- private, on-device language model execution (see llama.cpp for feasibility)
- a single, consistent AI available with you wherever you go
- total access to your personal information / documents (knows your birthday, can see your meeting notes)
Because they have the hardware to run it locally, they have three very hard-to-beat advantages:
1) privacy, because the LMs can see all your stuff but none of it goes back to apple. Microsoft can't do this; they get flak every time they try and phone home with telemetry, and they don't control their platform enough to run a massive LM in the background.
2) omnipresence: if you're in the apple ecosystem, you'll always have your iphone with you. That means the LM will have access to location data, maps, chat - everything. And since it never leaves the phone, privacy-oriented people may be ok with it. And that means the LM can be exponentially more useful than just summarizing documents.
3) evaluation costs - they are the only competitor who will not have to pay for a massive datacenter, which means that the LMs can be as powerful as the M2+ hardware they sell. Everyone else will have no alternative to running the LMs on their centralized, expensive hardware.