Sebastiaan de With is joining Apple’s UI team. He is behind the design of Halide and is a well-respected interface champion.
did Tim Cook got to the “Melania” screening?
He did.
Seb previously worked at Apple during the corinthian leather skeumorphic phase.
Apple’s primary vulnerability is its lack of vertical integration in semiconductor manufacturing. As foundries reallocate capacity toward higher-margin AI/accelerator workloads (principally NVIDIA), Apple — as a capacity-taking customer rather than a capacity-owning one — faces structurally rising input costs with no offsetting lever. This is compounded by NVIDIA’s software moat: CUDA’s entrenchment as the dominant programming framework for GPU compute, backed by a large existing developer base and library ecosystem, creates high switching costs that extend NVIDIA’s pricing power upstream into foundry allocation decisions. Notably, Jensen Huang does not have a contract at NVIDIA, and TSMC — NVIDIA’s primary fabrication partner, they approached him as a prospective CEO candidate, illustrating the leverage NVIDIA holds even with its largest supplier. Apple’s reliance on third-party fabrication leaves it a price-taker in this dynamic.
The more material long-term threat is the shift toward natural-language, agentic interaction (e.g., Gemini) as the primary OS interface, displacing manual app navigation. Once a user delegates tasks via voice/conversational instruction rather than touch input, the marginal utility of iOS’s interface advantages declines, while the iPhone’s price premium over Android flagships (Pixel 10, Samsung) becomes harder to justify on UX grounds alone. Given the iPhone is Apple’s highest-margin product line, this is a direct threat to the core earnings base, not a peripheral one.
I moved from iPhone 15 to Pixel 10 (trade-in covered ~50% of device cost, plus $150 store credit and 12+ months of Gemini included), driven primarily by Siri’s limitations. There’s a UI learning curve, but it’s navigable — once conversational input handles most tasks, the remaining friction is largely menu-location, which Gemini resolves directly by routing to the relevant setting.
The ecosystem lock-in advantage is real but arguably overstated for the average consumer — Amazon, Google, and other platform incumbents already hold comparable behavioural data regardless of device OS. The open question for Apple is retention economics: how many mainstream consumers will continue paying a ~50% premium (and increasing) once daily-use AI agents reduce the differentiation between platforms?
My personal take on this is I have always thought that Tim Cook, had decades to resolve Siri, and ignored the Clarion of criticism, and has now resigned as CEO because he can see the writing on the wall.
Vertical integration for manufacturing is now a huge moat that “assembly” companies can no longer ignore or compete against.