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- Hacker News
- > Apple of AI
Except Apple does not really innovate. They just polish until it looks shiny.
Just look at the upcoming flip phones, but the examples are numerous.
by amelius - That’s what it means to build a product. So the comparison fits perfectly: Both offer the best polished (-> real-world usable) products in their category.by solarkraft
- UI, polish, and customer experience are innovation. It takes an enormous amount of work to build consistent user experiences and build products that make choices on behalf of users that don't alienate those same users, yet Apple is able to consistently do that in ways that produce fervent customers who love their products.
I personally don't like or use most Apple products outside of my work MacBook pro, but I recognize the value and innovations there.
by ygjb - This seems misinformed. Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple Silicon.
Not every product iteration changes the world, but they’ve pushed the industry forwards much more than most.
If they, “don’t really innovate,” who do you think does?
by tyleo - They do seem to have done a "better" job of marketing
But are disappointing like Apple for being a "closed" ecosystem
by erelong - Great, can we have thought traces back yet?by exabrial
- My hot take: the only people willing to pay for LLMs are using it for code generation, and they prefer Claude.by mr_toad
- This may not last as long with alternatives catching up. Markets would have more 'inertia' for hardware and app ecosystems than for subscription-based software/AI.by alok-g
- the credibility of using vercel data - means the journos were lazy.
vercel is mostly used by the 'next.js' kids - so that ain't gonna paint the full picture.
again vercel is just reselling aws services at high marked up prices - so people paying for vercel again are most likely to pay for anthropic models. though we know models are a commodity at this point - without major differentiation.
what a lazy analysis.
by dzonga - And we’ll be lazy if we blindly trust your words. Do you have any number to back up your assessments?
Anthropic is reported to have $11.5B in revenue in 2nd quarter, compared to $787 million a year ago, and $4.73B in 1st quarter. In other words, massive jump. The annual run rate is $47B in May, so probably higher now.
In other word, the article is right —- Anthropic is the vendor with the highest revenue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/anthropic...
by signatoremo - Journalists just took whichever numbers fit the Apple narrative betterby SwtCyber
- Nope, Apple delivers the best hardware out there, Anthropic doesn't, they dumb dound, nerf it, put in constraints.
Yes, Apple provides a closed ecosystem, this isn't news. Anthropic is manufacturing the closed ecosystem themselves now, trying to capture via regulation.
by sscaryterry - Apple hardware is nerfed by the app distribution model, which is controlled by the OS, which is controlled by trusted computing featuresby petscoop
- I think the reason is that after all the benchmark comparisons, anthropic models still perform much more reliably and better in day to day use. Every day now there is a new supposedly fable level model that then somehow completely vanishes in a couple of days. While fable is still the best model and if only it were cheaper less people would be hating I suppose.
This really reminds of the spec comparison obsession android users had in the 2010s. Every 6months an 'iPhone killer' was released, but they were only ever superior in total isolation.
by asar - Switching to a different AI vendor has way less friction than switching between phone ecosystemby dgellow
- Vercel data as proof of market dominance is hilarious. Obviously next.js pet projects are mostly generated by Claude, it's just unmatched for frontend right now. But enterprise with their rag pipelines is sitting on Azure with OpenAI, and there are completely different budgets spinning there that simply don't make it into any Vercel dashboardsby SwtCyber