Apple's building "World Knowledge Answers" because they're sick of writing $20B checks to Google every year. Since 2003, Apple's been Google's biggest customer, paying for the privilege of letting Google harvest Safari user data. It's like paying your landlord while they sell photos of your apartment. Now Apple wants to build their own search and probably botch it worse than iOS Maps sending people into lakes.
Apple's $20B Problem: They're Google's Biggest Customer
Google pays Apple $20B every year just to be Safari's default search. That's more than most companies' entire revenue, but it also makes Apple dependent on their biggest competitor. It's like paying your biggest competitor $20B to not compete with you. Makes no fucking sense.
Here's the kicker: Apple's "Google killer" runs on Google's Gemini AI. Let me get this straight - Apple's master plan to destroy Google involves paying Google for API calls? That's like trying to compete with AWS while hosting everything on EC2. Either Apple's AI team is completely fucked or Tim Cook is playing some galaxy-brain strategy that makes zero sense to mortals.
Project Glenwood: Making Siri Less Useless
Apple's trying to unfuck Siri after years of being the worst AI assistant on the market.
"Project Glenwood" is Apple's desperate attempt to make Siri suck less after years of being the worst voice assistant on the market. Siri can't even set two timers while Alexa runs your entire house and ChatGPT writes code. They're rebuilding the whole mess with LLMs hoping it stops saying "Here's what I found on the web" every time you ask it to do literally anything useful.
Apple claims their new system will magically combine text, images, video, and local results like Perplexity already does, but with Apple's usual "privacy-first" marketing bullshit. Whether anyone still buys Apple's privacy theater after years of NSA cooperation and location tracking controversies is a whole other question.
The 2026 timeline screams "we have no idea what we're doing." Apple considered building a standalone ChatGPT competitor but realized they'd get destroyed, so they're hiding it inside iOS instead. Smart move - nobody expects Siri to work anyway, so low expectations might help.
What This Actually Means for the Internet
If Apple's search doesn't completely suck, it could accelerate the death of websites. When AI gives direct answers, nobody clicks through to the original source. Publishers already getting fucked by Google's AI overviews might get double-fucked by Apple's version.
The timing isn't accidental - the DOJ is trying to break up Google for monopolizing search. If regulators force Google to stop paying for default placement, Apple could launch their search engine without losing that sweet $20B annual check. Classic Apple: let someone else take the legal heat, then swoop in with a "revolutionary" product.
Apple's Privacy Theater vs. Reality
Apple will obviously market this as "privacy-focused search" because that's their entire brand now. While Google hoovers up your data to sell ads, Apple claims they don't need your data because they already charged you over $1,000 for the phone.
Google's search works because they know you searched for "rash cream" three weeks ago and you're still getting CVS ads for antifungal cream. Apple has to match that quality while pretending they don't know what porn you watch. On-device LLM processing sounds great until your iPhone 15 Pro turns into a pocket heater and dies in 45 minutes.
I've run Llama 7B locally on my M2 MacBook Pro - that shit will melt your lap, spike the CPU to 98°C, and make the fans sound like a fucking leaf blower. Battery went from 80% to 12% in 37 minutes just running basic queries. Now imagine doing that on a phone with 1/4 the thermal headroom. iPhone's gonna thermal throttle so hard it'll take 3 minutes to generate "what's the weather like" while your battery dies watching the loading spinner.
Everyone Wants to Kill Google Search Now
The search engine wars are heating up again - Apple joins the fight against Google's dominance with AI-powered alternatives.
Apple's joining the "Google Search Must Die" party with OpenAI's SearchGPT, Microsoft's Bing + ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Google's been so dominant for so long that everyone forgot how to compete until ChatGPT made search look ancient.
Google has the best index and makes around $300B from ads. Microsoft has ChatGPT and desperate-to-not-be-irrelevant energy. OpenAI has the best AI but no business model. Perplexity actually cites sources instead of just hallucinating answers.
Apple's only advantage is controlling the device, but first they need to build something that doesn't crash when you ask it basic questions. Their service track record speaks for itself: Ping died in 2 years after nobody gave a shit about social music, Apple Music wouldn't even sync playlists correctly until iOS 12.3, Siri peaked in 2011 and has been getting worse ever since, and Maps v1.0 was so catastrophically broken it sent people into lakes and got Scott Forstall fired.
Remember when iCloud lost people's photos in 2019? Or when the App Store went down for 4 hours during Black Friday 2022? Apple's great at hardware but their cloud services have a 50/50 chance of working on any given day. I'm not holding my breath for their search engine to magically work better than literally everything else they've tried online.