I agree with 1. For 2, have they ever been a company big into research? They're very consumer focused and it can take time to integrate new tech into consumer products at scale. Especially the way Apple likes to do it: polished and seamlessly integrated into the rest of their ecosystem.
I would say not doing AI research (or buying another big company that does) is tantamount to dropping the ball on AI, if it turns out that AI is a capability they should have had and must have to succeed.
You could argue that publishing research is not the same thing as doing it. But they don't seem to have done much of it until fairly recently.
I agree that Apple does less research than other big tech companies. But they do it where they think it matters. Their M-series CPUs are more than just integration and polishing. And they have been doing some research in health AI as well, I think.
Dearth relative to Apple's size and relative to the amount of research that competitors have been doing.
But I think part of the problem is that Apple simply hasn't focused on the tasks and the methods and the people that have now turned out to be so impactful.
They have clearly been course correcting for a while now as some of the more recent papers show, and they have done successful research in areas such as health AI.
That's the public perception. Maybe due to them not getting in on a quick cash grab off the LLM hype wave?