Apple has sat out a capital-allocation shitshow. Its investors and likely customers are better off for their patience.
We can't say for confidence they'll find a niche in the AI world. But we can say they probably sat out some value-destroying capital investment. Like, I don't think Apple is going to wind up strategically worse off than Meta. But it won't have blown a metaverse on this.
Most everyone outside of a core believer knew metaverse was a bad investment and total value destruction.
Im not sure that Apple's strategy will pay out -- they may avoid the heavy capex lift but if that strategy is successful they ill have missed the strategic upside. Thats the part the jury is out on.
They've taken a more deliberate approach which might be the winning one ... tbd. We should re-check this in 3-5 years to re-assess.
Of course we can - they managed to avoid spending 100s of billions while still giving their users AI...
There is no future in which the entire world is beholden to the current VC-backed companies for AI. IOW, there is no moat.
Doesn’t seem like they changed their ideas much (I’m sure some iteration occurred but still) and the issue was the tech didn’t took 2 years to become workable
Feature set is borderline identical
I'm not saying they played 5D chess. Maybe they got lucky. But they're coming out of this infrastructure boom with the second-highes P/E ratio in the Magnificent 7 [1], dividend intact, and tens of billions of cash on balance sheet unburned (and their stock and balance sheet unincumbered by new debt or stock sales).
If you choose to outsource your AI to OpenAI/Anthropic/whomever, now you're beholden to another (risky), and for a critical feature of your ecosystem that your customers have grown accustomed to and to expect. And it's not just that they might jack up prices on you, but they can just... get acquired, or go bankrupt, or fall behind on model development...
