Apple and Amazon will miss AI like Intel missed mobile
gmays.com89 points by gmays 3 days ago
89 points by gmays 3 days ago
> But now there’s a new paradigm shift. The iPhone was perfect for the mobile era, which is why it hasn’t changed much over the last decade.
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?
https://www.apple.com/watch/
https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/
Idk my MacBook Pro is pretty great and runs well. Fast moving here implies that as soon as you release something there's like this big paradigm shift or change that means you need to move even faster to catch up, but I don't think that's the case, and where it is the case the new software (LLM) still need to be distributed to end users and devices so for a company like Apple they pay money and build functionality to be the distributor of the latest models and it doesn't really matter how fast they're created. Apple's real threat is a category shift in devices, which AI may or may not necessarily be part of.
I'm less certain about Amazon but unless (insert AI company) wants to take on all the business risk of hosting governments and corporations and hospitals on a cloud platform I think Amazon can just publish their own models, buy someone else's, or integrate with multiple leading AI model publishers.
I think the bet here is that AI is like Dropbox — a feature. Operating globally, these models are going to be a regulatory tar pit. The industry hype train is 100% reliant on courts ignoring the law - that didn’t work out well for Napster.
That makes the “category shift” difficult for Apple to execute well and difficult for competitors to gun for them. Microsoft is even worse off there because the PC OEMs relied on dying companies like Intel to deliver engineering for innovative things.
AWS, Azure, and GCP are doing the same stuff in different flavors. Google and Microsoft approach human facing stuff differently because they own collaboration platforms.
Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.
> at the device level. Apple is ahead
Apple could turn everything around overnight by quietly re-enabling the jailbreak community for a few years, or restoring the 2022 Hypervisor API entitlement for arbitrary VMs. Hopefully this does not have to wait for leadership changes.
Either of those actions would take the shackles off Apple's underutilized hardware and frustrated developers. The resulting innovations could be sherlocked back into new OS APIs under Apple guardrails, whence they could generate revenue via App Store software. Then retire the jailbreaks and silently thank OutsideJobs for uncredited contributions to Apple upstream.
At present, the only industry participants maximizing usage of Apple hardware are zero-day hoarders. Meanwhile, every passing day allows Qualcomm, Nvidia and Arm-generic/Mediatek to improve their nascent PC hw+OS stacks, whittling away at Apple's shrinking hardware lead.
Any loosening of Apple hardware restrictions is going to be judged internally on what impact it will have on App Store revenue & related DRM / IP contracts.
I'm not sure Tim Cook is the guy to overrule that based on a vision of the future.
Let's see if the $599 MacBook (iPhone SoC!) can run VMs and software distributed outside App Store, i.e. like existing MacBooks.
If Pixel phones (with inferior hardware) can run Debian Linux VMs with external USB-c display, so can Apple tablets/phones. Apple and Google app stores have similar business incentives and antitrust constraints.
You are spot on, they can indeed run that software.
The problem that you and others with similar interests are running into is that you’re asking Apple to spend perhaps tens of millions of dollars to make a change that, frankly, almost nobody wants or cares about. I don’t want it or care about it whatsoever, nor does my grandma. That’s why this all plays out in court and in countries that want to stick a finger in the eye of American tech companies.
Anti-trust concerns tend to just be multi-billion dollar corporations (Apple, Meta, Epic, Netflix, etc.) arguing over who gets the slice of your wallet. None of these companies lower prices when they win court battles, experiences don’t get better, and as Apple in particular loses more and more control over the App Store they lose the ability, however flawed, to collectively bargain on behalf of regular folks against developers [1].
Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?
Is there a single example?
[1] Items like forced private Sign in with Apple, or disclosing how data is used, don’t and won’t exist on “the Meta App Store” because as a single person or small group you’d rather have access to Facebook and you’ll give up data for it. But Apple can listen to users and then force Meta to comply with those demands, however flawed the situation may be and however self-serving Apple’s interests may be.
> Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?
Epic?
What prices were lowered? Or was there another improvement such as further privacy restrictions against developers?
The original 2020 discount was literally what sparked the Apple/Google-Epic lawsuits.