That's not a surprise. They're in completely different businesses.
Google is a display advertising company that occasionally puts out a better display (Chrome, Android). Apple is in the business of finding and extracting value from hardware markets no one else took seriously.
I agree that they aren't same but I doubt if Apple is even in the same league as Google when it comes to AI.
Apple is a product company that makes iOS+Hardware for profit and also seeks rent to access this platform. Google is synonymous with search/advertising which is fancy word for media. For google that media comes first and platform monopoly comes second. That is why Google continues to offer all its services on iOS despite virtually owning Android.
For every product that Apple builds in future its success will be like a toss of a coin (of course biased). Google succeeds no matter which platform succeeds.
They're both all about forcing you into their ecosystem. The difference is that Apple's business is (mostly) about their hardware ecosystem, while Google's is (mostly) about their online services ecosystem.
Both of them are trying to make as much money as they can from hardware and ads. Currently Apple is doing better at one and Google is doing better at the other, but that seems like a contingent fact rather than a deep difference.
I have since stopped comparing Apples to Googles since the following realization hit me: Apple is a tech company. Microsoft is a tech company. They sell technology. Google and Facebook are not. They're advertising companies. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that we can't expect the two types of companies to behave the same way.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. Their ad business is successful in a basic-ass, privacy-friendly way, because to show ads on their platform, you have to pay apple, no competitors there. Google literally lives from ads, this is just not a comparison made in good-faith.
Although both are American companies operating under the same rules, there is a fundamental difference between Apple and Google's business models.
Apple makes its money from selling you new hardware every year or two - they need to make you lust after slick, shiny things every keynote.
Google makes its money from knowing about you, mining that data and converting that into advertising clicks - they need to collect as much information about you as possible.
Which means that the same pieces of data have different value to the two companies.
(Of course, Facebook follows a similar model to Google)
It's kinda different. Google is a company that is famous to launch new products just to see if they stick and then kill them quickly if they don't. Apple is a company that is famous to launch new products only when they know they can sustain them for years and integrate them fully in their own ecosystem.
Apple sells a vertically integrated device where they profit on every level.
Google is working to create and grow a mobile market that just didn't exist. I don't think you can compare the two approaches directly. Google is making sure their primary business profit center has a market while Apple is maintaining a top to bottom ecosystem they can control.
And they are spreading that control style to desktops.
Because Google makes money by harvesting data and providing paid services to as many users as possible, while Apple makes money by selling a UX. It's much harder to sell UX to every possible market segment than to have varying degrees of UX and still make money off of just that. That's why the business models between them differ (just like Microsoft differs from both of them yet again - even if there are a lot of comparable practises).
And this makes a world of difference. Google is selling products at cost to drive their ad business. There's no way you can compare that to Apple's business model. The idea that Apple sells expensive products is a belief born out of the PC market, and if you want to compare apples to apples, you should be looking at the iPhone 5 vs the Samsung Galaxy S3.
For all their faults (I no longer buy their products) Apple is, or at least traditionally was, a company that makes money by making and selling things, so they try to be good at making things.
Google is an advertising company that occasionally tries making and selling things to cope with the insecurity they feel about being an advertising company. But they've never been good at it and never will be.
Google is a display advertising company that occasionally puts out a better display (Chrome, Android). Apple is in the business of finding and extracting value from hardware markets no one else took seriously.
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