🔮 Why I changed my mind about Apple

AI’s most important hardware company?

This post originally appeared in Exponential View by Azeem Azhar.

“Demand for AI inference is extremely high. Data center capacity is constrained, utilization is high and demand is growing faster than chips can roll off the production lines.”

I hold my opinions firmly, but when the facts change, so do I. Today I want to tell you why I changed my mind on Apple and AI.

Apple has been conspicuously slow to deliver on AI. Unlike its peers, it isn’t spending hundreds of billions on data centers. Capital expenditure has been reasonably flat. Siri, the feature we all love to turn off, hasn’t meaningfully improved in a decade. No one expects major breakthroughs from Apple in research AI or applied AI in the near future.

John Gruber, the most widely read Apple analyst, called a WWDC demo “a concept video.” Analyst Ben Thompson said Apple was nowhere near the cutting edge. I was in this group.

But what I missed was that every single day, as I was hammering away at ChatGPT or Claude, switching between models, I was doing it through an Apple device. The model I used changed constantly but the device did not. This only really hit me once OpenClaw arrived.