The biggest story of a very bad week for tech comes from John Gruber, who eviscerated Apple Intelligence.
The “personalized Siri” Apple showed recently was a concept video, he writes. It’s the kind of thing the company did under John Sculley, when it was failing and flailing. This matters because Gruber knows his stuff and has a deserved reputation as an Apple fan.
Om Malik agrees that what’s called Apple Intelligence has been anything but. Apple’s market cap “golden handcuffs” that keep it from doing great things in software. It can’t put the money it needs to put into people and tell Wall Street to wait for them to get things right. It just says things are great and hopes numbers speak for themselves.
But this isn’t limited to Apple. Microsoft Co-Pilot has laid an egg. Google Gemini is substandard. All the “Big” AI projects have been shown to be strawmen. Amazon may be putting way too much money into capital investment.
People Beat Capital
Sam Altman convinced the markets, and his competitors, that a “Large Language Model” was everything, that software no longer matters. Nothing could be further from the truth.
DeepSeek and Manus have shown that the best hack still wins. They’ve also shown the superiority of the Open Source model and mindset.
Meta claimed to have that, but it also tried to redefine open source, as in “you can download it free, you can use it free, but all your improvements belong to me,” which isn’t open source at all. The Chinese startups are using real Open Source licenses, and the market is flocking to them.
This is what’s behind the big tech selloff. The idea that capital can replace coding was bogus from the start. Now the proof is in. As I have been writing all along, the big winners here will be startups and open source. The irony is that it’s coming from China.
Cut the capex and hire back those coders.
