OK, but it's easy to retroactively declare the "late entry" into smartphones as a galaxy-brain move, to let all those suckers at BlackBerry, Microsoft, Handspring, Nokia, etc. beta-test all the ideas and formfactors, then swoop in as soon as they knew what they had developed would torch the whole market - we know the outcome, and that's frankly quite accurate.

But the difference here is, this iPhone was obviously already far along in development in 2005, when the BlackBerry 8700 was shipping.

In this case, due to their own announcement, we all know that Apple had intended to have LLM technology ready to ship in late 2024. We also know from the copious leaks that they eventually made massive, flailing pivots, and did major reactive internal reorgs to try to get back on track. They've had a lot of setbacks which push them later and later, and unlike in 2005 there is a great likelihood that their competitors can use the delay to significant advantage. (A chance. Of course, Google is the only other player in mobile and they seem sure to do mostly boneheaded things, like the subject of this article!)

But anyway, pretend we don't know any of that, pretend WWDC24 never even happened either. If the assertion is "Apple being at least 3 years late to the market for a major tech industry trend is in this case a sign that they are wisely taking notes from the sidelines, and will eventually pounce with a product that blows us all away, iPhone style" -- my reply is, from the outside and from this moment in time, isn't this also how it would look if they were repeatedly fumbling hard on the execution of this idea, with no clear path to shipping and no clear path to having a superior product to show for it?