Apple? The company that has built its entire brand and product lines around "we know what's best for you and if you don't like the way we've done it, you're wrong"?
You’re not wrong but so far they’re one of the only major companies in their cohort that isn’t shoving AI down our throats/integrating it into literally everything and begging us to use it with some embarrassing corporate plea.
Opting out of Siri is incredibly easy and there are no major features i care about that decision locks me out of. I think it has some impacts on CarPlay but it’s never stopped me from being able to put on music for my kids or whatever.
Frankly I forget I’ve opted out all the time because they never bug me to start using it.
Let's not pretend that fact is anything but a happy accident, though. The only reason AI has been practically scrubbed from their website is to try to make us forget the time they preannounced fantastically brilliant AI capabilities and then delivered less than nothing -- not even fixing Siri, which is the obvious #1 product in the world that needs to be rebuilt on LLMs.
Apple, maybe because of ego, is often not the major mover on anything they didn’t come up with first. They tend to take a wait and see approach with a lot of ideas. Hell look at VR (which I’m surprised they even did but clearly they see longterm value)
OK, but it's easy to retroactively declare the "late entry" into smartphones as a galaxy-brain move, to let all those suckers at BlackBerry, Microsoft, Handspring, Nokia, etc. beta-test all the ideas and formfactors, then swoop in as soon as they knew what they had developed would torch the whole market - we know the outcome, and that's frankly quite accurate.
But the difference here is, this iPhone was obviously already far along in development in 2005, when the BlackBerry 8700 was shipping.
In this case, due to their own announcement, we all know that Apple had intended to have LLM technology ready to ship in late 2024. We also know from the copious leaks that they eventually made massive, flailing pivots, and did major reactive internal reorgs to try to get back on track. They've had a lot of setbacks which push them later and later, and unlike in 2005 there is a great likelihood that their competitors can use the delay to significant advantage. (A chance. Of course, Google is the only other player in mobile and they seem sure to do mostly boneheaded things, like the subject of this article!)
But anyway, pretend we don't know any of that, pretend WWDC24 never even happened either. If the assertion is "Apple being at least 3 years late to the market for a major tech industry trend is in this case a sign that they are wisely taking notes from the sidelines, and will eventually pounce with a product that blows us all away, iPhone style" -- my reply is, from the outside and from this moment in time, isn't this also how it would look if they were repeatedly fumbling hard on the execution of this idea, with no clear path to shipping and no clear path to having a superior product to show for it?
