Apple is in the midst of what is basically a rotten, no-good year so far. The company is contending with a high-profile antitrust battle with the Department of Justice, plummeting iPhone sales in China, and another EU regulatory investigation.
Daniel Howley for Yahoo Finance:
The company is also still facing a shortfall when it comes to generative AI capabilities. And while it’s widely expected to debut some kind of generative AI offering during its WWDC developer event on June 10, it’ll need to have quite an impressive showing if it’s going to catch up to its Big Tech rivals including Microsoft and Google.
All of that is hurting Apple’s stock price. Shares of the iPhone maker have fallen more than 7% since the start of the year and are up just 6.25% over the last 12 months. Shares of Microsoft, meanwhile, are up 14% year to date and 49% over the last 12 months. Google? Shares of the search giant are up 9% year to date and 43% in the last 12 months.
Apple’s latest headache came Tuesday, when Bloomberg, citing Chinese government data, reported that iPhone shipments fell 33% year over year in the country in February…
While Apple is certainly facing a slew of challenges, it’s far from down and out. It’s still the second-richest company in the world by market capitalization — behind Microsoft — and it’s sure to continue to sell millions of devices and services subscriptions throughout the year ahead.
Still, for the foreseeable future, Apple could be in for a bumpy ride.
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in February:
Apple’s time a having a caretaker CEO to milk products and services conceived and created under Steve Jobs will, hopefully, draw to a close sooner than later.
Apple is clearly not as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs who even started the company’s work on Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro, but the company — thanks to Jobs and Cook’s subsequent management of iterations of products and services conceived during Jobs’ tenure — now has more than enough money to make up for Cook’s lack of vision.
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
If Apple can manage to train its generative AI in an unbiased way – a big IF – Apple will be just fine in generative AI soon enough. The company has an install base of more than 2.2 billion active devices in the hands of the highest quality customers; even “good enough” generative AI will be just fine. Anything above and beyond that will just be icing on the cake!
Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024)… – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
MDN has a point on “good enough” AI. One thing no one is noticing is there is no “leader” in AI. There dozens of XGPT out there. A bunch have been literally open sourced. People are running these things on their desktop.
And frankly, no one normal people have really found a use for it. Unless your dying to have it make up BS answers with bad information, or want it to make some cool photos videos of “what would dogs playing chess look like instead of poker”, the killer app for it is more hidden than it is for the Apple Vision Pro.
We’re in VERY VERY early innings on the machine learning/AI front. A lot of this panic “they’re late to AI” seems to be fomented by people that love to mess with stock prices more than on any semblance of cogent analysis.
Weirdly, coming in LATE to AI, like it did to the phone, like it did for the MP3 player, and making something coherent with it, could be a great end game, even if it was born of mismanaged stumbling.
Isn’t the point here that Apple doesn’t even have ‘good enough’ AI? They’re currently reduced to using other providers’ services which Apple will put their ‘skin’ on as I expect will happen with the next iteration of Siri.
The thing with AI is that successful implementations retire a focus. What does Apple want to focus their AI on? Till they figure it out, efforts like the L4 is what they have to compete against.
“Nvidia has partnered with Google to launch a new cloud hardware offering, the L4 platform, optimized to run video-focused applications. The L4 platform is designed to accelerate “AI-powered” video performance1. Nvidia and Google are also partnering to establish the industry’s first AI-on-5G Innovation Lab, enabling network infrastructure players and AI software partners to develop, test and adopt solutions that will help accelerate the creation of smart cities, smart factories and other advanced 5G and AI applications.”