"Apple doesn't have their own LLM. They can't innovate."

They also don't have their own search engine yet they make $20B+ a year from search.

Lesson in there.

when you are that size you make money off of anything. but are you maxing?

the argument is more of a 'could they have made more if they had their own search/ad'
-- google makes more than 20b off of their traffic otherwise they wouldn't pay 20b for it

Apple is a hardware company that's good enough in software. Always has been.

They win when it's about hardware differentiation + vertical integration.

Frontier LLM doesn't matter if there are 3 other ones and every one of them is available as an app.

Dad, geek, conversation liquidity provider. vrypan.net (home), @l--o--l (fun). devcoin:$lemon3

My point is that if you are extremely good at one thing (hardware), and you make most of your money from an other (services), it creates an internal tension that goes against what you are good at.

I don't expect someone to offer significantly better hardware in the domains where Apple already excels. But a new device? Not impossible.

The services are deeply coupled with the hardware.

They were a good desktop operating system company. But their first party software has always been second tier. Look at every category they are not the leader even on their own devices with the exception of mobile safari (because they looked down private APIs)

Until you can offer a significantly better hardware + software bundle they aren’t going anywhere. ChatGPT will have an app. And so will every other competitor.

Profits from services is more than profits from hw in the last quarters, I think. And given that "services" in Apple's case is 99% rent seeking (google, app devs), I don't find this healthy.

Also Apple use to be a great software company.

All this combined, could mean that Apple is vulnerable to a paradigm shift in hw, just like Microsoft was with mobile. Curious what they'll show tomorrow.

Apple‘s partnership within Anthropic points to local models. Probably running in earbuds.

OS level integration of LLMs is akin to the hardware differentiation you mention
-- plenty of earbuds on the market (LLMs as apps) but airpods slap (OS level LLM integration could too)
-- not to mention running models locally which is literally hardware differentiation

agree that 'don't have a model, can't innovate' is wrong 
but because it's actually reverse 
if they were innovating they would've done better already