Apps
The Curious Case of Apple and Perplexity: Do They Need Each Other?
Apparently itās the season of acquisitions and hirings. Thankfully, this time Apple is also in on the action. According to Mark Gurman, Apple executives are in the early stages of mulling an acquisition of Perplexity. My initial reaction was āthat wouldnāt work.ā But Iāve taken some time to think through what it could look like if it were to come to fruition. Let me share where my headās at.
The core reason that I thought Perplexity might not be a good fit was simple: they may be culturally incompatible. Both companies have very unique cultures. Apple is much older, deeply set in its ways, led by a group of seasoned executives, and serves an audience so big that the stakes are astronomically higher. Power is concentrated to say the least. They also move, shall I say, more slowly. Perplexity on the other hand is nimble, fast-moving, extremely daring, and can be the young startup that can take the kind of risks that Apple canāt. To say that you can probably have a lot more fun working at Perplexity right now is likely an understatement. The field is wide open and they are capable of doing almost anything. At Apple, Iād expect them to be largely restricted and though some see it as a way to draw more talent, that doesnāt matter if the talent would still be working under what would probably be the same conditions. Theyād have to work within the boundaries of an organism thatās already fully grown. I personally think that the best foot forward is for Perplexity to stay independent and strike some deals with big players that can help ensure their long term survival.
Apple needs Perplexityās search engine for a bunch of reasons. Itās not just about finding a solution for AI search, itās also about offsetting the pressure they are getting from regulators about their deal with Google. AI Mode in Google Search is extremely good, a worthy rival to Perplexity. It would be great as a core feature of Safari, except itās still Google and I imagine the company would continue to face scrutiny. Perplexity needs to be added to Safari on all of Appleās platforms as a search engine option. And not a second class one like Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. It needs to be a serious option that users consider and Apple should seriously encourage them to do so. Thankfully, this has already been largely confirmed to be on Appleās roadmap.
Including Perplexity in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS would instantly give the startup more users and it would exponentially improve Appleās own apps. But Perplexity stands to be so much more than a service in one behemothās arsenal. The company is already in talks with Samsung to integrate its products into Galaxy devices. Thatās thinking big and strategically. Itās also a clear shot across the bow from Samsung to Google, which frankly comes at a strange time where the two companies have been working more closely together than ever. Perplexity can have the best of both worlds if they play their cards right.
At the end of the day, Apple needs a technology company, not another product company. Perplexity is really good at, for lack of a better word, forking models. But their true speciality is in making great products, theyāre amazing at packaging this technology. The reality is though, that Apple already knows how to do that. Of course, only if they can get out of their own way. That very issue is why Iām unsure the two companies would fit together. A company like Anthropic, a foundational AI lab that develops models from scratch is what Apple could stand to benefit from. Thatās something that doesnāt just put them on more equal footing with Google, itās something that also puts them on equal footing with OpenAI which is arguably the real threat. Itās worth noting that Appleās own on-device models have improved a lot over the past year, so there are plenty of things they are capable of doing without an external lab. But thereās something to be said for these possibilities truly changing the game. An organization like Perplexity would almost certainly get enveloped into Apple, but a bigger lab could remain truly independent and just build models to hand off to Appleās existing teams.
But, letās say Apple does make a serious attempt to acquire Perplexity. Letās say that a deal happens and Apple needs to find a way to build their technologies into their products. What does that look like?
First and foremost, Siri and Spotlight would need to shift away from defaulting to traditional engines for searches and ChatGPT for queries itās confused by. Make it the focal point of any place your iPhone queries the web. Supercharge Apple News with Perplexityās discover technology. Donāt replace the Apple News staff, just complement it to fill out the service with more content that surfaces in real-time. Take Perplexity spaces and offer a new tool in Pages that works like NotebookLM. You could even see it being integrated into Shortcuts. Another thing Perplexity has that would be worth integrating into Shortcuts is labs. Let users vibe code simple tools and link them up with Shortcuts actions. The company has also built out a surprisingly robust financial product that could power a next generation Stocks app. You can see lots of ways that Perplexity could be infused into Apple platforms. It could, in theory, put the iPhone on more equal footing with Android far faster than if they went it alone. You could no longer say Android was that much further ahead on the AI side anymore.
All of this is to say that I think Apple could do all of these things on their own. I just donāt think that they want to. Thatās no insult to Perplexity, itās really a compliment. Everyone at Perplexity should be super proud of what theyāve built. Theyāve taken advantage of the AI gold rush better than almost anyone else. Apple has thus far has shown an aversion to offer products that overlap with Perplexityās domain. It goes back to being nimble and being able to take risks. So far, itās paid off for Perplexity while Apple has spent a year getting smacked every which way for failing to get the new Siri off the ground.
At the end of the day, I suppose that Iāve made the case both for acquiring Perplexity and against it. Ultimately either path is likely good for users and Iāll be happy no matter what happens. This whole situation is great for Perplexity, it helps further legitimize them. But as a fervent observer I keep coming back to the same two questions āIs Perplexity really what Apple needs?ā and āIs Perplexity better off without Apple?ā
On Dia, Arc, and "People Don't Know What They Want Until You Show it to Them"
I was absolutely captivated by the Arc web browser from the moment I started using it a few years ago and quickly became an evangelist. It really felt like an entirely new idea for how to use the internet, it was more organized while also somehow being more fun. It became an essential part of my workflow on the Mac and when it first came to iPhone, it became a cross platform obsession. The introduction of Arc Search and Arc Max signaled however, that The Browser Company was thinking bigger. With the advent of AI tools around the same time as Arc was taking off, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the internet was about to change dramatically. Arc continued to improve between 2022 and 2024, but at the end of the year they decided to pivot. Instead of building on Arc, they chose to build an entirely new browser. I suppose apt for a company literally called “The Browser Company."
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