The alliance with Google and Gemini makes it clear what tactic Apple has chosen for its future: the parasite strategy

Let’s do a little memory. It was the summer of the year 102 BC. C. and Consul Gaius Mariusde facto ruler of Rome, was facing the invasion of the Germanic tribes of the Teutons and the Ambrones, who three years earlier had annihilated several legions of the Republic in the battle of Arausio.

Marius, camped and with abundant provisions, saw how the Teutons did not stop provoking him and his soldiers. The Germanic tribes, superior in number, mocked them and tried to force an immediate battle, but Marius flatly refused.

He punished soldiers who responded to provocations, let his troops despair, and endured humiliation by simply following and observing the enemy. He made his troops go up to the palisades in turns and observe the Teutons, their weapons, their movements, their shouts. Forced them to get used to them and to make them go from something scary to something familiar.

But all Mario was doing was choosing the battle that was really worth fighting. The Teutons tried to cross the Alps and Marius and his legions followed them until Aquae Sextiae. There, in an advantageous position and highly motivated—among other things, by thirst—the Romans ended up annihilating the Ambroni first, and then the Teutons.

Mario didn’t care that they laughed at him, that they provoked him and that his own soldiers distrusted him. He achieved a historic victory that prevented a potential invasion by those and other Germanic tribes.

And he did it with a simple tactic: choose the battles to fight.

Which is, at least on the surface, what Apple seems to be doing.

The parasite strategy

For years Apple has boasted of controlling every element of its ecosystem, both hardware and software. And if there was something that he didn’t control, he worked to do it, as we are seeing with the iPhone or the Mac, increasingly less dependent on third-party chips and technologies.

However, the alliance with Google and Gemini breaks that trend and represents a disturbing implicit recognition: in the generative AI race, Apple is not only not in the lead, but it seems to have decided to stop running.

At least it doesn’t do it like its rivals do. While Google, Microsoft, Meta, xAI or Amazon do not stop investing billions in chips, new AI models and above all new data centers, Apple has not wanted to enter into those battles. He didn’t care about the provocations or that the industry and the media distrusted (we distrusted) that strategy. Apple has gone about its business, and has barely launched new features in an absolutely explosive segment.

Its Apple Intelligence platform is comparatively much lower than those of rivalsyour Private Cloud Compute It’s an interesting idea but at the moment without a clear impact and Siri delay last year was the definitive sign that Apple I had missed the AI ​​train. And it is better not to talk about economic investment: its competitors are betting everything on AI while Apple’s capex remains almost symbolic compared to that of others.

That has made many of us doubt the future of an Apple that seems to “move on from AI.” But be careful, because Tim Cook may just be adopting that same Mario tactic of choosing which battles to fight.

They may not believe it makes sense to spend those billions of dollars developing a foundational model right now, and they may not believe in the need to create their own data centers either.

In fact, Apple has been applying the parasite strategy: in those segments in which he did not dominate or was not strong, he delegated:

• Cloud infrastructure: Apple has never been strong in the cloud and has delegated to other platforms to which it has paid large sums of money for years.
• Searches: We have the clearest example of this strategy in internet searches. The multi-million dollar alliance with Google has been offering both companies a perfect solution in this area for years

That agreement with Google in the search segment now has its sequel with the historic agreement to use Gemini as a fundamental pillar of the reinvention of Siri. Apple’s voice assistant will make use of Google’s AI models and will thus become a critical component of the functioning of its ecosystem. It is an alliance with extraordinary implications and that once again confirms that parasite strategy in which the ultimate goal is clear: achieve benefits without taking risks.

Apple as a wrapper for AI

In fact, here Apple is once again taking advantage of its leading role in the mobility market—especially in the US—once again. While other companies like Google and OpenAI spend fortunes on servers and energy, Apple it is limited to being the elegant packaging.

They provide the screen, the local processor and the user’s trust. Google puts the brain that runs in the cloud. It is (theoretically) a win-win.

But it is also the recognition of a pragmatic defeat. Giving in to that reality—we don’t have a foundational AI model, we don’t have cloud infrastructure, we don’t have data centers—is also a tactic that can end up winning the game.

AI aims to become a commodityin something that will be accessible to everything and everyone and that loses its differentiating characteristics in the eyes of the consumer. It will be something generic, interchangeable and basic, and what may matter then is not the AI, but how it is distributed and provided.

And Apple is changing from being a company that invents all its tools to becoming a company that is the largest distributor of services in the world. They certify it the more than 2.35 billion active devices with their different operating systems around the world, which can clearly become – if they are not already – the gateway to AI for millions of people.

This parasite strategy allows Apple to turn that theoretical defeat into a potential victory. Apple is the mandatory tollnot only for billions of users, but for companies like Google, which seems to have been the big winner here.

So, it seems that Apple has not missed the AI ​​train because it couldn’t catch it, but because it didn’t really want to catch it. Furthermore, by delegating to models like Gemini, Apple distances itself from criticism: if the AI ​​fails, the mistake lies with Google. If you get it right, the experience is “iPhone-like.”

That is also not necessarily a definitive surrender. The terms of the agreement are unknown, and the way of communicating that agreement raises diverse possibilities for the strategy in which Apple will use Gemini:

1. Let Gemini be an option in Siri along with ChatGPT (Apple has already reached a previous agreement with OpenAI in this regard)
2. Let Gemini be used for Apple to train its own foundational models
3. Let Gemini be used in Siri while Apple develops its own foundational models without Gemini

Apple already did something similar to option 3 with chips: it allied itself with Intel until it decided to create its own chips for the iPhone and Macs. It could do the same with AI, and delegate to Google while gaining time to develop its own models at its own pace and without that colossal investment that other companies are making.

But here we must also remember that it did this with hardware, but not always with software and services, and the searches prove it again. They have always ended up using Google’s even though they had supposedly been there for years. working on his own, Pegasus. But the parasite’s strategy here works better than ever: Google’s is better and makes them a lot of moneyalthough that may change in the future.

So, this win-win may have an expiration date. Apple may end up wanting to regain technological sovereignty and, in effect, launch its own founding model. But it may also have accepted its current role: that of being a luxury shell for other people’s technologies.

What is clear is that today Apple’s tactics are clear: at the moment it does not need to have the best AI on the market. It is enough for it to be the place where (almost) all of us have to use it.

That’s the battle Tim Cook has chosen to fight.

Gaius Marius would probably be proud.

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