I'm not sure I agree with this article and the large pile on. Apple does do a lot of annoying and consumer unfriendly things and has had several technology fails, but I don't think this puts them in a bad light compared to other CE companies.
Regarding AI/LLMs specifically, it seems fairly clear that of the big tech companies, only Google was taking LLMs seriously with their own in-house development. Then came the release of ChatGPT 3 in late 2022 (and the associated MS CoPilot). This launch made the large companies (including, not only Apple & Amazon) suddenly take notice that their (initially market leading) AI solutions had fallen far behind. It even made Google, who had been developing Bard, rush it to market before it was ready to signal to investors that they could keep up. In fact, it was
reported in the WSJ (described in this
AppleInsider post) that Craig F only started to understand how far behind they were when he used CoPilot around Christmas 2022 and that before this, he didn't really get the importance of LLMs, preferring to focus AI on image/video-based features.
With all the hype around "AI" (meaning LLMs) and the real threat they could pose to the incumbants (e.g. an LLM smart speaker could overtake Alexa/Google assistant devices to be, LLMs could replace Google's search engine (and main revenue stream) everyone and their dog fell over themselves to communicate to investors and the market that they wer bringing AI to their products and wouldn't be left behind.
Regarding Apple Intelligence and the iPhone 16 range, again the fact that the iPhone 15 (non-pro) came with an A16 chip/6 GB and did not support AI is probably related to the fact that it was planned out in 2022 before the ChatGPT moment and the thought that lots of RAM would be needed for AI models within 1-2 years wasn't even a consideration. As above, I think that Apple had to show the market that an LLM was coming to the Apple ecosystem - hence the WWDC annoucement. The fact that complex queries have to go to ChatGPT again shows how far behind Apple are, but getting something to market quickly was key. I imagine that the plan to drip feed out Apple Intelligence features over the year probably seemed like a good idea (it's happened many times previously that WWDC-announced features are only added into iOS .x releases) and to be honest I believe that Apple acted in good faith with the WWDC "demonstration." What has gone wrong is that, as Apple and Amazon have found, it's difficult to implement an LLM system from scratch into an existing product. Amazon also planned to add their own LLM to Alexa, then had to go to Anthropic for the LLM and still struggled to get it working properly - we'll see how it performs on release next quarter). Now, questions around whether they were naive to think everything could be done within 12 months, whether they should have officially delayed the introduction date sooner and whether they should have built the entire iPhone 16 advertising campaign around AI are all valid and should be reviewed internally.
For me, this goes back to the common advice of: don't buy a product based on promises of what it will be able to do in the future; buy it for what it can do today. I typically buy refurbished iPhones from the previous generations because I often see big new features not really maturing for 6-9 months (off the top of my head, TouchID on the iPhone 5S couldn't do much apart from unlocking the phone and authourising App Store purchases until Appe developers started supporting it and Apple Pay on the iPhone 6 didn't come to the UK for months after launch).
Regarding Apple under Tim Cook, I think a lot of people either don't remember or didn't really experience Apple under Steve Jobs. Even back in 2009 when I first got a MacBook, it came with too little RAM and storage and the upgrade prices were a rip-off (although you could upgrade them yourself back then). iPhone & iPad storage tiers were still too low & expensive to upgrade and products shipped with defects (nVidia GPUs). So, I don't see things that much worse under Tim Cook. I think the range of products that have been heavily reported to be under development (Car, non-invasive blood glucose sensors, AR glasses etc) as well as Apple Silicon show that Tim is willing to open the purse strings to go after new products, but again questions around why some of these large investments fail are very valid - look at Xiaomi: a similar CE producer that backed development of a car and are now selling loads of them at prices from $30k upto $100k in China.
TL

R - Apple has many failings, but I don't think the Apple Intelligence failure is as bad as is being made out (and buy a product based on what it can do today, not what it may do tomorrow)