In the age of AI, Apple needs to open up
Tight control over its products, once an asset, has turned into a liability
DURING Apple’s annual developer conference, which began on June 9th, the tech giant’s bosses were in their happy place. On home turf in Cupertino, California, they unveiled a glossy visual overhaul of Apple’s operating systems and showed off new features that pull its devices into ever-closer harmony. However, although the new “liquid glass" styling may give its software a new sheen, beneath the window-dressing things are not going well.
Nearly all of Apple’s products are made in Asia, so President Donald Trump’s tariffs threaten to crush its margins in America. Its tight grip on its software ecosystem has got it into trouble with regulators; after a bust-up with a judge during its long-running fight with Epic Games, the maker of “Fortnite", over how it runs its App Store, Apple was slapped with a court order that jeopardises the $30bn it takes each year in app-related fees. And in the vital field of artificial intelligence (AI), Apple is floundering. No wonder, then, that its share price is down by almost a fifth this year, the most of any of America’s five biggest tech firms.
The company’s struggles to adapt to the AI boom are deep-rooted. Even before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, Apple was falling behind, as Siri, its voice assistant, proved to be notably less capable than the alternatives from other firms. At last year’s conference Apple previewed a new version of Siri that could combine data from different apps to handle complex requests. It looked impressive, but it never shipped.
As in the fight with Epic Games, Apple’s difficulties come down to control. The firm has long differentiated its products by enabling users to keep their personal data private. It can afford to do this because it makes most of its money selling hardware—unlike rivals such as Google and Meta, whose business models depend on collecting and analysing data in order to sell personalised ads.
The rise of AI has turned Apple’s control-freakery from a strength to a weakness. The plan, announced last year, was to deploy the company’s own AI model directly on users’ devices, where it could gain access to personal data (such as emails, messages and calendars) to answer queries and perform tasks, without compromising privacy. The problem is that this doesn’t seem to work: a small model running on a smartphone cannot compete with a much more powerful one running in the cloud. Surely Apple could develop its own big cloud-based model, to compete with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini? Maybe. Catching up might be possible if Apple dipped into the rich trove of its users’ data. But it has promised not to.
As a result, it is now seeking outside help. Already, Siri can offer to hand off more complex queries to ChatGPT, though it must clunkily ask permission each time. This week Apple announced a deeper partnership with OpenAI. With users’ permission, ChatGPT will be given more access to their devices, for example to answer queries about what is on their screens. ChatGPT will also be baked into Apple’s programming tools.
This is a step in the right direction, but Apple needs to go further. Rather than trying to control what AI can and cannot do on its devices, Apple should let users decide. This would go against Apple’s instincts for control, which have only intensified under the leadership of Tim Cook. Yet openness may not be as scary as Apple fears.
Think back to when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and refused to let anyone else build native apps for it. Apple changed its mind the following year, allowing others to build apps on its terms and unleashing a surge of new tools, games and services. It should now apply the same approach to AI. Opening up the App Store helped make the iPhone the world’s most successful consumer product. Opening up to others’ AI models is Apple’s best chance of keeping it that way.
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