Apple is only bottlenecked from doing the same by their AI products not working.
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
That's the thing: amazing hardware. I want two things: good hardware and software I trust. It's going to be hard to trust a for-profit company selling a closed source OS, but Apple is doing a much better job of consistently talking and walking respect for user privacy for many years. There may be another reason beyond incompetence that they're not rushing out half-baked chatbots wrapped in privacy disasters.
The other problem is things like DRM being increasingly common. Last I checked, many video streaming providers either don't support Linux, or only serve low-quality videos. With Macs you know they'll get support.
Many content rights contracts I see instruct the streaming platforms that they must detect Linux and either give low quality or deny the playback entirely.
It's because, rightly or not, they don't trust Linux in comparison to MacOS and view it as a piracy vector.
Apple is considered golden because it's hard to tamper with the video pipeline. Windows isn't perfect but you can take steps. But overall 90% of premium content is not viewed on computers, it's TVs and STBs.
If it wasn't going to get blocked by some prominent factions on principle, I think you could build some trusted web technologies that allowed secure video delivery pipelines. But there's too much of a position that nothing like that should exist from some quarters that it'll never happen.
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
Microsoft has the copilot brand which includes relatively well valued products, apple does not have anything that could potentially work if only it was integrated well.
I’m not saying that to defend Microsoft, but at least they have _some_ measure of product success leading them to push further. With apple the leadership push for ai seems an entirely divorced from the current reality of the company.
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.