One of Apple's directors expresses his vision and fears about the impact of AI on the company. According to him, consumers may no longer need iPhones within ten years. This could potentially cause a major reset in the company's strategy.
Will Apple still be known for its iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other new hardware in ten years? The growing integration of ever-more powerful AI into our daily lives leaves Eddie Cue, the company's director of services, wondering about the strategy to adopt for the next decade.
He believes that the impact of artificial intelligence will be so profound that consumers will soon no longer need what the company is best known for today. In particular, there is talk of the inevitable death of the iPhone, due to this development. He explains: "The heavyweights in the industry die hard... We're not an oil company or a toothpaste manufacturer—these products are made to last forever... Maybe in ten years we won't need an iPhone."
Why smartphones (among other things) are probably doomed
He adds that some big names in Silicon Valley have fairly recently succumbed to the rapid changes in the industry—for lack of a sufficiently radical change of direction. He cites HP, Intel, and Sun Microsystems, among others, which continue to exist, but "are now much smaller players, with limited impact.".
Today, Apple is a $2.92 trillion company (at the time of writing). But this golden house for shareholders remains, like other tech players, threatened by a loss of momentum. The firm was slow to embrace AI, and is now clearly lagging behind the Android competition.
iPhones have long since reached maturity. With profitability increasingly based on the sale of dematerialized services (Apple One, iCloud+, Music, TV+, etc.). More broadly, in the product catalog, Macs, in particular, are delivering good commercial performance. But Apple is clearly experimenting with other formulas – by claiming to want to transform iPads into computers. Or by presenting its Vision Pro headset as a spatial computer.
We feel that the firm is trying to stay in the game. But AI's incredible capabilities still lack a "vessel" that would allow the company to sell something that can do everything its current products do, simply by talking to a broad language model.
Apple must offer a solution at the right time
Beyond that, there's the question of timing. Arriving too early with a good idea can quickly turn out to be disastrous. Especially if the technology, especially provided by third parties, isn't quite up to scratch yet. This is exactly what happened to Humane's AI Pin. A fascinating product, since it didn't really integrate a screen (except for a monochrome laser projector), and focused on a 100% conversational experience.
Unfortunately, the slowness of the ChatGPT API, the proprietary nature of the operating system, which lacked applications, and the long list of things that voice interactions didn't allow for got the better of this $699 device, with a $24 per month mobile subscription. The idea was nevertheless good, with a more liberated user experience than what current mobiles offer. Apple could certainly take inspiration from this idea, by perfecting it.
However, it seems that the company's efforts in VR headsets tell another potential story. Apple could very well offer a more functional and complete user experience via lightweight mixed reality glasses. The question now is whether Apple will be able to avoid accelerating the development of LLM models comparable to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, which it has fully mastered. In order to offer an AI-centric product that meets the challenges and market expectations.
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