Maybe the most surprising thing about Apple’s all-hands meeting – aside from the fact that Apple had an all-hands meeting – was how effectively it may have reset the narrative around the company’s AI efforts. Those efforts have not gotten great reviews over the past year as Apple has seemingly struggled to keep up with its tech company peers.
Partly, that’s because Apple made big promises that, so far, it hasn’t delivered on at all. And, partly, it’s because Apple has virtually endless resources and talent, but hasn’t figured out a compelling AI product – especially when it comes to Siri, the beleaguered voice assistant that still struggles to do basic tasks at a time when Apple’s peers are talking about shipping agents that can do computer things for you.
Presumably, the point of the meeting was to rally the troops around fixing Apple Intelligence.
“Apple must do this,” CEO Tim Cook said, according to Bloomberg, which first reported on the meeting. “Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab. We will make the investment to do it.”
That’s the kind of thing you would say if you’re a CEO trying to get your team excited. As a general rule, if you want your team to care a lot about something, they have to believe you care a lot about it. Otherwise, it will hardly seem worth their energy.
There is the obvious question of whether Apple is able to “grab” the moment and build something compelling, or whether the company is willing to “make the investment” on the scale of its rivals, some of whom are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to poach talent from the competition. But, there was one thing Cook said that caught my attention, if for no other reason than it might be the best way to reframe the entire narrative.
“We’ve rarely been first,” Cook said. “There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod.”
All of that is true, and it’s actually a very important point because with those four words, Cook did something Apple hasn’t managed to do in nearly two years of artificial intelligence hype: he reframed the company’s position not as a weakness, but as an intentional strategic advantage. Cook reminded everyone that this deliberate, slow-burning, wait-until-it ’s-ready approach isn’t new for Apple.
On the contrary, it’s the playbook. Being first has never been Apple’s goal. Being right has.
This idea– that Apple is best when it reimagines categories instead of inventing them – has long been a part of the company’s mythos. But in the AI era, where speed seems to matter more than anything else, Apple’s silence has looked less like restraint and more like hesitation. Some critics have even accused the company of being so far behind that it can’t catch up.
Apple knows it has to catch up, or – at least – deliver. “AI is as big or bigger than the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps,” Cook said.
I think the jury may still be out on the scale of AI’s impact on not just the tech industry, but on every aspect of our lives. What is clear is that every other major tech company is forging ahead as though this is the single most important platform shift in the last 30 years.
According to Apple’s head of software engineering, Craig Federighi, Apple originally pursued a hybrid approach to upgrading Siri, bolting LLMs onto its existing command-and-control framework. But the results weren’t good enough. “We realized that approach wasn’t going to get us to Apple quality,” Federighi admitted.
So, they scrapped it – and started over.
That’s not something you do unless you believe the stakes are existential. And for Apple, they might be. If AI becomes the next primary interface for computing – replacing touch, voice, and visual navigation with intelligent inten – then whoever builds the best system wins not just attention, but platform dominance.
But even with this urgency, Cook isn’t pretending Apple will be the first to market with bleeding-edge AI tools. What he is saying is: we know how to play this game.
And that’s what makes those four words so powerful.
They reframe delay as design. Restraint as responsibility. They set expectations for investors, employees, and customers – not for Apple to be the fastest, but to be the one that gets it right when it counts.
They also remind everyone that Apple doesn’t need to outpace OpenAI or Google in foundational model development. That’s not the game Apple plays. It’s never tried to be the loudest or the most open. It tries to be the most useful to the most people, in the most seamless way.
And in a platform shift, what matters most isn’t who makes it first, it’s who makes it usable. That’s where Apple shines.
The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but it was the first one that made sense to normal people. The iPad wasn’t the first tablet, but it was the first one that didn’t feel like a failed laptop. Apple doesn’t win with specs. It wins with user experience.
So when Cook says, “We’ve rarely been first,” it’s not a concession. It’s a flex. It tells Wall Street: don’t confuse quiet with complacent. It tells employees: trust the process. And it tells rivals: we’re still Apple.
In many ways, the all-hands was a necessary culture moment – not just to unify Apple internally, but to reassert its identity externally. After a year of AI hype and hand-wringing, Apple finally gave us a coherent story about where it fits in. And it did so with just four words. – Inc./Tribune News Service - y Jason Aten
