Apple is taking a beating right now. Tech and finance media are piling on because the company’s AI rollout has been, by Apple standards, a mess. The much-hyped AI-powered Siri they showed off in June? Delayed indefinitely. The text message summaries they actually shipped? Comically useless.
Look, the criticism isn’t entirely unfair. Apple fumbled the execution. But there’s something deeper going on here that most coverage is missing.
Every big tech company is scrambling to cram AI into their products. Why? Because “it’s the future!” What problems does it solve? Nobody’s really sure. Are customers demanding it? Absolutely not. Last year Apple had to pull an AI ad because the backlash was so intense.
The real reason is Wall Street. Investors are desperate for an Apple “super cycle” — some new feature compelling enough to make people rush out and upgrade. AI was supposed to be that. It wasn’t.
So Apple did something rare: they admitted the features weren’t ready and pushed the timeline out. “In the coming year,” they said. Which, of course, just fueled the narrative that Apple has fallen behind in the Most Important Technology Of Our Time.
That’s where this whole thing goes off the rails.
There’s a saying in politics: “The party can never fail, it can only be failed.” It’s what ideologues say when their candidate loses — blaming the voters instead of the platform.
The same thing is happening with AI. AI can never fail, it can only be failed. Failed by you and me, the smooth-brained Luddites who just don’t get it.
Kevin Roose at the New York Times recently argued that Apple has failed AI, not the other way around. He said on his podcast that Apple needs to “be more comfortable with error, with mistakes, with things that are a little rough around the edges.”
Respectfully, that’s nonsense.
Apple built a $3 trillion empire by being obsessive about detail. Its “walled garden” approach — hated by developers, sure — is why a billion people trust this company with their face scans, bank accounts, and real-time location. You buy an iPhone, turn it on, and it just works. No manual required. Even your parents can figure out FaceTime.
Roose says regular users understand that AI isn’t perfect, and that there’s a right way and wrong way to query a chatbot. So apparently we’re the ones failing AI — because on top of having jobs and lives and laundry, we should also learn to work around the limitations of models that may or may not give us accurate information.
To what end?
As Roose’s co-host Casey Newton pointed out in the same episode, it’s not like Google or Amazon has cracked some incredible use case that’s making people line up for new hardware.
“AI is still so much more of a science and research story than it is a product story,” Newton said.
That’s the real takeaway. Large language models are fascinating science. ChatGPT and Claude are genuinely impressive. But a bot that’s 80% accurate — and confidently wrong the other 20% — isn’t a product. It’s a demo.
Apple knows this. They’ve always been about shipping products that work, not shipping science experiments. And while their competitors are busy hyping half-baked features, Apple is doing what they’ve always done: waiting until the tech actually delivers before putting it in people’s hands.
Maybe that’s not a failure. Maybe it’s the only sane approach.
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