alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
I think you're correct on it not being a disadvantage. Apple's competitors are the Android OEMs, Microsoft, and Dell. Apple Intelligence is a failure only in the sense that we hold Apple to a higher standard. Can anyone argue that Apple's AI implementation is more flawed than Microsoft? I don't think so.