> I can't think of any company which has comparable know-how and, most of all, a comparable sell-out scale to even consider Apple's strategy.

I'm not sure where you position Samsung or Xiaomi, Oppo etc. They're competitive on price with chipsets that can handle AI loads in the same ballpark, as attested by Google's features running on them.

They're not vertically integrated and don't have the same business structure, but does it matter regarding on-device AI ?

Vertical integration matters for sure, but people often underestimate the scale in which this market is already skewed.

- Apple owns more than 50% of this market-segment, the annual sales of iPhones is roughly 200 Million units. In comparison, Samsung Galaxy S-series sits at roughly 20-25 Millions.

- Apple's is alone in the iOS ecosystem, while Samsung, Xiaomi and Oppo have to compete within the Android space every year. iOS is extremely sticky, which makes a certain volume of iPhones almost guaranteed to sell every year, at a lofty profit margin.

In comparison, Samsung always has to consider that the next BAD Galaxy-S might only sell a fraction of the previous one, because users might move horizontally to another Android brand (even to Pixel, a first-party product of their ecosystem provider). So Samsung cannot even make bets based on the sale of 20 million units, they are already at risk to make bets on the initial shipment-volume (~5 millions) because if the device doesn't sell they will have to PAY money to the carriers to get them into the market.

Apple has a much lower risk here. If the next iPhone is not catching on, Apple will likely still sell 200mn iPhones in that year, because the ecosystem lock-in is so strong that there is little risk of losing customers to anything else than ANOTHER (then more-profitable) iPhone.

So even when assuming a MASSIVE annual drop of 25% in Sales, Apple can still make development bets based on a production forecast of 150 MILLION units.

For their supply-chain that's still an average production output of ~400k units per DAY for each component. With that volume you can get entire factories to only produce for you.

That's why I can't think of any company in a comparable position. Apple can add hardware to their device and sell the resulting product to the consumer for profit before delivering any actual value with it.

If any competitor in the Android space attempts that, just the component costs alone will risk the device to be dead-on-arrival just because "some other Android device" delivers the same experience at lower cost.