I no longer trust Apple to deliver groundbreaking technology that captivates us. Once known for innovations that left us in awe, they now consistently lag behind, outpaced by competitors. It’s clear a $2.9 trillion company is struggling with AI. Fresh leadership is urgently needed to restore their edge.
What Apple are you remembering? Apple's strength hasnt ever been
"first to market", it's been, at least since they got reverse bought by NeXT and Jobs was back,
"in a category where things already exist but arent living up their potential deliver an excellent refined consumer ready product that's better than the competition with most of the rough edges shaved off, and even if it remains niche keep working on it as long as it remains useful to at least the ecosystem or profitable". They also tend to exit markets they feel they can't do that in anymore (like airport routers, which there wasnt anything like them on the market at the time and Apple decided to give WiFi a shove with a refined set of routers/APs, expecially since they were betting on it becoming a big part of the selling point of newer laptops, which they were very much right about).
Has been true of the pmps (ipod), smartphones, earphones, tablets, wifi routers, smart watches, media boxes, even displays (the XDR doesnt really have many competitors in its direct class) and on internals CPUs and other silicon. Hell, it's even true of the AVP, there isnt a VR/AR competitor that comes close to touching it, the problem there is price and killer apps.
That's also what I'm expecting with a folding phone for instance, they wont be first but it will likely be the first one to really iron out the kinks in the tech, plus Apple's strength with the iPad means folding out into a small tablet will have the best implementation of the tablet mode end of things right off the bat
To go back to AI in your comment for a sec, 2 things:
1) Apple's been ahead of the curve on machine learning for a long time, which is what AI is. Apple just hasnt been calling it AI. There's a lot of what other companies are calling AI subtly built in and working well in Apple's products, and have been for a long time. They're probably actually the best company on this around in general consumer products, they just hadnt been touting it as AI
2) on Chatbots specifically while Siri's definitely had its problems that need addressing the problem Apple really has in terms of matching current LLM chatbots is they dont harvest data the way competitors do, and I'll take a dumber assistant over surveilance any day.
I'm also not convinced that this particular use of AI is actually something most people are clammoring for. For one thing modern LLMs still hallucinate *way* too much to be reliable sources of information. Siri can handle my smart devices, shopping list, music, reminders, hands free texting, can answer basic questions (spelling, math, weather, etc), and timers etc just fine. That's the stuff most people want out of such things. There's a reason amazon, microsoft, and google have struggled to get traction with their assistants, and being "AI ready" isnt driving sales on PCs and phones
