This is an examination of Apple’s current posture toward the incoming artificial intelligence (AI) revolution per a specific historical lens: IBM at the outset of the personal computing revolution.
In the iconic Super Bowl commercial aired 42 years ago, Apple’s “1984” hammer soared high overhead, found its target, and smashed to smithereens a world of lockstep conformity. The commercial was an unmistakable provocation aimed squarely at IBM, then the most powerful company in computing. In the decades that followed, Apple rose as IBM receded. “Is Apple the Next IBM?” seemed an absurd question in 1984 due to the upward trajectory it implied. Asking the same question today begs the opposite.
In 1983 IBM hired me as an engineer to help make semiconductor chips; six years later I was an IBM sales rep. Apple desktop computers hit the market as I was finishing school and IBM’s Personal Computer, enabled with Microsoft’s DOS, then Windows, was making inroads with corporate clients by the time I was selling IBM systems to DC-based banks. The personal computing revolution was in full swing.
The first computing revolution was simply computing at all. IBM rose during that first era because it authored and owned the defining systems. The second revolution—microcomputers, distributed processing and user-oriented software—reversed that rise and reshaped not just technology but control. IBM entered it without ownership of the operating systems and interfaces that ultimately defined the incoming era: DOS, then Windows, and later Netscape and other software layers that reshaped how users interacted with machines. IBM partnered for that intellectual property. Apple had its own software platforms that it authored and owned. That absence of ownership at IBM did not cause the company’s decline on its own, but it constrained what followed. IBM surrendered leadership, relevance, and a substantial portion of its inflation-adjusted gross profit[1] even as the industry it once dominated expanded dramatically.
AI is the third major computing revolution. As Apple enters it, the company is choosing partnership rather than authorship for the defining software layer, the AI engine and its primary user interface. Let’s look at this position on three separate fronts.
The first front is Apple’s AI product set. Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute provide AI-assisted features tightly integrated into Apple’s ecosystem. Currently this makes for a limited foundational (basic) AI-assisted user environment, but no frontier (cutting-edge) AI system, nor the primary interface to one. Apple explicitly frames this choice as a commitment to user privacy and data security. Apple is in partnership with Google to license further foundational models and has plans to further improve the Siri user interface. For now, when Apple users step outside established security guardrails they are handed off to Apple partner OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with Apple offering to cite any such departure in real time.
This posture has strengths. It reinforces Apple’s brand promise around privacy and control. It also has historical analogues. During the last revolution, IBM emphasized data security as a reason to resist or slow adoption of distributed systems. At IBM in those days, as salespeople we were instructed to cite greatly diminished security as a reason not to implement distributed processing—an argument that proved largely irrelevant to how the market quickly evolved. Another analogue is that, ultimately, Google owns the newly developed AI/IP with Apple licensing it, much like IBM licensed from Microsoft.
As a second front for inspection, let’s consider the user experience. Until recently, computing meant conforming to machines—menus, commands, and applications constrained by rules. Full-blown AI unravels those constraints. The interface is no longer a defined pathway to functionality (icons, buttons, sequences, structured language) but an interlocutor (“What do you want?”). Over time, such interfaces will disappear from conscious view, becoming personalized, adaptive, and indispensable. Ownership of this layer and the brains (the AI engine) behind it confers more than revenue. It confers agenda-setting power: the ability to determine how users interact with information, how workflows evolve, and how entire ecosystems form. In the second computing revolution, those benefits accrued overwhelmingly to the companies that owned the operating systems and interfaces outright.
The third front is perception. These revolutions aren’t just technical, they’re social. Attention clusters around perceived leaders. In today’s AI discourse (which is mammoth and growing) dominant names are OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), and Perplexity. Apple is rarely mentioned.
IBM was widely regarded as the most respected company in the world. At times it was the most valuable company in the world. Apple has occupied the top of Fortune’s reputation rankings for nearly two decades. It has, at times, been the most valuable company in the world. Apple’s flying hammer hit its mark in real life.
The Apple of today is extraordinarily wealthy, diversified, influential, and capable of course correction, including through acquisition. Current partnering does not preclude authorship, but the last revolution came fast, rewarded those who owned its defining intellectual property, and penalized those who did not, regardless of intent.
AI will likely define computing, and maybe much of life. The question this historical view of our current moment raises is whether Apple, without owning the IP behind the tidal wave currently crashing into us, can continue to define computing, thereby keeping its position atop the mountain of influence, control, public reverence and profitability that defining power confers. If AI ends up occupying a transactional space in our lives like Google search has (with Apple merely delivering it), authorship likely won’t matter, but if it innervates and defines our collective work/life experience remotely like Windows/Netscape - IOS/Safari did, and it’s looking like AI will make those prior life-changing vehicles look modest in comparison, Apple, like IBM before it, could be subject to an underrated risk factor regarding its social and marketplace hegemony.
[1] Comparing years 1983-85 to years 2023-35 using IBM consolidated financial statements 1985 (includes 1983 and 1984 data), 2023, 2024, 2025; all figures inflation-adjusted to July 1984 dollars for comparison using Bureau of Labor Statistics CPIAUCSL data for temporal midpoints (07/1984 and 07/2024) of financial periods compared
In the iconic Super Bowl commercial aired 42 years ago, Apple’s “1984” hammer soared high overhead, found its target, and smashed to smithereens a world of lockstep conformity. The commercial was an unmistakable provocation aimed squarely at IBM, then the most powerful company in computing. In the decades that followed, Apple rose as IBM receded. “Is Apple the Next IBM?” seemed an absurd question in 1984 due to the upward trajectory it implied. Asking the same question today begs the opposite.
In 1983 IBM hired me as an engineer to help make semiconductor chips; six years later I was an IBM sales rep. Apple desktop computers hit the market as I was finishing school and IBM’s Personal Computer, enabled with Microsoft’s DOS, then Windows, was making inroads with corporate clients by the time I was selling IBM systems to DC-based banks. The personal computing revolution was in full swing.
The first computing revolution was simply computing at all. IBM rose during that first era because it authored and owned the defining systems. The second revolution—microcomputers, distributed processing and user-oriented software—reversed that rise and reshaped not just technology but control. IBM entered it without ownership of the operating systems and interfaces that ultimately defined the incoming era: DOS, then Windows, and later Netscape and other software layers that reshaped how users interacted with machines. IBM partnered for that intellectual property. Apple had its own software platforms that it authored and owned. That absence of ownership at IBM did not cause the company’s decline on its own, but it constrained what followed. IBM surrendered leadership, relevance, and a substantial portion of its inflation-adjusted gross profit[1] even as the industry it once dominated expanded dramatically.
AI is the third major computing revolution. As Apple enters it, the company is choosing partnership rather than authorship for the defining software layer, the AI engine and its primary user interface. Let’s look at this position on three separate fronts.
The first front is Apple’s AI product set. Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute provide AI-assisted features tightly integrated into Apple’s ecosystem. Currently this makes for a limited foundational (basic) AI-assisted user environment, but no frontier (cutting-edge) AI system, nor the primary interface to one. Apple explicitly frames this choice as a commitment to user privacy and data security. Apple is in partnership with Google to license further foundational models and has plans to further improve the Siri user interface. For now, when Apple users step outside established security guardrails they are handed off to Apple partner OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with Apple offering to cite any such departure in real time.
This posture has strengths. It reinforces Apple’s brand promise around privacy and control. It also has historical analogues. During the last revolution, IBM emphasized data security as a reason to resist or slow adoption of distributed systems. At IBM in those days, as salespeople we were instructed to cite greatly diminished security as a reason not to implement distributed processing—an argument that proved largely irrelevant to how the market quickly evolved. Another analogue is that, ultimately, Google owns the newly developed AI/IP with Apple licensing it, much like IBM licensed from Microsoft.
As a second front for inspection, let’s consider the user experience. Until recently, computing meant conforming to machines—menus, commands, and applications constrained by rules. Full-blown AI unravels those constraints. The interface is no longer a defined pathway to functionality (icons, buttons, sequences, structured language) but an interlocutor (“What do you want?”). Over time, such interfaces will disappear from conscious view, becoming personalized, adaptive, and indispensable. Ownership of this layer and the brains (the AI engine) behind it confers more than revenue. It confers agenda-setting power: the ability to determine how users interact with information, how workflows evolve, and how entire ecosystems form. In the second computing revolution, those benefits accrued overwhelmingly to the companies that owned the operating systems and interfaces outright.
The third front is perception. These revolutions aren’t just technical, they’re social. Attention clusters around perceived leaders. In today’s AI discourse (which is mammoth and growing) dominant names are OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), and Perplexity. Apple is rarely mentioned.
IBM was widely regarded as the most respected company in the world. At times it was the most valuable company in the world. Apple has occupied the top of Fortune’s reputation rankings for nearly two decades. It has, at times, been the most valuable company in the world. Apple’s flying hammer hit its mark in real life.
The Apple of today is extraordinarily wealthy, diversified, influential, and capable of course correction, including through acquisition. Current partnering does not preclude authorship, but the last revolution came fast, rewarded those who owned its defining intellectual property, and penalized those who did not, regardless of intent.
AI will likely define computing, and maybe much of life. The question this historical view of our current moment raises is whether Apple, without owning the IP behind the tidal wave currently crashing into us, can continue to define computing, thereby keeping its position atop the mountain of influence, control, public reverence and profitability that defining power confers. If AI ends up occupying a transactional space in our lives like Google search has (with Apple merely delivering it), authorship likely won’t matter, but if it innervates and defines our collective work/life experience remotely like Windows/Netscape - IOS/Safari did, and it’s looking like AI will make those prior life-changing vehicles look modest in comparison, Apple, like IBM before it, could be subject to an underrated risk factor regarding its social and marketplace hegemony.
[1] Comparing years 1983-85 to years 2023-35 using IBM consolidated financial statements 1985 (includes 1983 and 1984 data), 2023, 2024, 2025; all figures inflation-adjusted to July 1984 dollars for comparison using Bureau of Labor Statistics CPIAUCSL data for temporal midpoints (07/1984 and 07/2024) of financial periods compared
