Apple WWDC 26 – Second time lucky?

Sniping from the back of the pack.

• Apple laid out its second shot at adding AI to the Apple Ecosystem, but its refusal to say when this would be generally available reveals a lack of confidence despite some pretty good use cases.
• WWDC headlined with the much-anticipated rehash of Apple Intelligence which, to be fair to Apple, envisages some pretty interesting use cases.
  • First, Sniping: where Apple could not resist having a go at the industry leaders, claiming that it would not run a race simply for the sake of AI, and that the leaders were doing so without clear regard for the people the AI is meant to serve.
  • This is easy to say when one is at the back of the pack and using the AI of one of the others to support AI services within one’s ecosystem.
  • The leaders’ slapdash approach to privacy was also targeted, but to be fair to Apple, it has done and most likely will continue to be the industry leader in privacy.
  • Second, New models: where Apple has rebuilt its models from scratch using Gemini as its starting point.
  • There are now two models, one which runs on almost all iPhones, Macs, iPads and another which is larger and more powerful, which will only run on M4 iPads, M3 Macs and iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone Air.
  • These are the engine of the new features, and an orchestrator layer will be used to provide the new services that Apple thinks its users will want.
  • Third, Use cases: which is where Apple really shone (as one would expect).
  • Here the usual capabilities that have been shown many times by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have been given the Apple spit and polish and presented for our consideration.
  • Activities like searching, selecting, sharing and editing photos were presented in a way that were natural and easy to use.
  • Finding events, the criteria for buying tickets and setting reminders for when tickets are on sale were also well presented.
  • Shortcuts has now also become much more usable as the AI will now write the shortcut after the criteria are set using natural language rather than tedious step setting by the user.
  • The AI is going everywhere, and another use case highlighted is on the Mac where the AI will now group tabs by subject automatically, which is something I could see myself finding very useful.
  • However, all of this depends on the AI working flawlessly (big problem to date) and being made available sooner rather than later.
  • Fourth, Availability: this is where all the ifs and buts are to be found and is almost certainly what triggered a 5% sell-off in the shares after the keynote concluded.
  • Apple will usually tell the market exactly when a product will come to market but in this case, it declined to say when any of the new services and capabilities would hit general availability.
  • Developers can test it now, and some of the services will become available in beta form “later in the year”.
  • This gives Apple some room for delay should the services not prove to be as good as promised and is an indicator that Apple is not nearly as confident that it will get it right second time around as it is trying to lead us to believe.
• The net result is that we are still in the AI holding pattern, but crucially, I still don’t think that it matters very much.
• AI has yet to become something that drives users to purchase one device over another, and while this remains the case, Apple has time to get this right.
• The market, however, is less patient and can regularly be observed getting in a tizzy about holding shares over the weekend, which is what may create an opportunity.
• I am fairly confident that Apple will get this right eventually, although it may take longer than expected, and when it does, everything will be well again.
• In the meantime, the market could easily put a 20%+ discount into the shares, creating an opportunity to take a short-term (12 months or so) position.
• Hence, I will be watching this carefully over the next few months.