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Apple needs to become a software company again

The AI features baked into iOS 18 and macOS 15 need to be compelling enough to convince people to upgrade.

As the heat from the iPhone’s huge acceleration of growth begins to cool down and iPad and Mac sales drop from their pandemic-driven heights, Apple is looking for reasons to sell new hardware. While iOS has proven generally to be better at managing memory usage than Android, that’s still a relatively small amount of RAM, and would seem to be the bare minimum capable of running an on-device LLM of the kind Apple and Google are working on. But if Apple can manage to infuse AI into its operating systems in ways that make them more appealing, and by happy coincidence, it requires faster processors and more memory, that’s going to motivate a round of hardware upgrades.

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