They are a hardware company at heart, the do software as software is needed.

For building a competitive AI they'd have to hire the talent, which is expensive and then do a massive investment, which may still end up far behind the competition. (See there attempts with Siri)

Now they can pick the model they want and if time is right they can still build their own.

In the end they still want to sell devices. They aren't doing a search engine (while they could), they are not doing an LLM model, ...

>> They are a hardware company at heart, the do software as software is needed.

This has never been true, not since Steve Jobs returned.

The heart of Apple is software and hardware integration.

Hardware companies that do software just to prop up the hardware business do terrible software, and (no doubt the Apple haters gonna hate this) but Apple does - for the most part - amazing software.

>> which is expensive and then do a massive investment

Apple has $145 billion in cash.