![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/e2d58d02d795d75f8c311aa514997f809f-apple-timcook-screentime.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
There are two main stories people are telling about Apple these days. One, rooted in its financial performance going back nearly 20 years, is of the most successful electronics device-maker of all time \u2014 a wildly profitable, well-positioned, multitrillion-dollar company that continues to make a lot of money but that, since 2020, hasn\u2019t been growing quite as quickly as it did for most of the decade prior. The other is of a firm that, despite all its advantages, is missing out on the next big thing in tech \u2014\u00a0the only thing that matters<\/a>, in this telling \u2014 having failed to invest enough in AI.<\/p>\n A report from Bloomberg\u2019s Mark Gurman<\/a> suggests the company has something to say about both. In a wave of new products and software characterized as an \u201cartificial-intelligence comeback,\u201d Apple appears to be jumping into about a half-dozen new industries at once. There\u2019s a \u201ctabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion\u201d and looks like \u201can iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room,\u201d Gurman writes, as well as a \u201csmart speaker with a display,\u201d both powered by \u201ca lifelike version of Siri.\u201d There\u2019s \u201can Apple security system that can automate household functions,\u201d as well as \u201csmart glasses,\u201d a \u201cfoldable phone,\u201d and a \u201clarge foldable device that melds a MacBook and an iPad.\u201d It\u2019s also, according to Gurman, \u201cexploring a mobile bot with wheels \u2014 something akin to Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s Astro \u2014 and has loosely discussed humanoid models.\u201d<\/p>\n A few of these projects have been leaked and teased before, but a lot of this is new. In the history of Apple\u2019s product releases \u2014\u00a0a dependable, steady spectacle with a big but highly telegraphed semi-surprise every once in a while \u2014\u00a0this looks like an onslaught, an explosion of development and creativity after years of incremental updates and the Vision Pro\u2019s big swing and miss<\/a>. Taken in the context of the broader consumer-tech industry, it now looks more like a company struggling to chase its rivals wherever they go.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t help that those rivals have gone all over the place. In the last decade, companies with vastly different histories have converged on a sprawling, overlapping set of secondary businesses. Amazon, an e-commerce company, became a cloud provider, a device manufacturer, and a massive advertising company; Google, the search and advertising firm, built a smartphone operating system, started selling phones and tablets, got into home cameras and thermostats, and, like Apple, started making its own processors. Meta, with momentum from its social-media businesses, tried to make a phone before settling on VR and smart glasses. All of them have, or have had, a stake in the self-driving-car industry. Everyone, of course, became an advertising firm. Now, everyone is an AI firm, not just because it\u2019s where money is flowing generally but because each firm sees AI assistants as a way to unify disparate product lines and to lock customers into even deeper \u2014\u00a0and perhaps exclusive<\/a> \u2014\u00a0relationships.<\/p>\n Every company is trying to become an everything company, in other words, which means Apple\u2019s moves here are less about forging new paths than filling gaps in its own omni-conglomerate portfolio (more urgently, perhaps, as its core product, the iPhone, approaches its 20th anniversary). Its \u201clifelike version of Siri\u201d is a response to voice products from Google, OpenAI, and Amazon; its \u201csmart speaker display\u201d is a competitor to millions of Alexa and Nest screens already in customers\u2019 homes, often connected to Nest and Ring smart cameras that are mounted on doors and inside houses across America. Samsung\u2019s flagship phone is a foldable device and its first version came out in 2019. Between its Oculus headsets and Ray-Ban glasses, Meta, not Apple, seems to be setting the direction of the AR\/VR industry.<\/p>\n Whether Apple\u2019s cautious, disorganized approach<\/a> to AI represents a historic corporate blunder depends a lot on just where the current boom is headed; clearly, it\u2019s already gone further than the company anticipated, so it\u2019s going to spend some serious money anyway. At the very least, it\u2019s consistent with a larger recent pattern<\/a> for the company. Apple used to have the power to declare and shape entire product categories. Now it looks like a company trying to catch up.<\/p>\n Sign Up for John Herrman column alerts<\/p>\n Get an email alert as soon as a new article publishes.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n