Robotics has it's own supply chain issues. Apple's forced divestment away from China creates a supply gap that will be difficult or impossible to bridge with US suppliers. It could easily develop into another "Tesla vs. BYD" situation that depends on federal protectionism to work (and outright fails as a business outside of the US). When you look at it from that perspective, home robotics is just another Vision Pro product on the roadmap. It will have hardware limits, the price tag will be astronomically unaffordable, and competing systems will probably undercut Apple in seriously threatening ways. By the time that Apple can iterate robotics into something that customers want, the market will have festered into something beyond their control.

At risk of sounding like a glazer, Nvidia has a super clean path to home robotics no matter who wins the consumer segment. They have experience selling their hardware to system integrators like Nintendo and Tesla, and have shipped low-power GPGPU platforms on an SOC since the mid-2010s. The value add of CUDA is enormous, versus the struggle Apple will have bringing developers into the CoreML ecosystem. Nvidia has the momentum with Tegra and Jetson, the hardware and software lead will take years to catch up with.

I guess in a fair essay, this is the point where I should commend Apple for their output. They make the fastest AArch64 CPUs on the market, have an excellent "ecosystem" sell to the billions of iPhone owners in the world, and can ship any service from advertisement to F1 and sports streaming. Individually these are very impressive accomplishments that Tim Cook deserves commendation for. Taken as a whole, I don't see any coherent strategy that ties it all together. The "iPhone ecosystem" concept can't save expensive masterpiece products like the Vision Pro, even if it's a great headset. Users despise Apple's advertisement and service upsells, and single-core CPU performance isn't constraining home robotics. All of Apple's strongest tactics are pretty benign in the light of who they'll have to oppose.

This was a good discussion, and it's fun to game-theory future products with other people. Admittedly, asking Apple to compete with Nvidia's tech stack is like asking the coughing baby to defuse a hydrogen bomb. I recognize that the full scope of my demands for competition are unrealistic, but I think there's some meat on the bone that Apple is leaving for no good reason. The Mac Pro is one of those lowest-hanging fruit that didn't have to die, or at the very least could have been redesigned to champion the advantages of Apple Silicon. The Mac Studio is not a very confident future-facing product, and I feel a bit of worry for Apple's future designs seeing it as their flagship Mac. Apple has all the resources to push out the compute frontier for consumers and datacenters alike - here's hoping they join the fray, for all of our sakes.