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An Interview with Asymco's Horace Dediu About Apple at 50 (Stratechery). Horace Dediu, who has worked closely with Clay Christensen, makes an interesting point in this interview about why, in his view, AI is a sustaining technology for the big incumbents rather than a disruption. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are all pouring hundreds of billions into AI instead of being repelled by it and thinking "this isn't for us" or "our customers don't want this". So obviously they all think that AI is a sustaining technology for them.

The interesting exception is Apple, which is the only major tech company that, unlike most others, isn't sprinting to spend as much as possible on AI infrastructure. In Horace Dediu's view, Apple has always positioned itself at the interface between humans and computers, and thinks that the current AI interface (essentially a command line for natural language) isn't where they'd want to compete. Whether Apple is making a smart strategic bet by waiting for the technology to commoditize and then controlling the device and interface layer, or whether they're the one incumbent that actually is being disrupted, is the open question.