Apple Silicon is the one part of Apple I have never been able to argue with. I spend most of my time on the Qualcomm and Arm side, rooting for the people trying to break Apple’s performance-per-watt lead, and four years in, they still have not managed it. The M-series is the quiet reason Apple gets to be smug about everything else.

The silicon keeps winning

The receipts pile up fast. The MacBook Pro with the M2 Pro and M2 Max made a fast laptop faster without doing anything clever, which is its own kind of flex, and the iPad Pro on M2 put desktop-class silicon in a tablet most people still use to watch Netflix. Then the M4 MacBook Pro finally shipped 16GB of RAM as standard and became, annoyingly, the laptop I would point most people toward. By the time the M5 landed across the iPad Pro, Vision Pro and MacBook Pro, the jumps had shrunk to a modest 12 percent, which is just what maturity looks like. On the phone, the iPhone 15 Pro’s switch to titanium, USB-C and the A17 Pro kept the SoC lead intact even as the EU finally forced the port change. Even the Metal 4 graphics API, dull as it sounds, was Apple quietly wiring native AI into the Mac’s graphics stack while nobody was watching.

The device cadence never stopped either. The iPhone 14 was Apple betting that “mainstream” was a strategy rather than a shrug. The Apple Watch Ultra was the company going after the rugged buyer it had handed to Garmin. iOS 16 made the lock screen customizable, which sounds trivial and was the most-used new feature of its year. The iPhone 16 put Apple Intelligence and a camera control on every model, the iPhone Air showed up at 5.64mm as a thinness flex plenty of people bought anyway, and the quiet housekeeping kept coming with a new iPad Air on the M4 and iOS 26.5’s subscription and payment changes.

The Siri problem won’t go away

Then there is Siri, which is where the whole model cracks. Apple bet its AI on doing everything on-device and private, inside the walled garden, and that bet has aged badly. I said so when iOS 18 shipped and its on-device AI raised a sovereignty question Apple would not answer: privacy is a great pitch right up until your assistant is visibly dumber than the cloud models everyone else runs. The standoff with the EU over Siri turned it into a regulatory fight too, one that will shape how AI gets governed in Europe long after the specifics are forgotten. And Apple kept promising the fix was close. At WWDC 2025 it unveiled Apple Intelligence across the product line and the demos looked fine. A year later, at WWDC 2026, Siri was smarter inside the garden and still behind everyone outside it. Calling that a delay is generous. It is structural: the on-device-first religion that makes Apple Silicon so good is the same religion that leaves the AI a step behind.

Spatial is the real gamble

The one genuine swing is spatial. When the Vision Pro arrived next to the Quest 3 and the XR2 Gen 2, it looked like Apple might do to headsets what it did to phones. Then it actually shipped, Meta showed Orion, and the question quietly changed to glasses versus headset, which Apple has not answered and Meta might.

Here is what nags at me, watching from the Android side. Everything that makes Apple’s hardware untouchable, the vertical integration, and above all, the on-device obsession that will not lean on anyone else’s cloud, is the same thing that is making its AI late. For fifteen years, that integration was the entire advantage, and the keynotes I was streaming back in 2015 sold it as destiny. Now, for the first time, the thing Apple does better than anyone might be the thing holding it back, and I cannot tell whether Cupertino reads that as a trap or a principle worth losing a cycle over.

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