I was having trouble charging my phone (iPhone 12 Pro Max) yesterday and wondered how old it was. It’s 5 years old 🤯 I was shocked, that’s the longest I’ve ever had a phone.
Before this one I was on the Apple upgrade program for years, so I got a new phone every year. Then I stopped because setting things up on a new phone became more trouble than the benefit of getting a new phone.
Now 5 years later I’ve never had any issues or saw any reason to get a new one until now. I experienced the same thing with my computer. Last Fall I got a MacBook Pro M4 Max with everything maxed out assuming I’d be using it to run models locally… Nope, I just still use cloud based models so I can use the latest and greatest models.
It’s interesting how I used to care so much about hardware, but now it seems to matter less and less. I’ll probably have this MacBook for 5 years and when I get the iPhone 17 in the Fall I’ll keep that for another 5 years.
But it makes me wonder: What hardware will I care about? Probably the next generation of wearables, like AI glasses since I’ll want the sensors, resolution and on-device compute, etc. to be top notch so it has all the context I do, and hopefully more. Same with whatever self-driving car I get next.
So, it seems AI is such a powerful, game-changing advancement that hardware only matters to the extent that it makes my AI better. That’s why it’s so interesting that Apple, the preeminent hardware company, is virtually nonexistent (read: irrelevant) in the AI conversation.
What happened to Microsoft with mobile (not missing it, just getting it wrong) seems to be happening to Apple with AI. However, Microsoft had SaaS and Cloud which came after that they nailed.
I don’t think the same will happen to Apple since their company and culture are so deeply intertwined with what it took to win mobile (supply chain, etc.). That’s a lot harder the change, it would take a new leadership team to change course. Either way, they probably have at least 5-10 years to figure it out thanks to their current cash cows. Will they figure it out? I don’t know, but I don’t hold any Apple stock anymore aside from what’s in QQQM.
