> This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been... They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar by actually using your apps, not through some brittle API layer that breaks every update.
And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Let other companies figure out the model. Let the industry figure out how to make it secure. Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
Right now we are still in very, very, very early days.
I don’t believe this was ever confirmed by Apple, but there was widespread speculation at the time[1] that the delay was due to the very prompt injection attacks OpenClaw users are now discovering. It would be genuinely catastrophic to ship an insecure system with this kind of data access, even with an ‘unsafe mode’.
These kinds of risks can only be _consented to_ by technical people who correctly understand them, let alone borne by them, but if this shipped there would be thousands of Facebook videos explaining to the elderly how to disable the safety features and open themselves up to identity theft.
The article also confuses me because Apple _are_ shipping this, it’s pretty much exactly the demo they gave at WWDC24, it’s just delayed while they iron this out (if that is at all possible). By all accounts it might ship as early as next week in the iOS 26.4 beta.
Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into fire trucks.
Apple's niche product, consisting of like 1-4% of computer sales compared to its dominant MacBook line, is now flying off the shelf as a highly desired product, because of a piece of software that Apple didn't spend a dime developing. This sounds like a major win for Apple.
The OS maker does not have to make all the killer software. In fact, Apple's pretty much the only game in town that's making hardware and software both.
Mac minis, but they’re only flying off the shelves for the same reason that folks are forced to use iPhones if they want to date: fear of the dreaded green bubble.
(Yes android users are discriminated against in the dating market, tons of op eds are written about this, just google it before you knee jerk downvote the truth)
No it’s like someone owning a Ferrari and looking down on someone who drives a Corolla. Or that’s how they see it, anyway. Plus there’s the annoyance with interoperability: it’s not just about status, it’s about all your iMessage group chats that don’t play nice with android
(Yes android users are discriminated against in the dating market, tons of op eds are written about this, just google it before you knee jerk downvote the truth)
If someone is shallow enough to write you off for that, is that someone you want as your partner?
> ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while since we've seen this model of software development from Apple succeed in recent years. I'm not at all confident that the Apple that gave us Mac OS 26 is capable of doing this anymore.
Their software efforts have little ambition. Tweaks and improvements are always a good idea, but without some ambitious effort, nothing special is learned or achieved.
A "bicycle for the mind" got replaced with a "kiosk for your pocketbook".
The Vision Pro has an amazing interface, but it's set up as a place to rent videos and buy throwaway novelty iPad-style apps. It allows you to import a Mac screen as a single window, instead of expanding the Mac interface, with its Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial world.
Great hardware. Interesting, but locked down software.
If Tim Cook wanted to leave a real legacy product, it should have been a Vision Pro aimed as an upgrade on the Mac interface and productivity. Apple's new highest end interface/device for the future. Not another mid/low-capability iPad type device. So close. So far.
$3500 for an enforced toy. (And I say all this as someone who still uses it with my Mac, but despairs at the lack of software vision.)
Not just lack of ambition, lack of vision or taste. Liquid Glass is a step back in almost every way, that it got out the door is an indictment of the entire leadership chain.
I mean they literally just looked at Tile. And they have the benefit of running the platform. Demonstrates time and time again that they engage in anticompetitive behaviour.
No, they didn't just look at Tile. The used a completely new UWB radio technology with a completely new anonymization cryptographic paradigm allowing them to include every single device in network, transparently.
AirTag is a perfect example of their hardware prowess that even Google fails to replicate to this date.
This is generally true only of them going to market with new (to them) physical form factors. They aren’t generally regarded as the best in terms of software innovation (though I think most agree they make very beautiful software)
Personal intelligence, the (awkward) feature where you can take a screenshot and get Siri to explain stuff, and the new spotlight features where you can type out stuff you want to do in apps probably hints at that…
> And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Except this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, when you look at Siri. FOURTEEN years and it is still spectacularly useless.
I have no idea what Siri is a "much nicer version" of.
> Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
And in the case of Apple products, oftentimes "because Apple won't let them".
Lest I be called an Apple hater, I have 3 Apple TVs in my home, my daily driver is a M2 Ultra Studio with a ProDisplay XDR, and an iPad Pro that shows my calendar and Slack during the day and comes off at night. iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra.
Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I feel sure that Siri was much better a decade ago than it is today. Basic voice commands that used to work are no longer recognised, or required you to unlock the phone in situations where hands free operation is the whole point of using a voice command.
There were certain commands that worked just fine. But they, in Apple's way, required you to "discover" what worked and what didn't with no hints, and then there were illogical gaps like "this grouping should have three obvious options, but you can only do one via Siri".
And then some of its misinterpretations were hilariously bad.
Even now, I get at a technical level that CarPlay and Siri might be separate "apps" (although CarPlay really seems like it should be a service), and as such, might have separate permissions but then you have the comical scenario of:
Being in your car, CarPlay is running and actively navigating you somewhere, and you press your steering wheel voice control button. "Give me directions to the nearest Starbucks" and Siri dutifully replies, "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
In that list of Apple products that you own, do none of them match the ops comment? You’re saying none of those products are or have been in their time in the market a perfected version of other things?
There are lots of failed products in nearly every company’s portfolio.
AirTags were mentioned elsewhere, but I can think of others too. Perfected might be too fuzzy & subjective a term though.
Can you understand how this commoditizes applications? The developers would absolutely have a fit. There is a reason this hasn’t been done already. It’s not lack of understanding or capability, it’s financial reality. Shortcuts is the compromise struck in its place.
> Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
That's a pretty optimistic outlook. All considered, you're not convinced they'll just use it as a platform to sell advertisements and lock-out competitors a-la the App Store "because everyone does it"?
Apple literally lives on the "Cutting Edge" a-la XKCD [1]. My wife is an iPerson and she always tells me about these new features (my phone has had them since $today-5 years). But for her, these are brand new exciting things!
How many chat products has Google come out with? Google messenger, buzz, wave, meet, Google+, hangouts… Apple has iMessage and FaceTime. You just restated OP’s point. Apple evolves things slowly and comes to market when the problems have already been solved in a myriad of ways, so they can be solved once and consistently. It’s not about coming to market soonest. How did you get that from what OP said?
Pointless argument given that android isn't just "android". Never has been.
It's a huge, diverse ecosystem of players and that's probably why Android has always gotten the coolest stuff first. But it's also its achilles' heel in some ways.
First Mover effect seems only relevant when goverment warrants are involved. Think radio licenses, medical patents, etc. Everywhere else, being a first mover doesnt seem to correlate like it should to success.
There are plenty of Android/Windows things that Apple has had for $today-5 years that work the exact same way.
One side isn’t better than the other, it’s really just that they copy each other doing various things at a different pace or arrive at that point in different ways.
Some examples:
- Android is/was years behind on granular permissions, e.g. ability to grant limited photo library access to apps
- Android has no platform-wide equivalent to AirTags
- Hardware-backed key storage (Secure Enclave about 5 years ahead of StrongBox)
> I suspect ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it
Ten years from now, there will be no ‘agent layer’. This is like predicting Microsoft failed to capitalize on bulletin boards social media.
Ten years from now, the agent layer will be the interface the majority of people use a computer through. Operating systems will become more agentic and absorb the application layer while platforms like Claude Cowork will try to become the omniapp. They’ll meet in the middle and it will be like Microsoft trying to fight Netscape’s view of the web as the omniapp all over again.
Apple will either capitalise on this by making their operating systems more agentic, or they will be reduced to nothing more than a hardware and media vendor.
I think you are right. In fact, if were a regular office worker today, a Claude subscription could possibly be the only piece of software you might need to open for days in a row to be productive. You can check messages, send messages, modify documents, create documents, do research, and so on. You could even have it check on news and forums for you (if they could be crawled that is).
If you're arguing that in 10 years we won't have fully automated systems where we interact more with the automation than the functionality, I've got news for you...
I feel like I’m watching group psychosis where people are just following each other off a cliff. I think the promise of AI and the potential money involved override all self preservation instincts in some people.
It would be fine if I could just ignore it, but they are infecting the entire industry.
I had a dark thought today, that AI agents are going to make scam factory jobs obsolete. I don’t think this will decrease the number of forced labor kidnappings though, since there are many things AI agents will not be good at.
people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless machines whose sole job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw—the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-4, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware
That makes little sense. Buying mac mini would imply for the fused v-ram with the gpu capabilities, but then they're saying Claude/GPT-4 which don't have any gpu requirements.
Is the author implying mac minis for the low power consumption?
If you’re heavily invested in Apple apps (iMessage/Calendar/Reminders/Notes), you need a Mac to give the agent tools to interact with these apps. I think that combined with the form factor, price, and power consumption, makes it an ideal candidate.
If you’re heavily invested in Windows, then you’d probably go for a small x86 PC.
Some of those connectors are only available on the mac and some only on the iPhone. Like notes is available on the mac, but not on the phone. Vice versa for reminders.
The software can drive the web browser if you install the plugin. My knowledge is 1.5 weeks old, so it might be able to drive the whole UI now, I don't know.
It is absurd enough of a project that everybody basically expects it to be secure, right? It is some wild niche thing for people who like to play with new types of programs.
This is not a train that Apple has missed, this is a bunch of people who’ve tied, nailed, tacked, and taped their unicycles and skateboards together. Of course every cool project starts like that, but nobody is selling tickets for that ride.
I think a lot of people have been spoiled (beneficially) by using large, professionally-run SaaS services where your only serious security concerns were keeping your credentials secret, and mitigating the downstream effects of data breaches. I could see having a fundamentally different understanding of security having only experienced that.
What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find absolutely insane.
Apple had problems with just the Chatbot side of LLMs because they couldn't fully control the messaging. Add in a small helping of losing your customers entire net worth and yeah. These other posters have no idea what they are talking about.
Exactly, Apple is entirely too conservative to shine with LLMs due to their uncontrollability, Apple likes their control and their version of "protecting people" (which I don't fully agree with) which includes "We are way too scared to expose our clients to something we can't control and stop from doing/saying anything bad!", which may end up being prudent. They won't come close to doing something like OpenClaw for at least a few more years when the tech is (hopefully) safer and/or the Overton Window has shifted.
And yet they'll push out AI-driven "message summaries" that are horrifically bad and inaccurate, often summarizing the intent of a message as the complete opposite of the full message up to and including "wants to end relationship; will see you later"?
Was about to point out the same thing. Apple's desperate rush to market, summarising news headlines badly and sometimes just plain hallucinating stuff causing many public figured to react when they end up the target of such mishaps.
Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw is so far from figuring out the “trust” element for agents that it’s baffling the OP even chose to bring it up in his argument
this seems obviously true, but at the same time very very wrong. openclaw / moltbot / whatever it's called today is essentially a thought experiment of "what happens if we just ignore all that silly safety stuff"
which obviously apple can't do. only an indie dev launching a project with an obvious copyright violation in the name can get away with that sort of recklessness. it's super fun, but saying apple should do it now is ridiculous. this is where apple should get to eventually, once they figure out all the hard problems that moltbot simply ignores by doing the most dangerous thing possible at every opportunity.
Apple has a lot of power over the developers on its platforms. As a thought experiment let's say they did launch it. It would put real skin in the game for getting security right. Who cares if a thousand people using openclaw. Millions of iOS users having such an assistant will spur a lot of investment towards safety.
This post completely has it backwards, people are buying Apple hardware because they don't shove AI down everyone's throat unlike microsoft. And in a few weeks OpenClaw will be outdated or deemed too unsecure anyways, it will never be a long-term products, it's just some crazy experiment for the memes.
> Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.”
It sounds to me like they still have the hardware, since — according to the article — "Mac Minis are selling out everywhere." What's the problem? If anything, this is validation of their hardware differentiation. The software is easy to change, and they can always learn from OpenClaw for the next iteration of Apple Intelligence.
Because people are forced to buy them. Same as how datacenters are full of mac minis to build iOS apps that could easily be built on any hardware if Apple weren't such corporate bastards.
I don't think it's hardware differentiation as much as vendor lock in because it lets people send iMessages with their agent. Not sure about the running local models on it though.
After having spent a few days with OpenClaw I have to say it’s about the worst software I’ve worked with ever. Everyone focused on the security flaws but the software itself is barely coherent. It’s like Moltbook wrote OpenClaw wrote Moltbook in some insidious wiggum loop from hell with no guard rails. The commit rate on the project reflects this.
> ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it
Why is Apple's hardware being in demand for a use that undermines its non-Chinese competition a sign of missing the ball versus validation for waiting and seeing?
You don’t look at it, you just talk to it and it can talk back to you. It’s more just having a conversation with a personal assistant while driving. Which is a pretty common thing to do.
Apple has a very low tolerance for reputional liabilities. They aren't going to roll out something that %0.01 of the time does something bad, because with 100M devices that's something that'll affect 10,000 people, and have huge potential to cause bad PR, damaging the brand and trust.
Apparently APIs are now a brittle way for software to use other software and interpreting and manipulating human GUIs with emulated mouse clicks and keypresses is a much better and perfectly reasonable way to do it. We’re truly living in a bizarro timeline.
In terms of useful AI agents, Siri/Apple Intelligence has been behind for so long that no one expects it to be any good.
I used to think this was because they didn’t take AI seriously but my assumption now is that Apple is concerned about security over everything else.
My bet is that Google gets to an actually useful AI assistant before Apple because we know they see it as their chance to pull ahead of Apple in the consumer market, they have the models to do it, and they aren’t overly concerned about user privacy or security.
This is Yellow Pages type thinking in the age of the internet. No one is going to own an agentic layer (list any of the multitude of platforms already irrelevant like OpenAI Agent SDK, Google A2A) . No one is going to own a new app store (GPTs are already dead). No one is going to foundation models (FOSS models are extremely capable today). No one is going to own inference (Data centers will never be as cost effective as that old MacBook collecting dust that is plenty capable of running a 1B model that can compete with ChatGPT 3.5 and all the use cases that it already was good at like writing high school essays, recipes etc.) The only thing that is sticking is Markdown (SKILLS.md, AGENTS.md)
This is because the simple reality of this new technology is that this is not the local maxima. Any supposed wall you attempt to put up will fail - real estate website closes its API? Fine, a CUA+VLM will make it trivial to navigate/extract/use. We will finally get back to the right solution of protocols over platforms, file over app, local over cloud or you know the way things were when tech was good.
P.S: You should immediately call BS when you see outrageous and patently untrue claims like "Mac minis are sold out all over.." - I checked my Best Buy in the heart of SF and they have stock. Or "that its all over Reddit, HN" - the only thing that is all over Reddit is unanimous derision towards OpenClaw and its security nightmares.
Utterly hate the old world mentality in this post. Looked up the author and ofcourse, he's from VC.
Don't underestimate the capitalists. We've seen this many times in the past--most recently the commercialization of the Internet. Before that, phones, radio and television.
> the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-4, or whatever model you want to
And
> Here’s what people miss about moats: they compound
Swapping an OpenAI for an Anthropic or open weight model is the opposite of compounding. It is a race to the bottom.
> Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.”
From what I hear OC is not like that at all. People are going to want a model that reliably does what you tell it to do inside of (at a minimum) the Apple ecosystem.
I used to have little cron jobs that would fire small python scripts daily to help me detect when certain clothes were on sale or in stock on a website it scraped and then send me an email or text. I was proud of that “automation”.
I guess now I’ll just use an AI agent to do the same thing instantly :(
This article is talking about the AI race as if it’s over when it’s only started. And really, an opinion of the entire market based on a few reddit posts?
Author spoke of compounding moats, yet Apple’s market share, highly performant custom silicon, and capital reserves just flew over his head. HN can have better articles to discuss AI with than this myopic hot take.
> ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it
I don't pretend to know the future (nor do I believe anyone else who claims to be able to), but I think the opposite has a good chance of happening too, and hype would die down over "AI" and the bubble bursts, and the current overvaluation (imo at least. I still think it is useful as a tool, but overhyped by many who don't understand it.) will be corrected by the market; and people will look back and see it as the moment that Apple dodged a bullet. (Or more realistically, won't think about it at all).
I know you can't directly compare different situations, but I wonder if comparisons can be made with dot-com bubble. There was such hype some 20-30 years ago, with claims of just being a year or two away from, "being able to watch TV over the internet" or "do your shopping on the web" or "have real-time video calls online", which did eventually come true, but only much, much, later, after a crash from inflated expectations and a slower steady growth.*
* Not that I think some claims about "AI" will ever come true though, especially the more outlandish ones such as full-length movies made by a prompt of the same quality made by a Hollywood director.
I don't know what a potential "breaking point" would be for "AI". Perhaps a major security breach, even _worse_ prices for computer hardware than it is now, politics, a major international incident, environmental impact being made more apparent, companies starting to more aggressively monetize their "AI", consumers realising the limits of "AI", I have no idea. And perhaps I'm just wrong, and this is the age we live in now for the foreseeable future. After all, more than one of the things I have listed have already happened, and nothing happened.
OpenClaw is a very fun project, but it would be considered a dumpster fire if any mainstream company tried to sell it. Every grassroots project gets evaluated on a completely different scale than commercial products. Trying to compare an experimental community project to a hypothetical commercial offering doesn't work.
> They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid it.
I sincerely doubt that. If Apple charged $500 for a feature it would have to be completely bulletproof. Every little failure and bad output would be harshly criticized against the $500 price tag. Apple's high prices are already a point of criticism, so adding $500 would be highly debated everywhere.
> And they would have won the AI race not by building the best model, but by being the only company that could ship an AI you’d actually trust with root access to your computer.
and the very next line (because i want to emphasize it
> That trust—built over decades—was their moat.
This just ignores the history of os development at apple. The entire trajectory is moving towards permissions and sandboxing even if it annoys users to no end. To give access to an llm (any llm, not just a trusted one acc to author) the root access when its susceptible to hallucinations, jailbreak etc. goes against everything Apple has worked for.
And even then the reasoning is circular. "So you build all your trust, now go ahead and destroy it on this thing which works, feels good to me, but could occasionally fuck up in a massive way".
Not defending Apple, but this article is so far detached from reality that its hard to overstate.
If you can’t see why something like OpenClaw is not ready for production I don’t know what to tell you. People’s perceptions are so distorted by FOMO they are completely ignoring the security implications and dangers of giving an LLM keys to your life.
I’m sure apple et al will eventually have stuff like OpenClaw but expecting a major company to put something so unpolished, and with such major unknowns, out is just asinine.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
I genuinely don't understand this take. What makes OP think that the company that failed so utterly to even deliver mediocre AI -- siri is stuck in 2015! -- would be up to the task of delivering something as bonkers as Clawdbot?
No no no. It's too risky, cutting-edge, and dangerous. While fun to play with, it's not something I'd trust my 92 year old mother with dementia (who still uses an iPad) with.
> This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been... They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar by actually using your apps, not through some brittle API layer that breaks every update.
And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Let other companies figure out the model. Let the industry figure out how to make it secure. Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
Right now we are still in very, very, very early days.
I don’t believe this was ever confirmed by Apple, but there was widespread speculation at the time[1] that the delay was due to the very prompt injection attacks OpenClaw users are now discovering. It would be genuinely catastrophic to ship an insecure system with this kind of data access, even with an ‘unsafe mode’.
These kinds of risks can only be _consented to_ by technical people who correctly understand them, let alone borne by them, but if this shipped there would be thousands of Facebook videos explaining to the elderly how to disable the safety features and open themselves up to identity theft.
The article also confuses me because Apple _are_ shipping this, it’s pretty much exactly the demo they gave at WWDC24, it’s just delayed while they iron this out (if that is at all possible). By all accounts it might ship as early as next week in the iOS 26.4 beta.
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/8/delaying-personalized-s...
Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into fire trucks.
This is so obvious I'm kind of surprised the author used to be a software engineer at Google (based on his Linkedin).
OpenClaw is very much a greenfield idea and there's plenty of startups like Raycast working in this area.
Apple's niche product, consisting of like 1-4% of computer sales compared to its dominant MacBook line, is now flying off the shelf as a highly desired product, because of a piece of software that Apple didn't spend a dime developing. This sounds like a major win for Apple.
The OS maker does not have to make all the killer software. In fact, Apple's pretty much the only game in town that's making hardware and software both.
What are you referring to?
Probably the Mac Mini. A few OpenClaw users are buying the agent a dedicated device so that it can integrate with their Apple account.
For example: https://x.com/michael_chomsky/status/2017686846910959668.
Do you want to know how I can tell you didn't read the article?
Mac-Minis
Mac minis, but they’re only flying off the shelves for the same reason that folks are forced to use iPhones if they want to date: fear of the dreaded green bubble.
(Yes android users are discriminated against in the dating market, tons of op eds are written about this, just google it before you knee jerk downvote the truth)
People are buying mac minis so their openclaw instances can date?
Imo using android is a great way to filter out extremely boring and vapid individuals from my dating pool.
who's "afraid" of green bubbles? it's like saying a toyota corolla driver is afraid of the ford pinto
No it’s like someone owning a Ferrari and looking down on someone who drives a Corolla. Or that’s how they see it, anyway. Plus there’s the annoyance with interoperability: it’s not just about status, it’s about all your iMessage group chats that don’t play nice with android
It's a real thing, you're either too old and/or not dating young people. Some do care a lot.
> ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while since we've seen this model of software development from Apple succeed in recent years. I'm not at all confident that the Apple that gave us Mac OS 26 is capable of doing this anymore.
Airtags were released in 2021, I'd say that counts, but generally I agree.
Their hardware division has been killing it.
The software has been where most of the complaints have been in recent years.
Their software efforts have little ambition. Tweaks and improvements are always a good idea, but without some ambitious effort, nothing special is learned or achieved.
A "bicycle for the mind" got replaced with a "kiosk for your pocketbook".
The Vision Pro has an amazing interface, but it's set up as a place to rent videos and buy throwaway novelty iPad-style apps. It allows you to import a Mac screen as a single window, instead of expanding the Mac interface, with its Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial world.
Great hardware. Interesting, but locked down software.
If Tim Cook wanted to leave a real legacy product, it should have been a Vision Pro aimed as an upgrade on the Mac interface and productivity. Apple's new highest end interface/device for the future. Not another mid/low-capability iPad type device. So close. So far.
$3500 for an enforced toy. (And I say all this as someone who still uses it with my Mac, but despairs at the lack of software vision.)
Not just lack of ambition, lack of vision or taste. Liquid Glass is a step back in almost every way, that it got out the door is an indictment of the entire leadership chain.
I mean they literally just looked at Tile. And they have the benefit of running the platform. Demonstrates time and time again that they engage in anticompetitive behaviour.
No, they didn't just look at Tile. The used a completely new UWB radio technology with a completely new anonymization cryptographic paradigm allowing them to include every single device in network, transparently.
AirTag is a perfect example of their hardware prowess that even Google fails to replicate to this date.
File taxes? That's a tall order, especially juxtaposed with managing calendar or responding to emails.
>File taxes?
Sure why not, what could go wrong?
"Siri, find me a good tax lawyer."
"Your honor, my client's AI agent had no intent to willfully evade anything."
Absolutely none of the things you quoted that he said an AI agent could do would I want be done for me and I doubt most other people would.
This is generally true only of them going to market with new (to them) physical form factors. They aren’t generally regarded as the best in terms of software innovation (though I think most agree they make very beautiful software)
Personal intelligence, the (awkward) feature where you can take a screenshot and get Siri to explain stuff, and the new spotlight features where you can type out stuff you want to do in apps probably hints at that…
> And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Except this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, when you look at Siri. FOURTEEN years and it is still spectacularly useless.
I have no idea what Siri is a "much nicer version" of.
> Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
And in the case of Apple products, oftentimes "because Apple won't let them".
Lest I be called an Apple hater, I have 3 Apple TVs in my home, my daily driver is a M2 Ultra Studio with a ProDisplay XDR, and an iPad Pro that shows my calendar and Slack during the day and comes off at night. iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra.
But this is way too worshipful of Apple.
Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I feel sure that Siri was much better a decade ago than it is today. Basic voice commands that used to work are no longer recognised, or required you to unlock the phone in situations where hands free operation is the whole point of using a voice command.
There were certain commands that worked just fine. But they, in Apple's way, required you to "discover" what worked and what didn't with no hints, and then there were illogical gaps like "this grouping should have three obvious options, but you can only do one via Siri".
And then some of its misinterpretations were hilariously bad.
Even now, I get at a technical level that CarPlay and Siri might be separate "apps" (although CarPlay really seems like it should be a service), and as such, might have separate permissions but then you have the comical scenario of:
Being in your car, CarPlay is running and actively navigating you somewhere, and you press your steering wheel voice control button. "Give me directions to the nearest Starbucks" and Siri dutifully replies, "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
In that list of Apple products that you own, do none of them match the ops comment? You’re saying none of those products are or have been in their time in the market a perfected version of other things?
There are lots of failed products in nearly every company’s portfolio.
AirTags were mentioned elsewhere, but I can think of others too. Perfected might be too fuzzy & subjective a term though.
Remember the time when the former members of the Siri team demoed a prototype for a more capable version of Siri and Apple didn't even use it
Can you understand how this commoditizes applications? The developers would absolutely have a fit. There is a reason this hasn’t been done already. It’s not lack of understanding or capability, it’s financial reality. Shortcuts is the compromise struck in its place.
> Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
That's a pretty optimistic outlook. All considered, you're not convinced they'll just use it as a platform to sell advertisements and lock-out competitors a-la the App Store "because everyone does it"?
Apple literally lives on the "Cutting Edge" a-la XKCD [1]. My wife is an iPerson and she always tells me about these new features (my phone has had them since $today-5 years). But for her, these are brand new exciting things!
https://xkcd.com/606/
How many chat products has Google come out with? Google messenger, buzz, wave, meet, Google+, hangouts… Apple has iMessage and FaceTime. You just restated OP’s point. Apple evolves things slowly and comes to market when the problems have already been solved in a myriad of ways, so they can be solved once and consistently. It’s not about coming to market soonest. How did you get that from what OP said?
Pointless argument given that android isn't just "android". Never has been.
It's a huge, diverse ecosystem of players and that's probably why Android has always gotten the coolest stuff first. But it's also its achilles' heel in some ways.
Except operating system and security updates…
"It’s not about coming to market soonest. "
First Mover effect seems only relevant when goverment warrants are involved. Think radio licenses, medical patents, etc. Everywhere else, being a first mover doesnt seem to correlate like it should to success.
Network effects.
See social media, bitcoin, iOS App Store, blu-ray, Xbox live, and I’m sure more I can’t think of rn.
Network effects are maybe akin to "phsyical effects". Non-monopoly but physical space is also another 'first mover' type of moat.
A very tired “red versus blue” take here.
There are plenty of Android/Windows things that Apple has had for $today-5 years that work the exact same way.
One side isn’t better than the other, it’s really just that they copy each other doing various things at a different pace or arrive at that point in different ways.
Some examples:
- Android is/was years behind on granular permissions, e.g. ability to grant limited photo library access to apps
- Android has no platform-wide equivalent to AirTags
- Hardware-backed key storage (Secure Enclave about 5 years ahead of StrongBox)
- system-wide screen recording
Android is an OS, not hardware tho so some of those can't really be judged equivalently.
> I suspect ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it
Ten years from now, there will be no ‘agent layer’. This is like predicting Microsoft failed to capitalize on bulletin boards social media.
Ten years from now, the agent layer will be the interface the majority of people use a computer through. Operating systems will become more agentic and absorb the application layer while platforms like Claude Cowork will try to become the omniapp. They’ll meet in the middle and it will be like Microsoft trying to fight Netscape’s view of the web as the omniapp all over again.
Apple will either capitalise on this by making their operating systems more agentic, or they will be reduced to nothing more than a hardware and media vendor.
I think you are right. In fact, if were a regular office worker today, a Claude subscription could possibly be the only piece of software you might need to open for days in a row to be productive. You can check messages, send messages, modify documents, create documents, do research, and so on. You could even have it check on news and forums for you (if they could be crawled that is).
I don’t doubt the end goal.
My point is that it won’t be a ‘layer’ like it is now and the technology will be completely different from what we see as agents today.
Or how "your next meeting will be in Metaverse"
Hoping that LLMs go the way of the Metaverse.
Good example.
Is your prediction that most people actually like to use software?
No it’ll be some idea we have not developed or named yet.
The current ‘agent’ ecosystem is just hacks on top of hacks.
If you're arguing that in 10 years we won't have fully automated systems where we interact more with the automation than the functionality, I've got news for you...
I’m saying we won’t call it agents and it will involve substantially different technology compared to what we mean by agents today.
Of course AI will keep improving and more automation is a given.
According to https://1password.com/blog/from-magic-to-malware-how-opencla..., The top skill is/was malware.
It's obviously broken, so no, Apple Intelligence should not have been this.
I feel like I’m watching group psychosis where people are just following each other off a cliff. I think the promise of AI and the potential money involved override all self preservation instincts in some people.
It would be fine if I could just ignore it, but they are infecting the entire industry.
I had a dark thought today, that AI agents are going to make scam factory jobs obsolete. I don’t think this will decrease the number of forced labor kidnappings though, since there are many things AI agents will not be good at.
Is the author implying mac minis for the low power consumption?
Wouldn't it run on a $50 raspberry pi?
Probably the same people getting a macbook pro to handle their calendar and emails
Yep, there is zero reason to use mac mini’s. It’s way more cost effective to rent one (or more!) small VMs the cloud.
If you’re heavily invested in Apple apps (iMessage/Calendar/Reminders/Notes), you need a Mac to give the agent tools to interact with these apps. I think that combined with the form factor, price, and power consumption, makes it an ideal candidate.
If you’re heavily invested in Windows, then you’d probably go for a small x86 PC.
Some of those connectors are only available on the mac and some only on the iPhone. Like notes is available on the mac, but not on the phone. Vice versa for reminders.
The software can drive the web browser if you install the plugin. My knowledge is 1.5 weeks old, so it might be able to drive the whole UI now, I don't know.
Welcome to the AI meme race where everyone's knowledge is about 1.5 weeks old :)
I have seen dozens of people/videos talking about buying Mac minis for clawdbot.
I don't understand why, but I've seen it enough to start questioning myself...
The author is full of shit is what it is. They see a few posts online and extrapolate from that to fit whatever narrative they believe in.
Claude/GPT-4 don't have any GPU requirements?
No dude, you send text or images and get the same back, it's all cloud.
OpenClaw is a security NIGHTMARE - Apple would never.
It is absurd enough of a project that everybody basically expects it to be secure, right? It is some wild niche thing for people who like to play with new types of programs.
This is not a train that Apple has missed, this is a bunch of people who’ve tied, nailed, tacked, and taped their unicycles and skateboards together. Of course every cool project starts like that, but nobody is selling tickets for that ride.
I think a lot of people have been spoiled (beneficially) by using large, professionally-run SaaS services where your only serious security concerns were keeping your credentials secret, and mitigating the downstream effects of data breaches. I could see having a fundamentally different understanding of security having only experienced that.
What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find absolutely insane.
Apple had problems with just the Chatbot side of LLMs because they couldn't fully control the messaging. Add in a small helping of losing your customers entire net worth and yeah. These other posters have no idea what they are talking about.
Exactly, Apple is entirely too conservative to shine with LLMs due to their uncontrollability, Apple likes their control and their version of "protecting people" (which I don't fully agree with) which includes "We are way too scared to expose our clients to something we can't control and stop from doing/saying anything bad!", which may end up being prudent. They won't come close to doing something like OpenClaw for at least a few more years when the tech is (hopefully) safer and/or the Overton Window has shifted.
And yet they'll push out AI-driven "message summaries" that are horrifically bad and inaccurate, often summarizing the intent of a message as the complete opposite of the full message up to and including "wants to end relationship; will see you later"?
Was about to point out the same thing. Apple's desperate rush to market, summarising news headlines badly and sometimes just plain hallucinating stuff causing many public figured to react when they end up the target of such mishaps.
Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw is so far from figuring out the “trust” element for agents that it’s baffling the OP even chose to bring it up in his argument
this seems obviously true, but at the same time very very wrong. openclaw / moltbot / whatever it's called today is essentially a thought experiment of "what happens if we just ignore all that silly safety stuff"
which obviously apple can't do. only an indie dev launching a project with an obvious copyright violation in the name can get away with that sort of recklessness. it's super fun, but saying apple should do it now is ridiculous. this is where apple should get to eventually, once they figure out all the hard problems that moltbot simply ignores by doing the most dangerous thing possible at every opportunity.
Apple has a lot of power over the developers on its platforms. As a thought experiment let's say they did launch it. It would put real skin in the game for getting security right. Who cares if a thousand people using openclaw. Millions of iOS users having such an assistant will spur a lot of investment towards safety.
This post completely has it backwards, people are buying Apple hardware because they don't shove AI down everyone's throat unlike microsoft. And in a few weeks OpenClaw will be outdated or deemed too unsecure anyways, it will never be a long-term products, it's just some crazy experiment for the memes.
> Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.”
It sounds to me like they still have the hardware, since — according to the article — "Mac Minis are selling out everywhere." What's the problem? If anything, this is validation of their hardware differentiation. The software is easy to change, and they can always learn from OpenClaw for the next iteration of Apple Intelligence.
Because people are forced to buy them. Same as how datacenters are full of mac minis to build iOS apps that could easily be built on any hardware if Apple weren't such corporate bastards.
I don't think it's hardware differentiation as much as vendor lock in because it lets people send iMessages with their agent. Not sure about the running local models on it though.
After having spent a few days with OpenClaw I have to say it’s about the worst software I’ve worked with ever. Everyone focused on the security flaws but the software itself is barely coherent. It’s like Moltbook wrote OpenClaw wrote Moltbook in some insidious wiggum loop from hell with no guard rails. The commit rate on the project reflects this.
The author is a bit extreme for expecting apple to have done something as complex as ooenclaw, not even OpenAI or Anthropic have really done it yet.
However this does not excuse Apple to sit with their thumbs up their asses for all these years.
> ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it
Why is Apple's hardware being in demand for a use that undermines its non-Chinese competition a sign of missing the ball versus validation for waiting and seeing?
> An AI agent that clicks buttons.
Are people's agents actually clicking buttons (visual computer use) or is this just a metaphor?
I'm not asking if CU exists, but rather is this literally the driver of people's workflows? I thought everyone is just running Ralph loops in CC.
For an article making such a bold technological/social claim about a trillion dollar company, this seems a strange thing to be hand wavey about.
Not mine, the plugin doesn’t work on Mac apparently :) a bug with calculating coordinates to click.
Https://heyblue.com does, very helpful for people with disabilities or when driving.
get off your devices when driving, it's as dangerous as being drunk behind the wheel
You don’t look at it, you just talk to it and it can talk back to you. It’s more just having a conversation with a personal assistant while driving. Which is a pretty common thing to do.
That is nearly as dangerous - it causes inattention blindness.
Apple has a very low tolerance for reputional liabilities. They aren't going to roll out something that %0.01 of the time does something bad, because with 100M devices that's something that'll affect 10,000 people, and have huge potential to cause bad PR, damaging the brand and trust.
I think this is exactly the holdup with Apple Intelligence. No rush to ship a Beta.
(Ok, I suspect this is one of the main problems.. there may be others?)
Apparently APIs are now a brittle way for software to use other software and interpreting and manipulating human GUIs with emulated mouse clicks and keypresses is a much better and perfectly reasonable way to do it. We’re truly living in a bizarro timeline.
As someone who has spent a good portion of my career in the RPA/intelligent automation field this take was a spit-coffee-close-laptop moment.
In terms of useful AI agents, Siri/Apple Intelligence has been behind for so long that no one expects it to be any good.
I used to think this was because they didn’t take AI seriously but my assumption now is that Apple is concerned about security over everything else.
My bet is that Google gets to an actually useful AI assistant before Apple because we know they see it as their chance to pull ahead of Apple in the consumer market, they have the models to do it, and they aren’t overly concerned about user privacy or security.
This is Yellow Pages type thinking in the age of the internet. No one is going to own an agentic layer (list any of the multitude of platforms already irrelevant like OpenAI Agent SDK, Google A2A) . No one is going to own a new app store (GPTs are already dead). No one is going to foundation models (FOSS models are extremely capable today). No one is going to own inference (Data centers will never be as cost effective as that old MacBook collecting dust that is plenty capable of running a 1B model that can compete with ChatGPT 3.5 and all the use cases that it already was good at like writing high school essays, recipes etc.) The only thing that is sticking is Markdown (SKILLS.md, AGENTS.md)
This is because the simple reality of this new technology is that this is not the local maxima. Any supposed wall you attempt to put up will fail - real estate website closes its API? Fine, a CUA+VLM will make it trivial to navigate/extract/use. We will finally get back to the right solution of protocols over platforms, file over app, local over cloud or you know the way things were when tech was good.
P.S: You should immediately call BS when you see outrageous and patently untrue claims like "Mac minis are sold out all over.." - I checked my Best Buy in the heart of SF and they have stock. Or "that its all over Reddit, HN" - the only thing that is all over Reddit is unanimous derision towards OpenClaw and its security nightmares.
Utterly hate the old world mentality in this post. Looked up the author and ofcourse, he's from VC.
> No one is going to own an agentic layer
Don't underestimate the capitalists. We've seen this many times in the past--most recently the commercialization of the Internet. Before that, phones, radio and television.
Fair enough. This is my war time rhetoric. Its up to us to effect the future we want.
I think there is a contradiction between
> the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-4, or whatever model you want to
And
> Here’s what people miss about moats: they compound
Swapping an OpenAI for an Anthropic or open weight model is the opposite of compounding. It is a race to the bottom.
> Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.”
From what I hear OC is not like that at all. People are going to want a model that reliably does what you tell it to do inside of (at a minimum) the Apple ecosystem.
I used to have little cron jobs that would fire small python scripts daily to help me detect when certain clothes were on sale or in stock on a website it scraped and then send me an email or text. I was proud of that “automation”.
I guess now I’ll just use an AI agent to do the same thing instantly :(
Expensive and overhyped?
How is that not right up Apples alley?
Because Apple products at least work deterministically
They don't say here is a 1000 $ iphone and there is a 60% chance you can successfully message or call a friend
The other 40% well? AGI is right around the corner and can US govt pls give me 1 trillion dollar loan and a bailout?
When I ask Siri to play some album on Spotify, it feels like it works about 60% of the time.
So far my agents has worked better than Siri and afaik nobody has actually asked for a bailout yet.
Don't worry, it's coming
This article is talking about the AI race as if it’s over when it’s only started. And really, an opinion of the entire market based on a few reddit posts?
Author spoke of compounding moats, yet Apple’s market share, highly performant custom silicon, and capital reserves just flew over his head. HN can have better articles to discuss AI with than this myopic hot take.
> ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it
I don't pretend to know the future (nor do I believe anyone else who claims to be able to), but I think the opposite has a good chance of happening too, and hype would die down over "AI" and the bubble bursts, and the current overvaluation (imo at least. I still think it is useful as a tool, but overhyped by many who don't understand it.) will be corrected by the market; and people will look back and see it as the moment that Apple dodged a bullet. (Or more realistically, won't think about it at all).
I know you can't directly compare different situations, but I wonder if comparisons can be made with dot-com bubble. There was such hype some 20-30 years ago, with claims of just being a year or two away from, "being able to watch TV over the internet" or "do your shopping on the web" or "have real-time video calls online", which did eventually come true, but only much, much, later, after a crash from inflated expectations and a slower steady growth.*
* Not that I think some claims about "AI" will ever come true though, especially the more outlandish ones such as full-length movies made by a prompt of the same quality made by a Hollywood director.
I don't know what a potential "breaking point" would be for "AI". Perhaps a major security breach, even _worse_ prices for computer hardware than it is now, politics, a major international incident, environmental impact being made more apparent, companies starting to more aggressively monetize their "AI", consumers realising the limits of "AI", I have no idea. And perhaps I'm just wrong, and this is the age we live in now for the foreseeable future. After all, more than one of the things I have listed have already happened, and nothing happened.
Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.
It's just the juiciest attack surface of all time so I vehemently disagree.
This! Def a game changer for apple.
OpenClaw is a very fun project, but it would be considered a dumpster fire if any mainstream company tried to sell it. Every grassroots project gets evaluated on a completely different scale than commercial products. Trying to compare an experimental community project to a hypothetical commercial offering doesn't work.
> They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid it.
I sincerely doubt that. If Apple charged $500 for a feature it would have to be completely bulletproof. Every little failure and bad output would be harshly criticized against the $500 price tag. Apple's high prices are already a point of criticism, so adding $500 would be highly debated everywhere.
Apple doesn’t enable 3rd party services without having extreme control over the flow and without it directly benefiting their own bottom line.
Unfortunately by not doing that they only managed to be the most valuable company ever.
So yeah, the market isn’t really signaling companies to make nice things.
Openclaw is a nice thing?
What it is supposed to do is nice, separate from the risks.
> And they would have won the AI race not by building the best model, but by being the only company that could ship an AI you’d actually trust with root access to your computer.
and the very next line (because i want to emphasize it
> That trust—built over decades—was their moat.
This just ignores the history of os development at apple. The entire trajectory is moving towards permissions and sandboxing even if it annoys users to no end. To give access to an llm (any llm, not just a trusted one acc to author) the root access when its susceptible to hallucinations, jailbreak etc. goes against everything Apple has worked for.
And even then the reasoning is circular. "So you build all your trust, now go ahead and destroy it on this thing which works, feels good to me, but could occasionally fuck up in a massive way".
Not defending Apple, but this article is so far detached from reality that its hard to overstate.
How much revenue do you think Apple made EXTRA from people buying Mac minis for this hype?
...And it will be, now that Apple has partnered with OpenAI. The foundation of OpenClaw is capable models.
If you can’t see why something like OpenClaw is not ready for production I don’t know what to tell you. People’s perceptions are so distorted by FOMO they are completely ignoring the security implications and dangers of giving an LLM keys to your life.
I’m sure apple et al will eventually have stuff like OpenClaw but expecting a major company to put something so unpolished, and with such major unknowns, out is just asinine.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
Steve Jobs
> If you browse Reddit or HN, you’ll see the same pattern: people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use.
Saved you a click. This is the premise of the article.
Why specifically mac mini? There are cheaper NUCs and it's not like they're running a local model on the mac mini are they?
I believe it’s to integrate with iMessage, Calendar, Reminders etc.
it's so that your agent can access your 2fa codes sent over messages
no, seriously, that is a thing people are using it for
I genuinely don't understand this take. What makes OP think that the company that failed so utterly to even deliver mediocre AI -- siri is stuck in 2015! -- would be up to the task of delivering something as bonkers as Clawdbot?
No no no. It's too risky, cutting-edge, and dangerous. While fun to play with, it's not something I'd trust my 92 year old mother with dementia (who still uses an iPad) with.