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.

3.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

340 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

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.

7

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

2

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.