Apple is a famously secretive company, which means that it’s hard to know exactly how Apple is thinking about AI internally. That said, from an outside perspective, Apple seems very behind - they have done little to improve the capabilities of Siri and though they have touted Apple Intelligence, it has continued to be delayed. For a company that has often defined the next frontier of consumer engagement (iMac, iPhone, iPad, AirPods), this lag seems odd.
It’s possible that Apple correctly perceives that the current generation of agentic tools are not yet good enough for full consumer adoption (too slow, too many quality errors), or perhaps they’re just asleep at the wheel. Whatever the case, I believe Apple has a durable advantage and that their eventual entry into LLM-based AI is still secure - the vast reach of the personal tooling they can offer.
If you’re in the US, in your pocket right now is likely an iOS device that runs a large portion of your life. It has access to all of the apps you use habitually (do you use DoorDash or Grubhub? Gmail or Outlook? ClassPass?) along with the data about how you access those tools. There are many other companies with data about you (Google being one of the most obvious), but no one has the same concentration of tools that you use.
In fact, we can see this ecosystem of tools in other areas. Gemini models are not generally the most powerful, but their reach into the Google ecosystem means that they come packaged with a ton of utility. You can tell Gemini to read an email, turn it into a spreadsheet, and then send the results on Drive.
Outside of Android (which does have this same ecosystem advantage, though for a different set of consumers), Google still only has access to a relatively small number of tools within the Google ecosystem that you might not even use in your daily life. Apple, on the other hand, has almost complete control in the ecosystem of the apps that you personally have chosen to install on your phone, due to their importance to you.
If I were Apple, I would tell every app developer that the next version of iOS will require apps to make available all major functionality to a tool-calling agent, on pain of being delisted from the App Store. Coupled with an appropriately powerful model (which I think is a commodity that Apple can rent), overnight, Apple will go from a world with a limited agentic story to one where their system has direct access to all of the functionality that it knows you use all the time. Instead of having only a limited toolset, requiring users to do extra work to hook up what they care about, or building generic and limited functionality, this system would be able to create fully personalized workflows for each individual user, built by the developers of each app - much like the App Store allowed full personalization of the phone.
All of this requires Apple to execute and integrate better than they have been. There are many possible barriers in the way - regulations could stop this from happening, developers especially of the most important apps might have enough leverage to stop Apple from disintermediating them in this way (see ClassPass, MCP, and the absence of UX moats), or they could be late enough that a company like OpenAI or Anthropic beats them to the creation of an app ecosystem. That said, I think it’s only halftime, and the advantage their app ecosystem confers is real.