Opinion | Apple is late to the party again. It still might clean up. (2024)

After all, despite jumping to an early lead in 2011 with its AI phone assistant, Siri, Apple had fallen badly behind the competition. As The Financial Times tartly noted, it has to be humbling for the great Apple to issue products so obviously derivative of those already on the market from the likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft. The last of these surely would have made Steve Jobs turn in his proverbial grave, given his well-known disdain for the PC software maker against which he competed for so long.

Worse, Apple’s new AI entries aren’t even ready yet. The company said to expect them by the fall.

For all that, though, Apple’s critics still went gaga over the company’s news. In the two weeks since the beginning of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where it demonstrated its new features, the company has added more than $300 billion to its $3 trillion market capitalization.

What do the markets see here that so many cannot? A hardware and software giant with a long history of being exceedingly good at playing catch-up.

Apple has done an outstanding job over the years of telling customers the story of its constant innovation. But the firm’s true genius is its ability to capitalize on the ideas, as well as the early product offerings, of others. This goes back to Apple’s earliest days, when a youthful Jobs toured the labs of Xerox PARC in Palo Alto and came away with the idea for a “mouse” that controlled an on-screen graphical user interface. This eventually led to the Macintosh and a worldwide consumer and cultural revolution. Xerox, which had the idea in the first place, never commercialized it.

Apple’s ability to borrow and then improve what others had started continued apace. What were once boringly known as MP3 players predated the iPod. Napster preceded iTunes, which figured out how to charge for licensed music. Nokia, not Apple, popularized the smartphone. But the iPhone, with its magical touch-screen technology (which Apple also didn’t invent) changed that massive market forever. (iPhones make up the bulk of Apple’s 2.2 billion devices in the wild today.)

It’s tough, in fact, to name a single product category that Apple came up with first. But it’s a snap to rattle off those that Apple redefined as its own. Amazon’s Kindle and Microsoft’s Tablet PC predated the iPad, which then dominated the tablet market. Spotify debuted before Apple Music, now part of Apple’s online services empire. Samsung brought a smartwatch to market before the Apple Watch, which has become a market-making fashion statement, status symbol and fitness tool.

None of this means Apple’s entry into AI will be a slam dunk. The field has numerous well-funded competitors that are far ahead: Microsoft shrewdly invested $13 billion in OpenAI and then “acqui-hired” an AI pioneer named Mustafa Suleyman (who sold a previous start-up, DeepMind, to Google) to run its consumer AI efforts. Amazon and Google have invested billions in another AI start-up, Anthropic, considered a potent competitor to OpenAI. Meta has some of the best AI talent in the industry and has been rapidly integrating AI into its products.

Until recently, no one has been quite sure what Apple had up its AI sleeve, in part because the company is so secretive — it shies away from publishing academic papers for fear of giving away its intentions — and because it has had so little to show. And what it put on display at its developers’ conference was a bunch of stuff the competition already is doing: nifty photo editing, clever plumbing of emails and contacts, traffic-mapping suggestions and the like.

Even its embrace of OpenAI is limited. Apple plans merely to refer users to OpenAI, but in a way that shields their data from the start-up. It’s a shocking acknowledgment that Apple doesn’t have technology to match ChatGPT.

The enthusiasm around Apple’s new strategy, then, comes down to three factors, none of which include its demonstration so far of what the tech industry calls a killer app.

First is Apple’s record of playing the imitation game. If Apple can harness what it sees in the marketplace with what its creative engineers can cook up, good things will happen. Second is scale: Did I mention those 2.2 billion devices? Apple directs its technology to its iPhones and other products and sometimes blocks competitors from those same gadgets. (This is why the federal government has brought antitrust charges against the company.)

Finally, there’s the intentional piece: Apple isn’t playing coy anymore. It has acknowledged that AI is more than a bright, shiny object and instead is the next product category that cannot be ignored. Until now, and with a few exceptions, when Apple has applied all its focus to a new technology, the marketplace has changed forever, and usually for the better.