While Apple does not appear to be competing to build the world’s leading standalone frontier AI model, the company continues to demonstrate its strength as a hardware provider. Just as NVIDIA is the "shovel seller in the gold rush" of the AI era, Apple produces some of the best hardware for working with AI.

I can rarely remember looking forward to an upcoming keynote this much. And I have high expectations for incoming CEO John Ternus. As Apple’s head of Hardware Engineering, he oversaw the teams responsible for the company’s hardware products. However, Apple credits Johny Srouji with playing the central role in driving its silicon strategy and transition to Apple silicon. That transition was a masterstroke and arguably one of the best and most important decisions Apple has made in recent years.

The Mac mini has also turned out to be a great product if you work within the Apple ecosystem and want to keep a computer running 24/7, for example, for OpenClaw or Hermes. If Apple releases a Mac mini with an M6 chip, I will almost certainly get one, and I’m already looking forward to it. Let’s see what else Apple releases.