He’s right about the AI, but “Instead they should really focus on Apple Vision Pro” is a really good way to make absolutely EVERYTHING else you say seem wrong too.
Disagree. The Vision Pro is one of the few remaining products where Apple has a tangible advantage over its competitors and where there is no clear, equivalent alternative from another manufacturer (at its level of quality).
Apple might have an amazing bit of tech with Vision Pro, but its a failed product when it’s10x the price of competition.
Apple fell into their own RDF on this one.
The implication of this is that the technology is not a dead end, and I still maintain it is a solution in search of a problem. There are no competitors because there is no need for the product.
Somebody once had the best 3D TVs too - but they no longer exist for a reason.
If you can get it cheap and light it would be great
At their very core, Large Language Models’ costs run contrary to basically every model of selling software.
Consumers and enterprises alike have been trained to pay a monthly fee for a service, and while these services might have limits or strictures, basically nobody buying software expects to have a metered service, let alone one that’s both metered and with hard to measure costs.
LLMs burn tokens at a per-million rate regardless of whether or not you get the response you want, or whether it does what you ask it to do. If you ask a coding agent to do some sort of software task and it goes off and spins its wheels in a loop, you’re paying for the tokens regardless.
AI companies knew that consumers would never pay the actual cost of their AI services, so they have, for the most part, sold them monthly subscriptions with vague rate limits that allow them to burn way more in tokens than the cost of their subscription. SemiAnalysis found that you can burn hundreds of dollars on a $20-a-month subscription and thousands of dollars on a $200-a-month subscription, and while AI boosters will claim that these companies have “70% gross margins on tokens,” there is little proof that this is the case, and my own reporting shows that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025.
Famously thought Apple would release a TV and a car for like a decade. I hope he’s right but he’s got a track record.
has been described by Politico as the AI boom’s most “acerbic gadfly”
The AI boom is about as real as the Metaverse boom.
I’ve seen researchers and academics prefer ‘AI spring’ to contrast with the AI winter of the last few decades to highlight the change in research and development spending, without the ‘successful market’ implications of the word ‘boom’. Can’t really call it a ‘boom’ when you’re losing billions a day.
I expect a mix of dotcom boom and Enron.
Don’t forget to sprinkle in some GFC with the banks it’ll take down.
