Apple is increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place — and not just on Artificial Intelligence.
Here’s the problem, one that may have been stretched to breaking point during CEO Tim Cook’s 2025 WWDC keynote. There are people in the market for Apple products, who want and have always wanted technology that just works. They want gadgets that are intuitive to use, not intrusive. According to multiple surveys, consumers continue to be distrustful of anything with an AI label. According to the nonprofit IAPP, 57 percent of us believe AI poses a threat to our privacy.
Then there are investors who are in the market for Apple stock, who are always on the lookout for tech products that seem new. Overall, tech investors are still drinking the AI Kool-Aid despite abundant evidence — including a brand new paper from Apple researchers! — that AI’s ability to reason, and to be useful in general, may have already hit a wall.
SEE ALSO:
‘The illusion of thinking’: Apple research finds AI models collapse and give up with hard puzzles
Apparently, Apple is trying to keep both of those groups happy. Result: a keynote that liberally sprinkles on mentions of “Apple Intelligence,” a rebranding of many software services (including voice assistant Siri, which got just one shout-out compared to multiple mentions of ChatGPT), but failed to gin up any excitement about what Apple Intelligence can do for you.
Given privacy is a major concern for consumers, it’s cool that Apple Intelligence won’t send any of your queries to the company. But we already knew that from Cook’s 2024 keynote that introduced Apple Intelligence. Without getting tough on dangers posed by other companies who are more reckless with your data when it comes to AI — the same way Cook once dared to call Android a “toxic hellstew” — mentions of privacy just fly by like an F1 race car.
More than anything else, Apple’s updates were mere vibes. Apple Intelligence is a vibe. The “liquid glass” design refresh is a vibe. Craig Fedherigi is definitely a vibe. But tech stocks are coasting on a different vibe right now, the one OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been nurturing for the last three years — including hiring Apple legend Jony Ive to create a screenless gadget. There are only so many F1 dad jokes Apple can make to compete with that alluring vision.
The Apple analyst who called the event a “yawner” because Apple did not “monetize on the AI front” spoke for the market, which drove Apple stock down from the minute the keynote began.
Mashable Light Speed
How Apple is being a people-pleaser
“Yes. F1, baby.”
Credit: Apple keynote, Mashable screenshot
You’d think the interests of Apple consumers and Apple investors would not diverge, and for most of the past two decades they haven’t. Thanks to the roaring success of the iPhone, Apple got millions of new customers for all its well-designed, highly-rated, premium price products. Investors rewarded that runaway growth by making Apple the first company ever with a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion.
But Apple is increasingly dealing with mature markets. Or in normal person-speak, its gadgets have solved most major problems and settled down into standard versions of themselves. The average user can buy an iPhone now and be reasonably confident that its superfast chipset and self-updating software will keep it future-proofed for the next five years or so. You can still rock an iPhone 11 from 2019 well into 2026; it’s the oldest phone that officially supports the upcoming iOS 26.
And that’s as it should be! Apple would not have earned its current level of love from consumers if it had gone any further with the obnoxious business strategy known as planned obsolescence, or if it wasn’t trying to rein in the environmental impact of its gadgets. A business model that has nothing to do with selling user data means the company can crow about privacy on billboards.
But it also means Cook has to work extra hard to convince the market that incremental updates are something to be excited about — and risks looking extra in the process.
“Liquid Glass” is a case in point. Fedherigi described it as a “material” that sits atop the user interface in Apple OSes, as if the company had literally injected liquid glass into all its screens. Spoiler alert: it hasn’t. Liquid Glass is just a design language that makes menus a bit more “see-through-y”, in Mashable senior editor Stan Schroeder’s memorable summary. Such obvious overhyping makes Apple marketing a bit more see-through-y too.
In search of a new look, Liquid Glass also adds a drop shadow to some icons — verboten at Apple back when Jony Ive was there. Former Apple executive Scott Forstall was ousted in 2012 in part because he championed this kind of design, known as skeumorphism, whereas Ive favored a flat look. Apparently Apple has extended its recycling program to include design ideas.
Apple’s new call screening feature will positively affect more lives than Liquid Glass. But Android has taken the lead on that front, so Cook can’t really claim credit for it; it’s just listed as one of a grab bag of features in Apple Intelligence. Polls in group chats? That’s also an Apple Intelligence feature. Order tracking in Apple Wallet? Sure, let’s call that Apple Intelligence too.
But whether you fear AI or love it, that grab-bag approach to what Apple Intelligence actually is ain’t going to cut it. Investors, who have already sent the market cap of AI-leveraged companies like Microsoft and Nvidia soaring higher than Apple’s, aren’t going to be satisfied with what seems like a weak commitment to the coming AI era. And so long as he refuses to explain what the market and other companies get wrong about AI, Cook will stay stuck between the rock and the hard place.
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![OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
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San Francisco, CA
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October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
#OpenAIs #existential #questions #TechCrunchAnthropic,Equity podcast,OpenAI](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2266645295.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1 "OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
#OpenAIs #existential #questions #TechCrunchAnthropic,Equity podcast,OpenAI")
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