Apple has physical stores that will provide you timely top notch customer service. While not perfect, their mobile App Store is the best available in terms of curation and quality. Their hardware is not so diverse so is stable for long term use. And they have the mindshare in way that is hard to move off of.
Let’s say Google or Anthropic release a new model that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter that an OpenAI one, nobody would stick to OpenAI. There is nearly zero cost to switching and it is a commodity product.
Their API product is easy to swith away from but their consumer product (which is by far the biggest part of their revenue) has much better market share and brand recognition than others. I've never heard anyone outside of tech use Gemini or Copilot or X AI outside of work while they all know ChatGPT.
Anecdata but even in work environments I hear mostly complaints about having to use Copilot due to policy and preferring ChatGPT. Which still means Copilot is in a better place than Gemini, because as far as I can tell absolutely nobody even talks about that or uses it.
There is only a zero cost to switching if a company is so perfectly run that everyone involved comes to the same conclusion at the same time, there are no meetings and no egos.
The human side is impossible to cost ahead of time because it’s unpredictable and when it goes bad, it goes very bad. It’s kind of like pork - you’ll likely be okay but if you’re not, you’re going to have a shitty time.
Let's say Google release a new phone that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter than an Apple one. nobody would stick to apple. There is nearly zero cost to switching and it is a commodity product.
The AI market, much like the phone market, is not a winner take all. There's plenty of room for multiple $100B/$T companies to "win" together.
> Let's say Google release a new phone that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter than an Apple one. nobody would stick to apple.
This is not at all how the consumer phone market works. Price and “smarts” are not only factor that goes into phone decisions. There are ecosystem factors & messaging networks that add significant friction to switching. The deeper you are into one system the harder it is to switch.
e.g. I am on iPhone and the rest of my family is on Android. The group chat experience is significantly degraded, my videos look like 2003 flip phone videos. Versus my iPhone using friends everything is high resolution.
> Let's say Google release a new phone that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter than an Apple one. nobody would stick to apple.
I don't think this is true over the short to mid term. Apple is a status symbol to the point that Android users are bullied over it in schools and dating apps. It would take years ti reverse the perception.
You’re aware that LLMs all have persistent memory now and personalize themselves to you over time right? You can’t transfer that from OAI to Anthropic.
Let’s say Google or Anthropic release a new model that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter that an OpenAI one, nobody would stick to OpenAI. There is nearly zero cost to switching and it is a commodity product.