It’s odd that the article identifies Apple’s hardware as a limitation for AI. I don’t think this is the case. If anything it’s the opposite, and makes Apple’s lack of execution more mysterious.
I was running Stable Diffusion on my iPhone two years ago. You can get quite good open weights models running on-device today. What’s going on over there?
I don't think there's much mystery here. Apple has blocked their researchers from publishing and has a very siloed approach. Researchers don't like this, so they work for companies that allow them to publish and engage in the research community. As a result Apple can't hire the talent needed to execute in this space.
I wonder if AI is just not up to Apple's standards yet. It's very, very amazing in some ways, but also, deeply flaky in others. Remember all the Apple news summarization memes? That sort of thing bothers any tech company but it really bothers Apple. "Very amazing but also deeply flaky" is fine for the Android ecosystem but it's not on brand for Apple.
I suspect Steve Jobs would be very aggressively driving them internally but also not necessarily releasing much yet either.
> The problem there is twofold. One is that so-called on-device AI hasn’t yet proved to be a major selling point for products such as PCs and smartphones. The other is that Apple’s lack of its own cloud-based AI capabilities leaves the $3 trillion company still in need of powerful allies. The company struck a deal with OpenAI last year to effectively back up its own AI capabilities, and analysts have widely been expecting similar partnerships involving other major AI services, including Google’s Gemini.
Yes. If I have to trade off a stupid phone with 100% determinism and good battery life versus an intelligent phone with 70% determinism and shit battery life then I'm going to take the stupid phone.
Wrong or not, it's a danger for Apple when this sort of thing starts popping up in the media.
It wouldn't take much for a "Apple have taken a wrong turn, and have left themselves unable to participate in the race for AI" narrative to take hold. If that happened, it would severely damage their position at the premium end of the market.
Its a low bar but a bar you cant walk back from if you collide poorly rather than pass with flying colours.
Take MS, sure they are doing a lot with AI, however some matters like Recall I'm not sure they can ever fully step back from, the trust has been lost for many by a rushed attempt.
Recall-like features will be a standard and accepted part of operating systems soon. People freaked out about Gmail "reading all your email" at first too.
I know there's a difference in the OS having access to everything on your screen, but people will still calm down once there are useful benefits delivered.
Especially in the US, where non-tech folks have shown time and time again they don't care about privacy, and will happily trade all of their personal information over for useful products and features.
I know several people who were actually excited for Recall, rather than horrified by it.
It's a reminder that generally, what techies on HN (and especially Reddit) think is generally the opposite of the general population.
Hard disagree. Apple powers search with Google because Google pays them. Google pays them because they can show ads and scarf down user data. I don't want my devices' ability to do certain tasks controlled by the highest bidder for my attention and data.
Gemini hasn't even been "the best" for a year. Google's quick answers AI is the most laughably bad high-exposure model out there. In six months, Anthropic or OpenAI or any other provider might have a model or models that are exceedingly good for the use cases that Apple cares about.
Hell, Meta or Microsoft might surprise us and make a really robust model that uses very little in the way of resources and battery (arguably, MS has in the past and will do it again), and on-device compute will be the best option.
There's no best option right now. And if you're not aiming for short term ROI on AI products, there's no reason to make commitments that you might regret in a quarter or two.
Why would I want ‘AI’ on my iPhone anyway? All I want is an all-in-one electronic notepad, calculator, encyclopaedia, communicator, music player and camera. And it already does all of that (almost) perfectly. And has done for the last fifteen years.
That’s it though. The iPhone set the paradigm for nearly 20 years. And up to that point nobody knew it was coming.
It’s been done and every tech company wants to find the next game changing thing.
I’m kinda rooting for Apple on this one. Give me a smarter smart phone that doesn’t sell out my privacy.
If they can do that and whatever AR or VR or whatever ends up finally being usable perhaps it will be built with user privacy back in mind. As it is I’m not getting anywhere near a Meta or a Google or an Amazon reality device
I agree mostly, but what exactly do you mean by privacy?
I think the real pressing issue is not ‘privacy’ or ‘tracking’ or whatever; it’s having one’s views slowly but surely warped by AI-enabled mass disinformation campaigns and having one’s eyeballs taken hostage by whichever company pays enough to keep you watching. Half the world seems to now be addicted to short-form video slop/brainrot now, and they don’t even enjoy it!
That’s really the hallmark of addiction — you’re consciously aware that it’s completely pointless and detrimental to your life and yet you can’t put it down.
Perhaps the same was said of TV when it was new, but, looking at what the BBC used to broadcast as recently as twenty years ago, I’m shocked how far we’ve fallen. If Apple really wants to save the world, they should find a solution to this. Since (fairly uniquely) their business isn’t dependent on selling attention to advertisers, they might just have a shot.
If everyone's iPhones already do everything they want, the only reason to buy a new one is if the current one breaks. Which would decimate Apple's stock price.
You’re not wrong, but how does it relate to my question? I’m asking why I would want AI, not why Apple would want to artificially inject ‘AI’ into their product — that’s obvious.
I care that they do the tasks I command them to do, quickly and efficiently. If the developer achieves this using AI somehow, great. If the developer achieves this using traditional algorithms, also great. It doesn't even remotely matter to me if they are "using AI" any more than it matters whether they are "using Python."
My biggest concern is that it will degrade my phone sooner and its battery life. I rather just hit an LLM in the cloud somewhere from my phone.
If the tech ever reaches the point where Apple can fully do, on device-first and there's no issues with it, then they'll likely invest drastically into it.
Feels more like Apple is sticking to its position that "all those LLMs are gimmicks and not actual AI". So they think they're not late because they see the primary tech behind oAI (etc) as a base for non-threatening features.
This stance will probably age very poorly but that's what it is.
They didn't do anything with "blockchain" either, and are no worse off for it. It's actually nice to see a company not just chasing whatever is hot and trendy each month.
I'd say they're correct from the consumer POV. In the context of a phone that's consumed mostly by non-technical people, AI in its current form is at best a better Google that occasionally fabricates the truth (or a silly image generator for creating memes).
AI products have shown a lot of progress over the past few years, even if they haven't "reached the bar".
But Apple is failing to deliver anything solid in the same time frame. Disregarding an arbitrary notion of "reaching the bar", they need to show progress.
What has Microsoft delivered? What has any hardware manufacturer delivered? What features of any operating system have been added by any company, that are worth while?
There's basically one "killer ai app", that's the chatbot. There's a second, plausible case, for agentic additions to IDEs.
But where is this high bar we're meant to be seeing? All I see is google and stackoverflow being replaced by openai.
I think part of the problem is nobody has a clear vision of what "progress" would look like here. What is the thing that they should be shipping today that would get someone to upgrade their phone, or to switch to iPhone?
Inverting it, what are the AI features that Google has shipped that are getting people to upgrade their Android phones, or to switch to Android?
My Apple devices are pretty useful for AI devices now given that I can run e.g. ChatGPT and Claude on them. I know they have to do something so the tech press can stop saying they are behind, but it still feels premature given lack of consensus on how best to integrate phones with the unreliable AIs we have today.
That’s what I was thinking. The most valuable AI tools are probably coding assistants, and I’d argue they haven’t even reached the bar. What AI products have reached the bar?
Readit News
I was running Stable Diffusion on my iPhone two years ago. You can get quite good open weights models running on-device today. What’s going on over there?
Counterexamples: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/
I suspect Steve Jobs would be very aggressively driving them internally but also not necessarily releasing much yet either.
Especially now that their App Store revenue is collapsing
It wouldn't take much for a "Apple have taken a wrong turn, and have left themselves unable to participate in the race for AI" narrative to take hold. If that happened, it would severely damage their position at the premium end of the market.
https://ioshacker.com/iphone/how-much-ram-does-my-iphone-has
Take MS, sure they are doing a lot with AI, however some matters like Recall I'm not sure they can ever fully step back from, the trust has been lost for many by a rushed attempt.
I know there's a difference in the OS having access to everything on your screen, but people will still calm down once there are useful benefits delivered.
I know several people who were actually excited for Recall, rather than horrified by it.
It's a reminder that generally, what techies on HN (and especially Reddit) think is generally the opposite of the general population.
Yesterday's presentation shows that their software wheelhouse is making fancy user interfaces.
Gemini hasn't even been "the best" for a year. Google's quick answers AI is the most laughably bad high-exposure model out there. In six months, Anthropic or OpenAI or any other provider might have a model or models that are exceedingly good for the use cases that Apple cares about.
Hell, Meta or Microsoft might surprise us and make a really robust model that uses very little in the way of resources and battery (arguably, MS has in the past and will do it again), and on-device compute will be the best option.
There's no best option right now. And if you're not aiming for short term ROI on AI products, there's no reason to make commitments that you might regret in a quarter or two.
It’s been done and every tech company wants to find the next game changing thing.
I’m kinda rooting for Apple on this one. Give me a smarter smart phone that doesn’t sell out my privacy.
If they can do that and whatever AR or VR or whatever ends up finally being usable perhaps it will be built with user privacy back in mind. As it is I’m not getting anywhere near a Meta or a Google or an Amazon reality device
I think the real pressing issue is not ‘privacy’ or ‘tracking’ or whatever; it’s having one’s views slowly but surely warped by AI-enabled mass disinformation campaigns and having one’s eyeballs taken hostage by whichever company pays enough to keep you watching. Half the world seems to now be addicted to short-form video slop/brainrot now, and they don’t even enjoy it!
That’s really the hallmark of addiction — you’re consciously aware that it’s completely pointless and detrimental to your life and yet you can’t put it down.
Perhaps the same was said of TV when it was new, but, looking at what the BBC used to broadcast as recently as twenty years ago, I’m shocked how far we’ve fallen. If Apple really wants to save the world, they should find a solution to this. Since (fairly uniquely) their business isn’t dependent on selling attention to advertisers, they might just have a shot.
If everyone's iPhones already do everything they want, the only reason to buy a new one is if the current one breaks. Which would decimate Apple's stock price.
Just got rid of a 9 year old 6s a few months ago that still worked fine!
I care that they do the tasks I command them to do, quickly and efficiently. If the developer achieves this using AI somehow, great. If the developer achieves this using traditional algorithms, also great. It doesn't even remotely matter to me if they are "using AI" any more than it matters whether they are "using Python."
i don't need that sort of thing
If the tech ever reaches the point where Apple can fully do, on device-first and there's no issues with it, then they'll likely invest drastically into it.
And no network latency.
This stance will probably age very poorly but that's what it is.
If that's their stance, they aren't wrong.
This is like saying "Company X is behind on Python" when they just don't use Python to make their products.
No one has reached the bar.
AI products have shown a lot of progress over the past few years, even if they haven't "reached the bar".
But Apple is failing to deliver anything solid in the same time frame. Disregarding an arbitrary notion of "reaching the bar", they need to show progress.
There's basically one "killer ai app", that's the chatbot. There's a second, plausible case, for agentic additions to IDEs.
But where is this high bar we're meant to be seeing? All I see is google and stackoverflow being replaced by openai.
Inverting it, what are the AI features that Google has shipped that are getting people to upgrade their Android phones, or to switch to Android?
My Apple devices are pretty useful for AI devices now given that I can run e.g. ChatGPT and Claude on them. I know they have to do something so the tech press can stop saying they are behind, but it still feels premature given lack of consensus on how best to integrate phones with the unreliable AIs we have today.
To whom?
We have shitty chatbots which confidently spew garbage and a new button on laptops no one wanted.
And the customers are worried that the technology is coming for their jobs, their income and their lives.