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AI is ‘absolutely critical’ to Apple
Tim Cook calls artificial intelligence integral to almost every Apple product.
Leander Kahney
August 04, 2023
It’s always struck me as absurd when critics say Apple is falling behind in AI simply because the company doesn't release a chatbot like ChatGPT.
Yes, it’s true that Apple’s most visible AI product — Siri — can oftentimes be as thick as a brick, giving the impression Apple is woefully behind.
But Apple has been building AI into its chips for years now with the Neural Engine, a set of specialized cores that process machine learning and other AI tasks.
The Neural Engine debuted in 2017 in the A11 Bionic chip. It came with two neural cores capable of 600 billion operations a second.
Since then, all of Apple’s chips have featured Neural Engines that have gotten increasingly bigger and badder.
For example, the latest M2 Ultra chip has 32 neural cores that can process a mind-blowing 31.6 trillion operations a second. You can see an eye-popping chart of the Neural Engine’s growth here.
All of this processing power is in service of AI that is baked into almost everything your Apple devices can do.
As Tim Cook explained on a Wall Street analyst call yesterday, AI is critical to Apple devices. It is “integral to virtually every product that we build,” he said.
So when anyone says Apple is falling behind in AI, point out that there’s an installed base of more than 2 billion devices that are primarily powered by AI.
That’ll shut ‘em up!
Also in today’s newsletter:
Apple Q3 revenues were slightly down but profits were up. And the company’s services now have an impressive 1 billion paying subscribers.
The iPhone 15 reportedly will launch just over a month from now on September 13.
Today’s the day that Steve Jobs made a rare apology for the failure of MobileMe, one of Apple’s first forays into online services. Behind the scenes, he gave the team a biblical tongue-lashing.
Get a great deal on this massive 60,000mAh Anker battery pack, which is perfect for days at the beach, camping or blackouts.
Got a new MacBook? You should check out Energiza Pro, a battery-management app that Apple really should be building into the core of macOS.
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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