I think this analysis is directionally right but the supportive arguments are quite weak. Maybe the iPhone is the wrong form factor, but do we really doubt Apple's ability to create a new hardware device and tightly integrate software?

The deeper issue, in my view, is that Apple is violating its own philosophical belief, articulated by Steve Jobs himself: that Apple should always own the primary technology behind its products (i.e., multi-touch, click-wheel). This is central to Apple's "we need to make it ourselves" approach.

Camera lenses are commodities. AI models are foundational. Apple's own executive leadership likened models to the internet, and said, well surely we wouldn't try to build and own the internet! This misplaces AI as infrastructure when in fact it's foundational to building and serving useful applications.

They further see "chat" (and by extension) as an app, but I think it's more like a foundational user interface. And Apple's certainly always owned the user interface.

When Siri was first announced, there was excitement that voice might be the next paradigm shift in user interface. Partly because Siri is so bad for a decade now, and partly because people didn't feel like talking to their screens, Apple may have learned a very unhelpful lesson: that Siri is just a feature, not a user interface. In this age though, chat and voice are more than features, and yet Apple doesn't own this either.

Apple should not buy Perplexity. Perplexity is smoke and mirrors, and there's nothing defensible about its business. Apple cannot get the talent and the infrastructure to catch up on models.

So what then?

OpenAI is not for sale. Anthropic is likely not for sale, but even if it were, Apple wouldn't buy it: Anthropic is very risky to Apple's profit margin profile and Apple can't unlock Anthropic's bottleneck (capacity).

In fact, to Apple's advantage, why not let the VCs and competitors like Microsoft and Amazon and Google light their money on fire while this industry takes shape, provided you have an option in the end to sell a product to the consumer?

The best option, in my view, is Search Deal Redux: partner deeply with Google and Gemini. Google very obviously wants as much distribution as possible, and Apple has more hardware distribution than any company in history.

Partnership is the only path because, yes, Apple missed this one badly. There is one area where I agree with Tim Cook, though: being late doesn't guarantee you lose, even in AI.

> I think it's more like a foundational user interface.

I don't. The foundational interface hasn't been created yet. Let's be honest, chat isn't great. It is the best we have right now to leverage the technology, yes, but if it is our future — that we cannot conceive of anything better, we've failed miserably. We're still in the "command-line age". No doubt many computing pioneers thought that the command-line too was foundational, but nowadays most users will never touch it. In hindsight, it really wasn't important — at best a niche product for power users.

> Apple may have learned a very unhelpful lesson: that Siri is just a feature, not a user interface.

That is the right lesson, though. Chat sucks; be that through voice, typing, or anything else. People will absolutely put up with it absent of better options, but as soon as there is a better option nobody is preferring chat. This is where Apple has a huge opportunity to deliver the foundational interface. Metaphorically speaking, they don't need to delver the internet at all, they just need to deliver the web browser. If they miss that boat, then perhaps there is room for concern, but who knows what they have going on in secret?