discountopinion

A better partner for Apple would be xAi with Grok. They currently appear to be iterating faster than the rest and also have a lower user base than the rest which may mean that they are more open for the massive distribution that Apple could offer.

Personally I think Apple is playing with fire and for most production use cases are way way behind or irrelevant in AI.

I use Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok (plus local models with the outstanding Apple MLX framework running on the beautiful M series Apple Silicon) along with a series of other models and services like Veo3, Midjourney etc.
All models have pros and cons and different "personalities" if one can call it that.

These services solve real problems for me and has transformed my productivity. When reasoning models trickled through another jolt of uplift of outcomes and frankly my main constraint is that my use case ideation process is too slow to fully use the vast capabilities.

Google IO was a mic drop of awesome. Apple is behaving like AI is an add-on when AI has already become integrated into a large set of use cases for daily life and business processes. The MLX crew are continuously knocking it out of the park but feels like an engineer led sideshow rather than strategy.

Apple's narrative that AI Siri is not good enough for Apple yet is just nonsense when their operational Siri stinks. I think most customers would take a half baked AI Siri over the current Siri. Perfect getting in the way of good.

I would have preferred a much stronger increase in dividends than stock buybacks as Apple has burned 400+ billion on reducing outstanding shares with just 12%. 

Likely their buyback program does provide some minor price support during dips and they can now scoop up a lot more shares at a discount.

I am wondering if they could have deployed a couple of 100 billion of their capital towards AI back in the day and avoided the Siri travesty and lagging behind on AI in general.

Feels like they thought that their existing model would go on in perpetuity.

This is very good news if true and looks like Apples short term plan of having AI providers bid for distribution is working well.
Google's Gemini reasoning models are very good and can only help to improve Apple's customer experience

I read this as whatever is next for Vision Pro has completed and Siri would have been fixed earlier if Vision Pro was not the apple of Tim's eye.

iOS is quickly looking like the feature phone of smart phones given that any decent AI experience and voice based interface is now app based with ChatGPT, gemini, grok et al.

I have observed people that are late adopters of technology using ChatGPT voice mode daily and this is a huge wakeup call for me at least that we have broad mass AI adoption by people that were late to adopt smartphones and smart watches.

AI and the siri dropped balls may be apples Nokia/Blackberry momement unless tide is turned at Grok levels of improvement velocity.