Tim Cook Defends Apple's AI Delay: 'We've Rarely Been First'

[sjsharksfan12]

so your beef is with Apple Marketing not the whole company.
these things happen. often.

Always has been. I still like the iPad and wish they would do more with Apple TV (box) but they do a number of good things.

 

[WebHead]

It’s not about who’s been first, they used ai as marketing for new iPhones and didn’t keep their promise

Yes and the stock was artificially inflated as a result. Then the inevitable correction came when they didn't deliver.

 

[subjonas]

Tim.. Don´t talk. Deliver. Show your action if you think you are a real man. Siri from WWDC 2024 is already overdue.

He’s not talking to us, he’s talking to Apple employees. He definitely should talk to them.

 

[Christopher Pelham]

Sure, Apple is not always first. But this is different. They tried to be one of the firsts and flopped. That’s unprecedented. When Apple is late to the party it’s because they waited to introduce a product that revolutionized the space.

Nice pep talk but ultimately many dollars many days too late

I could be wrong, but I don't see that they're too late at all. While many competitor AIs are getting more and more competitive and formidable all the time, they also still make mistakes, hallucinate, and give horrendous, even deadly, advice on occasion. No company has cornered this market or delivered a finished product. It's very much there for the taking, and there are many niche use apps and services waiting to be created and rolled out well.

 

[Shanghaichica]

It really isn’t that good in its current state I have to admit. I’m not excited about any AI but my husband uses a Samsung phone and he ordered some stuff. His email is intelligent enough to give him a notification in his mailbox that items are due to be delivered today. He didn’t even have to open any emails or track anything it just looked through the emails and alerted him to that. I need something like that.

 

[sehns]

Imagine the fact that people in the Siri department have been getting regular bonuses and pay increases for the last 12 years? They should fire the entire team

 

[Lioness~]

Tim Cook is an idiot!

Any idiot can be a beancounter, not a difficult work at all.
He is just dedicated idiot without a life except his beancounting.
I honor everyone that have been brave and put up with this guy since Steve got sick/ died.

I'm really excited about AI - but not Apple's AI.
I still love my Mac's in particular, so I'm not dropping Apple. But I am allowed to dropp Timmy - it actually happened a long time ago.

 

[ThailandToo]

🤣 😂

I think this is a CEO problem. Most of the time the CEO holds a company back.

Imagine if this would have happened under Steve Jobs. Thousands of Apple employees would be looking for a new job even the SVPs.

Yet here it didn't and I have a feeling the CEO of Apple is to blame for this fiasco.

I would like to add more about what you said about Tim Cook but the moderators will suspend my account.

To be polite and on topic I will say this: Tim is not a visionary like Steve was. He has a Master of Business Administration and I think he is good at the manufacturing side of things and procuring what is needed and negotiating manufacturing costs. As a CEO during this time, with AI and everything else, he is not the right CEO for Apple. Someone else should take over, someone that has a good understanding of current and future technologies. Personally I would pick Craig Federighi as his successor.



It might be too late, but is still better than doing absolutely nothing. Time will tell if they can catch up and be at the same level as their competitors. We will see how this plays out.

I can't believe I am saying this but I agree with you. Apple's main revenue source still relies on what has been developed under Steve Jobs. We might never know the truth, but I have a feeling that almost nothing new has been developed since Tim Cook took over as CEO of Apple. One thing is certain, Steve was a futuristic visionary and he was thinking very far into the future.

I think Tim skipped every meeting that Steve deemed important. It's really sad.

I don't think Tim has a strategy at all. He doesn't have the courage to invest enough in AI like their rivals do.

They must hurry. Siri has been around since 2011. It's been 14 years. There are no excuses for Tim Cook.

100% correct!

Cook should take a step back and let someone else take over before he destroys Apple and there's nothing left to save from Steve's legacy. If this were to happen other companies would buy what's left of Apple.

Tim missed a lot of things. He must step down ASAP.

The reason he isn't sacked is because the revenue and profit rose significantly since he took over as CEO from Steve. If this wouldn't have been the case then they would have fired him years ago. I hope he has some dignity to step down ASAP. I don't think the Mac transition to in-house SOC is Tim's project. I think Steve was already working on this so Tim simply took over all the projects that Steve was working on.

I like the new design too. Can't wait to update my devices to iOS 26, macOS 26 and tvOS 26.

Sleepy Tim Apple. Every time the Unicode Consortium comes out with a new emoji, Tim schedules an urgent meeting with Apple's employees to discuss the strategy of perfect Apple emoji and hire new staff. 😂🤣😜

Tim Apple is to blame for Apple's unspeakable state of mind.

More like Mr Tim Apple. The CEO is 100% to blame here.

Timmy doesn't have what it takes to lead Apple from now on. I wish the board of directors would either give him an ultimatum or simply fire him and look out for a worthy CEO to take over and save Apple, that is slowly lagging behind everyone in every aspect.

Tim never launched anything successful since he is CEO. He is ruining Steve's legacy slowly but surely. He must be fired. I think Steve would have been very dissatisfied with Tim and his lack of vision and courage.

They will wake up once Tim leaves the company.

Apple can't innovate and find new sources of revenue as long as Tim Cook is CEO. Apple should get rid of him and bring a fresh mind at the helm of the company.

He admits it because he is in the corner. Maybe his job is on the line. I wouldn't be surprised if he still doesn't realise how many opportunities Apple lost because of his lack of vision and courage to invest in the future of AI

I have bought 5 iPhones since 2010. The services category will take a big hit if they must end their agreement with Google.

They should buy Anthropic but under Tim's leadership the investment wouldn't pay off.

The only thing that is rotten at Apple is Tim Cook. I don't think employees are motived under Tim Cook since he lacks the courage to invest some of Apple's cash flow for a better software, hardware and AI. That is also to be expected since Tim's only worry and priority is to invest as little as possible and expect high profits off Steve's visionary products without thinking about the future.

Personally I am not that patient anymore and I believe Tim Cook must be fired. He is to blame for everything.

The walled garden and even Apple won't be around in the next 10 years if Tim Cook is not fired this year.

I think he did and Microsoft is out of the smartphone business.

It might be enough but it's too late, that's the problem.

I think the pressure came from Wall Street or the shareholders.

Apple should hire more skilled engineers to fix the bugs, maybe split the OS department in two separate teams. One team fixes all the bugs across all the operating systems and another team works one the current and future operating systems.

I agree the CEO Crook is holding the company from innovation and starving its future while ruining its goodwill as we speak. Tarnishing the name Apple and lost as he doesn’t understand products or why people buy. He only knows how to maximize the innovation that Steve built. AI will ruin every company’s future that doesn’t use it in their favor. You either use AI or it will eat at your livelihood and destroy all before it. Those who don’t like change quickly ignore AI but it is an opportunity not something to be put on a back burner or not have someone in charge who can use it when it’s promised. Development is scarce and the team leaves as Crook only cares about money and doesn’t see the long term as he never has. He’s short sighted for money and gains now and cannot fathom Apple’s downfall but neither did any company’s CEO who failed before him. He’s not just a crook but a failure.

 

[Nuno Lopes]

The way I see it, with the exception of Vision Pro, Tim Cook did not deviate much from Steve Job tech plan / vision for the last decade. All while milking the thing with unprecedented mastery.

Now TC is on is own when it comes to vision.

Will see.

PS: The way I see it OSs will behave quite, quite differently in 5 years. The question is will Apple provide the best solution or not? For that matter they will need to be bold.

 

[Bungobungo]

Cook said that AI is going to be bigger than smartphones and the internet

pfft.

 

[ricketysquire]

Can they just not get into AI? For once could a Tech company have the "courage" to not chase after hype. I'd rather see improved battery life, increased stability, more efficient usage of memory and storage. I just want to see companies make better products and serve customers better rather than chasing hype and adding "ai" to everything.

 

[MilaM]

There are estimates Apple has about 2.5B active devices, so I misspoke. I didn’t mean to quote the iPhone number.

Call it 2B….its a lot.

Two billion devices might be the right ballpark and sounds very impressive. But consider this. I have eight actively used devices all tied to a single Apple Account. Yet I'm only going to subscribe to Apples services once for all the devices. To make estimates about future revenue potential regarding services, a better number would be active Apple Accounts that are tied to at least one device. I'm not sure if there are good numbers for this metric though. I could not find any. But I bet this number is much smaller than 2B.

 

[maflynn]

For a company with nearly unlimited resources, it’s fascinating to watch them struggle.

I was going to post about Tim cook's tenure and lack of innovation, yet he's been fairly successful, rolling out products over his tenure, some successful, like the apple watch, others not so successful like the vision pro but there's been attempts

What is surprising on this one, and I think hubris was the driving force here, they (not just tim cook but the C-level folks too) all thought AI would be easy for them and over promised without knowing the complexity and depth of what they were trying to do.

With what appears to be a brain drain in Apple's AI division, their work is getting harder without some major changes imo. Apple is in danger of being left behind as major players are making progress but apple is still on promise phase of the initiative

 

[MilaM]

What is surprising on this one, and I think hubris was the driving force here, they (not just tim cook but the C-level folks too) all thought AI would be easy for them and over promised without knowing the complexity and depth of what they were trying to do.

With what appears to be a brain drain in Apple's AI division, their work is getting harder without some major changes imo. Apple is in danger of being left behind as major players are making progress but apple is still on promise phase of the initiative

I would not be surprised, if Apple's famous secrecy and lack of cooperation between departments plays a huge role here. They might need to reorganize internally to have a chance to even compete in this new area. But I'm only speculating of course.

 

[parestailor]

Apple won’t be able to catch up, AI growth is far far too quick. They need to buy a few pre-built AI platforms, this is not Google Maps vs Apple Maps scenario.

 

[AAPLbuyback]

Two billion devices might be the right ballpark and sounds very impressive. But consider this. I have eight actively used devices all tied to a single Apple Account. Yet I'm only going to subscribe to Apples services once for all the devices. To make estimates about future revenue potential regarding services, a better number would be active Apple Accounts that are tied to at least one device. I'm not sure if there are good numbers for this metric though. I could not find any. But I bet this number is much smaller than 2B.

They have over 1B paid subscriptions.

 

[heretiq]

“Rarely been first”? Agreed. But Tim… this is different, Apple is now light years behind. This isn’t Apple vs Nokia - this is a Ferrari against a bicycle.

Light years behind what exactly?

There is not a single AI tool from the so-called leaders that delivers consistent, reliable utility. Use any of them for non-trivial, real world tasks and spend the time to verify their output and you’ll quickly see that these tools often fail silently and are more hype than substance. Use them with diligence for extended periods and you see that the jury is out on whether they are improving or killing productivity or creating real value.

If electricity, transportation, communications, compute or any of the utilities we use to get important work done failed at 1/10th the rate of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other products from the so-called leaders we would characterize these utilities as crap.

It seems that judgment of the state of AI tools and AI technology leadership is itself a grand hallucination. I’m thrilled to see Apple charting a different course that doesn’t add to the existing mountain of AI crap.

 

[AAPLbuyback]

Light years behind what exactly?

There is not a single AI tool from the so-called leaders that delivers consistent, reliable utility. Use any of them for non-trivial, real world tasks and spend the time to verify their output and you’ll quickly see that these tools often fail silently and are more hype than substance. Use them with diligence for extended periods and you see that the jury is out on whether they are improving or killing productivity or creating real value.

If electricity, transportation, communications, compute or any of the utilities we use to get important work done failed at 1/10th the rate of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other products from the so-called leaders we would characterize these utilities as crap.

It seems that judgment of the state of AI tools and AI technology leadership is itself a grand hallucination. I’m thrilled to see Apple charting a different course that doesn’t add to the existing mountain of AI crap.

I’ve said the same. AI is unreliable and even asking the question a different way yields different answers. I asked for a simple list of hotels with beach front properties for a certain brand. Gave a different answer literally every single time and forgot the best property in the world in all cases.

Apple will be able to buy or license “the best AI” if they want and put in on their devices. seamless integration with their own model might be ideal too, but it’s likely coming as well. Nothing today is a game changer. I realized Grok is horrible, not to mention biased.

 

[jinnj]

Behold, the iTunes phone! Definitely no stumbles there!

That was built by Motorola. It was the restrictions from Motorola and the call carriers that caused Jobs to pause work on the iPad and start the iPhone project. This also provided leverage over Cingular, now ATT (thanks to Jobs). That leverage allowed the actual iTunes store, a full IP stack, fully unlocked and update-able phone. You can see comments from other carriers like Verizon where they stated that the iPhone will never be on their network.
You can also thank Jobs that the Motorola Razor was released. While discussing a possible partnership with Motorola for a phone, a Motorola engineer was using a Razor prototype. When Steve inquired about the phone, they stated that it was dead cause no one wanted it. His reactions cause Motorola to restart the project and release it.

 

[jinnj]

By the way...I wonder if Apple starts buying chips from Nvidia...

No. Never. Read the history. Nvidia burned multiple laptop manufacturers in the past, Apple being one of them. Also when it comes to mobile components Nvidia isn't it. They tried to buy their way in by acquiring ARM but that failed.

 

[heretiq]

To address his employees and acknowledge reality.

If I'm reading your other post correctly I think you're way off base on Apple having a grand strategy for AI that is baking behind the scenes. Private Cloud Compute has a great implementation but Apple can't wait a decade and get a privacy centric version out when the sheer utility means people will make that trade willingly.

Google has about 500 million users of Gemini, and ChatGPT is on track for 1 Billion users by the end of the year. Neither of those companies are great with privacy; OpenAI isn't even deleting anything unless you have a ZDR contract with them due to the NYT lawsuit.

There is not a market advantage here until ads roll out and some of the providers (e..g Meta, xAI) have enough capital to stave that off for the rest of this decade if people really revolt against it when it occurs.

There's a paradigm shift happening with the entire internet for many reasons, a lot of them pretty nefarious. RealID is being required virtually simultaneously worldwide with many countries and many states in the US passing laws for various sites and services. That's going to accelerate, unfortunately.

I care deeply about privacy and especially tracking but I make tradeoffs to use frontier models because they provide enormous utility for specific tasks. I gate what I put in there and still use them fairly often. I'm for sure in the less than 1% of the billion+ using AI that cares about that.

Apple needs a quality advantage, privacy alone won't be enough. Nvidia is also probably 2 years ahead of them on hardware, even with the stuff we haven't seen publicly. I'd bet my house on that.

I want Apple to catch-up and surpass the others in user experience, but they need to retain researcher talent and grow it – acquiring Anthropic and keeping it as a subsidiary as I've posted elsewhere would be my choice. I think perplexity is a mistake but it might be a hedge in case they lose the Google deal, so they can have the appearance of killing two birds with one stone, getting search and AI. I just don't think perplexity has a unique advantage or novel research which is critical, particularly with world models which will determine who stays relevant into the 2030s.

I don't ascribe to the theory that the first to world models will dominate forever, but I do think it's extremely likely the research will be proprietary so multiple independent efforts are critical both for society at large and to make sure there isn't some patent nonsense down the road because the equivalent of licensing something as powerful as the internet is probably not going to happen. Meta (who probably has the largest lead right now internally) is already starting to seed the idea that they won't, in fact, keep open sourcing key research – it's even in Zuckerberg's post from a couple days ago.

Apple may offer the platform that we interface with but if they want to own the whole stack they have a ton of work to do. I think their efforts to date have been mostly misfires outside of their good research on small quantized models which are useful but are not the type of thing that will be "bigger than the internet" as Tim put it. That requires enormous levels of investment in R&D and the management commitment to keep both the talent and hardware to support them maximally funded.

Thank you for this well reasoned and thought-provoking post. I would characterize Apple as having a grand *vision* for the use of AI that is grounded in their historical values framework, and scrambling to adapt their strategy for a fast changing environment — including shifting views on privacy, sustainability and other bedrock values.

This is very challenging for a principles-driven culture while watching others eschew values to maximize competitive positioning. I personally believe the end goal is to fashion a reliable AI utility and the mad rush to get “there” first is misguided. In the end I suspect that more value will be lost by businesses spinning their wheels and doing parking lot donuts vs businesses that take their time to define and get to a worthwhile destination.

These are interesting times and we and have a front-row seat to watch it unfold!

 

[jinnj]

Never thought they’d ever admit to it

They've admitted in the past. They weren't the first to have 1080 HD playback but when they did it worked and wasn't a gimmick. At WDC, they stated this. Sure they didn't release a PR about it but it wasn't hidden. Meanwhile the 1000's that purchased the first Android with HD playback, an LG phone, had 30 minute battery life.

 

[ThailandToo]

I was going to post about Tim cook's tenure and lack of innovation, yet he's been fairly successful, rolling out products over his tenure, some successful, like the apple watch, others not so successful like the vision pro but there's been attempts

What is surprising on this one, and I think hubris was the driving force here, they (not just tim cook but the C-level folks too) all thought AI would be easy for them and over promised without knowing the complexity and depth of what they were trying to do.

With what appears to be a brain drain in Apple's AI division, their work is getting harder without some major changes imo. Apple is in danger of being left behind as major players are making progress but apple is still on promise phase of the initiative

Maybe it’s because they don’t pay anyone except the shareholders and themselves as the executive team. They don’t care about development teams or engineers. They only care about greed of money.

 

[heretiq]

Apple's problem is that they like to build walled gardens and have control of the entire experience. I think it is impossible to build an AI platform that is going to be useful to consumers if it is not open and capable of talking to any system. The hypothetical on device AI on my iPhone cant be sandboxed to iCloud if some one is sharing data with me from Google Drive or Box.

This is incorrect. Check your settings app — iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 and Apple developer APIs already have the plumbing to allow applications to expose both functionality and data to Siri and Apple Intelligence.

The mechanism is there for developers to build integration into their apps and for users to grant permission to Siri and Apple Intelligence to use those capabilities and access associated data.

Apple is way ahead of where some think it is.

 

[citysnaps]

Maybe it’s because they don’t pay anyone except the shareholders and themselves as the executive team. They don’t care about development teams or engineers. They only care about greed of money.

No. Apple cares about its 1+ Billion active and repeat customers. Without making great products they want to purchase, year after year after year, Apple would collapse, leaving its shareholders and executive team with worthless Apple stock. Without happy Apple customers, Apple has nothing.

Apple makes great products -> Happy Apple customers opening their wallets year after year to purchase Apple products they love -> Apple makes loads of money -> Apple shareholders are delighted with their highly valued Apple stock.

It really is that simple.