I’m sure most of you remember the netbook craze of the late 00s. Everyone and their mother made these small, cramped mini-laptops that usually ran some form of stripped-down Windows, or Linux. They were built down to a cost and you could definitely tell, with performance to match the price tag. But much like the Nexus 7 that would come a few years later, we looked the other way because you know what? For the price, regressions were a lot more forgivable.
I’m not here to do a netbook retrospective, though. Rather, I want to draw a fun parallel.
The netbook craze was significant. Pretty much every PC OEM had their fingers in the pie. Naturally, the tech press turned to Apple, and began beating down their door as they were seemingly the only consumer electronics company who wasn’t jumping on this fad, and The People vehemently demanded Apple make a netbook. They must! Or they’ll miss their chance and forever miss out on this bold new product category that surely won’t fizzle out! They’ll lose millions!
Apple prided itself on skating to where the puck was going to be, and not where it currently was, and this was another example of that: Apple said they don’t want to build cheap, crappy laptops. Rather, they zagged hard and their answer to the netbook craze was not a netbook, but rather a tablet: The iPad.
The rest, as we know it, is history. People eventually grew tired of the compromises of netbooks, and the iPad offered most of what people wanted from netbooks but with a far better experience. Netbooks fizzled out entirely. Apple had done it again. Much like The People demanding Apple do Flash on the iPhone, Apple refused to buckle to industry pressure, and this turned out to be the correct move.
Fast forward to 2023-2024, and Apple found itself in a very similar situation.
AI craze has been sweeping the tech industry like a pox. Everyone and their mother is introducing some level of AI integration into their products, no matter how much utility said AI actually provides. (Arguably, this had been brewing for a bit: LG for example was and still is known for slapping “ThinQ AI” on damn near everything they can. They did it for phones too, and it made damn near no sense.)
AI feels like yet another tech fad, much like NFTs and crypto when that blew up. I don’t need to re-tread how AI–at least the way it’s being marketed by techbros–is hot garbage and the sooner this bubble bursts the better.
Naturally, much like netbooks, the tech press asked the question: “Everyone is doing it, why isn’t Apple?”
Now, Apple has been doing “AI” stuff for a while, except back then, it was known as machine learning, wasn’t marketed like AI is now, wasn’t used to be a massive plagiarism engine, and has practical applications. All that got swept under the AI umbrella within the last couple of years (which is unfortunate because unlike generative AI, machine learning actually has practical use cases and is actually useful).
Apple could well have done what they were damn good at: Telling the industry to go sod off, that they’re going their own way on this, and sticking to machine learning because as it stands now, the AI that companies like OpenAI are marketing feels like nothing more than a fad whose bubble is going to burst in much the same fashion as netbooks. But they didn’t.
Rather, Apple completely bent the knee to the tech bros, forging a partnership with OpenAI to allow iOS 18 to call out to ChatGPT (with your permission, thankfully). And developing their own take on generative AI (and cheekily calling it “Apple Intelligence”). Rather than doing what they did with netbooks and recognizing something that honestly feels like a fad that’s going to fizzle out, they just…went all in on it for their latest OS releases. Cool.
Time will tell if it was the right move to make. Personally? I don’t feel it was. Eventually, I feel like this bubble is going to burst, and every company who crammed an AI chatbot into their everything unnecessarily is going to have a whole lot of egg on their faces.
Apple would have been better off just saying “we’ve already been working on AI, it’s called machine learning” and kept on keepin’ on.