I believe, under Tim Cook’s leadership, the biggest contribution from Apple to consumer tech is the Apple silicone. Everything else is umm, ok, you are late; and sometimes, outright, meh!
Not iPhones, not wearable gadgets, the one single thing that has the biggest contribution in changing the technology landscape is the M series processors. It almost took the mighty Intel out of business, Windows laptops irrelevant, and made portable computing absurdly powerful.
Apple loves control, and hates dependencies. Probably that’s the main reason why they are “late” in the AI game. It is a choice. I think they won’t be in the business of building their own AI models until they solve the hardware and electric-power bottlenecks. And highly likely, they are trying out a response for nvidia’s GPU domination—wait for it, Apple is probably going to put a serious dent there soon.
Apple will not settle for energy and water hogging large data centres for AI, they are waiting to bring something that would run AI natively on device with their own high-efficiency processors that mimics GPU style processing at ultra-low power. Perhaps a new series of processors, or more compartmentalised AI focused GPU capabilities within the M series. That’s the bigger game out there that Apple is probably playing.
The future of AI is in the smaller solutions that actually makes day to day lives easier; nobody needs a super-AGI for anything really. That’s why SLMs and low-power, context-aware, task specific agentic solutions are going to thrive over bigger and bigger models of general LLMs. And solving this “micro AI” territory is probably Apple’s next move.
I of course do not like how they confine and monopolise everything that they touch, but I am also deeply thankful to them for building products that simply just work, and make everyone’s life easier. Let’s see what the new leadership does after the era of Tim Cook.
