The iPhone's Last Stand?

https://stratechery.com/2026/the-iphones-last-stand/

by swolpers • 1 month ago

191 228 1 month ago

wiseowise2• 1 month ago

iPhone's last stand? More like Microsoft's last stand. Nobody wants their garbage hardware and software outside of enterprise shmucks more interested in filling their pockets with fat contract money than delivering value.

The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive

Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?

consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

What they do want to do is watch short-form video

Yeah, it seems so.

cultofmetatron• 1 month ago

What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

baal80spam• 1 month ago

This hurts.

wiseowise2• 1 month ago

brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?

coldtea• 1 month ago

and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!

yladiz2• 1 month ago

Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.

skywhopper• 1 month ago

I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.

thunky• 1 month ago

brother,

Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?

mcculley• 1 month ago

capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge

No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.

graemep4• 1 month ago

yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life.

Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.

jollyllama• 1 month ago

Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.

sph• 1 month ago

My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible.

At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.

Traubenfuchs• 1 month ago

Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?

Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.

imglorp2• 1 month ago

I think Microsoft does have a point here: hosted services and thin clients are going to make money. (1) Their main focus is selling services, selling you, selling your data, and showing you ads. Children are being raised to think that asking chat to add two numbers is normal; they will enter the workplace in this state. Everything for MS is a service: this is going to work for them. And (2) because those hosted services will also replace some jobs, as the enterprise schmucks want.

engineer_22• 1 month ago

How is that different than using a calculator

debugnik• 1 month ago

I still can't get over people calling ChatGPT "chat" instead of it referring to a stream chat.

thewebguyd• 1 month ago

Microsoft winning here requires them to actually execute well which they have a long storied history of completely missing the window. Tablets, phones, MP3 players, they were always either too early or too late and their consumer marketing is terrible.

You could be right, but I don’t think it’s going to be Microsoft that’ll be the leader here.

jstummbillig• 1 month ago

The anger is real, but it's misguided (as anger mostly is). The benchmark is reality. Everyone is more "TikTok addicted kids" than not and the analysis is quite apt.

wongarsu• 1 month ago

If enterprises were really focused on saving employee's time, Jira wouldn't sell. At least not the bog slow SaaS version

Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all

parpfish2• 1 month ago

i dont think jira (or linear or any other ticketing platform) is about saving anybody time. they know on some level that they are all a burden.

but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.

jmuguy• 1 month ago

Thompson is speaking broadly about markets, not trying to put anyone down. The point he's getting at is that Apple and MS are just playing (or trying to play) to their strengths. Did you see anything in the new Siri AI demos that looked all that much like someone getting work done? I didn't. And that's fine, for Apple and the iPhone. Microsoft for better or for worse is what a large part of the American business world is using to get work done, and so Microsoft is trying to position their AI strategy towards that.

For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.

csallen• 1 month ago

What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?

It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.

dang• 1 month ago

Can you please not post to HN in the denunciatory/indignant style? I know it's popular on the internet but we're trying for curious conversation here, and those things can't co-exist.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

gradientsrneat• 1 month ago

That last quote is when I stopped reading the article. The opening with the premonition of personal computing moving to the cloud, followed by the heavy use of the word "consumer", made it clear that the author has a cynical view of humanity, but at that point it went too far.

I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.

gohome190• 1 month ago

Apple is targeting consumers, for whom traditional chatbot functionality is probably sufficient for the vast majority of their AI needs.

I disagree strongly here. The chatbot is the furthest thing from sufficient for the average consumer. Take the newly announced feature that groups your compromised passwords together and offers to agentically change them all for you. Really cool! Could you do that via a chatbot interface? Sure. Would the average consumer? No.

move-on-by• 1 month ago

I doubt the ‘average consumer’ is even using a password manager, let alone going to change their password because of something so common place as it being compromised.

eschatology• 1 month ago

title is too biased and sensational

first paragraph begins the article upon 2 very big and flawed statements:

Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware.

maybe some would, but as a whole I would say this is not a common thing

After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game

no it's not

I didn't know about Project Solara so learned a new thing from the article, but I got the impression that it's not as big as the author tried to make it seem, felt very distant and forced.

drcongo• 1 month ago

It only gets worse from there.

QuadmasterXLII• 1 month ago

i was under the impression that the 2024 apple intelligence rollout was something of a victory: Apple realized that the majority of people don't actually want this stuff forced on them at the os level, and the ai maximalists all used apple anyways via clawbot (including purchasing an additional apple device, the mini!) because of apples non-ai-specific commitment to phone computer interop.

Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows

threetonesun• 1 month ago

I say this every time: the average person never wants to hear the letters A and I. Not because it has a negative connotation, but because they don’t care how their phone gets them an answer to “when is my dentist appointment” they just want it to do it.

Gigachad• 1 month ago

At least for consumer software, AI is synonymous with annoying nagware forcing itself in your way.

frizlab• 1 month ago

Exactly. Even though Siri is completely lost today, my friend asks it a number of random things, all she wants is an answer. Currently it redirects to the web, it’s enough for her. I told her “next year it’ll work!” And boom. We’re in the EU. Sad.

simonh3• 1 month ago

Yep, by using the terms intelligence, and occasionally Apple Intelligence and not AI[1], they get to talk about these features in a way that don't trigger an automatic mental gag reflex. The fact they cottoned on to this 2 years ago is actually pretty impressive.

[1] https://x.com/ArtemR/status/2056961743142957143

recursive• 1 month ago

But also because it has a negative connotation. Not with everyone, but with a lot of people. If someone says "That looks like AI", do you think they are intending to make a compliment?

lambdaone3• 1 month ago

Exactly this. I want a system that can understand basic instructions like this, in context, with all the necessary unspoken assumptions implicit in natural language and the problem domain, and get it right _every single time without fail_. A bit like AppleScript, but in natural language and smarter.

Most definitely _not_ a cleverer system that sometimes hallucinates or goes off on tangents, or sends my personal information to parties unknown.

nl• 1 month ago

Whether or not consumers wanted it, Apple failed to deliver. And that wasn't because they were listening or anything - they just couldn't deliver.

Apple doesn't leak much but there has been coverage of this:

https://spyglass.org/apple-ai-fail/ (April 2025)

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-... (paywalled)

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/06/07/one-fateful-meeti... (2 days ago)

zarzavat• 1 month ago

They couldn't deliver because they are not a startup and thus have something to lose in a way that OpenAI/Anthropic don't. If Siri starts telling people to self-destruct themselves it would be a major PR disaster, whereas Apple Intelligence being late is not. Arguably the technology they needed (strong guardrails) didn't really exist at the time and the extra couple of years is what made the difference.

simonh3• 1 month ago

I think you're quite right in a sense, but let's say it had been Samsung making these promises. Do you think the system not working properly or producing weird and unacceptable results would have prevented them releasing it anyway?

Well, the results[1] are[2] actually[3] in. Samsung of course did do that and the results are what you'd expect.

So in a sense Apple 'could' have released what they had, after all Samsung and others have, but almost certainly not at the level of quality Apple expects. In which case arguably not releasing until it is capable of reaching that quality bar is the right call. The wrong call was announcing it in the first place when it wasn't ready.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1b4zc1j/new_ai_tex... [2] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/awful-galaxy-s24-feature-... [3] https://www.androidauthority.com/im-tired-pretending-galaxy-...

marricks• 1 month ago

Their most recent iPhone which had no major AI advertisements associated with it GAINED market share over competition[1]

They have no ground to make up on AI, and changing their operating system to center on AI would piss off every iPhone user I know outside of tech, and probably half of them within tech.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/13/apple-q1-market-share-g...

kylehotchkiss• 1 month ago

copilot button in ms paint

things there don't seem to be going well

solid_fuel2• 1 month ago

Genuinely, the day they start shoving "AI features" into my iPhone is the day I switch to a fairphone or something I can actually own. I don't care if they include optional features, but I am so tired of seeing chatbots and text manglers shoved into every fucking app. I can write my own emails, thanks google.

fundad3• 1 month ago

Avie Tevanian told the parable of not needing to outrun the bear if you can outrun your friend. These companies aren’t competing to be perfect, they’re competing for our money.

If Apple had to be the best at AI, it would be out of business already. But it just has to make things people want and the customers will use them to run local or remote LLMs.

saberience2• 1 month ago

Last Stand? This is rather strong language and overselling the situation, for clicks I guess.

You might re-title the article instead, "The iPhone holds its ground", and it would be a more realistic title. But perhaps garnering less clicks.

I've always thought Ben Thompson is strong on enterprise and b2b topics but super weak on everything consumer related, he simply doesn't seem to understand consumer behavior (he has zero empathy or ability to project his mind into the average person's mind)

E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it. (It's struggled as people don't like the smaller battery life).

Ben was sure the Vision Pro would be a huge hit because he himself loved it. (It was a total failure as the average person doesnt want to pay huge amounts for a ridiculous looking dork helmet).

Ben raving about Meta's hand controller which he was sure was going to be the future of consumer electronics (The Neural Band). He was discussing how you could use it while your hand is in your jeans/pants pocket. Not quite thinking about how this would look while you're sat on the subway with someone sat opposite you.

Ben discussing how the future of watching sports is in VR. Not considering how weird it would be to go to a friends house to watch the game and everyone has their own VR headset. Also not considering the fun of watching sports is doing it with other people.

Basically, he has a huge issue with extracting his own liking of techy products to the average consumer who are basically nothing like Ben Thompson.

ksec• 1 month ago

This. Not sure why it it downvoted. The same with Patrick Moorhead, or in similar stance DED from Apple Insider etc.

Just because you like something, doesn't mean it will succeed. These people will more likely using some sort of industry knowledge to form conclusion which conforms with their bias.

On the flip side, just because you hated something doesn't mean it will fail. There are plenty of Apple haters who will write things that seems to make sense but completely misses the mark every single time.

mohsen1• 1 month ago

I get the criticism and all your previous judgments samples are valid. I also agree that title is click-bait BUT:

I know people are desperate for a Siri that works. The convince of just talking to your phone is priceless. If Apple gets this right, this is a huge deal – which it seems they are on the right track.

People are still talking to Siri for basic stuff like timers and alarms because it works, doesn't need an app, works when phone is locked or even away from you. If this works for more complex tasks like texting and general questions Apple will have the upper hand over Meta and Google in this new way of using computers/internet.

Apple also took a very clever approach for Capex and general AI strategy. Everyone knows that the best intelligence will eventually become a commodity and Apple decided to step aside from this expensive experiment. That's worth pointing out too.

cguess• 1 month ago

Personally I hope you can also type to Siri, which is what I'll use WAY more than voice. I work from home and live alone, but even then I don't want to basically be talking to myself all day. I also live in a major urban city and while random people talking to themselves on the sidewalks certainly isn't unheard of it's not a great look, much less on a subway or cafe.

fundad3• 1 month ago

That would be a huge deal. I’m wondering how current android is being received because as far as the reporting goes it has already delivered LLM voice assistant with personal context. But I haven’t seen any reporting about the consumer market reaction. Android phones already sell better so are thry just miles ahead now?

matwood2• 1 month ago

E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it.

The Air was interesting because everyone I've seen hold it, loves it. But, everyone also loves battery life and the best camera more. The Air is proof of that (similar with the mini lovers).

ramon156• 1 month ago

Wait what, is this a Microsoft ad in disguise?

swiftcoder3• 1 month ago

Weirdly, despite the headline and how the article starts off, it’s pretty pro-Apple by the last paragraph?

shazeubaa• 1 month ago

What struck me reading this is that everyone seems focused on who gets to own the next computing platform: Apple, AI companies, the cloud, agents, whatever comes next.

I wonder if the bigger question is what happens to us.

Convenience is great, but if we optimize away every moment of reflection, tradeoff, and decision-making, we risk becoming passengers in our own lives. The goal shouldn’t be to hand over our judgment to increasingly capable systems. It should be to use those systems to help us think more clearly and act more intentionally.

The future I want isn’t one where AI lives my life for me. It’s one where it helps me live it better.

kilroy123• 1 month ago

I am still convinced that Apple is slowly working its way to smart glasses. And that *this* is the Next Big Thing. Frankly, the future is very good AR glasses that just work.

- iPhone Air to cram everything into a small space

- Vision pro - a new OS for looking at things and interacting

- Better Siri and AI that works with voice

- Smart local model / routing to big models in the cloud

- integration with wearables (air pods and watches)

mschuster91• 1 month ago

Smart glasses aren't well-liked by the mainstream population. The term "glasshole" exists for a reason.

infecto4• 1 month ago

Never have even heard of the word before.

sleepybrett3• 1 month ago

Smart glasses WITH cameras and microphones aren't well liked by the mainstream population.

What if the glasses are display only and paired to an iphone for most of it's 'senses'?

Peanuts99• 1 month ago

This would not be a net benefit to society.

irieie• 1 month ago

It’s amazing how people post with such confidence - exhibiting the behaviour that they just posted something of immense value.

lol no you did not. A whole lot of nothing.

SirMaster• 1 month ago

I have 0 interest in wearing glasses on my head all the time though.

People spend several thousand on Lasik so they don't have to wear glasses all the time.

I don't see glasses as the ultimate form factor that everyone uses.

kbelder• 1 month ago

I'm not sure Apple will provide it or not, but I don't see a future that doesn't have nearly ubiquitous smart glasses. The potential usefulness is too great.

Obviously it'll be a big cultural conflict for a while. But again... the usefulness is too great for it not to happen. Cultural objections will give way, I think. Maybe it'll have to wait for a generation to die off.

hapticmonkey• 1 month ago

They’ve been working towards this since the introduction of ARKit in iOS back in 2016. Maybe even earlier.

They’ve done a very good job at proving the required tech with stuff like putting LiDAR in iPhones which is key to the Vision Pro….which is their AR interaction model testing ground. They are taking a pretty measured approach.

I just don’t think the physical tech is ready for AR glasses that reach a level of polish that Apple would ship mass market. But all the other pieces are there.

thenthenthen• 1 month ago

On step into the markets in Shenzhen and you will know it is not over. That new foldy iphone is a bit dodgy tho..

mg4• 1 month ago

    you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of
    devices, none of which stand alone, but are
    more like portals to interact with your agents

I would be really happy with my phone + headphones as the device I use most. But only if I could use Gemini (or ChatGPT or Grok or any other chat agent) in voice mode and say "SSH into my GitHub Codespace soandso and implement feature soandso.". And it replies "Did it. I told copilot (or codex or whatever coding agent lives on that VM) to implement the feature".

And then a minute later I could ask it "Is copilot done yet?" and it replies "No, looks like it is still working on it". And then a minute later I ask again. It replies "Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?".

But it looks like none of the chat agents with voice interface have such a connector at the moment? An SSH connector would be the most useful. But a "GitHub Codespace connector" or something like that would also do.

I wonder if that will be a missing piece for long. If so, I would build an agent with voice mode and ssh connector myself. But I guess it should come out from the big guys any moment now?

jazzypants4• 1 month ago

Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?"

A verbal diff sounds practically useless. Does it first read out the entire left-hand base, and then read out the entire right-hand target? Does it say loudly "REMOVING ... ADDING ... "? How would it read out something like Struct->Field? This seems lower fidelity than a visual confirmation, and I just don't think that voice commands make sense with this kind of work.

mg4• 1 month ago

It would tell me about the changes like a human would.

"It changed the plot function so it takes another parameter called linewidth. It also added an input field in the stylecontrols section where the user can ...".

trumpdong2• 1 month ago

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

slopinthebag• 1 month ago

I like how people think that if LLMs get to the point where they write code you can ship without reviewing it, that humans will still be in the loop "sshing into a code space" and "implementing features". Do you really think you'll even know what files are in that repo? Or that you'll be a necessary part of the process whatsoever?

MyelinatedT• 1 month ago

This Microsoft notion of “devices that don’t stand alone but surround you” sounds an awful lot like Google’s “ambient computing” of yonder.

Thrymr• 1 month ago

"The network is the computer." - Sun Microsystems, 1984

spogbiper• 1 month ago

"Everything's computer" - Trump, 2025

sleepybrett3• 1 month ago

Ambient computing goes back far further than that... and we are getting there. I have digital control over most of the lighting in my apartment as well as several other items through various iot adapters (button pushers, stepper motors attached to my blinds, power outlet relays). Audio reactive agents like alexa/bedpodsiri/whateverrunsheygoogle can put you in control of all of that. Nothing is stopping anyone from building a audio reactive agent that dumps input into their AI model or models of their choice if they want it.

With the right set-top-box, you tvs become just another display for whatever you want to send their way. We are extremely close to startrek tng style spaces. I'm sure there is a github repo out there that may even be there.

Why do you think apple has the appletv, the apple watch, the phone itself is essentially a pocketwatch with an addressable display.

I think we have all the parts it's just now about knitting them all together and building up a ux that works for normal people.

economistbob• 1 month ago

They see "thin is in" and I see remote servers now watching everything on your screen or within audio visual range. Eventually the only jobs will be at the intel agencies watching the data feeds from all the rabble so they can ascertain who is mouthy enough to whack and charge the others by the word for what used to be processed locally for free.

Of all the things they could build, why must they pick this future...

zombot• 1 month ago

Seen from this perspective, the GDR was prescient: They had more than half of their population engaged in spying on all the rest. We can now take our cues from them an reshape our economies in their image.

jubilanti• 1 month ago

the GDR was prescient: They had more than half of their population engaged in spying on all the rest.

Wrong. It definitely wasn't 50%. This number seems to grow each time I see it referenced. The Stasi directly or indirectly employed about 2% of the population, which is still huge. But /The Lives of Others/ takes a lot of artistic license. The true levels will never be known, but the largest and most widely quoted figure is 1 in 6.5 or about 15%. That derives from one historian's estimate, which was that at the upper bound, 1 in 6.5 people had in some way made a report to the government that in some way made it to the Stasi. I'm sure 15% of the people in any developed country have called the police at some point in their life.

This is also assuming no duplicates, you really think the Stasi could uniquely identify and disambiguate informants at this scale? And that every Stasi low level officer tasked with recruiting new informants or else actually recruited new informants instead of making them up and keeping the payouts for themselves?

And because I have to say it: authoritarian surveillance is bad, the Stasi was bad, this is not an apology or minimization, but a correction of historical facts.

al_borland2• 1 month ago

Having watched Microsoft try and fail to launch countless new ideas into the market over the past couple decades, I have 0 faith in their ability to deliver something people actually use. Others, often Apple, seem to succeed where Microsoft had previously tried and repeatedly failed.

cmxch2• 1 month ago

At least with Microsoft it’s more likely to not be a walled garden.

al_borland2• 1 month ago

At least a walled garden exists. Microsoft pulls the products that don't work in the market. So either you're left with nothing, or endless migrations as they keep trying different things without traction.

alsetmusic• 1 month ago

I've valued Ben Thompson's opinions less over time. He was super into goggle-like devices and remote meetings. I own Apple Vision Pro. It's a technical achievement, but not compelling beyond immersive video (too bad). He harps on Dems trying to clean up monopolies (Lina Khan during Biden, who had good principles but didn't get much done; probably blame her boss) and is quiet through republican bullshit (T2). He seems to interview huge tech figures as though he was the was the Verge or Nilay Patel does: with a soft touch.

Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.

Edit: missing words, thinking faster than typing

saberience2• 1 month ago

Yeah I've been noticing the same trends. In my opinion, when analyzing B2B topics, or in general enterprise software and hardware, he is pretty good.

But when it comes to anything around consumer behavior, individuals, etc, i.e. the average family in America, he is often completely and utterly wrong in all his takes and predictions. In fact, so wrong it's often laughable, and amazes me that he is so confident in his predictions.

Also, in the podcast I've noticed that he talks almost every podcast about his "hits", i.e. his times in the past where he predicted something accurately. But never, ever mentions the times where he was completely wrong. He's like the dictionary definition of confirmation bias (or survivorship bias).

It's like he's gotten overly confident (or a little arrogant) as he's become more of a tech celebrity, to the point where he thinks he's some sort of Nostradamus now and doesn't recognize his weaknesses or failures. And I've personally stopped listening to the podcasts as much as it's getting a little tiresome.

BTW, I also noticed how often he is wrong on deep tech topics, e.g. his explanation of IP addresses and routing in one podcast. It's like he thinks his business knowledge + Claude is enough for him to authoritatively discuss how technical systems work, and he often is mistaken...

grvdrm2• 1 month ago

I recently canceled my Stratechery Plus subscription. Don’t miss it to be honest - once a week free is plenty.

analogpixel2• 1 month ago

I canceled mine; I thought it would be a good way to stay updated on tech news without having to read other news, but then they over-extended the service to a bunch of other things instead of just focusing on the one news letter.

I don't care about a twice a week podcast about the NBA and national parks, or the other 5? podcasts about random stuff.

wrsh07• 1 month ago

I think some of his advantage analyzing where tech can go is because he pushed the limits of it (eg working remotely early early).

He was disappointed in the Apple vision pro for just being an entertainment device (it seems like you two agree there?)

And then the interviews by media of tech should be viewed as an iterated game. He can ask interesting questions for an analyst, but he (and Nilay) do depend on access and that fundamentally constrains what types of questions they can ask if they want continued access

Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.

Pretty sane take tbh

MattDamonSpace• 1 month ago

“Lina Khan had good principles”??

Yeah might as well cancel your subscription if you’re not gonna read it

deltarholamda• 1 month ago

After the blowout success of the Macbook Neo, I'd think the bet would be on a cheap iPhone. Maybe not, as so many people finance their expensive phone through their carrier, but I suspect a $300 iPhone would eat the mid-range Android market.

throw310822• 1 month ago

Not sure about this- Windows laptops have been a disaster for a decade- consumers have basically no clue of what they're buying and how it will work- will it be a piece of cheap, creaky plastic; will the basics actually work (e.g. audio in and out); will the speed be acceptable, will its fans constantly sound like a jet taking off, etc. A well made cheap laptop with guaranteed quality is a godsend.

The case of smartphones is completely different: Android is actually a good OS and there's plenty of excellent devices and high quality brands in the mid range.

simonh3• 1 month ago

I really doubt it, for several reasons. The Neo is cheap because it mainly leverages a compute core that already existed, consisting mainly of binned parts.

Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design.

The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity.

Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it.

I don't see it happening.

maherbeg• 1 month ago

iOS 27 supports devices all the way down to the iPhone 11, so I think they're doing pretty well here.

flyingshelf• 1 month ago

People would buy a $400 iPhone even if it's fatter than the competition. They most definitely have the ability to create a cheap phone from binned parts, even if they have to go as far as being unapologetically pastic.

Nobody would have guessed that Apple could ever produce the Neo, so you can't say Apple isn't looking into an iPhone Neo.

fundad3• 1 month ago

They had to replace the iPhone SE with a much more expensive iPhone 16e because of tariffs so I don’t think iPhones will get any cheaper.

pjmlp• 1 month ago

In some regions. I am yet to see how much of a success it is when the euro based prices.

analogpixel2• 1 month ago

Who is paying for all of this AI usage on the Iphone? I didn't see anything about a new AI subscription (maybe I missed it?), and I doubt Apple will want to pay million/billions a year to do it indefinitely.

gottagocode• 1 month ago

There will be ads/our data.

mitkebes• 1 month ago

Supposedly they're going to do a fair bit of it on device for privacy reasons, so the only payment for that will be RAM and battery power.

For stuff that can't be run on phones, some of it will be run on Apple's servers, which I'm assuming Apple is eating the cost of for the time being.

Stuff that needs heavy reasoning or external knowledge will be processed by google, in exchange for $1 billion a year. However Google already pays Apple $20 billion a year for google to be the default iOS search engine, so you could view this as just changing to google paying $19 billion a year instead.

e28eta• 1 month ago

I think the server-side stuff will be a mix of users & developers paying. I have seen this info in several places:

PCC delivers a powerful server model without compromising privacy: data is never stored, used only for the request, and independently verified. It's integrated with the OS and iCloud, so there's no authentication or API keys, no token cost to developers, a daily per-user limit (higher with iCloud+), and eligibility for apps under 2M downloads.

Source: summary on https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/319/

I haven’t seen any information about what’s happening with apps over 2M downloads, who graduate from the Small Business Program. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...

SllX• 1 month ago

Pricing is looking to be complicated and not clear cut.

Some of it is free on-device. Some of it is free & rate limited per day. They mentioned in the WWDC infomercial that users with iCloud+ (the storage tier subscriptions, Apple likes to throw random things in with that) will be able to get more uses per day. And some of it developers will pay for.

layer82• 1 month ago

From Apple's press release: "Some features, including image generation, have daily usage limits because they rely on powerful server models. Increased access is available with most iCloud+ subscription plans, which also include Apple Intelligence support for compatible Home cameras." (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/apple-intelligence-br...)

raincole• 1 month ago

Isn't it obvious? They bet on the same level of intelligence will get cheaper and cheaper and it'll be a smaller and smaller fraction of iPhone's profit.

And even if the assumption turns out to be wrong, they can just scale down and serve dumber and cheaper models. Shrinkflation is not a novel idea.

tarentel• 1 month ago

They briefly mentioned getting more access to some AI feature with an iCloud subscription so it isn't completely unlimited. Sorry I don't remember exactly what it is.

endemic• 1 month ago

I mean, they're already subsidizing some of the phone services (e.g. maps) that users expect to have.

thraway3837• 1 month ago

Not sure why the article is titled the way it is. Ben’s take on Siri AI being just good enough for the vast majority of consumers makes sense. The iPhone is the most consumer facing product because it’s a consumption platform. Some folks use it to create stuff, but most people use it to consume media or interact with another human.

iPadOS also did not receive any product specific updates because I think Apple understands that device well: it’s also a consumption device with a bit more productivity capability. They know they can ship a full macOS on iPad, as witnessed by the lower performance A18 chip in the Neo running the full OS, but what’s the point? Using a desktop UI with a touch interface is terrible. So you’d need a mouse and keyboard. By the time you get that accessory, you’ve already exceeded the cost of a Neo or MacBook Air. There’s also no size, weight or space difference between a fully accessorized iPad and MacBook Neo, Air or 14” Pro.

I think Apple will be fine regardless of whether this new Siri AI stuff actually works well or not. I think deep down they don’t really care because they don’t have to. All of their devices are perfect clients that can interact perfectly fine with cloud inference. And their devices are such a joy to use. That’s what Apple is good at.

Now the confusing part is the new Microsoft hardware project. Is Solara a laptop? Tablet? 2-in-1? Phone? They already have a great hardware run with Surface, so I wonder if this new project is a more powerful local inference push?

catlikesshrimp• 1 month ago

I stopped reading when he mentioned "..beyond the fact that billions.." I looked it up and iphone users are much less than two billions. I can't expect much axcuracy from this opinion.

kens• 1 month ago

I noticed the same thing. "The fact that billions of consumers already have iPhones" is a hallucination, not a fact. Billions of consumers have Android phones, but that's not the case for iPhones. (Billions of iPhones have been sold, though.)

phuff• 1 month ago

[C]onsumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention- harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

I came here to talk about this, like some other commenters did, too :) I think that this _is_ a predominant view amongst most of Silicon Valley but I think it's kind of a local maxima view... Easy to agree with, easy to see that it's a functional idea, but... people... (i.e. consumers) do lots more than just waste time on their phones even though I bet that's a huge amount of what people are doing across the US right now.

I guess the thing that _is_ true about this nugget is the "at scale" part. It's hard to find things _at scale_ that people would pay for on a phone. So the phone sort of falls back into this easy to monetize thing via advertising. But I think people (qua consumers) probably can clearly be a sustainable market for way more than attention harvesting (or dopamine fracking!) but it requires a lot more effort to think of things that you can build a market out of there. So people sort of lazy-back into attention harvesting via ads.

daft_pink2• 1 month ago

It kind of reminds me of Windows mobile and blackberry and palm os where apple was clearly behind but they eventually caught up. The first iPhone didn’t even have apps!

I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket. It’s okay and apple can easily simplify and eventually win. The mainstream hasn’t really started using agents yet and no one has come close to delivering a platform that will get them there.

acdha2• 1 month ago

I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket

These ones also seem really weird because the baseline is most often someone using the iOS app to do the same thing, and the agent demos are usually slower in addition to being riskier. One of the Chrome demos had someone buying groceries at pretty hefty markup, which seemed to be targeting a narrow demographic of people who a) don’t worry about paying 50% more for produce and b) can spend time writing a prompt but not 30 second opening an app and just doing it with zero chance of getting scammed.

daft_pink2• 1 month ago

Something that I thought when reading this was that I'm not willing to buy groceries remotely, because when I had covid during the pandemic I had grocery delivery and I ended up with milk that expired in a few days and produce that was very subpar neither or which I would have bought in person.

I would actually be willing to use AI to purchase groceries if it could provide me with some assurance that it would choose the items better than a shopping cart.

As for now, I'm only willing to purchase non-perishable goods that are difficult to screw up online.

Might be a service idea for AI.

bjustin2• 1 month ago

I agree but I also think this end up a case of "worse is better". Sure it sucks that doing things with AI is slower and more prone to issues, but now you can be more lazy and still mostly accomplish the same things.

I don't expect to go for that, but other people might. Especially if AI stuff continues to improve.

GeekyBear• 1 month ago

I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket.

Once again, early 1990's General Magic looks prescient.

They were working on smartphones with agents capable of completing remote transactions before we had wireless data networks.

General Magic: The Greatest Tech Company You’ve Never Heard Of

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tuFl4WEXBrk

allowing end-user equipment with limited capabilities to upload Telescript programs to servers to allow them to take advantage of the server's capabilities. Telescript could even migrate a running program... transfer it to another Telescript engine (on a device or a server) to continue execution, and finally return to the originating client or server device to deliver its output.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langu...

JellyPlan• 1 month ago

Side note, this page really likes to jiggle horizontally as you scroll.

DontBreakAlex• 1 month ago

Not on my phone. Ah the web, such a beautiful place.

827a4• 1 month ago

You cannot trust companies to communicate an unbiased vision of the future, because they will always build what they're capable of selling. Microsoft and Meta are incapable of selling phones and laptops; they're certainly capable of building them, but few people will buy them. So instead Meta builds smart-glasses and Microsoft presents this weird vision of "connected thin devices" by keeping the hardware itself very abstract and unknowable. The hardware doesn't matter to Microsoft, not because the hardware doesn't actually matter, but because it cannot matter, because Microsoft cannot win in hardware. Its not a vision of the future; its a vision of what Microsoft can meaningfully sell. Microsoft can meaningfully sell their weird constellation of 365 subscriptions that no one knows what they do or if they remotely do what you buy them for; thus their marketing now wears that idea of "unknowable capability" like a mask.

jamothy• 1 month ago

"You cannot trust companies to communicate an unbiased vision of the future, because they will always build what they're capable of selling." This just rewrote my brain, thank you.

MoonWalk2• 1 month ago

Based on Microsoft's ever-more-fetid output over the last two decades, they can't sell self-respecting people jack squat.

827a4• 1 month ago

IMO there's an even more real story at the heart of this idea than stratechery's predictable, banal attempt to compare Microsoft and Apple's competing visions of the future, and its part of why I've become so bored of stratechery's articles lately. He glances against that Microsoft video, recognizes that the video does a horrible job of communicating their vision, and then carries water for Microsoft by working overtime clarifying their vision for them; instead of doing the obvious and totally reasonable thing of asking: Why the fuck is that video so incomprehensible? Microsoft used to be pretty good at aligning themselves and their customers around a shared vision of their future, but since the advent of AI the company has seemed more-and-more adrift at sea without a bearing.

Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.

trueno• 1 month ago

lol thats actually funny and kinda spot on. some of my coworkers regularly move goal posts to double down on windows in the face of microsoft doing absurdly hostile shit and it feels like watching some kinda stockholm syndrome. i sort of get it like many i was born and raised in a windows computer household and it wasnt until i dunno 7 years ago or so i started dinking with other stuff, i think if i try to remember hard enough there was some perceived inner feelings of tribalism there. but really once you start getting proficient in another OS it's hard to make the case for windows, windows just feels kinda dirty.

so yeah, it's interesting to watch microsoft pitch a piece of hardware or something, see a couple coworkers gawk at it, sometimes buy it, only to have it repeatedly turn into vaporware rarely with a refresh from microsoft or to end up in another line of products thats sunset forever. microsoft appreciates their business tho, i'm sure. i just wish they could see how funny their relentless hope looks from the outside that microsoft might someday reign supreme and be everyones computer sweetheart again. i had a coworker actually express frustration because we didn't select the microsoft fabric solution or whatever for a datalake. took a hot minute to just get him to relent on trying to only champion microsoft services and products at every corner it's wild to me that someone should have so much allegience to a massive tech company. especially one that is not just hostile to it's users but the industry at large, microsoft has kinda always been a hostile part of the computing history story.

specproc• 1 month ago

I love my Surface laptop. I use arch, BTW.

protocolture2• 1 month ago

Does the btw version have a changelog published somewhere?

theandrewbailey• 1 month ago

Surface Pro with Debian KDE here. I just dressed it up like Windows 7, because I need more Fruitiger Aero in my life.

woah• 1 month ago

At the same time, the only things that get built and sold are the things that someone is capable of building and selling

g42gregory• 1 month ago

There is a presupposition in this statement, that someone in these companies even cares about being unbiased. I don't think this is true.

protocolture2• 1 month ago

Eh I agree mostly, but Microsoft was doing well with Lumia, at least in other markets. The 520 was a loss leader but it had really good penetration.

I almost reverse this. Its not that Microsoft cant sell hardware, its that no one trusts them to keep making it long term. Everyone is just waiting for the end of XBox, Surface is presumed to have a ticking clock. They bought a phone company and ended all the products they purchased. They set up a concept lab to create an iPad Killer, in the Courier, hired a fancy apple hardware guy and killed the project because the office team was worried about competition. All they need to do is support a product long term and the market will start to accept them as hardware guys again.

Aperocky2• 1 month ago

Microsoft put forth a vision for a new ecosystem of hardware devices under the banner of Project Solara

While I don't necessarily disagree with their vision but if implemented like "Copilot for Windows" I don't see me or anyone wanting to go anywhere near it.

Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac".

Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature.

throwaway27448• 1 month ago

Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac".

Is this not what Apple Intelligence is?

Aperocky2• 1 month ago

Maybe, but I've never interacted with it on my 5+ apple devices, so I'm blissfully unaware.

chrisandchris• 1 month ago

No, they don't force it down your throat. You can click "no" once in a while and it looks like it does not exist. Try that with Copilot.

bigyabai• 1 month ago

Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature.

Sometimes it's a curse. Apple might be a 2-3 trillion dollar business right now, if they didn't refuse to sign CUDA drivers for their ARM servers.

bjustin2• 1 month ago

Apple's market cap would have dropped by 30-50% if they had signed CUDA drivers? How would that have played out?

_HMCB_• 1 month ago

Long-winded article. I’ll give you my take: people like their phones. They identity with them. It’s a singular piece of tech that isn’t cumbersome. It does multiple things well and sometimes at once. Why would I want a duplicity of devices to do similar things at the cost of more stuff?! Answer me that riddle.

billdybas• 1 month ago

What I don't see anyone talking about is how Private Cloud Compute is behind an iCloud subscription.

From what I can tell, this means any app that is using their foundation model is sharing against a user's pooled usage quota & Apple takes all the revenue upside if a user chooses to upgrade their plan.

Why would an app developer choose their model which has a minuscule 32K context window, might get throttled because of usage in another app, and doesn't share revenue over any frontier model vendor (where you can package/pass along token costs to your customers)?

827a4• 1 month ago

I have consumed a decent amount of literature coming out of WWDC and I do not understand how the billing and model availability side of things will work.

Its definitely the case that Apple said that some AI capabilities will rely on cloud hosted models; and that some of these capabilities will be metered; and that "some paid iCloud+ plans" include increased usage. Its unclear what the full extent of capabilities that rely on cloud models are. We know that Spatial Reframing is a capability that relies on cloud models and will be metered; this was stated on-stage. The typical conversations with Siri are, supposedly, a mix, possibly based on how complex the query is? We know there are two cloud-hosted models (what they call internally "Cloud" and "Cloud Pro"); are both of these metered? Does it depend on the use-case (e.g. is Spatial Reframing metered because of its use-case or because of which model it uses?)

A lot of this would be easier to figure out if there was, somewhere, a "meter" you could see drop every time you used a metered feature; but there isn't. There is zero indication of metered AI usage anywhere in the settings that I have found (I am on the 27 dev beta). There is also zero indication that any of the iCloud+ plans include metered AI usage. It is also of note that Apple very specifically said on-stage that "some iCloud+ plans" include increased usage; implying that the $2.99/mo plan likely does not.

Apple has also announced that developers under a certain revenue number can use their foundation models in private cloud compute for free [1]. This implies: third party developers will pay for it. In other words: it might be the case that your shared iCloud+ pool of AI usage only applies to AI capabilities from first-party Apple apps, while in third-party apps the developers are expected to front the bill. Which further reinforces your point: Why would anyone choose to integrate with these cloud models?

Strange situation, and unlike Apple; they seem very frantic.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/apple-bets-cheaper-ai-will...

meatmanek• 1 month ago

Freemium is a potentially interesting model for app developers. If you're small enough to be in the free tier, you can avoid the risk of someone turning your app into the next backend for Chipotlai Max and running up your AI bill.

Once you get enough downloads to where Apple starts wanting to charge you money, you can consider switching to OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Deepseek or whatever. Sounds like they've even made that relatively easy to do in the Foundation Models framework -- just implement the LanguageModel protocol. I expect open-source or provider-written adapters to pop up that would let you use your vendor of choice.

sroussey• 1 month ago

Motra, my workout app on iPhone (with great Apple Watch support, including counting reps), uses Apple foundation models to build a workout.

Not all use cases will be big agentic coding things that will use millions of tokens.

Some on device (or on server) stuff might be small one shot calls that just use what’s the OS provides.

manquer• 1 month ago

Apple will deploy the same security/ privacy / ease of use /packaging strategy they have done for every other product.

Same reason developers continue to use Apple payments even when they have to shell out 30% of the revenue.

I can see Apple, setting App store rules around declaring AI usage, or could start labeling apps not using their models with strong language designed to amplify the increasing user concerns around AI and so on.

The product strategy has to be better the product itself does not have to be objectively better for the developer for them to have to choose it.

sleepybrett3• 1 month ago

Microsoft has a bad reputation for hardware. Back in the late 90s you could trust them for mice/keyboards, not fancy but they worked. Some swore by that ms natural (it gave me RSI that it took a special keyboard that made people look at me like I was crazy to fix). The xbox eventually helped them build some trust. However then there was the surface series and the phone. They dropped support for certain surface tables/laptops very quickly, they got deeply mixed reviews. The phone was back to front a disaster. Recently they had that AR headset, total miss, a miss that makes the Apple Vision Pro look like a wildly successful product.

I don't trust microsoft with hardware anymore, nor do i trust them with software.

qmr• 1 month ago

The concept — which isn’t entirely clear from that video, but was more fully explained on stage — is that in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud.

The fuck I will.

There is no cloud, only other people's hard drives.

-- your increasingly crusty and curmudgeonly old Unix admin who is not paranoid because they are out to get you

w10-1• 1 month ago

What does it mean to say Apple is behind in AI or back in 2024, when Apple is not trying to build AI models, and no one else is nearly as evolved as their local architecture?

Is Microsoft's device "vaporware" even comparable to a live demo?

iPhone AI comes via AI-safe pipes: private by design, on device or not, accelerated via MLX. Given that vectoring an AI request to GPU/NPU/CPU/private cloud takes non-trivial engineering, is anyone else as advanced as Apple? It seems wishful to believe interactive UI's will be superseded by untethered, non-interactive (pay by the token) workflows.

iPhone AI is last-mile; the value depends entirely on what you're trying to do. Apple can demo features for their own apps (esp. with personal knowledge), but the real question is what independent developers can do with Apple pipes.

He can say enterprise (not consumers) is the only way to recoup the Nvidia capex, but free local coding models run well enough now on mid-range Apple Macs to make me doubt the business model of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, and the upside for Nvidia.

I'm glad Apple will be investing that capex into their own chips.

paradox242• 1 month ago

I just know I'm going to end up having to pay more for a phone that doesn't have all this AI bullshit on it.

bcjdjsndon• 1 month ago

Op said himself there's no money selling chatbots to users... The money is in enterprise.

ahartmetz• 1 month ago

in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud

Ewww, that's fucking gross. Please don't say such things when I'm about to eat.

dmzxnico• 1 month ago

iPhone will always lead as long as iOS is the standard. To be honest, most companies do good phone frames. But they all run on Android.

Apple has been smart by keeping iOS only for them and not work with partners as Android does, it helps keeping it optimized.

If someone could do the same, it'd be a game changer in the next 10 years.

The iPhone's Last Stand?

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