Apple's New iPad Mini Highlights the Company's AI Advantage

I feel my point still stands, and that video is reasonable evidence for it. Of course they think about what customers want and would buy when building products. But the difference between Apple and many other product organizations is, are they meeting customers where customers are at, or are they building for their own internalized notion of "yeah, this is how musicians should make music"? Apple has always been the latter; this is an extreme characterization of what I just said, because its probably not entirely true, but in a way they think about what customers would want without ever talking to one. And they've been eerily good at it for many years; its only recently that this strategy has stopped working.

Tim Cook's Apple, especially post-2020, has embodied a strange synthesis of both models of product development. Apple Vision Pro is the purest example of this: AVP's sales numbers have been startlingly bad, and anyone with a brain in bizdev at Apple could have estimated the Meta Quest sales numbers and extrapolated to the conclusion that this market isn't chomping at the bit for Apple to release something. So: They made it because they thought it was cool. They made it because they had the technology; they maybe exclusively are the only company on the planet that could have made Apple Vision Pro. But no one talked to a customer, because there was never any "ideal customer profile" for AVP.

>So, again: I think the assertion that "Apple is late but does it right" is totally invalid when applied to AI, because there is no way to do it right, because no one wants it.

No one wants "Artificial Intelligence," but it's unclear if they want the features that it will drive -- i.e., "Apple Intelligence." This is something that can't be known for sure until the features are released and the companies that make them get analytics on them. For now, the very conservative set of features that comprise "Apple Intelligence" are reasonable in that they easily slot into the workflow of users by enhancing or making easier things that people already do. The fact that they are not impressive like what Google or Meta is doing is only important to people who either live their life on the cutting edge of technology or are tech investors. For the people buying phones every 3-5 years (as opposed to every 1 or 2), the story is yet to be written.

I think Apple has a hard line to walk here. They have project progress to investors so the stock will continue to rise, and they have to be the thoughtful curator of features that the customers demand -- that second impulse is what gave rise to the reputation that drove the stock originally.

Apple Intelligence really should have been kept in the oven until WWDC '25, because it's not clear that any of them really require external developers to make happen. But Apple had to keep the impression that they are 'doing something with AI,' and now they're stuck doing what they typically haven't done: promising things that clearly aren't ready. This puts them in the same league as, i.e., Google. Google labelled Gmail as "Beta" for half a decade (April 1, 2004 to July 7, 2009), and now has a reputation for shipping quarter-baked, basically-Alpha projects and then killing the ones that don't catch on.