Yeah, I think Vision Pro is a good indicator she’s still strong in this area. Releasing Vision Pro was likely Tim Cook’s decision, but getting it to where it is from zero is still impressive regardless of if the product was really ready for prime time.
In some ways it echoes the original iPhone, not having copy paste etc. Personally I think there are hardware and form factor tradeoffs that shouldn’t have been made in the first shipping version of the headset, but they did get it out.
I’m not sure if she has domain expertise in AI or not and I think that does matter, but I also think she’s smart enough to surround herself with experts and raw feedback in a way that maybe some of these other executives have not been. I personally don’t think Tim Cook uses Siri very often, and doesn’t use competitor’s products enough to understand the potential.
We know on record that Craig used ChatGPT sometime in 2021/2022 but they still decided to ship an essentially broken and underbaked Apple Intelligence, I expect it’ll be Summer 2026 before we see a solid version of it across their platforms, assuming some of the technical hurdles even can be solved at all. Apple needs to allow WFH or start paying leading AI Computer Scientists 500k+ a year to get them to move local to the campus, actual research talent is scarce in the industry but I have seen some good papers recently from Apple so they have some people who know what they’re doing internally.
All of those people who left OpenAI etc. should be poached given the pocketbook Apple has, especially since their privacy approach probably aligns better with the values of those individuals. We’ll see.
www.macrumors.com
