My 2¢ on Apple and AI: A perspective you will hear nowhere else!

Full disclosure: I’ve been a supporter of Apple for 45± years now.

Here’s an interesting bit of background: for a short time, I was actually an Apple employee! I called on Apple retail dealers (like Sears) in upstate NY and gave them technical assistance. It was an interesting gig.

As an employee, Apple assigned me an email (my first): “aaprjohn@…” which I still have today. What does it mean? Apple Authorized Product Representative. (BTW, I also bought shares of Apple stock – $$$.)

I was subjected to slings and arrows like “IBM will squash Apple like a bug,” “Apple will soon be out of business,” “Microsoft is the real leader in the computer industry,” etc. All of it was nonsense — and I said so at the time.

The stories about the IBM and MS connection have several fascinating aspects to it — too many to go into here. But here’s a tidbit…

How many people use MS Word or MS Excel (aka MS Office)? So what was the origin of MS Office? The Apple Mac! When MS Office was originally released, it was a Mac-only product! PC’s at the time didn’t have the power or interface to take advantage of MS Office. It was later ported to Windows.

The stories regarding IBM are also revealing. In the 1960s and 1970s, IBM was the world’s computer behemoth. Everyone else was like a bird on an elephant.

When desktop computers were first proposed, IBM had to make a momentous decision: 1) to get behind this radical change, or 2) to continue to push their forte, mainframe computers. They chose #2.

All the geniuses at IMB (they had some 300,000 employees) decided that: a) desktop computers would never have the power to do real work, so b) the future would be that everyone would have a terminal (monitor) in their home/office, connected to a powerful, regional mainframe computer.

This key decision had worldwide implications that still reverberate today.

Briefly, IBM also knew that they had to have some desktop machine, but because they didn’t really believe in it, they offered woeful hardware (IBM PC), and outsourced the software (pathetic DOS, to Bill Gates). The end product was really bad, but people robotically bought it because it said “IBM”.

Apple followed a visionary path: to make a powerful computer that was easy to use. I put my money where my mouth was, so my first computer was an Apple Lisa (the predecessor to the Mac) — clearly enormously better than the IBM PC. Yes, it was more expensive, but what is the value of your time?

Anyways, my point here is something no one else in the world seems to have noticed. In the late 1970’s the question was desktop computer or mainframe?

Right now we have a similar technical choice regarding Artificial Intelligence: desktop computer or enormous regional data centers.

Almost everyone is following the 1970’s IBM failed strategy. Meanwhile, a slew of red flags have gone up, but it seems full steam ahead.

(As an aside, there are a lot of similarities between data center issues and wind project issues (economic, environmental, etc.). In both cases, governments largely ignored the negative impacts on local communities.)

The Bottom Line

Now (finally) to my punchline…

Regarding AI Apple is one of the very few companies that is not following the crowd. See their current (very different) thinking: here, here, and here.

My question: Is it wise to bet against Apple again?

©2026 John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

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