Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware.

Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the hood and computed locally. Hence their chips. I don’t see what Apple have to gain by building a competitor to what OpenAI has to offer.

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discordance 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

~25% of Apple's revenue came from services in FY25 (and 50% from iPhone, ~25% from other hardware). They made $415B in that year, so ~$100B from services alone!

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smt88 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

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tokioyoyo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user. Basically everyone around me is the same.

	▲	presbyterian 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, I’ve been a loyal iPhone user for a long time, and very few people I know use iMessage. I use it with my parents because they don’t have any other messenger, and they don’t even really know it’s iMessage, they just think of it as texting. Everyone I know is using something else for messages, whether it’s Discord, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, or occasionally Telegram or Snapchat.

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bdavbdav 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

US centric view, which I believe to be wrong. UK is predominantly WhatsApp, and the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones.

Income is a much tighter correlation than messaging platform. Rack up those market shares by phone value and the scales tip even harder.

	▲	hiq 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones According to https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kin... it's closer to 50/50.

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russelldjimmy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No one uses iMessage in my country. Yet iPhones are sought after. Some of us just really like iPhones for the experience - not everything is a conspiracy. People can have different tastes and are more free to choose than people on HN like to believe.

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Maxion 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

iMessage is AFAIK only really a big thing in the US.

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camkego 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I totally buy this as someone located in the US, but what is everybody else using? It can’t be WhatsApp? Is everyone sending all their connection graphdata to Meta?

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andrewl-hn a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of SMBs use Instagram to connect to their clients, so Instagram build-in messenger is a default option for a lot of people (especially women) in many parts of the world.

Some places have regional messengers that are very entrenched, like Line in Japan or KakaoTalk in Korea.

WhatsApp is a default option in a large number of countries including most of Middle East, parts of Europe, Brazil, most of Africa, Southern Asia. To me it is surprising, too, because out of all messaging options WhatsApp seems like the least developed and least ergonomic.

And yes, this does mean that most people share whatever data Big Tech wants. They use Meta to talk to each other, auto-upload their photos to Google, click "accept" to every cookie banner so that thousands of no-name companies around the world know where they are and what they are doing at all times.

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austhrow743 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You understand that Facebook and Instagram are also very popular yes?

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puelocesar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People who care about privacy (very very few) use signal, everyone else uses Whatsup

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agos an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

in my country it's Whatsapp, and has been since before it was acquired by Meta

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russelldjimmy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s WhatsApp. No one thinks about sending data to Meta. The world is much bigger than the HN bubble, where almost no one thinks about privacy implications.

	▲	lnsru 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely this. No one cares about privacy. 99,9% population has no clue how tech works. “Oh, it’s an app on my phone.” That’s what typical consumer understands. How text travels from one phone to other is something magical. Got WhatsApp, because there is no other channel to communicate with customers. It’s literally used by everyone without exceptions. Really scary.