Apple Intelligence: When every move is deemed a failure

When you're Apple, there's no such thing as success unless it's the iPhone. No, not today's iPhone, one of those previous models that were abstractly better because of nostalgia and cynicism.

The number one rule in Apple reporting is that everything is bad today and things used to be good. Depending on what you're talking about, that good time could be last year or 2013. And sometimes, Apple's successes are still failures because they didn't succeed enough or in the way an analyst wanted.

It's quite the conundrum. Especially since the bad things of today become the twinkling star of perfection sought by analysts in three to four years.

Apple used to be good, now they're bad. Rinse and repeat until the sun implodes.

Every Apple decision is deemed a pratfall

The latest report that caught my eye is from The Information, the online publication that costs hundreds of dollars for the privilege of reading. While sometimes they land a truly remarkable scoop, those subsidize the remaining articles that come through with a shrug.

Here's AppleInsider's non-paywalled coverage of that report.

The core of the report is Apple asking Google to help host the new Private Cloud Compute servers that will be used for the more powerful Siri. Nothing here is particularly new, as it has been shared heavily by Mark Gurman. No surprises here, Apple already uses Google to host iCloud servers and more.

Google is a great company for cloud services. They have strengths in places Apple doesn't, and the partnership is beneficial to users.

Of course, Apple partnering with Google is painted as yet another failure. The company overestimated its server needs versus how much Private Cloud Compute would be utilized. Apparently, only about 10% of Apple's PCC servers are actively used and many being built are not even installed.

That seems to be more of an issue with Apple's rollout than with the servers and their capabilities. However, pair that with Apple turning to Google for the new Siri rollout, and it's now reportedly a catastrophic failure for the company.

Two separate systems with different needs

The report assumes that Apple's servers are now just going to waste, but that's not how this works. What is more likely is that Apple's in-house PCC servers will continue to serve as the cloud-side processing for all things Apple Intelligence.

What the report misses is that Apple hasn't opened PCC to third-party use. Today, developers can target Apple Foundation Models, but only the on-device version. It is expected that Apple will open up access to Private Cloud Compute for third parties, and that would cause a flood of new processes being sent to the servers.

Perhaps it isn't that "only 10% of PCC servers are in use," suggesting a failure in the rollout, but "only 10% of PCC servers are needed today," as a success of focusing on on-device models at launch.

These reports will never paint it that way.

Round and round we go

Apple seeking work with Google for Siri-specific applications makes sense. For one, Gemini was used to train the new Apple Foundation Models. The two companies have been in a kind of back and forth these past few years around AI.

Previously, Apple had used Google Tensor hardware in training Apple Foundation Models, then later, Google provided Apple a Gemini that had been built to work in Apple's PCC servers. This latest development suggests that Google has worked with Apple to build Private Cloud Compute into Google's hardware servers.

Google hosts, but Apple owns the block. Like with iCloud, Google has zero access to anything.

It's a win-win for Apple, Google, and consumers. It's a better model and global access to Google's server infrastructure. But of course it's a failure because Apple didn't magic this together on its own.

Don't worry, the perceived failures of tomorrow will cause analysts to say today was the golden era of Apple. It's the circle of narrative-based Apple reporting, where reporters guilty of this are more interested in the click than the truth.