This is literally Apple's strategy, and has been for decades. They watch other players discover what works, then Apple makes a well-polished consumer product for the mass market. They have run this playbook to great success in at least music players, smartphones, smart watches, wireless headphones, tablets. Apple is literally never (since the '80s) among the first to market.

> they are being inactive because they don't have the skillsets

Rare to see an argument that Apple can't hire talent.

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ktallett 2 days ago | parent [-]

Apple were regularly first to market with WiFi, USB, FireWire, etc. The Apple of late are not first to the market and also have mixed success regarding quality and usability. They sell plenty due to to name but I would say the watch has been greatly surpassed, Vision Pro is a clunky solution for a portable headset, and the airpods max are a rather poor product all told not being remotely usable in day to day life in the outdoors. Apple have had no success with Machine Learning, Siri getting worse as it goes on is one key example.

They need a significant team creating their own model, (the talent of which has already gone elsewhere) and they also need to be working towards the future of photonic computing for running those models with success long term, again which will require a huge hiring effort. Considering it's clear they are not putting in that hiring effort it's obvious what work they have been doing.

	▲	runako 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> first to market with WiFi, USB This is extremely revisionist. For ex with WiFi, ThinkPad + a Lucent WiFi card was standard issue for years before any Apple product had WiFi. Apple shipped integrated WiFi, which is wholly consistent with the notion of improving what the industry is doing. Connectors? Yes, Apple has a history of improving connectors. Other computers have had connectors since forever. In this case, Firewire was Apple's semi-proprietary alternative to USB. USB, which Apple put into their computers years after others had shipped it. > They need a significant team creating their own model Your judgement. It's entirely reasonable at this point to license other models and look for a better/cheaper entry point. Apple tends to enter markets when it is possible to make profit. It is not clear yet that the business of creating and running advanced models is a profitable venture. By which I mean no company has yet demonstrated the ability to earn a positive ROI by developing and running an advanced model. > working towards the future of photonic computing Again, nothing in Apple's history would suggest that they would even aim to do this.