That's not "prepaid", that's just normal building of hardware. And Apple's AI hardware is pretty general-purpose -- it's already widely used for things like dictation, image recognition, all sorts of stuff. Sure they've upgraded their "neural engine" into a "neural accelerator" to optimize it more for LLM's, but that's still incremental.

What Apple is also doing is investing server-side, just like everybody else, precisely because phones can't handle the serious stuff:

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-serv...

So I'm not really seeing the unique Apple advantage here. Samsung is doing the exact same thing with Android, with LLM-optimized silicon.