https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_cupertino
Not disagreeing that the delay in Siri features was disappointing. But John Gruber shouldn’t get so upset about these. Apple is a hardware company and they make the bulk of their money from selling devices. Sure, Services revenue been growing, but all complementing hardware sales. AI is no different, the main focus is to drive up device sales.
But which other platform is even close to having a comprehensive set of AI features built into the system? Windows have Co-pilot, but more as an extension to Edge and other Office apps. Android is so fragmented and no such thing as a unified AI platform on that. Not saying Apple is the leader of this, but certainly hard to say that they are losing this game. In fact, I can’t think of any AI app or service out there not being available on iPhone and Macs. I have over 20 AI related apps installed.
I don’t think people are fully appreciating on-device AI yet. It’s good to have the basic writing tools, as extension of the keyboard features, not ever sending my data back to the cloud, Apple or not. It is that kind of privacy that I have kept me away from installing any 3rd party keyboards/IME on my iPhone and Mac.
Interestingly, the recent release of Mac Studio M3 Ultra shouldn’t be mocked by Gruber. The key point shouldn’t be just about why wasn’t it a M4 Ultra. But why did Apple make a 512GB RAM version? When M3 Max only had a maximum of 128GB RAM. So a “normal” 2 max chips in one Ultra should be 256GB at best. But this is getting the AI community very excited. As a 512GB machine can fully load some versions of the biggest DeepSeek models out there. And with 2 machines hooked up using Thunderbolt 5, they can load the full model. The waiting time for these 512GB machines are already pushed to over 2 weeks. These are expensive, over 10k each, but they are selling well. It was clear that Apple did this specifically for this market to jump from 196GB M2 Ultra to 512GB M3 Ultra.
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