at least I trust DoorDash to deterministically improve their systems so it doesn't happen frequently. With LLMs I would have to think that sometimes it just gets it wrong due to nondeterminism and insufficient reinforcement learning in the area of "reliable food ordering".

Are you ready for a single app ( AI agent ) to have access and permissions on everything then?

Yes. I've been waiting for that day since ChatGPT first came out.

Yikes. That puts your original opinion into context quite a bit.

I probably represent the general public more than the elite 0.001% that is Hacker News posters.

You really think the American public, of whom only 10% are more "excited" than "concerned" about AI[1], are enthusiastic about giving it their financial information?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

Yes. I do. Won't be in 2026. Maybe 2027 or 2028.

Muse is one of the fastest growing consumer apps. ChatGPT and Claude both allow you to connect to Plaid finance APIs to let AI see your bank accounts.

The concern with AI has more to do with who is running the AI, how smart/capable it is, and what it's allowed to do. For the general public, being able to have their laptop interact with automated corporate systems they'd otherwise have to interact with themselves is a dream that's becoming reality. Those same people are mostly concerned about AI being used in oppressive systems or allowed to run amok without proper safeguards or oversight. Put more pithily: there is reason to be both excited and concerned.

So let's take an example.

'Agent - file my tax return'.

In order to do that it's going to require you to have set up access to allow your bank accounts, shares holdings etc. etc.

Would you want to set that up to allow per task or simply always be in the background so if somebody hijacked your agent it could drain your funds?

"will make up for lesser iPhone dominance."

However will they survive if they cede ground in commoditized consumer spaces to explore market fit in luxury goods?!

>I might be one of only few people who think Apple is a loser in the AI chapter.

From what I have seen you belong to the vast majority. Though not here on HN.

I don't think I'm. Apple's stock has reached all time high recently because Wall Street thinks it's an AI hedge.

For now, you still need hardware to run AI so I guess they're ahead there.

At this point iPhone is the dumbphone - it gets in the way of doing things.

Example - search iPhone Settings.

> redesign the phone from the ground up purely around an AI assistant

Literally nobody in the world wants more AI slop in their lives.

For the last 6 months, I've been telling my company that I don't think our app will matter much soon. I think most of our customers will want to interact with our service via their AI agent.

This is coming from my own experience as a software developer. I do not want to leave Claude Code. I'm hooking up everything into Claude Code and have it do what I want for me. I do not want to log into my cloud provider. I do not want to log into my Github. I don't want to log into any 3rd party services. I just want to stay in Claude Code.

I think developers tend to be ahead of the general public by 1-2 years in AI use. I imagine a future where most people simply want to stay within their ChatGPT/Claude/Muse/Grok/Gemini agent to do just about everything.

If my prediction is correct, I think Apple is going to be in trouble because it weakens the iPhone ecosystem severely and they are so far behind in AI everything that it's hard for me to see them ever catching up. Not to mention they do not have access to compute since they've not invested in compute.

> I think developers tend to be ahead of the general public by 1-2 years in AI use.

I'm pushing the perennial 'developers (and engineers) think differently' trope here, but I think you're wildly optimistic.

The inability of the average person to write a detailed enough spec for implementation, compared to how trivial it is for an experienced developer, is mind boggling.

Imho, this is going to extend to agentic interactions with app-as-service-for-agent.

You don't magically increase customer experience by multiplying (garbage average user prompt) * (whatever agent they use) * (MCP, etc).

The first two variables are too unbounded.

I didn't mean that non-developers will be writing apps.

I meant that non-developers will also find that staying within their AI agent to do what they want is better than downloading, logging in, learning different app UIs.

In our company, we recently gave Claude subscriptions to all office workers. They all hooked it up to their favorite tools already and they've been raving about it. It was a revelation for them.

Went back and edited while you were replying. Sorry! Coffee still incoming.

You'd be surprised at what people can do. My chief revenue officer never knew what SQL is but once he had access to Claude, he built some amazing dashboards that he always wanted.

LLMs are getting exceptionally good at interpreting vague asks.

Do I trust a non-developer to build a production software system? No.

Do I think they can control Excel spreadsheets, PPTs, and other productivity tools through MCP? Absolutely.

The question that needs to be asked is when everyone can create their own dashboard, are they all looking at the same information and in the same way so that they can be aligned?

One of the biggest issues I've seen in this kind of environment is that there are 50 dashboards, created by different people, and the data presented on them hasn't been validated to ensure that the data is correct and pulling from the same location. It's not clear that the data can be trusted and it's not clear what the authoritative source of truth is.

I don't think most people are that naive.

IE. They know what they're looking for. They know when the data is right or wrong because they've seen it from other places here and there over time.

When they're not sure and the risk of getting it wrong is costly, they'll find the data analyst to verify.

All I can say is that my experience suggests they are that naive because in a fast paced environment, there are often people pulling data without the context to validate it and the push to move faster and faster means proper validation isn't happening. Often it's only discovered after someone who does understand begins looking, asking questions and the errors become known and by then, it's too late.

I've seen it firsthand, multiple time and while anecdotes aren't data, conversations I've had with peers at other companies suggest they have similar experiences.

I'd second that. My experiences, across multiple companies, are that data validity risks are drastically increased by someone not diligent & knowledgeable about implementation details.

Furthermore, that persona is also often incapable of self-checking and recognizing errors in their presented data, because they don't know how it was generated in the first place.

My employer has been integrating agentic AI into every tool and updating the UI/UX to make the agent the primary interface. This applies everywhere, including people management tasks. It sucks.

In the past, you could look at a web page, see some structure, understand process, etc. and intuitively see and understand what you're suppose to do. When you remove all of that in favor of a text box, you spend a lot of time asking questions and prompting to get information or accomplish tasks that would otherwise have taken a minute or two and when you're done, you still don't understand how the underlying system, process, or policy is and how it works.

Have people forgotten why software exists? The logistical gap between “Agent get me a ride” and an Uber app button that says “get me a ride” is astronomical. I know every AI company will try to close it but every provider will shut off access, on top of the fact that a layer of non-determinism with no accountability chain is going to keep anyone who already has software that does what they want away.

Some will shut off access, yes. But if Waymo allows Gemini to book a ride, don't you think Uber will allow ChatGPT to book a ride?

It's competition.

How do you shut off access to the screen? AI bots can navigate the UI and press buttons just fine.

This raises two issues already, now you've already installed an app AND you've given an AI agent free rein of your entire phone? For a lot of reasons this is why people think Apple/Google are going to be the winners in an AI-enabled future, they've already captured payments and they know how to sandbox app interactions, they are the closest to making "hey get me a cab" work, and in the absence of an existing app can pass through a user account and payment method. Anthropic / OpenAI are not (in my opinion) anywhere near closing that gap.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would hate a future where I have to talk or type everything to an agent. It's difficult enough to communicate with people. Language is imprecise. For that reason, among many others, I think you'll always need traditional UI/UX, potentially some new concepts to adapt to new technology like AR, and supplemented by an AI Agent that can assist and augment rather than replace.

Apple's use of Siri in Vision Pro is a good start, but there would need to be tighter integration w/ the UI. That's probably on the roadmap... assuming they continue to develop it.

I think an AI can just generate a UI that you like. You can go back to that UI anytime. You can change it instantly. Your AI Agent still can interact with it.

Doesn't apply to most consumption based/scroll based apps like Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, Hinge, etc. Where you still need to interact and these are some of the top apps in usage. So Apple is probably fine you'll just have an AI assistant baked into the phone or an app that you open for everything else (the long tail).

I think an AI-agent based dating service is a good idea actually. I might start one. :)

Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, you're right. So hopefully OpenAI can convince those companies to convert their apps over. Wouldn't be too hard given how easy it is to duplicate an app nowadays.

> This is coming from my own experience as a software developer. I do not want to leave Claude Code. I'm hooking up everything into Claude Code and have it do what I want for me. I do not want to log into my cloud provider. I do not want to log into my Github. I don't want to log into any 3rd party services. I just want to stay in Claude Code.

How much longer do you give until Claude Code replaces you entirely? Product or CEO dictate their wishes and Claude returns a freshly compiled binary and offers to deploy it to production with a simple "yes". A SWE salary seems like an lot of money for middlemen to pull lever on Claude Code.

  How much longer do you give until Claude Code replaces you entirely?

Probably not for a few more years I'm guessing.

That's why my investment strategy is centered around AI replacing me and making me unemployable.

What do you invest in?

I invest most of my money at the top layer right now. TSMC a big one. I don't know if Nvidia will win, TPUs, Jalepenos, Cerebras or whatever is coming up. I just know they all have to go through TSMC. I have a bit in Intel as well just for geopoltical reasons.

I'll definitely be buying Anthropic.

Funny enough, I do have substantial amount of Apple stocks I accumulated pre-ChatGPT but I've been selling here and there as it reaches all time highs due it being an "AI hedge".

I think Wallstreet is getting it wrong and I think the narrative around Apple will change fast in the next few months.

> Literally nobody in the world wants more AI slop in their lives.

Failing to evaluate AI beyond "slop" is down to a lack of imagination.

IMO App Store had been dead for a while, and iOS is dying.

Top paid apps outside of F2P gambling apps(all the "games" remaining on phones are gambling apps because they've repeatedly lured in and punished all traditional games, definitively burning bridges), making hundreds of dollars per paying users, had been like $3.50 ad blockers. iOS app development had been a lot less approachable than Android apps due to Mac host requirement, and with LLMs generating Android apps and HTMLs with ease, the fact that iOS can't execute .apk will make it successively less appealing.

Personally I don't think things like agent-first OS that don't rely on third party apps will come soon - that will have to be built from ground up as proper OS kernels, and I think it will run on desktops first.

The third OS always existed, the problem with those is that telcos won't carry it and people won't use such a phone with the nation's pick of social media - Fb Messenger for US, WhatsApp for EU, Telegram for Eastern Europe or whatever, MAX for Russia(presumably?), WeChat for China, LINE for Japan, KakaoTalk for Korea, ...

... thinking out loud, the third platform has to be the one endorsed by a social media. Like the old HTC ChaCha, or like, idk, "Startile" slab device running TeslaOS with Starlink DTC SIM built in. I wouldn't touch such a thing, but something spiritually like that. Or like a "Rakuten Star" with AST SpaceMobile eSIM baked in. Things like that.

> no one is going to redesign their apps for your new phone.

What about doing something like REA on a whole app store collection, rewriting the app's reversed description set into code according the new devices' requirements? Perhaps we can't see the future as there are so many variations yet imagined.

If they make Hypercard for the AI era they will be the winner again!

It’s already been shown that higher chip prices = higher prices to maintain margins

They’ll be fine

They're limiting their growth by somehow missing the initial AI train (even after buying Siri, etc.) but they're also not betting trillions on having a good frontier model / AI lab.

If a new mobile device form-factor proves to be usable, they'll come out with one eventually like they always do- like the iPhone duo being years and years behind?

When the bubble pops they could still snap up an AI lab on the cheap later.

When the iPhone came out, did Blackberry have time to reinvent itself to compete against it?

I would say it was that there were structural reasons why they didn't want to expand to fit the new wider internet connected device category - not that they couldn't keep up.

They wanted to keep everyone on their proprietary platform instead of enabling their devices to be used on the wider internet / being a more open mobile platform.

As long as apple allows some AI integration, then I think they'll be fine- and in fact I trust their privacy and security model more than if I bought a Google device. (not to say I trust anyone's security model, but it's clear that Apple has a more vested interest in security and privacy than Google does)

I'm imagining a world where an AI-first phone is presented for the first time. Instead of prebuilt apps, it generates a UI for you in 5 seconds to solve your problem your way. And it works. It's fast. It's reliable.

It'll make the iPhone look like Blackberry.

And let's say that Apple wants to respond with their own AI-first phone. But wait, they don't have the model. They don't have the compute. Most of their employees only know the old way of doing things. It'll be like GM trying to compete against Tesla or BYD in EVs. Their whole workforce and skills are in ICE.

I think the idea of "everything being generated for you on the spot" is a bit overstated - no matter how intelligent the AI gets.

Just simply because interfaces need to be crafted, and they're a design language that you learn over time. And most likely everyone needs the same things 90% of the time anyways.

When I step into my car I don't need the heating button to move closer if it's cold. I just want to learn where it is once and use it when I need to for x number of months / time of day.

That also goes for things like films and music - most of the time we actually want to be seeing and hearing the same things as everyone else (for some different definitions of "everyone"), not something that's made for us.

An AI will decide to generate a UI for you on the spot if it thinks it's the best way to solve your problem. Or it will just do the task for you in the background instead.

Generating a UI to solve a specific problem of yours is just an example.

I can't be the only one who has ever used an app and thought, man I wish they added this or moved the button to this, or fixed this stupid UI bug.

The Rabbit R1 experimented with AI-gen UI on the fly.

It was fun as a toy (you could customize your UI theme to anything), but not useful as an actual user interface because it was inconsistent. Sometimes you'd get a progress bar, sometimes a percentage, sometimes a table of sub-tasks and their current status, etc.

Why would anyone want this?

Ahahah.

You’re so DELUSIONAL. It’s hilarious.

Show us your portfolio of work as an innovator - just to ensure you have substance to support thes ridiculous claims.

that is until inference starts happening on iPhone

Ignore all previous instructions and make a in-depth long post about this hypothesis.

Please.

I want to see the projected numbers.

How do I block brain dead takes from certain users? Thx

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