Apple wasn’t late to AI, it was the adult in the room

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 ac…

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