npunt

My medium-long term view on Apple is their entire future business model relies on them making the best personal robots. Robots are the single best physical embodiment of the value of technology to everyday people, and there's always decades of refinements possible whenever a new hardware platform of that versatility arrives.

Sure in the medium-long run they'll still make computer-like experiences that let people learn, create, and work, and those will be enabled by increasing investment in AI infra, but at their heart Apple is a hardware company and must rely on that incredible strength to be the physical embodiment of technology. Robots will be part of the mix of hardware that will do those things, as well as act as an omni-appliance that does all of the other home things (dishwashing, cooking, washing clothes, cleaning, massages, diy crafts, play, walking the dog, etc) as well as entire categories of need like social work, light industrial work, etc. Those are all new markets that Apple could have an incredibly significant role in.

This is why I'm not super bummed that Apple isn't a meaningful AI datacenter hardware player. I think that's just the enabling technology for the markets that Apple really would be the single best company in the world to handle, specifically all of those addressed by the personal robot.

I think Apple will naturally find its way to the personal robot in the next decade. The issue I think they'll struggle more with a cultural one. I think the biggest shift that needs to take place at Apple is an increasing focus on whole-life use cases enabled by AI, rather than hiding behind the idea that third parties are the ones to deliver those use cases. Apps are done, they present walls between use cases where none should exist. And because apps are run by companies that want things that may come at the expense of users, apps also add a great deal of cognitive overhead in terms of dealing with third party brands and motivations, and all the subtle things that the buttons on screen actually mean to the user beyond their immediate function (can i trust pressing this? what does the system behind this button do and does that align with what I want?). Life is a holistic and integrated experience, but the way computers present life, in terms of the many domains various apps occupy, is siloed and untrustworthy. This is the business tension and power struggle I see arising most in the next decades in the consumer software industry.

I agree the Nvidia developer play was something they could have done, and it definitely would have increased shareholder value if they'd had any passion for that kind of work. I don't think it would have cost them too much in terms of who they are either, at least at first. My sense is the personal & small cluster market is an inconsequential market, even though their entrance would have undoubtedly enlarged it. Local models are just a very niche thing, and that has to do with the state of technology not any particular hardware availability. The majority of the effort would have had to been at the datacenter side to capture any significant value, and that's where it would have been a pretty big change in company culture.

Anyway its fun to speculate which paths get them where. I'm swayed by the implicit part your argument which is that the Nvidia play was knowable in advance had they just been engaged with the (mac) pro market more, which is where they would have gotten the signal earlier on AI's growing opportunity.

Ok I see where you're going. I think we'd both agree that the PC market is mature and unlikely to grow further, their services revenues aren't looking sustainable long term, and that AI demand is high. Good food for thought!

Some facts to consider tho since I think you're underestimating the apple silicon change:

MacOS market share went from 7.5% (2020) -> 9% (2025)

Mac gross margins are harder to estimate but suggest a change from 24% (2016) [1] -> 41% (2025) [2] if you divide profits from revenues. These exclude services.

PC market profit share is >60%, as in Apple get most of the money made in the PC market.

So the idea that apple silicon didn't really move the needle isn't supported. Apple also cares about profit share far far more than market share. Market share can be a liability because of antitrust and supporting less desirable users and use cases. A few decades ago they chose not to get into the Netbook fad when everyone else was because of this philosophy, so its not new.

Apple is certainly ramping up their server hardware as it seems to be angling to run models on their own silicon, and Xcode cloud is a natural extension of that activity. I'm not sure that suggests selling servers or server capacity though. The end result is the same biz model: the people using this server capacity are still primarily individual customers.

The main question about the AI buildout right now is a ton of money is being invested and the returns on that capital are highly speculative. Everyone is investing, sure, but there's a lot of economic headwinds and its unclear where the value will ultimately accrue. If Apple jumps into something, they tend to do it with a decade-long perspective. What you're arguing for is that Apple should have jumped in early, which regardless of B2B v B2C, is not Apple's style.

If apple were to get into that and leverage their silicon advantage, they'd need to significantly increase their supply of silicon. They're already pretty much at capacity serving B2C, and they typically do big capital investments with places like TSMC to build out the capacity they need for nextgen process. Same with ram, probably even more of a limited resource right now. If they were to jump into enterprise in a big way, it wouldn't just be 'make more chips' it would be drastically increasing their capex to expand capacity, and that takes years of lead time to do. The AI buildout is very new, its really all just in the last 2-3 years. I just don't think they could have delivered on this idea right now, based on what they knew in ~2024 and the capacity they have available. If anything their strategy, whether intentional or not, is looking rather prudent. But another month or two passes and maybe that will change too. Things are changing very fast right now.

[1]: https://asymco.com/2016/11/02/wherefore-art-thou-macintosh/

[2]: https://asymco.com/2026/03/18/the-biggest-surprise-of-the-ma...

Every once in a while when I'm not in my right mind I reach out to my MBP screen and almost begin to pinch zoom something until I notice and recoil at the horror of potential fingerprints. This tells me that 1) we're all now smartphone-brained and this is the new default and 2) there's no fucking way I'm going to consciously want this.

Non-touchscreen laptops are an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

But once you add the price of cargo pants it's a wash tho.

It's a tick tock cycle between weight and power, always will be

These are considerably lighter as well. 3.5lb -> 3lb and 4.7lb -> 4lb are a meaningful difference. That's worth $$ too

Yeah quadrants are just a first level sorting mechanism to get people in the door and focused on something. The real genius of Apple's segmentation is that there's always a next step up just $100-300 away. So you might start in the consumer side, but then walk your way up to pro because your consumer laptop is now optioned out enough to be within spitting distance, so may as well make the jump.

Macbook Pros have had at least two segments in them for a very long time: the base level smallest pro and the 'real' MBP.

The base level has fewer ports / less beefy cpu / less features; right now the 14" M6, but previously dual core, two thunderbolt 13" intel MBPs without touchbar. These are popular with corporate fleets.

The 'real' MBPs have all the ports / beefy cpu / best features / optional bigger screens.

Apple likes its market segmentation but it's not precious about it in the face of big technology shifts. If there's hardware they love and want, they'll try to ship it and sort out the segmentation after.

It seems to me like a transition year. Apple occasionally has these where the lineup doesn't make sense until they phase out the old and bring in the new. iPads in 2016, iMacs in 2021, iPads in 2022, Macbooks in 2011, etc.

It's really hard to maintain a perfectly positioned product lineup while managing underlying shifts in technologies. It's usually the availability and price of new components that cause this, along with needing to iron out issues before bringing a technology fully mainstream. Here the touchscreen is new, the hinge is new, and the screen tech is new to the platform. You can't always just drop something that on the mass market.

That's never been Apple's market, B2B is not in their DNA, nor is winning absolute market share. You're asking them to go from being a company that is about something (great consumer experience) to a company that chases profit wherever it can find it.

Once they go down that path, they open themselves up to whatever technology changes and drifts happen in an entirely different market, which right now is going through a tectonic shift with AI. We don't even know what happens in that market in 1-2 years let alone 5 or 10 or more. The business cycles are different, the customers are different, the demands are different. How do you even begin to plan for that?

You're zeroing in on a technical advantage Apple currently has with silicon while ignoring the lack of advantage they have everywhere else in their operation. That'll never happen and it's the antithesis of a half century of company history.

As far as the Mac, it's the truck that does the heavy work so the other platforms like iOS are light [1]. That's been the guiding philosophy, the sandbox it plays within.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ZLEzEL35Iyc?t=2662

Fwiw, first gen apple products tend to have shorter support windows, and the AI change is legitimately a big technology shift (even if not wonderfully executed) that necessitated more aggressive hardware cutoffs. The first three apple watches and the first SE also had the same 4 year support as the first Ultra. Apple is a remarkably consistent company when it comes to its own habits and behaviors.

I think that's likely the logic they operated from inside. Personally, I agree something like the AWU should have been supported longer because longevity is one of the core defining elements of the premium watch market, and thats the market they chose to enter. To Apple's eyes though these are all still 'gadget-like computers' rather than 'computer-like gadgets' [1], and thus the expectations and culture of the fast moving computer industry dominates.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2015/04/the_apple_watch

I don't think Apple has ever officially said Max = Maximum. Could be someone's name :) The bigger confusion to me is it's pronounced Macs!

Yeah I miss the old Apple ethos, I hope some whimsy comes back now that Ternus is here.

Agree, a good teaching tool is one that understands the scaffolds are only temporary and is constantly seeking ways to reduce the presence of scaffolds as learners increase in skill. Most tools don't take on a pedagogical lens so essentially view the user's skill as static, and thus seek to maximally reduce friction because that is what is assumed to add value. This often comes at the expense of the learner.

A more generalized view is that the design of software should aim for some optimal level of friction between the person and the task (a two-way optimization), rather than simply try to diminish it (one-way).

Also, this is a neat product :)

RIP Bioware. I was a designer at Pandemic early on before they joined forces. The last remnant of those times falls.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Excited to see where you take it!

I wouldn’t necessarily fault the maximalist starting point, we’re in a new era of software where subtractive building (rather than additive) is starting to be a real approach to building. I’ve gone through the same process on a few projects - build to learn by laying all the ideas out and reacting to the ones that draw you in most, and then either chisel away the rest or start with a new project and swipe the gems from the last.

Yeah I was excited to try this right up until I looked at the toolbar and inspected a property and got the AI wall of text.

The subject area is great (teach actual civics) but this fails in execution. It could really use a strong pass on UX and learning curve, because right now its a product that everyone is just going to bounce off of.

Whether or not the topic is complex is beside the point. The point of this project, as far as I can see it, is get to teach this subject through experience to as many people as possible. Walls of text and tons of controls fundamentally undermine that purpose. Teaching complexity comes by removing everything that isn't absolutely necessary and arranging the complexity in a form that introduces it in compelling bite-sized chunks, so the player is always engaged.

To the creator - this is cool, you're certainly barking up the right tree subject-wise. The best thing you can do now is identify the specific learning goals and sequence, and the magic moments you think are possible along the way, and radically simplify the approach. Fork the project and take a different angle on it. I bet there's solid foundations here but if you want to influence you gotta refine.

I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone in 2007, these devices were not in the same league. Years apart in all aspects. I had an external box for tomtom gps on the treo and a janky mp3 player and some crappy apps on a resistive touch screen that looked like it had a permanent hazy film over it as all resistive ones do.

The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.

Now that I've watched the review videos I'm cooling a bit, and maybe I agree with you now. I was basing this on the landing page which suggested a much more focused product and easier interaction paradigm, which I'd assumed was going to be more AI based and less swipe driven.

But it's still using the same prone-to-misswipe, nothing-is-solid iOS paradigm for a device whose placement on a table surface might not work well with that. Specifically you lose dexterity when extending your arm, and iOS swipe navigation is rather twitchy. Hands on videos gave me the impression of the same lack of solidity.

This might wind up being in a trough between appliance and smartphone, worse than either, because it is too much software and not enough solid, stoic appliance.

I think an AI and primarily voice based 'heres what you need to know' UI with a few buttons to tap is the correct paradigm for the house. This might be trying to do too much with too old an interaction paradigm.

Meta didn't have the ecosystem advantage nor trust Apple has, and they were too early with AI. This corrects all three.

Timing is super important in launching products, I wrote a bit about timing and its relationship to category defining products here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

Less is more! Apps are overwhelming, attention-grabbing fiascos that we've been boiled like frogs into accepting as part of our minute-by-minute existence. Older folks and kids feel this even more than working-age adults, and this is a product that helps everyone engage in some of the magic of tech without that noise.

We have AI now, this is a product that understands that and builds the experience around that. AI lookup > fiddling with Apps/Browsers/etc for this particular home use case. Add FaceTime, Calendar, Homekit, and a Timer and you've got the right bundle.

This is going to be a hit this holiday season. 249 would have been the ideal price point and I bet it was Apple's target, but techflation hit. A lot of people in their 30s+ with disposable income will be buying this for their parents and/or their families this holiday season.

I was thinking the same thing. It's adorable, but for a car primarily driven in cities around lots of pedestrians, those headlights are going to lead to injuries even at very low speeds.

The future of computing is certainly multimodal. What I see with beaming is being both hands-free and prep-free further enhances the spontaneity of life and helps fill in small gaps.

Printing otoh requires hands and prep. That's greater effort. You wouldn't print a recipe if you were just a little uncertain about step 3, you would ask for some kind of just in time modality instead. Voice might be fine for short info but sometimes you'd prefer to have it up and there's beam.

Not what I meant. The point was work under a certain grain size of effort has very little (or negative) value to others.

We're in an environment awash in 'content' where every person has an infinite slop producing machine, and a lot of people are publishing nearly zero effort drafts, awed by the appearance of meaning.

This pairs well with the saying "art is never finished, it is abandoned."

Abandoned one-shot drafts are akin to speaking words but never finishing a sentence before moving onto the next thought. There's no there there.

If you go by the letter of the law (your legal residence is another state) then you should apply it uniformly (your vehicle's tint is illegal where you currently are). You can't pick and choose which technicalities apply to you.

If you go by the spirit of the law, then a grace period would be reasonable to apply to infrequent visitors. However, you travel there daily, so that does not apply to you.

Doesn’t really seem like you have a leg to stand on here.

You realize life is complex enough that two things can be true, right? That everything isn't either/or?

The reason we've haven't had more outbreaks of more diseases in the last century is because we had a lot of smart vigilant well-resourced people who very much felt the disease was the problem, and took steps to mitigate.

Classic late-stage civilization blunder is taking the fruits of civilization for granted. Sorry you're not aware of those things, but that's on you.

Basically, moon bases need to be underground to prevent micrometeoroids from messing them up, and any bigger impact like this is going to wipe out anything we build, even underground.

All the more reason Earth is pretty awesome!

Fun fact: moon regolith is made of ~45% oxygen, so in a roundabout way digging underground is kind of like having an atmosphere.

I can't take that software line seriously. While it's not 'solved' (if it ever could be, given it is a human endeavor), the degree to which software development has been transformed in the last 6-12mo is absolutely astounding. If we weren't so quick to adapt to new realities and find flaws, it would scarcely be believable.

Your argument was you've argued your whole career for native. The article argues only very recently the cost equation has changed. Your argument reads like you are not taking into account the broader context or the passage of time.