Plenty of free apps get monetized just fine. They just have to offer something people want to use that they can slather ads all over. The AI doo-dads haven’t shown they’re useful. I’m guessing the dedicated hardware strategy got them more upfront funding from stupid venture capital than an app would have, but they still haven’t answered why anybody should buy these. Just postponing the inevitable.
I don’t think LLMs are useless, but I do think little SoC boxes running a single application that will vaguely improve your life with loosely defined AI features are useless.