If there's a company who could ever afford to be late to the party is apple though.
Not the first to bring mp3 players to the market, nor phones, nor tablets. Market leader every time.
They could have just stayed in a corner talking about privacy, offer a solid experience while everything else drowns in slop, researched UX for llms and come 5 years later with a killer product.
I don't get why they went for the rush. It's not like AI is killing their hardware sales either.
I see your point, but I see nothing to indicate they’re doing the “polish and wait”. No reason to believe they’re cooking behind the scenes or that this product was a learning exercise for them.
Most of their current products seem to be decaying in the dead march towards the next yearly release. ux and ui are becoming more and more poorly thought (see their last design language). They half pursue ideas and don’t manage to deliver (vr, apple car, etc).
I see cargo culting and fad chasing like any average leadership, only with a fatter stack of cash supporting the endeavour.
We basically know what they are cooking behind the scenes - to write a $1 Billion check to Google for a custom Gemini model
Because today they're racing against regulators for the privilege of setting their own service as the preinstalled, exclusive, default with APIs only they are allowed to use.
They already lost this superpower in the EU and I think Japan, India, Brazil too. Early next year they've got their US antitrust trial, and later in the year are some class actions challenging their control over app distribution, and at least two pieces of draft legislation are circulating that would require allowing competing apps to be defaults.
If they need another two years they might face an entrenched and perhaps even better competitor, while their own app needs to be downloaded from the App Store.
That's a great point and an easy way to visualize it as an outsider, but it's not necessarily that simple.
For one thing, the iPad (market-leading tablet) and the iPhone (market-leading pocket touchscreen device) were not their first attempt at doing that. That would be the Newton, which was an actual launched product and a commercial failure.
For another thing, even Apple can't just become the market leader by doing nothing. They need to enter late with a good product, and having a good product takes R&D, which takes time. With MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets, they didn't exactly wait until the industry was burnt through before they came in with their offering; they were just later (with the successful product) than some other people who did it worse. They were still doing R&D during those years when they were "waiting."
Apple could still "show up late" to AI in a few more years or a decade, using their current toe-dipping to inform something better, and it would still fit into the picture you have of how they "should've done it." Not to mention, Apple's also lost its way before with things like convoluted product lines (a dozen models of everything) and experimental products (the Newton then, Apple Vision now); messing up for a while also isn't exactly bucking history.