Apple lacks strategic vision
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If you want to brag about Apple's AI hardware prowess, talk about MLX. The ANE was a pretty obvious mistake compared to Nvidia's approach and hundreds of businesses had their own, even before Apple made theirs.
It's designed to have optimal performance/power ratios. The GPU is faster but it uses more power.
Yes, but what use is the best consumer hardware when the software is degrading?
Considering the liquid glass thing, there's no one at Apple left who understands and cares about usability, for example.
Plus the iOSification of Mac OS for no good reason... maybe to make it less attractive to developers?
I won't deny that Apple's hardware is great, but the software has been severely crippled by commercial rather than technical reasons. People have to go out of their way to glimpse outside the walled garden.
Yeah I guess it’s been a while since their last iPhone moment but that entire decade was just one revolution after another for every segment of tech, and Apple came out on top
With their in-house chips they’re going to do fine for AI, even if they need to partner with someone else on it
Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.
It goes against all MBA orthodoxy.
Sure, if you're able to buy all the required production slots, as Apple has been doing in the past.
However, with new market pressure from AI this might not be possible in the future ...
Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.
Instead there is an incredibly expensive VR scuba mask, with relatively little adoption. It's certainly not changing the way we use physical spaces and transforming society, which is something a previous Apple could have pulled off. Users and developers need to be shown how to get value from something radically new, and Apple hasn't done that recently.
> I think that is exactly right.
I think that's entirely wrong. The hardware just isn't there yet! The AVP is the closest you can get to real "AR glasses" at the moment (as distinct from the Xreal 'non-context-aware screen overlay with a tiny FoV and fixed position'), but it turns out the hardware needed for that is >1 lb of stuff.
BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Engine
It’s conceivable that had Apple not purchased NeXT, even though NeXT probably would’ve ended up getting purchased by another company, its technology would’ve likely lived on. Perhaps a 1998 or 1999 NeXT could have open-sourced the OpenStep API and WebObjects as a Hail Mary move…talk about a completely different “what if” path for the Linux desktop and server!
On which NeXT and Sun collaborated on, and thanks to that collaboration, and WebObjects (Java port), Java and Java EE came to be.
Patrick Naughton on what actually influenced Java's semantics and object model,
https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html
Distributed Objects Everywhere genesis, and its evolution into Enterprise JavaBeans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere
While in parallel, NeXT refactored WebObjects into Java as well.
I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives.
We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland.
Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.
You might argue that generic companies are doing that now as we see Windows ARM laptops finally, but I think they only got the courage to do that because Apple went first.
I was not expecting Apple silicon from Apple, I didn’t even realize they’d been hiring chip designers for the past decade before that.
Personal computing really sucked before the mid 2000s. You had windows computers which were cheap and fast, but had lots of bugs and were hard to use and didn’t do low energy very well, you had Linux as a powerful novelty, you had expensive well designed Mac’s that were sort of slow but with better battery life. It took Apple’s intel transition to fix all of that, and I basically thought it was finally done and personal computing all of a sudden got very boring. But today I’m running mid-sized LLM inference on a Max 3, and it’s all very exciting again.
There is no thing that needs the ubiquity that Jobs would have channelled the idea into.
In my opinion it would just never have seen the light of day.
Now, if you use multiple lenses, with one masking in grayscale the real frame positioned just before the lens in which you project the virtual frame, you can do some limited blending ops. But it's quite difficult to deal with parallax if the lenses aren't glued together, or even then with refraction.
Apple took a very conservative approach. And made it to market. Now look at the competition. Sure, they have concepts with good compositing, but the ones in the market right now aren't able to produce the same imagery that Apple Vision is capable of.
Maybe I'm wrong, haven't looked at the market in some months, but I always thought of the Apple Vision as a very pragmatic design trying to circumvent AR limitations by being a VR headset.
I don't think this is true. If anything, we'd have ipads with no stylus. Steve Jobs was a visionary, but most importantly a good business man. It's not like everything that made the iPhone was in house and strictly an Apple invention. Apple was lucky in that it bought a company that had developed the multi-touch technology the phone so heavily relied on. Without that, the iPhone wasn't going to happen when it did.
Additionally, a lot was sacrificed to make the iPhone happen. People took some serious physical and mental tolls in order to help ship that product. Marriages crumbled. The pressure was ruthless.
AR is vaporware. The form factor sucks, the power requirements to do anything meaningful are too high and there just isn't a compelling use case for most of the population. I'd argue that Vision Pro makes the most sense out of anything, being more work rather than consumer oriented.
AR is a folly. Meta almost tanked themselves by going all in and all they managed were a tech demo.
As for the other point, well ipod and iphone were both just "polished versions of what already existed". Thats kind of what Apple does...very very well. AirPods are bigger than Spotify. Apple Silicon was about optimizing hardware, software and supply chain, its really a thing of beauty how they managed to pull it off and completely disentangle themselves from Intel and Nvidia.
Since you say the competition has caught up, I assume it’ll be easy to send an Amazon link to the evidence.
I wonder what it would take to win you over, and i don't mean the rational you, which i'm sure you can justify, i mean the irrational 'i'm in love with the product' you.
- 7+ hour battery life while running a bunch of Docker containers and IDEs, at the same screen brightness nits I run my MacBook at.
- Those things run not-perceptively-slower than on my Apple hardware
- No perceptible fan noise while doing the above
- The chassis does not creak when I pick it up from one corner
- Does not weigh more than double my MacBook
I’ll even relax the trackpad requirement and allow a 60Hz HiDPI screen instead of the 120Hz screen my MacBook from four years ago drives while doing all of the above.
Is there anything that can check those boxes?
> - The chassis does not creak when I pick it up from one corner
This would be an INSTANT 'nope' from me.
It’s not, like, a usability concern, but it’s something I’m definitely willing to fork over a couple hundred bucks to not feel every day.
Its an honest question, I would love an arm based laptop running NixOS that is competitive with the upcoming M5 Pro's but I dont see it anywhere.
Case in point: Google's newest Google TV box (released this year) is an absolute turd when compared with an 8 year old 4k Apple TV box.
We used to get that same performance gain every few years just from regular process improvements, but this time Apple made it seem like it was Apple that made the gain and not the general world.
And why are you bloviating about TV boxes in topic about laptop chips?
Regardless of how you want to frame it, there clearly wasn't any grand innovative strategic vision in play there from Apple. It was just an incremental improvement to long established products with no shortage of equally significant and impressive increments improvements from others along the way.
The first time I wrote anything for Mac OS, it was with Metrowerks' Code Warrior whatever-the-student-edition-was-called, where the compiler only targeted the 68k series chips.
Making an iteration so much better is not something I'd ascribe to luck.
What, exactly, did M1 change about anything about using a laptop? Longer battery life? Faster? Okay, same improvements as had been featured for the last 20 years. And it wasn't any thinner, depending on the model line it was substantially thicker even.
So what exactly was new about M1 that wasn't just a bog standard iteration we'd seen dozens of times by that point?
Even just considering Apple's product line surely you'd have to rank things like Intel's Core 2 as more significant, as it enabled the creation of the MacBook Air and was Apple's return to subcompact laptops. Or Intel's thunderbolt which radically changed the entire I/O story and capabilities for Apple, who fully embraced it.
For instance, the unified CPU and GPU memory, which allows to run ML models on a Mac as if you have a large dedicated GPU. (Unified memory of course harks back to the 8-bit era; the key was to make it performant.)
Was already common and widespread with iGPUs in CPUs on x86, and was standard on all ARM mobile SoCs for a solid decade.
AMD in particular had already done a bunch here with their APUs including OpenCL support in 2012 and fully coherent shared address spaces with 2014's Kaveri
It’s the first time I owned a laptop that lacked compromises. It was consistently snappy and fast at every task from a full to empty battery. And it did so without burning my lap or producing an incredibly annoying fan noise.
As for loud fan and burning laps, though, do also keep in mind that Apple was particularly bad in the 2016 generation, which is why the M1 laptops got thicker.
Security is also much improved over the Intel laptops for various obscure and technical reasons.
Apple might not have been publicly pushing Arm, but they very much were not following Microsoft’s direction. It just wasn’t good enough.
ARMv8/v9's main advantages over Intel are in security, not performance.
But their version will lack one critical feature that everyone expects, such as a power button, or copy/paste, or pinch to zoom. For AI, maybe something like "remember context".
Then 3 years later they will invent "remember context," and everyone will lose their shit again.
He needs some fresh blood in software as well.
He should just buy something like Claude and lock them in with stock and very high salaries.
He should also stop scrimping on integrated memory on the M series. Overpriced memory is a huge issue. And do something about the GPU as well.
Perhaps an AI N series with 128gig of ram, & dramatically more powerful GPU with higher core/thread count.
They will probably leave as soon as their manager becomes just the run of the mill babysitter manager with charisma.
Now Meta is doing it again for AI.
Apple won't throw money down a hole like that, but they definitely need a more original and opinionated strategy than just an increased talent count.
The lack of love they gave Siri and AI in general, since they bought the original Siri tech in 2010, just keeps looking like a worse and worse oversight.
By convincing users they want hallucinating, gas lighting imps in their pockets 24/7 to reinforce their thoughts.
And he would have been all over it given his own alt-medicine beliefs.
Not my experience as an Apple user. The issue was not that I expected something better than an LLM. It was that I'm used to ChatGPT and the Apple AI was rubbish in comparison.
And if did useless stuff like mangled summaries of messages. If I could set if to know what files I have and web pages I'd used and could ask "which file do I have the holiday records in?" etc. then that would be useful.
But today, even the first 2021 M1 MBPs are still very good devices (I still don't feel like I need to upgrade to a more recent model).
What would make me buy a new Mac is a good OLED display. The display in my new Windows laptop is the one component that's better compared to my 2021 MBP.
Now I have a MacBook Pro and I pay a small annual fee and have full coverage Applecare with accidental damage and if the battery goes out they replace it, etc. The only reason I would upgrade at this point would be for a built in cellular modem or face id.
Of course they were worth marginal investment even if you just consider they now only have one architecture to support, they are better computers and margins are better since they don’t have to pay Intel.
CEOs are judged on today. Past achievements are past achievements and he was paid handsomely for it.
Tim Cook is a money guy. Saving money by reducing per device licensing costs via creating own chips and also now their own modems is a money guys domain.
Hardware and software innovation is another skill.
Tim Cook wasn't appointed on his ability to innovate. But he needs to ensure he has individuals who can do so, and that there aren't layers of management or himself obstructing them.
Airpods being dominant is something from many years ago. Sony, Bose, even Samsung caught up quickly and offer much better integration since half the features are locked to iPhone only. Airpods were early to market and assisted by forcing users to buy them since their phones no longer had headphone jacks. Which boosts their word of mouth marketing.
For a company selling huge quantities of mobile computing devices, that's paramount.
So, being an absolute Apple-skeptic, I don't blame them for not having a crystal-clear future direction right now. VR/AR? Nah, probably not happening. AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows? And they've got products in all these markets, just not obviously compelling ones.
So, a holding pattern is more than warranted at this point. Will this allow anyone to bypass Apple? Possibly, but the chance/hope of Apple front-running everyone else is definitely still alive.
Apple doesn’t. They created a market for products with a deep vertical integration of software and hardware. And they do it at enormous scale.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are the closest competitors but they license their software and have to compete on hardware across many products.
They've never been innovators, that's not their strength. They're polishers.
UX innovators then
This whole conversation feels like a zero sum discussion, as “if Apple isn’t the most innovative then they’re not innovative on any level.
Debatable at best..
If they could (quickly) come out with a personal assistant which was really useful for people's planning and shopping and productivity, which knew how to navigate the apps and services on a person's apples phone/computer/cloud data, and do it locally and/or privately... They'd be in a good position even if it wasn't the absolute leader of the pack.
AI is going to be so powerful in the coming years that if apple falls behind AND doesn't give the keys to some other company to integrate AI, then I could see people jumping ship.
Apple is the only company so far that seems to be unwilling to accept a poor user experience with generative AI, so their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
Of course Nadella is critical of Apple's efforts: he selling the goods! It's like a Steel CEO complementing a new bridge but then "they should have used more steel" - well duh, but since when do we trust the purveyors of components as to what should be added?
The bottom line is "Agentic AI" is just unreliable. If you thought you hated Apple Intelligence now, then if they had gone whole hog, the unreliability would be astounding.
That does feel like the ultimate goal with many of these AI initiatives. I have a suspicion that a lot of the negativity thrown towards Apple's AI integration comes from people hoping Apple will legitimize their product, not from people wanting their phone to be better.
iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are.
When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the commenters are missing are the Jobs' pageantry and showmanship. Which I also miss. But in terms of capability, I am quite happy with what we have.
Think every product that was one way, then Apple did it differently and suddenly every product on the market looked like theirs. That’s a long list of both hardware and software.
On the other hand, when was the last time any mass market tech product was _invented_ by that definition (something no one else has done before)? Most products are incremental improvements, even innovations are rare when it comes to mass market products.
This is a really cool take that actually aligns with Apple's walled garden. They've built the garden wall (their hardware), they've prepped the soil (marketing, sometimes not great), and now it's time for them and their partners to start releasing local apps that take full advantage of the M2/M3's power to execute LLMs locally.
Apple has made bets like this before, both on the CPU and peripheral side. Historically, for better or for worse, they've done the whole "build the hardware (AltiVec, Thunderbolt, even USB-A) and the software will come" thing. With their latest ARM CPUs they're doing that with AI & LLMs, and it's a huge chance to change the direction of this tech from SaaS centric to user-owned. I too am not an Apple fan but I think they are going to come out of this looking pretty good.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that Apple "built" USB-A, just saying that when they released the iMac it relied heavily on USB-A and people were pretty surprised at the investment they made in that tech.
Of course, Microsoft is also at this with its Copilot programme for laptops, where an onboard Neural Processing Unit has to be a particular speed to qualify. This lets you do local AI things like content-aware image snipping, text summaries and...er, Recall.
As to whether Apple will come out of this looking good or not, I think they're currently regretting rolling out a shitty initial AI offering, and will get better with the next release. It'll be like Apple Maps. Or the butterfly keyboard. Or any number of other broken version 1 Apple things.
An interesting question is to whether Apple Intelligence can be cancelled or pared back now the landscape is so AI dominated, i.e. will the lack of AI offerings be seen as a competitive disadvantage, or are people so sick of AI by now that it isn't a factor.
It's like listening to the Intel CEO saying that the new apple silicon is alright, but what would REALLY make them go is to migrate back to Intel x86.
I'm not really upset at Nadella for this, because it's what he should do. But for everyone else to breathlessly be obsessed with his word and forget his real job as salesman in chief is what's pathetic.
Take the Photos app. I can type any object like “car” and it generally locates photos containing a car. This is far more useful to me than a LLM to generate paragraphs of text on a phone.
The main features they have added are generating paragraphs and images which are terrible.
I don’t think that’s an Apple problem though.
1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself
2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc
3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones
There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" -
> Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.”
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...
It threatens to do that, sure. But the reality will likely be significantly less dramatic. The most likely outcome is AI (like every other hyped technology) finds a niche and that everything else carries on as it was.
I understand it is not that easy. But Apple has been neglecting Siri, or maybe failed to improve it, for so many years. And now the perception is that there is just no excuse anymore.
What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say.
If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it.
If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.
After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.
“Withered technology, with lateral thinking”. Sure, they find ways to have bleeding edge tech, especially in terms of hardware design. But at the core, their products do not differentiate with bleeding edge software. They aim to surprise and delight by delivering things that are well understood, in a convenient and focused manner.
This mode of thinking is incompatible with shipping the latest trend instantly.
Until then I'll be happy to wait-and-see and use LLMs as a glorified StackOverflow / search-engine replacement - at least as long as they're still free to use, and it doesn't take too long to get an answer back ;)
Technology is changing rapidly. Apple can easily afford to wait a few years for markets to appear.
They did make an attempt with the vision glasses, but it obviously flopped.
They succeeded for so long with top-down direction because the top had ideas. I think the best move would be to allow for more bottom-up direction. Give the engineers and designers license to run wild a bit.
Looking ahead to the next decade or so I believe what we're likely on course for is some sort of AI OS. AI will be able to vibe-code apps for you and you'll be able to manage and dispatch individual agents to do tasks. There will be a messy transitionary period that lasts a while from today's software.
Apple has a trusting customer base, they have tremendous hardware prowess, they have cross-platform cloud services, and they have design sense to figure out how to establish these new models. I think if a new form of computing emerges Apple basically gets a free first swing at it, in terms of consumer trust. We've seen that with their VR headset, that while a dud was given far more interest and attention than Facebook's and Microsoft's offerings.
I do think they show signs of vulnerability as well, even if I think they're less than their strengths. Apple's famously design focused culture seems to be cracking a bit and giving way to more Microsoft / Google style PM-led culture. That can be OK, but I think PM led cultures are sometimes almost too strategic for their own good, like someone you can tell is a salesmen not a friend, and that can result in gradual brand erosion.
A simple example of this happening is Apple's website. Like Microsoft the tabs at the top of their website now reflect the company's internal organization, not what makes the most sense to the user. In the Jobs era they insisted that there would be no separate "store" tab, a redundancy because the whole website was a store, but I suspect that changed because the "Store" division within Apple wants that extra prominence.
If Apple isn't careful with enough missteps they may dilute their brand and Google / Microsoft may seem just as appealing for early adopters of emerging AI OSs.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/07/31/ep-428
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900158/apple-watch-edit...
Apple's overall market strategy is "premium product, premium price". If you look to the 7x price ratio between AVP and Meta Quest 3 as your guide, they'd make a supercar that would cost something like USD 175k.
Sure, an Apple Car would likely have a lot of interesting and unusual but well understood design points, both positive (like liquid crystal electric tinting windows) and negative (imagine something as weird as charging a car like an Apple Magic Mouse), but hardly anyone would be able to afford them unless they were working in Big Tech.
Aside from all the difficulties that come with self driving, I suspect Apple cancelled its car effort because they couldn't figure out how differentiate its offering at a price low enough to drive volume and a cost low enough to drive comparable profit to its other businesses.
The competition is only in the mind of business writers and pundits; it maybe matters for the stock market but Apple has never made their stock the main driver of their efforts.
They don't need to beat these companies outright, but the more they fail to provide value relative to the competition, the more they will see users leave.
Yet nobody else was able to do it. Microsoft, for all its power and money, couldn’t make it happen. Samsung+Google have come closest, but even then, Apple dominates the profits.
AirPods in particular really are that good, and compared to them essentially every other audio product is a scam. Japanese companies instead invented something called "hi-res audio" which is just a pledge to only focus on useless features.
(The scam prevention systems like rtings' objective headphone reviews are themselves scams because they don't measure actually useful scenarios.)
If they managed to add inference chip that competes with Groq and similar hardware, they would make much bigger wins comparing to main their own models.
Imagine being able to run 32B reasoning models with hundreds of tokens per second on your local laptop.
There's no vision beyond defending the cashflow and squeezing it.
What they’re lacking is quality control. They need a hard-ass that will scream at them when they try to release stuff like liquid glass.
It’s been too long since Jobs death and they’ve gotten comfortable pushing out poor quality features.
Something as stupid as low opacity text UI over text should not have made it out to consumers to start with. It's the kind of thing that Jobs would have burst a blood vessel over.
Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about.
Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware.
Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta.
It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.
The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.
That's not really clear. Mac sales actually peaked during the pandemic, around 2022.
Apparently there was also some tariff fear-driven buying this year. Indeed, I purchased a new MacBook Pro earlier this year for that very reason.
If you compare, say, 2024 Mac revenue to 2014 Mac revenue, there was an increase of 25% over that period, but inflation increased even more over the same period. (Unfortunately, Apple no longer announces unit sales.)
Apple is "dominant" now in a couple spaces, but if they miss the next thing they will become the next Blackberry.
Apple is now a lifestyle brand with a supply chain.
Maybe they've just calcified - the youngest person on their board is 63. At the end of the day they haven't had a credible threat in over a decade.
Apple is like 150.000+ employees. What makes you think they have to choose between OS redesigns and AI. There is probably more than enough talent there to do all the things.
The rules for iPhone software are almost unchanged since 2009!
Safety razor blades did not change a lot either since the time they were invented; the seem to be in a deep local optimum. Maybe the iPhone is in a somehow similar situation.
By very-rarely revisiting these ~17 year old policies they avoided naturally-increasing their specs to foster and keep-up with more demanding software, and subsequently in the last two generations had to play catch-up and rush to upgrade their entire product line to a higher baseline of memory to support AI and increase their thermal capacities to support their foray into AAA games, leaving billions of active iOS devices as unsupported.
But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem.
And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later"
As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine.
"Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.