u/Constraints-First-67

I was a plus one at this wedding a couple of weeks ago so I didn't really know anyone there besides my girlfriend. Ceremony was nice and then the cocktail hour was normal and obv dinner starts and everyone is just doing what people do at weddings you know catching up with relatives they haven't seen in ages.

Then the bride starts making the round and at first I genuinely thought she was just being a really attentive host until she stopped at the table next to ours where two guys were talking about football and said, smiling the whole time with a really eerie smile- "No sports tonight, let's keep the conversations about the wedding."

It was so awkward everyone laughed and the guys laughed too then she walked away.

About ten minutes later she stopped an older couple because they were talking about a cruise they'd just come back from. She actually said and I not kidding- "You'll have plenty of time to talk about holidays later today is about us."

She kept doing it all night and it was driving me insane notice how she was sucking away the joy from her own wedding. Someone started talking about buying a house, she redirected them. Someone was telling a story about work and she appeared like Voldemort again. My girlfriend started catching up with a cousin she hadn't seen in years and the bride literally came over and suggested they share their favourite memory of the couple instead. like are you actually serious as an adult? What kind of attention seeking is this? It said so much about her as a person and I was kind of also worried considering my girlfriend is friends with her.

On the drive home I asked my girlfriend if I'd imagined the whole thing because it was so weird.

She just goes - No, she did this at the engagement party too. I am honestly left questioning how is my girlfriend even friends with this lady?

I've worked at places where leadership talks about "thinking like an owner" or "building for the future" but most employees don't get equity or meaningful bonuses or even raises that keep up with inflation.

I'm not saying people shouldn't do good work but if the financial upside of the company doing well mostly goes to shareholders and executives then why is it surprising when employees focus on doing their job well instead of treating the company like it's their own?

Is there something I'm missing?

Everyone spent two years writing the same obituary. Siri is a joke, Apple is behind, OpenAI is eating their lunch, Google is eating their lunch, honestly at some point there was no lunch left and Apple was still apparently losing it. And through all of it the stock barely flinched because the market understood something the tech press kept tripping over.

It doesn't matter which AI wins if every human being on earth is experiencing it through a device Apple made and a screen Apple designed and a chip Apple built in a factory Apple owns.

ChatGPT's biggest distribution channel is the iPhone. Claude's biggest distribution channel is the iPhone. Gemini, Perplexity, every model that broke the internet over the last three years, primarily touched by human hands through Apple hardware and Apple never had to build any of them.

This is not new and it is not accidental. Google built the greatest search engine in human history and then Apple built the iPhone and made Google pay twenty billion dollars a year just to live inside it as a default. Twenty billion. A year. To be on the device. Not to win. Just to be allowed in the house.

Now Apple just signed a deal to put Gemini inside Siri and everyone is calling it a comeback story but it was never a comeback because Apple never left, they just let everyone else sprint while they quietly remained the place where all that sprinting gets consumed.

In AI everyone is racing to build the smartest brain. Apple is just making sure every brain worth using has to knock on their door first.