India, March 19 -- Call it lazy. Call it an obsession. Call it a lazy obsession. For the past couple of years, everyone with a keyboard, the X app and half an opinion, insisted Apple was "behind" on artificial intelligence (AI). Apparently, barometers of success include having a frontier model to chest thump about, a founder or CEO doing the podcast circuit to explain why artificial general intelligence is just five minutes away, hyperscale capex flex, as well as dramatic product demos videos. Apparently, Apple was behind. Apple had missed the moment, we were told.

Microsoft pumped billions into OpenAI. Google scrambled to embed Gemini into every app they have. Nvidia's market cap went vertical for a while as every Silicon Valley startup...