Apple wasn’t late to AI, it was the adult in the room
Computerworld ·
You carry a huge burden of responsibility when you make the world’s most widely used electronics product with an audience of hundreds of millions and usage patterns that penetrate every single part of life. Some complain that Apple doesn’t innovate swiftly enough. They expect the company to act as if it didn’t have the responsibility it holds, but I propose that responsibility is why the company steadily focuses on incremental change — not just to prevent mass protest by customers when much-loved features disappear, but also to balance the repercussions of any change they make . After all, at this kind of scale, a simple-seeming change in the nature of product features or user interface can have quite dramatic impact. Social media is a perfect illustration of a technology that seemed so trivial on introduction but has had such huge impact — and Apple never really got into that business, either. The need to take a gradual approach when implementing big change means Apple is no longer in a race against competitors, because it can’t race against some of them in the same way. That’s also why I think it moves slowly sometimes. The existential paradox Think about AI. Only today I came across an Anthropic financial report in which the company warns that the product it makes poses “ existential AI risks to humanity ” while confirming that it lost $8 billion last year . In other words, a colossal amount of capital is being drained from other sectors of the economy as we invest it all in this tech that poses existential risk. Now, there are arguments about the veracity of Anthropic’s claims; some say the AI companies are coalescing around these arguments for competitive reasons more than any real human concern. But my point is, given the huge weight of criticism thrown at Apple over the last few years for “missing out” on artificial intelligence, we’ve reached the moment in the story when the very companies working on the technology warn of the dangers of their creations — which begs the observation that perhaps Apple’s careful approach was correct all along. Perhaps it was the adult in the room. The human factor Apple’s top brass seem to recognize what’s going on. Speaking at WWDC in June 2026, Apple’s SVP Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, said of the fast pace of AI development, “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people — all of us — that it’s ultimately meant to serve.” He didn’t stop there. He called AI an incredibly powerful technology. “At Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone,” he said. Critics cat-call Craig’s comment as being little more than smoke to screen the company’s AI mishap, but what if it’s not? What if what actually happened is that Apple was working on a slow, steady, responsible deployment of the tech, only to be overtaken by others who, lacking the market power, were able to take big risks? The regulation game That seems to be what happened, but OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Google now have powerful AI solutions that have achieved market scale sufficient to mean deeper, stronger, more intrusive regulation — just like any other big firm. Just like Apple. From my own cynical perspective, it seems possible to me that the industry’s sudden pivot toward warning us of “ existential danger ” is not an act of altruism, but a calculated move to delay or defer much-needed regulation by framing the technology as a matter of national interest rather than corporate monopoly. The final countdown Even so, Apple must still compete in the space that’s here, and with its own declared privacy-first approach to the tech, it has built itself a unique selling proposition. One can opt to use products and services made by companies who think they are building danger for humanity, or choose to use more focused products that still deliver much of the convenience , but not at the cost of our humanity. Because finding that compromise — building tech that intersects humanity, technology, and the liberal arts — really matters when you make the world’s most widely used electronics product with an audience of hundreds of millions and usage patterns that penetrate every single part of life. Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core , or follow me on BlueSky , LinkedIn , or Mastodon .
You carry a huge burden of responsibility when you make the world’s most widely used electronics product with an audience of hundreds of millions and usage patterns that penetrate every single part of life. Some complain that Apple doesn’t innovate swiftly enough. They expect the company to act as if it didn’t have the responsibility it holds, but I propose that responsibility is why the company steadily focuses on incremental change — not just to prevent mass protest by customers when much-loved features disappear, but also to balance the repercussions of any change they make . After all, at this kind of scale, a simple-seeming change in the nature of product features or user interface can have quite dramatic impact. Social media is a perfect illustration of a technology that seemed so trivial on introduction but has had such huge impact — and Apple never really got into that business, either. The need to take a gradual approach when implementing big change means Apple is no longer in a race against competitors, because it can’t race against some of them in the same way. That’s also why I think it moves slowly sometimes. The existential paradox Think about AI. Only today I came across an Anthropic financial report in which the company warns that the product it makes poses “ existential AI risks to humanity ” while confirming that it lost $8 billion last year . In other words, a colossal amount of capital is being drained from other sectors of the economy as we invest it all in this tech that poses existential risk. Now, there are arguments about the veracity of Anthropic’s claims; some say the AI companies are coalescing around these arguments for competitive reasons more than any real human concern. But my point is, given the huge weight of criticism thrown at Apple over the last few years for “missing out” on artificial intelligence, we’ve reached the moment in the story when the very companies working on the technology warn of the dangers of their creations — which begs the observation that perhaps Apple’s careful approach was correct all along. Perhaps it was the adult in the room. The human factor Apple’s top brass seem to recognize what’s going on. Speaking at WWDC in June 2026, Apple’s SVP Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, said of the fast pace of AI development, “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people — all of us — that it’s ultimately meant to serve.” He didn’t stop there. He called AI an incredibly powerful technology. “At Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone,” he said. Critics cat-call Craig’s comment as being little more than smoke to screen the company’s AI mishap, but what if it’s not? What if what actually happened is that Apple was working on a slow, steady, responsible deployment of the tech, only to be overtaken by others who, lacking the market power, were able to take big risks? The regulation game That seems to be what happened, but OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Google now have powerful AI solutions that have achieved market scale sufficient to mean deeper, stronger, more intrusive regulation — just like any other big firm. Just like Apple. From my own cynical perspective, it seems possible to me that the industry’s sudden pivot toward warning us of “ existential danger ” is not an act of altruism, but a calculated move to delay or defer much-needed regulation by framing the technology as a matter of national interest rather than corporate monopoly. The final countdown Even so, Apple must still compete in the space that’s here, and with its own declared privacy-first approach to the tech, it has built itself a unique selling proposition. One can opt to use products and services made by companies who think they are building danger for humanity, or choose to use more focused products that still deliver much of the convenience , but not at the cost of our humanity. Because finding that compromise — building tech that intersects humanity, technology, and the liberal arts — really matters when you make the world’s most widely used electronics product with an audience of hundreds of millions and usage patterns that penetrate every single part of life. Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core , or follow me on BlueSky , LinkedIn , or Mastodon .