He’s right about the AI, but “Instead they should really focus on Apple Vision Pro” is a really good way to make absolutely EVERYTHING else you say seem wrong too.
If you can get it cheap and light it would be great
Disagree. The Vision Pro is one of the few remaining products where Apple has a tangible advantage over its competitors and where there is no clear, equivalent alternative from another manufacturer (at its level of quality).
The implication of this is that the technology is not a dead end, and I still maintain it is a solution in search of a problem. There are no competitors because there is no need for the product.
Somebody once had the best 3D TVs too - but they no longer exist for a reason.
Apple might have an amazing bit of tech with Vision Pro, but its a failed product when it’s10x the price of competition.
Apple fell into their own RDF on this one.
I think this stems from the idea that Apple is a lifestyle company not a technology company. This is part of the reason they’ve been so resistant to join iOS and macOS though we are starting to see those walls fall. Because the touchscreen versus the mouse driven is the lifestyle choice you either choose the lifestyle of iPad or choose the lifestyle of laptop, and now you can choose the lifestyle of spatial.
There are people who really want apple to drop the whole AI thing and go back to doing different lifestyles.
and its COO said that it was getting “harder to justify” the cost of AI because it was hard to track the cost of AI to any actual useful features shipping.
It seems that we’re finally sliding down to the trough of disillusionment.
At their very core, Large Language Models’ costs run contrary to basically every model of selling software.
Consumers and enterprises alike have been trained to pay a monthly fee for a service, and while these services might have limits or strictures, basically nobody buying software expects to have a metered service, let alone one that’s both metered and with hard to measure costs.
LLMs burn tokens at a per-million rate regardless of whether or not you get the response you want, or whether it does what you ask it to do. If you ask a coding agent to do some sort of software task and it goes off and spins its wheels in a loop, you’re paying for the tokens regardless.
AI companies knew that consumers would never pay the actual cost of their AI services, so they have, for the most part, sold them monthly subscriptions with vague rate limits that allow them to burn way more in tokens than the cost of their subscription. SemiAnalysis found that you can burn hundreds of dollars on a $20-a-month subscription and thousands of dollars on a $200-a-month subscription, and while AI boosters will claim that these companies have “70% gross margins on tokens,” there is little proof that this is the case, and my own reporting shows that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025.
SemiAnalysis found that you can burn hundreds of dollars on a $20-a-month subscription and thousands of dollars on a $200-a-month subscription
Not to mention there’s millions of free user that will never pay for any token but still burn through token(electricity and clean water!) for stupidly mundane stuff that is achievable either via searching the internet, or simply asking human. Those are the money that can only be earn back via sneaky ads, else it’s considered loss.
The future is rather interesting to watch, and i really wish i’m not part of it.
When it works, it’s genuinely awesome. But that’s a load-bearing when.
I like this better than saying “that ‘when’ is doing some heavy lifting”.
has been described by Politico as the AI boom’s most “acerbic gadfly”
The AI boom is about as real as the Metaverse boom.
I’ve seen researchers and academics prefer ‘AI spring’ to contrast with the AI winter of the last few decades to highlight the change in research and development spending, without the ‘successful market’ implications of the word ‘boom’. Can’t really call it a ‘boom’ when you’re losing billions a day.
I expect a mix of dotcom boom and Enron.
Don’t forget to sprinkle in some GFC with the banks it’ll take down.
Can’t wait for our third once in a lifetime financial crisis!
Fad
Famously thought Apple would release a TV and a car for like a decade. I hope he’s right but he’s got a track record.
Not completely wrong though, Apple was working on a car for ten years but ultimately canned that project (ironically because of AI).
They work on many projects that never release, he was very wrong about the car and tv releasing.
How do you think the Apple TV was developed?
The Apple TV set-top-box existed before the TV TV project. It launched in 2006.
