What the heck is going on at Apple?

3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even happens) be a big deal, but he's not the heart of the company. He's been an extremely compentent accountant; enjoy your retirement party and gold watch. And to suggest they are falling behind because they're not investing hundreds of billions in an AI "strategy" that shows no pay-off - while the other tech companies start to scale back their capital investments? I've never been a huge Apple fan as a company but their current situation makes me more bullish than ever.

Perhaps the sky already fell a while back?

I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon, but Siri seems to have stagnated. The big "Apple Intelligence" capabilities of the iPhone 16 haven't exactly landed. The Vision Pro seems to be on at least a partial depreciation path.

The only real innovation I've seen in the last decade has been the M line of chips. Mind you, these are undeniably really good; but even that hasn't changed the market share that much (though it is going up and trending well).

Personally I prefer a useless Siri that I can turn off, rather than a copilot into everything I cannot turn off.

I am perfectly fine with Apple lagging behind in "AI".

Wouldnt you prefer a competent Siri that you can turn off?

Gemini on android just works. I can ask it nearly anything in spoken natural language and it'll talk back with an answer.

I can count on one hand, the number of times where I have gone “gosh, I so wish my voice assistant was better”.

It queues up music correctly, and picks the right destination on maps in my car. 98% use case satisfied. Would I like it to be better? Don’t really care. Is it a purchasing point? Nope. Would I miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? Also nope.