It’s become a trendy position to take: Apple is well behind other tech companies like Google and Samsung when it comes to AI in smartphones. Apple overly hyped Apple Intelligence but underdelivered. To make matters worse, the AI-powered Siri has been delayed until next spring. It’s not just that Apple is late to the AI party, Apple also came wearing inappropriate clothes.
This is the one place where Apple has been rewarded for lagging in AI
What I mean is that Apple is not only behind Google and Samsung in making AI features available to its smartphone customers, but Google, and to a lesser degree Samsung, have added AI capabilities that are useful and easy to find. When they work, that is. While the Magic Cue AI feature is supposed to deliver information to Pixel users proactively, this has not yet worked as perfectly as Pixel users might have hoped. Still when it does run smoothly, being given information from your messages, calendar, and emails without asking for it tops the capability of the iPhone to make that email you’ve written sound as though it was composed by Shakespeare.
Still, there is one place where Apple’s position in AI isn’t considered a negative and is, in fact, a positive. Surprisingly, that is the stock market. This month, the market experienced a sell-off of some tech stocks, especially those heavily involved in AI. Nvidia has dropped 8.08% this month to date, Google parent Alphabet is off 2.58%, Microsoft is down 1.47%, and Amazon is 3.90% in the red this month. Apple, on the other hand, is ahead .75% during November.
Apple’s shares outperformed those of its peers during November. | Image credit-Sherwood
One reason for these results is that Apple is spending much less than the other companies. For example, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta combined to spend $100 billion on property and equipment during the last quarter. Apple, by comparison, spent only $3 billion during the same quarter. Remember when AI dominated Apple’s 2024 iPhone event for the iPhone 16 series? With this year’s event, AI wasn’t mentioned at all.
Apple reportedly has a deal with Google for a custom Gemini LLM to help power AI Siri
Apple is reportedly going to be using a custom 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model of Google’s Gemini Large Language Model (LLM) to help power AI Siri. Compare that to the 150 billion parameter model that is used with the cloud-based version of Apple Intelligence. The deal will reportedly see Apple pay Google $1 billon. The bottom line is that unlike the other companies, Apple is not spending as much as the others on AI; this has helped prop up its stock since it isn’t constantly on the hot seat dealing with questions from analysts about all the money being spent on AI and asked to explain precisely what it expects to accomplish spending all of that money.
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Apple’s 2024 flagship is still nothing to snark at. It has all the same software features, about the same cameras, save for super-pro modes like ProRes RAW Log 2 recording. If that didn’t mean anything to you, you’ll feel perfectly fine with an iPhone 16 Pro in your hands. And you save about $200 on what is essentially an excellent device that’s still hard to beat. Item prices vary by condition, color, and availability.
