Why Is Apple Planning to Make a Robot?
There are two main stories people are telling about Apple these days. One, rooted in its financial performance going back nearly 20 years, is of the most successful electronics device-maker of all time — a wildly profitable, well-positioned, multitrillion-dollar company that continues to make a lot of money but that, since 2020, hasn’t been growing quite as quickly as it did for most of the decade prior. The other is of a firm that, despite all its advantages, is missing out on the next big thing in tech — the only thing that matters, in this telling — having failed to invest enough in AI.
A report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests the company has something to say about both. In a wave of new products and software characterized as an “artificial-intelligence comeback,” Apple appears to be jumping into about a half-dozen new industries at once. There’s a “tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion” and looks like “an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room,” Gurman writes, as well as a “smart speaker with a display,” both powered by “a lifelike version of Siri.” There’s “an Apple security system that can automate household functions,” as well as “smart glasses,” a “foldable phone,” and a “large foldable device that melds a MacBook and an iPad.” It’s also, according to Gurman, “exploring a mobile bot with wheels — something akin to Amazon.com Inc.’s Astro — and has loosely discussed humanoid models.”
A few of these projects have been leaked and teased before, but a lot of this is new. In the history of Apple’s product releases — a dependable, steady spectacle with a big but highly telegraphed semi-surprise every once in a while — this looks like an onslaught, an explosion of development and creativity after years of incremental updates and the Vision Pro’s big swing and miss. Taken in the context of the broader consumer-tech industry, it now looks more like a company struggling to chase its rivals wherever they go.
It doesn’t help that those rivals have gone all over the place. In the last decade, companies with vastly different histories have converged on a sprawling, overlapping set of secondary businesses. Amazon, an e-commerce company, became a cloud provider, a device manufacturer, and a massive advertising company; Google, the search and advertising firm, built a smartphone operating system, started selling phones and tablets, got into home cameras and thermostats, and, like Apple, started making its own processors. Meta, with momentum from its social-media businesses, tried to make a phone before settling on VR and smart glasses. All of them have, or have had, a stake in the self-driving-car industry. Everyone, of course, became an advertising firm. Now, everyone is an AI firm, not just because it’s where money is flowing generally but because each firm sees AI assistants as a way to unify disparate product lines and to lock customers into even deeper — and perhaps exclusive — relationships.
Every company is trying to become an everything company, in other words, which means Apple’s moves here are less about forging new paths than filling gaps in its own omni-conglomerate portfolio (more urgently, perhaps, as its core product, the iPhone, approaches its 20th anniversary). Its “lifelike version of Siri” is a response to voice products from Google, OpenAI, and Amazon; its “smart speaker display” is a competitor to millions of Alexa and Nest screens already in customers’ homes, often connected to Nest and Ring smart cameras that are mounted on doors and inside houses across America. Samsung’s flagship phone is a foldable device and its first version came out in 2019. Between its Oculus headsets and Ray-Ban glasses, Meta, not Apple, seems to be setting the direction of the AR/VR industry.
Whether Apple’s cautious, disorganized approach to AI represents a historic corporate blunder depends a lot on just where the current boom is headed; clearly, it’s already gone further than the company anticipated, so it’s going to spend some serious money anyway. At the very least, it’s consistent with a larger recent pattern for the company. Apple used to have the power to declare and shape entire product categories. Now it looks like a company trying to catch up.