Meta, Microsoft, and other tech giants are losing billions on AI. Can Apple catch up?

Steven Levy of Wired has been at this for a long time. In many ways, he might be the ultimate insider tech journalist. That means that even when his takes are bad, and this one certainly is, they're still interesting because they give us some insight into the way people in the tech industry are thinking.

Apr 24, 2026 11:00 AM 

Apple's Next CEO Needs to Launch a Killer AI Product

 

Sometime in the next year or two, Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, will step onto a stage and tell the world that his company has a revolutionary product. This product, he’ll say, will put the full and awesome power of AI into everyone’s hands. It probably won’t represent a breakthrough in AI research, and it might not let people automate work or perform tasks any better than a lot of technically minded people are doing today. It may or may not involve a new device, though if it doesn’t, one should be in development. But if it all works out, that keynote will mark the moment when Apple did to AI what it has done for desktop computers, the internet, mobile technology, wearables, and music distribution. That is, it’ll offer a solution to a troublesome technology that’s so delightful and right that it seems obvious in retrospect.

This isn’t optional for Ternus. While AI is clearly the future and millions of people use it, even more are suspicious of it. Powerful new AI agent technologies such as Claude Code and OpenClaw are still too risky or technical for most people to adopt. If Apple doesn’t decode this for the masses, someone else will. Current CEO Tim Cook, who announced this week that he’ll vacate his role in September and become the company board’s executive chairman, has done a superlative job guiding the company after Steve Jobs, but he left this important box unchecked. Apple Intelligence, rolled out with much fanfare in 2024, was underwhelming and uncompleted.

The notion that companies must rush to embrace every technological next big thing or be consigned to the dustbin of history is an article of faith among techno-optimists. It hasn't been true in the past—there are countless exceptions—but the belief remains as strong as ever.

To get a full sense of the disconnect from reality here, consider what Levy is able to come up with in the way of actual AI products that Apple might offer its customers.

 That’s fine, but I look back to the mid-2000s when everybody was waiting for Apple to come out with a phone. When Jobs finally delivered in January 2007, the product defined the mobile era. It’s a big ask for Ternus to do something similar for the AI age—but it’s an opportunity that must be seized. AI threatens to disrupt the entire iPhone ecosystem. By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”

I am hard-pressed to think of something less in need of agentic automation than booking a rideshare. It's a process of three to five clicks, taking less than a minute in most cases. What's worse, the only way that an agent might streamline the process is by removing steps that most people would very much want to maintain control over, like reviewing the driver or selecting the type of car.

(Admittedly, there is a long Apple history of removing functionality in the name of innovation.)

Of course, there are real and important uses for large language model-based technology, but in the case of Apple, this seems to be someone trying and failing to come up with a problem for this particular solution. That's the story of far too much tech journalism in the 21st century.