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.

Given that OpenClaw isn’t a lot of code, Apple could still build their own. After all, a hyper-personal AI Assistant is what they announced as “Apple Intelligence” two WWDCs ago. Or the could buy OpenClaw, hand it to the Shortcuts team, throw in their remaining AI devs, and Bob’s your uncle. They aren’t first to OpenClaw, but maybe they can still be the best. I know I’d like to be sure it can’t erase my entire disk just because i sneeze when I’m telling it what to do.

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.

My opinion is it seems counter to what made Apple so successful in the first place: second mover advantage, see where everyone else fails and plug the gap.

You're right on the liability front - Apple still won because everyone bought their hardware and their margins are insanely good. It's not that they're sitting by waiting to become irrelevant, they're playing the long game as they always do.

> 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.

Apple owns a platform. So they can just implement this later and make sure the competition loses their edge.

I keep seeing posts about OpenClaw (I still didn’t try it myself) but I don’t get the constant references to the Mac Minis.

Why are people needing the Mac Minis? Isn’t OpenClaw supposed to run locally in your laptop?

And if it actually should run as a service, why a MacMini and not some docker on the local NAS for instance?

I think this pov lacks empathy.

What if you don't want to trust your computer with all your email and bank accounts? This is still not a mass market product.

The main problem I see here is that with restricted context AI is not able to do much. In order to see this kind of "magic" you have to give it all the access.

This is neither safe or acceptable for normie customers