Tim has to talk it up. It's his job but sometimes he does go overboard.
We think it's the best. Yeah! I can't imagine him going on record as saying anything else, so long as 'think' is in there somewhere.
At least he is admitting that they are behind.
Yes, they have done ML for a long time but so has everybody else, and arguably better and more far reaching but I'm sure he'd still say he thinks it's the best.
I can't blame him for that but Apple made a strategic goof here and that's why it is behind and only the very latest hardware will be able to run it. If this were some kind of long term, well thought out strategic plan, at the very least, iPhones would have shipped with more RAM for the last few generations.
The reality looks more like' Yikes! We need to get rolling on this fast!'
That's why we got the initial response of not even uttering the letters 'AI' and doubling down on ML instead. In hindsight that was foolish but Apple literally had nothing to offer up back then so at least it is understandable.
One year on, AI was at least utterable and even became the star of WWDC but still there was nothing to show for it until 'later'. The new iPhones came and still AI was the star and STILL there was nothing to show for it and now the complete feature roll out isn't expected until 2025.
From the moment that the generative models became news and quickly stormed to over 100 million users, Apple has been on the back foot.
You know why Apple was hesitant about AI, but you'd rather dance around it with investor hype. To do AI properly you need to collect data about everything people do on your platforms. And to get people to agree to that, you need to hide the fact that you're doing it in convoluted terms of service agreements. Or what I call, sleazy business tactics. Something which Apple doesn't have the stomach for. Having business ethics is something which should be applauded in my books.
It was not 'hesitancy' IMO but 'impossibility'. Apple goofed strategically. Nobody expects Tim Cook to actually come out and say so of course and that's fine.
Yes, it all takes humongous amounts of data to create viable solutions. There are ethical issues surrounding both the foundational data and the use of resulting AI solutions but they have been known for decades. From theory to reality and beyond.
Obviously, hesitancy is not a valid explanation here and let's not forget all the ML talk from Apple a couple of years back and everyone trying to claim Apple wasn't 'behind' because they've been 'doing ML since 2017'.
ML requires huge amounts of data too! Yet Apple wasn't 'hesitant'.
The problem is that Apple was caught wrong footed - strategically.
Huawei launched an entire AI platform back in 2018 with absolutely everything needed to get moving on AI. From cluster systems with thousands of cores to software frameworks (CANN/Mindspore) to chipsets for cluster systems (Ascend Max) right down to earbuds (Ascend Mini/Nano) and everything else in between.
Or Nvidia. Or Google. Or Meta.
Apple didn't move when it should have. It's now late to 'where the puck is'.
It isn't the end of the world but in terms of actual shipping products, it is trying to catch up.
we shall see. 1) Apple Car 2) Apple Vision Pro 3) iPhone 16
Apple needs a few hits to help us forget the duds.
If Apple doesn't try anything new, the media says they're not innovating. If they do, and it's not an immediate success, then they're a dud. Those who can, do, those who can't, critique.
The industry is tough. Apple has slacked in some areas and deserves criticism for slacking.
Can you think of a valid reason (valid for consumers) as to why they went through all of 2023 without updating the iPad?
I was faced with the option of buying an already outdated iPad last Christmas and at full Apple retail prices (third party outlets were barred from applying discounts).
I criticised that by taking my money to a competitor.
When the 'new' amounts to implementing Android features on iOS and adding a button, that deserves criticism.
Refusing to call the camera button a button deserves criticism too.
This year's iPhone update was not great IMO and I can fully understand people wanting/expecting more for their money.
It is very subjective of course so YMMV but when the colour of an iPhone reaches headline status and people double down on the word 'iteration' you know something is off.
How about something simple: true fast charging (wired and wireless and reverse) up to competing flagship offerings, and the same for the non-pro screen refresh rates.
It’s hilarious how the folks here who keep saying Apple is playing catch-up don’t remember all the other things that Apple did “late” that then became the thing that everyone else had to catch up to.
Certainly, you don't mean CDRW, USB 2.0, music purchases vs streaming, the ton of well trodden Android features appearing on iPhones year after year, Siri actually becoming competitive, the HomePod, batteries and charging etc.
All I can assume from what you said was that you agree that Apple is behind on this, although trying to argue otherwise with Tim Cook admitting as much would be pushing it.
As for the future, and plainly obvious to most, is that we'll have to wait and see what actually ships and how it performs. Competitors aren't exactly waiting for Apple to catch up.
The same applies to the homegrown 5G modem etc.
Yeah, I mean things like iPod, iPhone, iTunes, the App Store, Apple Music, iPad, AppleTV, Apple Watch, AirPods, etc. These are all things that came "late" as Apple was trying to "catch up." The peanut gallery snickered as they were introduced, and within a couple of years, the competition was trying to catch up to how Apple had not only entered each of those markets, but changed the entire market, forcing those competitors to try to modify their not-ready-for-prime-time-but-first-to-market hot messes in order to catch up to Apple's better thought-out implementation.
AI right now is a hot mess. The stuff out there is trained on stolen IP, produces dubious results, and is more novelty than useful. Chances are, Apple Intelligence will will be usefully integrated into Apple's products and services, making it an intuitive extension of how everything else just works, rather than a standalone AI thing that people fiddle with as an odd novelty.
You think the iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods etc are the best devices in their respective categories?
They may well be better integrated with the Apple ecosystem but there are compelling alternatives to Apple out there and arguably better!
It all depends on what you are looking for.
And Apple has put itself into its current position by doing things like going through the entirety of 2023 without updating the iPad!
A blanket statement isn't a credible response.
The point was Apple is currently behind and you haven't provided anything to suggest otherwise.
AI is far from a 'hot mess' (another blanket statement that means nothing).
It has been a massive success even with all the tradeoffs.
Let's see. The iPad really has no significant competition. Don't even start with the MS Surface. When Apple Watch was released, the peanut gallery insisted that no one was wearing watches any more, because the phone in your pocket has a clock, and no one was going to pay that price for a glorified Fitbit. Now you can't go anywhere without seeing people wearing Apple Watches. AppleTV has been a slow burn, but I'm pretty sure Google discontinued its crappy chromecast dongle and just replaced it with a me-too box that's an AppleTV copy. Turns out having an external box like that is better than having to replace your entire TV because the built-in streaming hardware goes out of date long before the screen does. Folks also snickered at AppleTV+ content, and yet their original series and movies are now a high value for the comparatively inexpensive streaming service. Before AirPods, everybody was mad because Apple dropped the 100+ year-old headphone jack. At that point wireless ear buds were of middling quality at best. Now AirPods are ubiquitous, and they're about to introduce a hearing-aid feature set that will certainly benefit a lot of folks. I will assume you not mentioning iPod, iPhone, iTunes, the App Store, and Apple Music in your comment is acknowledgment that those things all "came from behind" to fundamentally redefine their market segments.
And yes, AI is indeed currently a hot mess, dubiously trained and looking for a purpose, while people are now suddenly realizing that it actually isn't just about to become sentient.The AI currently out there is made up of large (questionably sourced) databases on the back end, with a probability-based word jumble on the front end that do not, in fact, have reasoning power, and are, in fact, incapable of creativity. The hype has led people for the last couple of years to be duped into mistaking the reasonably good mastery of human language as evidence of actual cognitive processes happening behind the words. It's a search engine that can respond to queries with complete sentences. So with those limitations in the current AI market, it's a pretty good bet that Apple will be able to integrate that kind of resource into its ecosystem in a way that seamlessly enhances the utility of Apple devices, without screaming "look at me!, I'm AI!" Meanwhile, the AI that Apple supposedly has to catch up with exists largely as standalone chat programs that can generate aggregated search results (of dubious quality or accuracy) based on direct user queries.
You go ahead an bookmark this page and come back in two or three years to tell me I was wrong, o.k.?
Tim has to talk it up. It's his job but sometimes he does go overboard.
We think it's the best. Yeah! I can't imagine him going on record as saying anything else, so long as 'think' is in there somewhere.
At least he is admitting that they are behind.
Yes, they have done ML for a long time but so has everybody else, and arguably better and more far reaching but I'm sure he'd still say he thinks it's the best.
I can't blame him for that but Apple made a strategic goof here and that's why it is behind and only the very latest hardware will be able to run it. If this were some kind of long term, well thought out strategic plan, at the very least, iPhones would have shipped with more RAM for the last few generations.
The reality looks more like' Yikes! We need to get rolling on this fast!'
That's why we got the initial response of not even uttering the letters 'AI' and doubling down on ML instead. In hindsight that was foolish but Apple literally had nothing to offer up back then so at least it is understandable.
One year on, AI was at least utterable and even became the star of WWDC but still there was nothing to show for it until 'later'. The new iPhones came and still AI was the star and STILL there was nothing to show for it and now the complete feature roll out isn't expected until 2025.
From the moment that the generative models became news and quickly stormed to over 100 million users, Apple has been on the back foot.
You know why Apple was hesitant about AI, but you'd rather dance around it with investor hype. To do AI properly you need to collect data about everything people do on your platforms. And to get people to agree to that, you need to hide the fact that you're doing it in convoluted terms of service agreements. Or what I call, sleazy business tactics. Something which Apple doesn't have the stomach for. Having business ethics is something which should be applauded in my books.
It was not 'hesitancy' IMO but 'impossibility'. Apple goofed strategically. Nobody expects Tim Cook to actually come out and say so of course and that's fine.
Yes, it all takes humongous amounts of data to create viable solutions. There are ethical issues surrounding both the foundational data and the use of resulting AI solutions but they have been known for decades. From theory to reality and beyond
You speak about data like someone who is truly disconnected and simply sees everything as a game to be won. The amount of information which has, and continues to be, collected about people's lives without their knowledge is absolutely unethical. And sure, it has been studied, but still continues on in the face of all that research because investors, politicians, and corporate leaders choose not to care. If it's a "strategic goof" to actually care about what you put out into the world and how it will affect people, then I'm happy to support such "goofs".
Obviously, hesitancy is not a valid explanation here and let's not forget all the ML talk from Apple a couple of years back and everyone trying to claim Apple wasn't 'behind' because they've been 'doing ML since 2017'.
ML requires huge amounts of data too! Yet Apple wasn't 'hesitant'
The kind of data being gathered for ML is very different. Problem spaces like handwriting recognition, for which the data couldn't possibly be used to build a profile about someone's life for nefarious purposes.
The problem is that Apple was caught wrong footed - strategically.
Huawei launched an entire AI platform back in 2018 with absolutely everything needed to get moving on AI. From cluster systems with thousands of cores to software frameworks (CANN/Mindspore) to chipsets for cluster systems (Ascend Max) right down to earbuds (Ascend Mini/Nano) and everything else in between.
Or Nvidia. Or Google. Or Meta.
Aside from Nvidia, which is just for hardware, those are all companies which have deliberately hid their data collection behaviour from customers in their attempts to "win" the data gathering/AI race. Something which I refuse to support.
It's funny that so many folks lean on the "Apple Car" as being a character defining "Apple failure" when it was never even an industry insider, much less a publicly announced product. With cutting edge R&D there are always times when the most thoughtful, selfless, and merciful act is to cancel the project before it gets released as a heavily compromised product at best or a danger to society at worst. They brought the Apple Car project along long enough to realize it was never going to be viable in the form they originally intended. Apple killed it because it needed killing. Armchair quarterbacks with 20-20 hindsight will undoubtedly argue that they didn't kill it soon enough.
Apple and Tim Cook have a winning record when it comes to bringing products to market that are highly successful and profitable. Apple, like every other person and organization on the planet, is not perfect. They have wins and losses and they usually know when it's time to take the loss, gather whatever lessons and IP there is to be retained from the effort, and live to fight another day with their knowledge and reputation fully intact and prepared to regroup and go after the next big challenge.
I have a more confidence in Apple to bring whatever AI is to become for consumers to market in a useful format than I do some other companies even though I'm still not clear on exactly what it will mean to me. I am pleasantly surprised at the usefulness of GhatGPT as a "Better Google" or "Smarter Alexa" even though it will sometimes spew incorrect answers. I'm not in the business of fact checking AI generated results by any means, which would be impossible, but I know better than to implicitly trust everything that comes out of any AI algorithm. I don't expect that to change with Apple Intelligence.
I don't need to have my emails summarized because I can read them because I don't get 500 emails a day. When it comes to features like email summaries it's almost like we're trying to use new technology to undo the problems we've created for ourselves with older technology. I suppose that can be considered progress. Maybe AI will simply allow us and our little monkey brains to survive in the environment we are now starting to live in. At some point the AI will make decisions for us and we'll just lay around waiting for a few more food pellets to show up in our feed bowl every now and then.
we shall see. 1) Apple Car 2) Apple Vision Pro 3) iPhone 16
Apple needs a few hits to help us forget the duds.
Tim’s success isn’t necessarily measured by new products.
Though he does have some notable items:
Apple Watch
m series processors
streaming video and music
turning apple into a lean, mean success machine.
Cook’s forte isn’t the same as Jobs. It just isn’t. Where jobs was a visionary, who took the basic building blocks of computing and nearly single-handed brought forth modern computing as we know it - including the advent of the true smartphone, cook is the legendary refiner. Cook is not and cannot be Jobs. Likewise Steve was not and could never accomplish what cook has. They are two perfect back to back leaders for apple. Jobs laid the foundation and vision. Cook took that, ram with it. And built a great big, powerful success castle on top of that.
You can’t measure them the same. Jobs cwss easy to see. Mac, mouse, gui, iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. etc. but cook is more about the refining of those with some of his own launches along the way. Apple under cook is far more successful than under jobs. Take away jobs and there is no cook to follow. Take away cook at the wrong time and what jobs started doesn’t go this far or this high.
The apple car is a tragedy. It could have been great. Especially if Hyundai would have kept quiet. Or if there wasn’t an adversarial relationship with Tesla. I think those are lessons learned. Jobs had to learn his lessons as well. The Vision Pro was a lesson on not forgetting why apple has historically said “no” far more often than “yes.” And you can bet these hard lessons will not be forgotten. But they are drops in the bucket compared to the oceans of success Cook has honed Apple to deliver.
And now he has his Jobs moment - navigating the “Wild West” days of AI to reign in and hone a responsible way of utilizing artificial intelligence that is consistently useful and not just a nerd project, is ethically responsible and not just an excuse for rampant IP theft, and isn’t a gateway for bad actors and unscrupulous developers to distort facts or invade your privacy.
This is the huge deal of recent times and Cook is stamping more of his legacy here as well as reminding us - Apple has rarely been first, but is always the best.
Good things come to those who wait. Patience still is and always has been a virtue.
Still waiting for someone to explain *how* Apple is behind in AI.
If I’m not mistaken, Nvidia are the only ones to have earned any meaningful profit from AI. It’s easy to imagine Apple offering AI as a subscription service and thereby become the first profitable AI company after Nvidia.
we shall see. 1) Apple Car 2) Apple Vision Pro 3) iPhone 16
Apple needs a few hits to help us forget the duds.
So which part of Apple Car, a fantasy product that only exists in your mind, are you having the hardest time forgetting? Me, I love the fact that Cook invested in research, saw there was no profitable way forward for an actual product, and shut down the project. That's the kind of smart leadership that has allowed him to create the most successful Apple that has ever existed by all relevant metrics.
Apple Vision Pro was first delivered to users just 36 weeks ago. Meta is STILL losing $1 billion a month on Quest after 10 years of trying to make it successful. Now THAT'S a dud. Come back in 10 years and we can talk about Vision Pro.
iPhone 16: It's the same story every year. A month or so after the new iPhone drops, the Apple-is-doomed crowd is out saying that sales are a disaster. Yawn. Maybe someday it'll be true, right? So how are investors feeling about iPhone 16? You know, the people who actually put their money behind their researched opinions and don't just pop off as the peanut gallery on a message board. Well, investors have bid up Apple's share price to its current all-time high since the iPhone 16 launched. This year will be more of what it always is as we learn that iPhone 16 sales are doing just fine.
Comments
Yes, it all takes humongous amounts of data to create viable solutions. There are ethical issues surrounding both the foundational data and the use of resulting AI solutions but they have been known for decades. From theory to reality and beyond.
Obviously, hesitancy is not a valid explanation here and let's not forget all the ML talk from Apple a couple of years back and everyone trying to claim Apple wasn't 'behind' because they've been 'doing ML since 2017'.
ML requires huge amounts of data too! Yet Apple wasn't 'hesitant'.
The problem is that Apple was caught wrong footed - strategically.
Huawei launched an entire AI platform back in 2018 with absolutely everything needed to get moving on AI. From cluster systems with thousands of cores to software frameworks (CANN/Mindspore) to chipsets for cluster systems (Ascend Max) right down to earbuds (Ascend Mini/Nano) and everything else in between.
Or Nvidia. Or Google. Or Meta.
Apple didn't move when it should have. It's now late to 'where the puck is'.
It isn't the end of the world but in terms of actual shipping products, it is trying to catch up.
Can you think of a valid reason (valid for consumers) as to why they went through all of 2023 without updating the iPad?
I was faced with the option of buying an already outdated iPad last Christmas and at full Apple retail prices (third party outlets were barred from applying discounts).
I criticised that by taking my money to a competitor.
When the 'new' amounts to implementing Android features on iOS and adding a button, that deserves criticism.
Refusing to call the camera button a button deserves criticism too.
This year's iPhone update was not great IMO and I can fully understand people wanting/expecting more for their money.
It is very subjective of course so YMMV but when the colour of an iPhone reaches headline status and people double down on the word 'iteration' you know something is off.
How about something simple: true fast charging (wired and wireless and reverse) up to competing flagship offerings, and the same for the non-pro screen refresh rates.
That at a minimum.
And yes, AI is indeed currently a hot mess, dubiously trained and looking for a purpose, while people are now suddenly realizing that it actually isn't just about to become sentient.The AI currently out there is made up of large (questionably sourced) databases on the back end, with a probability-based word jumble on the front end that do not, in fact, have reasoning power, and are, in fact, incapable of creativity. The hype has led people for the last couple of years to be duped into mistaking the reasonably good mastery of human language as evidence of actual cognitive processes happening behind the words. It's a search engine that can respond to queries with complete sentences. So with those limitations in the current AI market, it's a pretty good bet that Apple will be able to integrate that kind of resource into its ecosystem in a way that seamlessly enhances the utility of Apple devices, without screaming "look at me!, I'm AI!" Meanwhile, the AI that Apple supposedly has to catch up with exists largely as standalone chat programs that can generate aggregated search results (of dubious quality or accuracy) based on direct user queries.
You go ahead an bookmark this page and come back in two or three years to tell me I was wrong, o.k.?
The kind of data being gathered for ML is very different. Problem spaces like handwriting recognition, for which the data couldn't possibly be used to build a profile about someone's life for nefarious purposes.
Aside from Nvidia, which is just for hardware, those are all companies which have deliberately hid their data collection behaviour from customers in their attempts to "win" the data gathering/AI race. Something which I refuse to support.
Apple and Tim Cook have a winning record when it comes to bringing products to market that are highly successful and profitable. Apple, like every other person and organization on the planet, is not perfect. They have wins and losses and they usually know when it's time to take the loss, gather whatever lessons and IP there is to be retained from the effort, and live to fight another day with their knowledge and reputation fully intact and prepared to regroup and go after the next big challenge.
I have a more confidence in Apple to bring whatever AI is to become for consumers to market in a useful format than I do some other companies even though I'm still not clear on exactly what it will mean to me. I am pleasantly surprised at the usefulness of GhatGPT as a "Better Google" or "Smarter Alexa" even though it will sometimes spew incorrect answers. I'm not in the business of fact checking AI generated results by any means, which would be impossible, but I know better than to implicitly trust everything that comes out of any AI algorithm. I don't expect that to change with Apple Intelligence.
I don't need to have my emails summarized because I can read them because I don't get 500 emails a day. When it comes to features like email summaries it's almost like we're trying to use new technology to undo the problems we've created for ourselves with older technology. I suppose that can be considered progress. Maybe AI will simply allow us and our little monkey brains to survive in the environment we are now starting to live in. At some point the AI will make decisions for us and we'll just lay around waiting for a few more food pellets to show up in our feed bowl every now and then.
Apple Watch
m series processors
streaming video and music
turning apple into a lean, mean success machine.
Stock price at an all-time high? Check.
Share price almost doubled since Jan 2023? Check.
Most valuable company by market cap in the entire history of companies? Check.
Approaching first-ever $4 trillion dollar valuation? Check.
World's Most Admired Company 17 years in a row and counting? Check.
See the kind of bad things that happen when you don't update the iPad for all of 2023! It's a disaster!
Apple Vision Pro was first delivered to users just 36 weeks ago. Meta is STILL losing $1 billion a month on Quest after 10 years of trying to make it successful. Now THAT'S a dud. Come back in 10 years and we can talk about Vision Pro.
iPhone 16: It's the same story every year. A month or so after the new iPhone drops, the Apple-is-doomed crowd is out saying that sales are a disaster. Yawn. Maybe someday it'll be true, right? So how are investors feeling about iPhone 16? You know, the people who actually put their money behind their researched opinions and don't just pop off as the peanut gallery on a message board. Well, investors have bid up Apple's share price to its current all-time high since the iPhone 16 launched. This year will be more of what it always is as we learn that iPhone 16 sales are doing just fine.