Apple AI servers unused in warehouses due to low Apple Intelligence usage

I've been wondering about this failed Apple Intelligence project, but the more I think of it, Apple can afford to sit and wait. In 5 years we're going to have Opus 4.6-level performance on-device, and Apple is the only company that stands to benefit from it. Nobody wants to be sending EVERY request to someone else's cloud server.

The rest of the FAANG has invested very heavily in cloud while Apple seems to be a laggard. GCP, AWS and Azure are all publicly available products, and cloud at Netflix, Meta seems very mature for a private offering.

This is not a huge disadvantage in my opinion. Let the rest of big tech fight each other to death over cloud, while controlling a very profitable differentiated offering (devices+services). Apple keeps the M series HW out of data centers, even though it presents some very attractive performance/w and per-core numbers.

Just like Siri, it’s completely useless. I don’t need Apple Intelligence to summarize my text messages. I can skim them nearly as fast.

What are these servers actually used for?

The Siri+LLM features of Apple Intelligence aren’t launched yet, and the other features like notification summaries run on-device.

Yeah but this is how Apple has always done infrastructure/services. Their internal software teams are a mess. They constantly reinvent the wheel poorly, and then they charge a premium for exclusive access. Is anyone surprised by this?

they should just scalp the RAM on ebay, that's what people actually _want_ to buy, not ai

Imagine launching such a shitty product that AI servers are sitting unused in 2026.

Apple will utilize them when needed and scoop up extra capacity after the bubble burst.

Taken another way given apple’s enormous market reach, this could be seen as perhaps the most solid metric of actual consumer interest in ai and features ignoring hype.

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