Apple is being far too conservative with a far too fast a developing piece of technology to possibly keep up unless they loosen up. But they're being run by a bunch of 50+ year old white guys trying to still be cool, but not understanding what's really going on. I'm not saying they need to publish a roadmap or anything, but they need to tell their marketing dept. to piss off and that not everything needs to be a "delightful surprise" on stage.
Apple has never been the company that does it first. They're the company that does it right. Arguably, their fuckup with LLMs was rushing a garbage product to market instead of waiting and watching and perfecting in the background.
> Apple is being far too conservative with a far too fast a developing piece of technology
Strongly disagree. OpenAI and Anthropic are blowing billions on speculative attempts at advancing the frontier. They're advancing, but at great cost and uncertainty in respect of future returns.
The smart move would be to recapitulate the deal with Google, possibly being paid by these cash-burning companies for the default AI slot on the iPhone, all the while watching what Apple's users do. Then, when the technology stabilises and the best models are known, Sherlocking the whole thing.
1. Siri - not the first assistant, absolute garbage.
2. Apple Maps (original) - utter garbage at launch, slightly better today in US.
3. Vision Pro - Not the first VR headset. Massive failure.
If anything, Apple has been tremendously successful few times when they were not first (phones, tablets, silicon ..) but they have also been tremendously faltered when they were not first.
The third bullet is soft because ALL vr headsets have been flops.
All told you are actually painting a pretty solid picture of apples track record. They’ve launched so many things in the past 20 years and expanded into new markets (wearables, headphones, streaming hardware and services) that it’s impressive there aren’t more flops
It doesn’t matter if you’re first or not, but even if the tech for AI stabilizes, it’s still going to need constant input for news, events, etc. It will never be static. Apple needs to form those data relationships asap if it wants to own the tech.
So I don't think this a likely explanation. Maybe they just wanted to have an in-house solution but realized they have no chance at delivering that value on their own. But it can't be about UX predictability because Siri has none unless you're setting a timer.