This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.

If true this is the deal of the century. Apple pay 1/14th of a Wang per year for a top tier model whereas Meta burn multiple Wangs a year in salary alone and get garbage.

Coincidentally, Google pays Apple over a billion dollars a year (est. at 1.5B) to be the default search in iOS. Could be re-titled.

Google closes their trade deficit to half a billion dollars per year.

Mind blowing they couldn't get this to work. It's struck me lately that the models don't seem to matter anymore, they're all equally good.

The UX and integration with regular phone features is what makes the tool shine and by now there should be plenty of open source models and know how to create their own.

What is Google offering that Apple can't figure out on their own?

Maybe people don't personal assitant AI enough to justify the investment? My phone has probably 6 or 7 AI tools that have talking features that I don't ever explore.

This isn't good news.

It means that Apple's huge, expensive AI team has basically failed.

And it presumably means that Apple is willing to accept Google's practices for ML model training and use.

Today I asked to my homepod:

> "Hey Siri, whens the next Formula 1 race in Montreal"

and she responds with the same infuriating answer I typically get

> "Hmm, I found some interesting results on the web, I can show them to you if you ask again from your iPhone"

I don't care what pride Apple has to swallow, or if they have to layoff 10,000 people.

I just want my device ecosystem to be able to do what its competitors have been able to do for a decade, or what Ive been able to build myself for the last 3 years. A working and useful voice assistant.

At this point Im convinced Tim Cook could sit at a terminal himself and ship a better version of what Apple has in an afternoon.

The question is if Apple will buy TPUs to run it too.

$1B for the software and $1B for the hardware, every few years.

I really hope Apple is working hard on improving on-device models for their use case so they can get out of this.

Why Gemini? Just because of the closeness between the two companies already or is there a technical reason? I like Gemini the least because each search results in slightly different hard to reproduce identically results... I find I like LibreChat the best and then just connect it to all the other LLMs like ChatGTP, Claude, Anthropic, etc. from there.

Much like they are paying the leaders in other specialties instead of becoming eg. a assembly company (Foxconn) or a search company (Google Search) they are not going to try and be a leader in at least large language models.

Am I interpreting that correctly?

I can understand that to a degree but that means the future for Apple is as a technology integrator, not a fundamental technology company.

As I type that out I guess I’m realizing that has always been true.

... and has widely been regarded as a bad move.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/apple-pla... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826664)

On device models please. My computer should work for me.

So now it does not matter what platform you choose for your smartphone, you cannot escape Google AI surveillance. Well you can shut it off on the iPhone I guess, but that means no more privacy focused Apple Intelligence.

Next to all the money they poured into Liquid glAss, this will be the worst investment Apple has ever made.