On Apple's earnings call on Thursday, the company reported mixed results. The short version is that the world's largest company is doing fine. While revenue was down from the same period last year, the company managed to beat expectations largely because of better iPhone performance, and a record quarter for services revenue.
During the question and answer period, however, Tim Cook was asked about something far more interesting, and his response was maybe the best I've heard yet on the subject. Responding to a question from analyst Shannon Krauss from Credit Suisse, Cook talked about how he thinks about the power and potential of A.I.
"Can you talk a bit about A.I.?" Krauss asked. "It's, you know, obviously, the topic of the day--it seems like the topic of the year. Just how do you think about it through your products and services?"
"I do think it's very important to be deliberate and thoughtful in how you approach these things," Cook responded. "And there are several issues that need to be sorted ... but the potential is certainly very interesting."
You have to have heard Cook's response to really grasp the emphasis he put on the word very in that second sentence. Cook is acutely aware that many of Apple's peers seem to be in a race to figure out how to incorporate generative A.I. into their products.
I think we can all agree that generative A.I. is interesting, but Cook's response stands out because it goes against the grain of what almost every other tech company is doing right now. Three words really say it all. Cook says it's important to be "deliberate and thoughtful."
Those words, as much as anything, are a hallmark of Cook's approach. Apple doesn't do things impulsively to respond to whatever happens to be the next big trend. It takes its time figuring out the best possible version of a given feature, and only then does it unleash it on more than two billion active devices.
By contrast, here's what Zuckerberg said just a few days earlier when talking about how Meta is thinking about adding A.I. features to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp:
The specifics are going to come into focus as we ship more of these things. So, these are just themes for now. But first for our product, we're always focused on connection and expression. And I expect that our A.I. work will reflect that. I think that there's an opportunity to introduce A.I. agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful.
Basically, Zuckerberg is telling investors that he's not really sure how A.I. fits into Meta's products, but the company will figure it out as "we ship more of these things." It sounds a lot like more of the classic "move fast and break things." Except this time you're breaking something with the potential to do a lot more damage.
That doesn't mean Apple isn't thinking about what A.I. means for its products and, more importantly, for its business. Apple has been working on integrating A.I. in some form into its products for a while. The most obvious example is Siri, which uses machine learning to handle a range of tasks. Cook pointed out that the technology also has other uses.
"We've obviously made enormous progress, integrating A.I. and machine learning throughout our ecosystem," Cook said. "And we've weaved it into products and features. For many years, as you probably know, you can see that in things like fall detection and crash detection, and ECG. These things are not only great features, they're saving people's lives out there. And so it's, it's absolutely remarkable. And so we view A.I. as huge. And, you know, we'll continue weaving it in our products on a very thoughtful basis."
Of course, Cook didn't specifically answer Krauss's question about generative A.I., which isn't surprising. Apple is notoriously cautious about saying anything about its plans for future products. However, Apple has already optimized its Core ML for Stable Diffusion, an A.I. image generator. It makes sense that Apple is continuing to think about what makes the most sense for its users on its products.
What Cook didn't say is that Apple is making major changes to its core products, the way Microsoft has done with Bing and its Office suite, or like Google is rolling out with Bard. Apple is taking a more cautious and measured approach--which is what you would expect. It also happens to be the best way to think about A.I. that I've heard yet.
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