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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI.

IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."

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> IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it.

They both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?

Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.

I just think the concept of an LLM is counter to how Apple treats content on their products. See [1] for more of my thoughts here. I think the only chance Apple embraces AI is if they manage to research a 1. local model that 2. is purely deterministic, whose output can be reliably constrained and controlled by Apple.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737

Apple is letting the market "commoditize its complements" without lifting a finger.

I don't see selling local LLM servers/software, as such, being something that makes sense for Apple, but selling an "Apple Intelligence" appliance that works with your Apple devices and/or provides home automation might do.

You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race.

You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.

Apple _is_ a software company: everything it sells is based on a Mac OS X foundation.

I would buy Mac hardware running Windows long before I would buy x86 hardware running MacOS. In fact Mac OS on x86 was really nothing remarkable. Macs were objectively worse than most Windows PCs during the last few years on x86 at least the laptops were.

That must be a very restrictive definition of “successful consumer hardware company”.

Name one other successfully computer hardware company? PC makers are barely profitable commodities, other phone companies aside from Samsung are making pennies, the Microsoft XBox division is on life support, Sony sold off its TV division. The PS5 is going okay but doesn’t sell in near the numbers of iPhones. Who is left?

You didn’t say “computer”. And I would count the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus as successful. Without “computer”, Nintendo, Sony, LG, and so on.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to restrict “successful” to iPhone-level unit sales and Apple profit margins.

So did you think when I was talking about Apple I was comparing them to a company that sold power tools?

But Dell’s profits cratered so bad that they took the company private and profits are still nothingburgers.

Sony just sold off controlling interest of its TV division.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/son...

Have you checked the profits of the other PC sellers?

A quick Google search shows that LG profits were $2.4 billion dollar (converted) and down its last fiscal year.

Walk in to any Best Buy and look around. There are many. Apple is in a league of its own, however.

Successful == decently profitable with decent profit margins. Someone else mentioned LG with an annual profit of $2.4 billion as a “successful” company.

Consumer electronics is a low margin business. Since low to mid single digit margin is typical and not every brand can be premium, like Apple, I'd say Sony and Samsung do pretty well, all things considered. "Success" is relative to the industry average.

Samsung both sells premium hardware and manufactures a lot of it own components in house and sales components to other manufacturers including Apple. I consider Samsung “successful”.

Every single low margin PC company that exists now like Dell, HP etc were much more profitable than an almost bankrupt Apple in 1997. They had no vision and decided to compete on price. It doesn’t matter why they are barely profitable low margin businesses.

Seeing there revenue vs profits, they should take Michael Dell’s (bad) advice to Jobs when he came back - “shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders” who could make more money in treasury bonds.

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