Anyone with money can trivially catch up to a state of the art model from six months ago.
And as others have said, late is really a function of spigot, guardrails, branding, and ux, as much as it is being a laggard under the hood.
How come apple is struggling then?
The may want to use 3rd party or just wait for AI to be more stable to see how people actually use it instead of adding slop in the core of their product.
Announcing a load of AI features on stage and then failing to deliver them doesn't feel very strategic.
Enter late, enter great.
To be fair to Apple, so far the only mass market LLM use case so far is just a simple chatbot, and they don't seem to be interested in that. It remains to be seen if what Apple wants to do ("private" LLMs with access to your personal context acting as intimate personal assistants) is even possible to do reliably. It sounds useful, and I do believe it will eventually be possible, but no one is there yet.
They did botch the launch by announcing the Apple Intelligence features before they are ready though.