That doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t be following the space closely but I think it’s a mistake to think that normal people are changing their buying decisions based on any of this yet. One trade off here is that Google is spending a ton of money but as of yet is massively in the red on that investment, which means they’ll stick with their own LLM while Apple is free to switch to whoever the market leader is without a large sunk cost factoring into the decision.
I am very very far from a google fanboi.
My perception is that a huge percentage of the mass market just like OpenAI because they were the first to market and still have the most name recognition. Even my coworker who works in DevOps says “Gemini sucks, Claude sucks” even though he has never once tried either of them and has never looked at a single benchmark comparison.