Benedict Evans

I think Craig Federighi said in an interview after WWDC, like, we don't have a YouTube.

He didn't call it YouTube, but like, we don't have a YouTube, we don't have a car-showing service, we don't do grocery delivery.

We also don't have a chatbot.

Okay, that wasn't quite the question.

The question for Apple is how much would integrating an LLM into the operating system change the experience of what it is, potentially shifting the competitive balance with Pixel, which at the moment basically only gets bought by people who work for Google and people who work for the tech press and literally no one else buys Pixels.

Well, because Google doesn't want to compete with Samsung.

We could go down a whole smartphone industry rabbit hole.

There's this sort of question for Apple around, does this actually change the experience of what a smartphone is, what the ecosystem is?

Does it end up kind of getting Microsofted in the sense that you're going to still, for the time being, you're still going to buy a smartphone?

It's not at all apparent there's going to be another device.

And if there is, it's a long way away and it might be an Apple device as well.

But you're still going to buy a smartphone.

You're still going to buy the nice one with a good battery and the fast chip to run the AI models and the good screen and the best camera, which will still be an iPhone because Apple still has the best chip team and a whole bunch of other hardware advantages.

But everything you do on it will be from someone else.

And it won't be someone else in the sense that it's an app from the App Store.

It will be someone else in the sense that it's a model running in the cloud, which is what happened to Microsoft in the 2000s, which was everyone had to get on the Internet.

To get on the Internet, you needed a computer.

You weren't going to buy a Linux computer.

You probably wouldn't buy a Mac either.

So everyone bought a Windows PC, but they were using it to do web stuff, not Microsoft stuff.