I agree. As usual these days, the culprit for lack of innovation is AI (mostly LLMs). Apple did try to shove it to the users unsuccessfully and they had the right amount of sanity to backtrack once they realized how the users' expectations are misaligned with what LLMs have to offer, which is mostly lack of reliability; average user thinks that something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck must be a duck, but LLMs, while pretending to be human-like are not like that. On the other hand, Microsoft is still forcing it upon their users with Copilot but users are resisting. We will see which tactic will win in the long-run but I would bet on Apple.

Airpods were many years ago, as was the MacBook pro redesign.

CEOs are judged on today. Past achievements are past achievements and he was paid handsomely for it.

Tim Cook is a money guy. Saving money by reducing per device licensing costs via creating own chips and also now their own modems is a money guys domain.

Hardware and software innovation is another skill.

Tim Cook wasn't appointed on his ability to innovate. But he needs to ensure he has individuals who can do so, and that there aren't layers of management or himself obstructing them.

Apple Silicon was definitely a massive leap forwards but I wouldn’t say the competition has stayed still either.

Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago.

Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.

Instead there is an incredibly expensive VR scuba mask, with relatively little adoption. It's certainly not changing the way we use physical spaces and transforming society, which is something a previous Apple could have pulled off. Users and developers need to be shown how to get value from something radically new, and Apple hasn't done that recently.

Yeah everyone complains about how Apple don’t “innovate” but currently they are just focussing on making the best consumer hardware of all time. Don’t get me wrong I dislike them for other reasons but those reasons are mainly things Jobs pushed for decades ago. An Apple fan should love the current Apple

Facts. I switched to Mac primarily because of the CPU. Look at the state of Intel...

Apple Silicon was only an improvement in battery life. AMD and Intel still made more powerful processors coupled with Nvidia and AMD GPUs that blew Apple Silicon out of the water. Also depends what you consider successful since Macbooks are still a small fraction of the laptop market.

Airpods being dominant is something from many years ago. Sony, Bose, even Samsung caught up quickly and offer much better integration since half the features are locked to iPhone only. Airpods were early to market and assisted by forcing users to buy them since their phones no longer had headphone jacks. Which boosts their word of mouth marketing.

I was wondering how long laptop computers have existed. The Epson HX-20 (1981) and Grid Compass (1982) seem like good early examples - the latter introducing the clamshell design used in many subsequent laptops such as ThinkPads.

But has Apple Silicon justified the investment? I don't doubt it's good tech, but the market share hasn't necessarily reflected it. In 2024, total shipped units dropped quite a bit. Judging by the available data, I wouldn't use the term "wildly successful" just yet (particularly if we account for pre/post pandemic sales).

People are acting like Apple Silicon actually matters to Apple's profit margins. Since when was the Macbook a serious contribution to Apple margins?

As usual a Silicon Valey point of view, most of the world the reality is a bit different.

And the Apple Silicon chips even include specialized cores that allow LLMs to run locally on both iPhones and MacBooks. (See the "Foundation Models Framework".)

It makes a lot of strategic sense but if you have so much money on the bank, then who wouldn't buy a silicon design firm to design your CPUs in house? I bet everyone here on HN would have suggested to do that if asked in a board meeting. The big surprise was how long it took Apple to bite the bullet.

Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.

That was 5 years ago and the chips themselves are much older than that. They can't skate on that forever, especially since the competition caught up.

Apple Silicon either followed Microsoft's direction (who pushed for ARM laptops a solid 8 years before M1) or just did a better iteration than Intel at the same time Intel was struggling.

Regardless of how you want to frame it, there clearly wasn't any grand innovative strategic vision in play there from Apple. It was just an incremental improvement to long established products with no shortage of equally significant and impressive increments improvements from others along the way.

Apple has historically been a little behind the curve in technology, but then excelling at execution and user experience.

If they could (quickly) come out with a personal assistant which was really useful for people's planning and shopping and productivity, which knew how to navigate the apps and services on a person's apples phone/computer/cloud data, and do it locally and/or privately... They'd be in a good position even if it wasn't the absolute leader of the pack.

AI is going to be so powerful in the coming years that if apple falls behind AND doesn't give the keys to some other company to integrate AI, then I could see people jumping ship.

As a long time Mac and iPhone user, I just don't get all the complaints about innovation. Macs are as innovative as they ever have been, maybe more. Apple silicon has been an absolute powerhouse and godsend for battery life.

iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are.

When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the commenters are missing are the Jobs' pageantry and showmanship. Which I also miss. But in terms of capability, I am quite happy with what we have.

Waiting until others struggle with early pains before swooping in with a polished version after the idea has been demonstrated is also Apple's consistent playbook.

They've never been innovators, that's not their strength. They're polishers.

> AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows?

This is a really cool take that actually aligns with Apple's walled garden. They've built the garden wall (their hardware), they've prepped the soil (marketing, sometimes not great), and now it's time for them and their partners to start releasing local apps that take full advantage of the M2/M3's power to execute LLMs locally.

Apple has made bets like this before, both on the CPU and peripheral side. Historically, for better or for worse, they've done the whole "build the hardware (AltiVec, Thunderbolt, even USB-A) and the software will come" thing. With their latest ARM CPUs they're doing that with AI & LLMs, and it's a huge chance to change the direction of this tech from SaaS centric to user-owned. I too am not an Apple fan but I think they are going to come out of this looking pretty good.

Edit: I didn't mean to imply that Apple "built" USB-A, just saying that when they released the iMac it relied heavily on USB-A and people were pretty surprised at the investment they made in that tech.

The same things Intel said 10 years ago.

I’m satisfied with the very subtle AI implementations in their products.

Take the Photos app. I can type any object like “car” and it generally locates photos containing a car. This is far more useful to me than a LLM to generate paragraphs of text on a phone.

I simply don’t need a lot of AI. I would be very happy with a futuristic UNIX workstation with lots of development on the kind of things that used to get everyone excited about computers.

There was a quote recently where Nadella was trash talking the apple AI stuff, and like yes sure, but also do we not realize that Nadella isn't a random third party CEO, he's literally financially incentivized to maximize AI usage because Microsoft is selling the stuff?

It's like listening to the Intel CEO saying that the new apple silicon is alright, but what would REALLY make them go is to migrate back to Intel x86.

I'm not really upset at Nadella for this, because it's what he should do. But for everyone else to breathlessly be obsessed with his word and forget his real job as salesman in chief is what's pathetic.

I think it's a combination of three things:

1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself

2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc

3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones

There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" -

> Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.”

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...

the number one reason is that Siri is an embarrassment. And that has become so much clearer now with ChatGPT and Claude next to it. Everyone is simply thinking: why can't we have that. Why do we have to talk to a low quality agent that can't answer basic questions while i can also walk around with my airpods in having a full conversation with ChatGPT.

I understand it is not that easy. But Apple has been neglecting Siri, or maybe failed to improve it, for so many years. And now the perception is that there is just no excuse anymore.

AI is being integrated with everything. Web, applications, cloud, mobile - everything. Any company that neglects this is going to be forced to license and dealmake.

I think its moreso their siri strategy is lacking. The personal assistant on IPhone game is what everyone is talking about.

I feel that any vision needs to have some actual execution behind it, otherwise it's just a twinkle in someone's eye. "Built for Apple Intelligence" is literally the slogan for Apple's 2024 lineup. The vision is there front and center. But everything they layed out in their vision (and explicitly advertised!) has been a joke so far, falling somewhere between half-baked, trivial, or nonexistent. They've had to pull that ad showing contextually-aware interactions because that's nowhere near ready. https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/...

After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.

Yes and it isn’t just a matter of in but when the bubble pops. Then everyone will be hailing apple as the strategic visionary, fun times!!!

This reminds me of the "well Blackberry doesn't need to worry. People in business will still prefer Blackberry after the smart phone hype dies down."