Marco Arment

That's not going to work.

I don't think I would concentrate quite that much on the AI stuff, especially considering how badly Apple is doing there.

But yeah, this is one of those things where it's like it would have been better if 10 years ago they had struck a better balance between, you know, new features and keeping up with industry trends because that would put you in a better position.

And I would argue that paying attention to the plumbing, especially on the Mac, but even on the iPhone or whatever, like really just, you know,

uh polishing up the basic functionality release after release is super essential in a world where you're going to drop in a bunch of agentic ai because the cleaner you can provide interfaces to your functionality like that you have stuff that it works it's proven it's reliable putting you know allowing ais to start controlling that or having access to it like you know for example what apple has done with security like they weren't doing it for ai but having a good security architecture allows them to

you know potentially because we don't know what they're actually going to do but in theory puts apple in a good position to have ai features integrated with the phone in a way that is privacy preserving let's say they didn't do anything with privacy and then ai came along and they said oh well we should really just concentrate on ai now it's like no you should have been concentrating over the past 20 years on privacy stuff because if you want this you know unreliable lm things to control any aspect of the phone

you need to have a good privacy architecture in place.

And they do, thankfully, right?

And that same philosophy, I think, is what they should be doing over all their platforms, which is it behooves you to maintain and polish and improve the basic architecture because whatever the next thing is, it will be easier to integrate it into your stack if you're not building on a house of cards, if you didn't neglect privacy for 20 years, if you didn't, let's say, neglect the finder for the entire history of Mac OS X.

It would be way easier to hook up an AI into that if it wasn't like this terrible, fragile house of cards.

It's buggy.

Nobody likes anymore.

And so, you know, you can't go back in time and fix that.

But like to answer Michael's question, like the balance between like new features and keeping up with the industry, every one of my like Apple report cards have ever done.

I've said that Apple is not striking the right balance between essentially maintenance stuff, like, you know, taking existing features and eliminating bugs and improving the design and new features.

That continues to be the case.

It is exacerbated by what Marco said, which is like, oh, guess what?

There's a bunch of really new stuff that you should get on right now.

It's a lot easier to strike that balance when you're kind of in a quiet period.

When you're not, that's when you're, you know, all those chickens come home to roots like, oh, we totally should have been keeping Mac, you know, more ship shape for all those years because now we're going to try to hook up this agent stuff to it.