Apple turns 50 at a moment when it’s losing the AI race and doing something once almost unthinkable: opening Siri to rival chatbots and leaning on Google’s Gemini to close the gap. But some of the people who helped build Apple, including co-founder Steve Wozniak, former CEO John Sculley and Siri’s co-founders, suggest the company may be playing a longer game. Apple has long excelled as a late mover. On Apple’s 50th anniversary, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos explores why AI could define its next era.<br><br>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Apple built a hardware empire in its first 50 years. The next 50 could be defined by AI. 4/1/26

TechCheck

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**Podcast:** TechCheck

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Apple's first 50 years were defined by iconic hardware. Products have changed how people worked, communicated and lived. Very few companies have reached this 50 year mark, let alone set the gold standard across multiple eras of technology from personal computing to the smartphone. But the real question now in the age of AI is can Apple hold its dominance or will it go to someone else? What is the weather like today? Here's the forecast for today. It is that easy.

In 2011, Apple looked early. Siri was the first mainstream voice assistant debuting years before Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. But as AI became the defining technology of a generation, Apple failed to turn that early advantage into lasting leadership. They basically blew a five year lead. It was too soon. The technology wasn't ready. And so LLMs are bringing that now.

Meanwhile, Google built Gemini, OpenAI built ChatGPT, Anthropic built Claude and Siri, despite reaching more than a billion users, never evolved into the platform that its creators envisioned. That's the hardware company mindset in action. We would kill to have the technology back then that exists now. So there are no further technical barriers to any part of the Siri vision that we had from the old days.

The 20 plus years that I've been investing and analyzing this company, this is the biggest delay that they've had by orders of magnitude. Now Apple is making its biggest bet yet, turning to a longtime rival to power a revamped Siri. They've made it clear they don't want to build the brain. They want to leverage the brain.

Apple has, I think, recognized that they need partners for AI. I don't think you could find any AI hyperscaler who has more data that would be particularly useful for the kinds of things Apple is interested in than Alphabet Google. Apple today needs to catch up and they're working very hard to do that. They are at a fork in the road when it comes to their products being meaningful over the long term because of powering an AI digital assistant.

If they don't solve that, somebody else will. And that could cause a very big company today to be much smaller in the future. Apple has to under promise and over deliver and stop trying to say everything's AI ready. Apple is buy it today and it works. It's not a promise of the future. It's a promise of today.

Apple's rise was built on great hardware. It revolutionized the tech world, bringing the personal computer to the masses. I had wanted a computer my whole life, the huge mainframes and switches and lights all over the front panels. And I had built one of those of my own design. So then I sat down and I wanted to make things more human. And then Steve Jobs came into town. I told him, you've got to come and see this, see the excitement. That's when Steve said, let's start a company. And we formed that little partnership on April 1st, 1976.

Steve Jobs was a product visionary who knew what to bui...

Apple built a hardware empire in its first 50 years. The next 50 could be defined by AI. 4/1/26

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Apple built a hardware empire in its first 50 years. The next 50 could be defined by AI. 4/1/26

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.