NVIDIA has not delivered useful AI applications either, yet it clearly is one of the main AI companies, and while many are struggling to turn their AI applications into reliable revenue streams, NVIDIA has a viable business model.

So does Apple even need to create applications (that nowadays will get copied and opensourced in a day), or the hardware is the winning strategy in the end?

> So far, they have not yet delivered on any useful AI application.

Who has? Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft have spent hundreds of billions and produced nothing but chat apps that Apple could build in a few days, they’re all just interfaces to models that are available to Apple via an API. Hard to imagine Apple as anything but the winner of this era unless OpenAI or Anthropic pull something out of the bag.

> So far, they have not yet delivered on any useful AI application

AI doesn’t have to be full-blown conversational AI.

In Photos, text recognition in Photos works well, object recognition and face recognition are somewhat decent.

In Mail, I find message summarization useful.

Small steps? Yes, but I think these are useful AI applications.

I do not use them, but in accessibility, they have AI applications to describe scenes which, I think, are useful to some.

They provide picks and shovels to all the gold rushes. Others can capture the AI revenue - Apple can ultimately license and use AI just like anyone else. They certainly seem to be capitalizing on it already.

Arguably the only “useful AI application” delivered by anyone is Claude Code, and the jury’s still out.

Tbh this applies to more or less the whole industry. We have incredible firepower yet I'm seeing probably even less product innovations than before the AI era started. Mostly R&D, benchmaxing and slop.

"privacy & trust"

But this is all based on marketing not facts. Apple is as privacy invasive as the next guy. Obviously this shtick will work as long as marketing continues do to good job.