Discussion

@adlrocha Beyond The Code

grtteee: This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing, envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.

HerbManic: Pretty much it. That said, they did try to appease the markets by announcing 'Apple Intelligence' so they didn't appear to be behind everyone.They did do the smart thing of not throwing too much capital behind it. Once the hype crumbles, they will be able to do something amazing with this tech. That will be a few years off but probably worth the wait.

grtteee: Yeah exactly the Apple Intelligence thing was pure BS to shut people up who kept saying apple was going to get disrupted by missing out.Apple seems to follow the disciplines that Steve laid out. Tim isn’t a visionary but he seems to follow the principles associated with being disciplined with cash quite well. They haven’t done any stupid acquisitions either. Quite the contrast with OAI.

dangus: It’s even more superpowered than previous implementations of this strategy.When they made the iPhone, iPod, and Apple Watch they had no specific hardware advantage over competitors. Especially with early iPhone and iPod: no moat at all, make a better product with better marketing and you’ll beat Apple.Now? Good luck getting any kind of reasonably priced laptop or phone that can run local AI as well as the iPhone/MacBook. It doesn’t matter that Apple Intelligence sucks right now, what matters is that every request made to Gemini is losing money and possibly always will.This is especially true in 2026 where Windows laptops are climbing in price while MacBooks stay the same.

worthless-trash: Don't worry, when apple introduce it, it'll be revolutionary and 10% thinner.

bigyabai: I just realized that next year Apple's Neural Engine will be 10 years old, just like the "NPUs will change AI forever!" puff pieces.Here's to another 10 years of scuffed Metal Compute Shaders, I guess.

livinglist: But why do I feel like the quality of the software from Apple declined sharply in recent years? The liquid glass design feels very unpolished and not well thought out throughout almost everywhere… seems like even Apple can’t resist falling victim to AI slop

skybrian: How do you know Gemini is losing money on inference?

46493168: Apple is almost 2 years out from their announcement of Apple Intelligence. It has barely delivered on any of the hype. New Siri was delayed and barely mentioned in the last WWDC; none of the features are released in China.In other news, people keep buying iPhones, and Apple just had its best quarter ever in China. AAPL is up 24% from last year.

Gigachad: Apple will just drip feed locally running models that enable minor conveniences. They will probably drop the Apple Intelligence label later and just have things with their own names like "magic eraser".

Gigachad: For consumers AI has anti hype right now. It's off-putting to see consumer products slapped with a hundred AI labels. I see people talk about how you can turn off all of Apple Intelligence with one toggle rather than hundreds on Samsung.Firefox is also marketing how easy it is to disable AI.

hapticmonkey: Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware.Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the hood and computed locally. Hence their chips. I don’t see what Apple have to gain by building a competitor to what OpenAI has to offer.

pram: I've had it turned off since Sequoia, and this I truly appreciate. It hasn't nagged me once to turn it or Siri on, and it isn't mandatory.When I open up JIRA or Slack I am always greeted with multiple new dialogues pointing at some new AI bullshit, in comparison. We hates it precious

javchz: What I think was a wasted opportunity was not bringing the xserve back, being one of the few e2e solutions out there at scale.

amazingamazing: Gemma4 in my view is good enough to do things similar to Gemini 2.5 flash, meaning if I point it code and ask for help and there is one it’ll answer correctly but it’s not great at using all tools or one shooting.If a couple more iterations of this, say gemma6 is as good as current opus and runs completely locally on a Mac, I won’t really bother with the cloud models.That’s a problem.For the others anyway.

rvz: Apple never competed in the "AI race" in the first place, because they already knew they were already at the finish line.This was really unsurprising [0].[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278371

nl: > How do you know Gemini is losing money on inference?It's not. People make this claim with zero evidence.But Google made around $20B profit on Google search in 2025 Q4, and that includes AI search.

rtpg: I think a lot of people are not hype about AI in their toaster, but... I don't think people are generally turned off form deeper integration in their OS itself. Especially when for some people this is representing ideas similar to how programmer-types get excited about Shortcuts.Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff

TheDong: I don't like companies forcing their newest features on me noisily and constantly trying to ship new features and see what sticks so you can't trust whether a feature advertised one week will even be there the next.However, I have even less patience for companies forcing paid-for third-party ads down my throat on a paid product. Slack at least doesn't sell my eyeballs. Facebook, Twitter, Google's ads are worse to me than new feature dialogues.Which brings me to Apple. I pay for a $1k+ device, and yet the app store's first result is always a sponsored bit of spam, adware, or sometimes even malware (like the fake ledger wallet on iOS, that was a sponsored result for a crypto stealer). On my other devices, I can at least choose to not use ad-ridden BS (like on android you can use F-Droid and AuroraStore, on Linux my package manager has no ads), but on iOS it's harder to avoid.Apple hasn't sunk to Google levels in terms of ads, but they've crossed a line.

nl: > Then Stargate Texas was cancelled, OpenAI and Oracle couldn’t agree terms, and the demand that had justified Micron’s entire strategic pivot simply vanished. Micron’s stock crashed.Well.. no. The Stargate expansion was cancelled the orginally planned 1.2MW (!) datacenter is going ahead:> The main site is located in Abilene, Texas, where an initial expansion phase with a capacity of 1.2 GW is being built on a campus spanning over 1,000 acres (approximately 400 hectares). Construction costs for this phase amount to around $15 billion. While two buildings have already been completed and put into operation, work is underway on further construction phases, the so-called Longhorn and Hamby sections. Satellite data confirms active construction activity, and completion of the last planned building is projected to take until 2029.> The Stargate story, however, is also a story of fading ambitions. In March 2026, Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had abandoned their original expansion plans for the Abilene campus. Instead of expanding to 2 GW, they would stick with the planned 1.2 GW for this location. OpenAI stated that it preferred to build the additional capacity at other locations. Microsoft then took over the planning of two additional AI factory buildings in the immediate vicinity of the OpenAI campus, which the data center provider Crusoe will build for Microsoft. This effectively creates two adjacent AI megacampus locations in Abilene, sharing an industrial infrastructure. The original partnership dynamics between OpenAI and SoftBank proved problematic: media reports described disagreements over site selection and energy sources as points of contention.https://xpert.digital/en/digitale-ruestungsspirale/> Micron’s stock crashed. [the link included an image of dropping to $320]Micron’s stock is back to $420 today> One analysis found a max-plan subscriber consuming $27,000 worth of compute with their 200$ Max subscription.Actually, no. They'd miscalculated and consumed $2700 worth of tokens.The same place that checked that claim also points out:> In fact, Anthropic’s own data suggests the average Claude Code developer uses about $6 per day in API-equivalent compute.https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-why-is-clau...I like Apple's chips, but why do we put up with crappy analysis like this?

colechristensen: I get it but... well I think of App Store as... a store. I don't have to go there.I'm actually pretty disappointed in the lack of discovery available in the App Store, but I rarely go there. I'm fine with advertising being there. I wish it was better but I'm not offended that there is paid promotion in a store.

foobar1962: A lot of the people that bought iPhones are now buying Macs as well.

46493168: Indeed, a lot of the people that bought iPhones are now buying Macs with a binned version of the chip they already bought. So much so that Apple is in danger of running out of them.

SoftTalker: When have they done that since the first iPhone in 2007? The watch maybe? Though not sure that's "leapfrog" better than anyone else's smartwatch, but I don't have one so maybe I'm wrong.

tiffanyh: - AirPods- Apple Watch- AirTagThose are a few that come to mind. All do multi-billions in revenue per year.

slopinthebag: I haven't noticed this at all and I wonder if you're mistaking curation for advertising? When I open up the App Store I get a panel written "games we love" and a listing of indie games that are clearly not paid for ads. The ads in search are visibly marked as ads, and while I don't particularly like ads in general, they are pretty easy to avoid.

16bitvoid: On iOS, if you open the App Store and click on the Today tab (it's the default tab if you kill and reopen), there's ads interspersed with curations.For me, the second tile is an ad for Upside, some cashback app

slopinthebag: Mine is Moneris Go, and the top review is titled "Garbage App!!!!" lolHonestly the last time I remember using the App Store was years ago and I can't recall if they had ads or not. Imo it's distasteful and I wish they didn't have them. Still leagues better than the fucking ads in the start menu which caused me to give up on gaming and Windows forever.

Gigachad: People like features, benefits, and outcomes. AI isn't a feature, it's a technology that can enable features. But it's being marketed as the only thing that matters.The user does not give two shits if the new laptop "has AI". This is how Apple has been killing it lately, they market the macbooks being powerful, cheap, with long batteries, and a premium feel. Things the user cares about. Most of the stuff marketers are just blanket labeling "AI" will eventually be shuffled to the background and rebranded with a more specific term to highlight the feature being delivered rather than the fact it's AI".

slopinthebag: Software quality decline has been a recognised trend long before LLMs took the limelight. Apple included.

m463: Quietly they are doing things on-device. The OCR + copy/paste is genuine goodness - modestly functional.

lern_too_spel: That's also literally years behind the competition. https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/09/android-ps-new-rece...

OccamsMirror: They're talking about free inference like Android and Google Home devices. No one is paying subscription fees for these and they're running their inference in the cloud. Apple Intelligence, for the most part, is running on the device.

int32_64: Nvidia restricts gamer cards in data centers through licensing, eventually they will probably release a cheaper consumer AI card to corner the local AI market that can't be used in data centers if they feel too much of a threat from Apple.Imagine a future where Nvidia sells the exact same product at completely different prices, cheap for those using local models, and expensive for those deploying proprietary models in data centers.

kube-system: There’s long been professional segmentation for GPUs, long before people started running AI models on them

eastbound: > wait to understand what the thing is capable of doingMy parents use Android to ask “What are the 5 biggest towers in Chicago” or “Remove the people on my picture” while apparently iPhone is only capable of doing “Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone”.My iPhone is lagging a ridiculous 10 years behind. It’s just that I don’t trust Google with my credit card.

Barrin92: I want the reverse version of this, if Apple can promise me to 'lag behind' for another ten years I'll buy my first Apple device in ten years

jayd16: My capex is even less than Apple, I can ship to user's Apple hardware and I can't access iPhone user photos either...so really I'm the winner.

knowaveragejoe: Isn't some of Gemini's functionality on Android on-device?