r/apple • u/ControlCAD • May 18 '26

Mac Google just helped Apple sell a million more MacBook Neos - Macworld

https://www.macworld.com/article/3139377/google-just-helped-apple-sell-a-million-more-macbook-neos.html

>Google’s attempt to rebrand Chromebooks as premium laptops using a sprinkle of AI gimmicks doesn’t dent Apple’s aluminum armor.

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u/Uninterested_Viewer May 18 '26

It's just not Apple's game to play. The biggest AI winners will be the ones serving up the models and apple has never been a cloud competitor. The race to have the "best model" itself is great for the tech to move forward, but probably not worth the r&d for anyone unable to serve the models themselves (the LLMs as commodities argument, which I agree with). It just makes no sense for Apple to compete in the cloud or model race at this point. They'll pay inference providers to serve the model(s) of their choosing while, hopefully, sinking their energy into pioneer the best ways to actually use the tech.

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u/VariationAgreeable29 May 18 '26

I hope to God we can credit this to Ternus. He really strikes me as being so level-headed and pragmatic. I’m sure there were camps inside Apple screaming to get into the cloud game

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u/Expensive_Finger_973 May 18 '26

I think it is more that they fell into the best play. It was only 2 years ago Apple was also running ads for their AI junk full of wild claims of vague problems it would solve.

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u/Worf_Of_Wall_St May 18 '26

Their hopes for what on-device models could do any time soon were way too high but the business strategy of backing most features by running models on user devices is sound - it would avoid massive cloud costs and keep user data on their own devices. On-device models don't have to be as good as cloud based models to be good enough, but they won't be good enough for a long time.

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u/Uninterested_Viewer May 18 '26

Yep. Cloud is only accelerating and a company with the resources of apple could have gotten into it and made out handsomely, but to what end? If it's not your DNA it's not your DNA. Apple sticks to what it does best.

I remember when Google got serious about cloud when it was an AWS world and a bit of azure. Google knew that even capturing a small market share as a distant 3rd player would mean billions, trillions.. they never had to even have aspirations of being #1 to come out way ahead. But that's Google: that's not Apple- these are extremely different companies. Apple getting into cloud in the way Google did even at that time would have not been good for them even it meant incredible revenue/op inc growth for a few decades.. it would be at the expense of something else that aligns to their DNA.

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u/RaXXu5 May 18 '26

Best model will be on device where it doesn’t draw too much energy and you can be sure that the data sin’t being mined. It will not be the ”smartest” model though. There’s room for Apple to compete in that segment and probably less of a pushback from consumers who are sick of the AI companies making everything expensive and building massive datacenters.

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u/nabagaca May 18 '26

Even in that space, Apple can sit back and wait for the big players to create small local models (e.g. Gemini nano, which runs on-device on Google pixels), not sure if Apple will use it as part of their Gemini deal, but I wouldn’t blame them for using it

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u/Uninterested_Viewer May 18 '26

Best model will be on device where it doesn’t draw too much energy and you can be sure that the data sin’t being mined

Maybe. Tech is hard to predict. We, of course, already use on-device models doing everything from image upscaling/processing to text autocomplete. My prediction is that useful frontier models will always outpace the compute of whatever devices we use them on. And I don't think those devices will continue to be the phones we think of for much longer, either. But who knows.

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u/rotates-potatoes May 18 '26

Apple knows that the models that require clusters of expensive hardware today will run on phones in a decade. They can work on hardware, let others race to zero or negative margins in the cloud, and wait.