“We acknowledge that Apple might not have fully finalized their own approach to AI, but we also believe that anyone thinking Apple will acquire an AI-powered search engine to ‘solve their AI shortfalls’ is misguided,” Woodring said. “Apple almost certainly is not, and does not, want to compete directly in search, regardless of what happens in the DOJ v. GOOGL remedy ruling.”
Where is Apple going?
The analyst, instead, believes Apple’s approach will be to build a broad ecosystem of new virtual-assistant-like features embedded into their OS, “some of which run on homegrown LLMs with Siri acting as central command, and others (arguably more) leveraging white-labeled technology from leading AI labs (Perplexity, Google, Grok, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) — that make their products and services better…”
If that’s true — that Apple wants to create its own unique family of AI tools and services to make life better for its customers, while integrating services from others for those tasks it does not provide — then getting there will take time.
