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Comment by biophysboy | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely never understood why there was a narrative that Apple is "falling behind" when it comes to AI. They make phones, computers and an ecosystem of services to lock you in. None of this stuff is threatened by AI; with the right integration, it would enhance them!

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I do think Siri is particularly behind, but they were behind long before the AI craze. I also understand you cannot simply make Siri “be smart” with an LLM without all kinds of consequences and edge cases to deal with.

It’s not the same, but PMs and VPs at my company think we can vibe code our way out of migrating a 1.6 million line codebase to a newer language / technology. Or that our problems can be solved by acquiring an AI startup, whose front end looks exactly the same as every other AI startup’s front page, and slapping a new CSS file that looks like that startup on top of our existing SPA because their product doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an absurd world out there.

They delayed a new product category because of poor AI performance (the iPad/HomePod fusion device)

And they also got slapped with class action lawsuits for failing to meet promised AI capabilities in products they launched

It’s easy to understand from evidence like this why they are falling behind, even if you believe they will pull ahead later

The falling behind was shipping a low quality integration.

What are some good quality AI integrations right now? The chat apps and the IDEs are sort of separate environments. A lot of "AI assistants" in other apps so far have been clunky/useless.

I don't even think Google has particularly good integration and they make Gemini. Although it was early when I was still using my Android phone, I went back to the old google assistant instead of letting Gemini take over because it didn't add anything of value for the basic functions that I need from a voice assistant. Hopefully that's changed and I'm simply uninformed, but I doubt it.

Nope, that did not change.

As someone who buys Apple-everything and has thought about switching to Android just so I can have Gemini as an assistant, my opinion is their selling of phones is threatened by AI.

I know it's fashionable to shit-talk AI and Google, and lord knows I dislike the latter, but Gemini works and is day-to-day useful.

You said you don't understand it while explaining it in the second sentence. They don't have a decent integration, hence the vulnerability. Devices that do have a good to great AI experience will win in the long run imho.

What integration features are they missing that people use/want? Genuinely not trying to be dismissive or stick my head in sand - I am out of the loop.

That's not all, my macbook (48 GM VRAM) can run better local LLMs at a workable speed than my RTX 5090 rig can, plus Apple has MLX and neural engines.

The reason there was such a narrative is because Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both narrative machines with little regard for veracity, and they are also not that smart (at least according to people who successfully beat their system, such as Buffett).

"Warren, if people weren't so often wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." – the late great Charlie Munger.

yeah tbh it sometimes feels like a lot of moaning from those crowds is more about self-validation than anything concrete

That's pretty cool! What are the advantages of using a local LLM currently? Do you tune them? I suppose it will be more enshittification proof..

> What are the advantages of using a local LLM currently?

You don't have to send all your thoughts to a third party. That's the advantage.

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