I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.
Google is not really a competitor to Apple in devices. I mean, they sell devices, but at a way lower volume. The Pixel phone is essentially a tech demo that exists to push their Android partners into making more competitive devices themselves.
The corporate strategies are not directly comparable. The entire Android project is essentially a loss leader to feed data back into Google’s centralized platform, which makes money on ads and services. Whereas Apple makes money directly from the device sales, supported by decentralized services.
Apple never produced a differentiated experience in search or social, two of the largest tech industries by revenue. Yet Apple grew dramatically during that time. Siri might never be any better than Google’s own assistant, and it might never matter.
Your framing fits well for the Nexus era and even the earliest Pixel iterations, where Google’s hardware largely functioned as a reference implementation and ecosystem lever, nudging OEMs into making better devices.
However, the current Pixel strategy appears materially (no pun intended) different. Rather than serving as an “early adopter” pathfinder for the broader ecosystem, Pixel increasingly positions itself as the canonical expression of Android—the device on which the “true” Android experience is defined and delivered. Far from nudging OEMs, it's Google desperately reclaiming strategic control over their own platform.
By tightening the integration between hardware, software, and first-party silicon, Google appears to be pursuing the same structural advantages that underpin Apple’s hardware–software symbiosis. The last few generations of Pixel are, effectively, Google becoming more like Apple.
I think you're assuming that no durable or at-scale changes in compute form factor will occur, so that their success pretty much just solely comes down to differentiated iPhone software features. That seems unlikely to me. I don't see phones going away in the next decade like some have predicted, but I do think new compute form factors are going to start proliferating once a certain technological "take off" point is reached.
The broader point I'm making is that Apple likely couldn't do all the other things they're excelling at right now and compete head-on with Google / OpenAI / Anthropic on frontier AI. Strategically, I think they have more wiggle room on the latter for now than many give them credit for so long as they continue innovating in their core space, and I think those core innovations are yielding synergies with AI that they would've lost out on if they'd pivoted years ago to just training frontier LLMs. There's a very real risk that if they'd poured resources into LLMs too early, they would've ended up liquidating their reserves in a race-to-the-bottom on AI against competitors who specialize in it, while losing their advantages in fundamental devices and compute form factors over time.
