Apple stands out among its peer companies as the Big Tech colossus that mostly just makes things you can hold in your hand. This is a clear advantage in some ways; people need portals to enter the digital world, and Apple is happily making billions of them and reaping the rewards.

But according to Bloomberg’s Apple leak collector Mark Gurman, Apple’s C-suite is starting to see this as a problem, and you’ll be shocked if I tell you why. Haha I’m just flirting with you. He said it was because of AI.

In Gourmet latest Power On columnhe tried to put a case against the primacy of gadgets, and then claimed that, “The company’s own senior executives understand this and privately question whether Apple has the right ingredients to win the AI-first landscape.”

Summarized, Gurman’s argument is that the hardware itself is less important than the software experience wrapped around it. Apple may have a hugely profitable App Store, but it doesn’t have the slick, AI forward hardware that, say, Meta does in the form of line of smart glasses. Smart glasses may not fly off the shelves, but if accompanied by the departure of AI boss John Giannandrea, and the recent Apple. Surrender to Google to get a functional AI model when one is needed, the trends make Apple look creaky and outdated, and generally like a company that needs to get its shit together. After that, OpenAI will release a physical product later this year that—hey, who knew?—could be really cool, even though it looked like it might be earbuds at first.

As for what it means product-wise, Gurman’s column is remarkably short on details and full of his own personal recipes. Instead, he made the reasonable position that Apple is in a better position to sell a popular pair of AI-powered earbuds than OpenAI.

But apart from earbuds, Gurman admits that we should expect a “patchwork approach” to AI products from Apple, including a combination of wearables, smarthome gadgets, and services involving AI, all organized around the new version of Siri. expected to be revealed later this month.

If that is indeed the approach to AI that Apple is taking, it seems that Apple is less concerned about having “the right ingredients to win the first AI scene,” and more that it is in wait-and-see mode. Silicon Valley trends like Moltbot It might sound noisy, but everyone I know is deeply wedded to the traditional hardware-and-software ecosystem, many of which rely heavily on Apple’s iOS and OSX. People responded negatively, say, to Microsoft aggressive push to get users to adopt its AI tools on Windows. In other words, the marriage between normal people and traditional electronic devices does not seem to be headed for divorce, which is good for Apple’s status quo.