Good post by Parker Ortolani, analyzing the pros and cons of a potential Perplexity acquisition by Apple:

According to Mark Gurman, Apple executives are in the early stages of mulling an acquisition of Perplexity. My initial reaction was “that wouldn’t work.” But I’ve taken some time to think through what it could look like if it were to come to fruition. Let me share where my head’s at.

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Apple needs Perplexity’s search engine for a bunch of reasons. It’s not just about finding a solution for AI search, it’s also about offsetting the pressure they are getting from regulators about their deal with Google. AI Mode in Google Search is extremely good, a worthy rival to Perplexity. It would be great as a core feature of Safari, except it’s still Google and I imagine the company would continue to face scrutiny. Perplexity needs to be added to Safari on all of Apple’s platforms as a search engine option. And not a second class one like Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. It needs to be a serious option that users consider and Apple should seriously encourage them to do so. Thankfully, this has already been largely confirmed to be on Apple’s roadmap.

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But, let’s say Apple does make a serious attempt to acquire Perplexity. Let’s say that a deal happens and Apple needs to find a way to build their technologies into their products. What does that look like?

First and foremost, Siri and Spotlight would need to shift away from defaulting to traditional engines for searches and ChatGPT for queries it’s confused by. Make it the focal point of any place your iPhone queries the web. Supercharge Apple News with Perplexity’s discover technology. Don’t replace the Apple News staff, just complement it to fill out the service with more content that surfaces in real-time. Take Perplexity spaces and offer a new tool in Pages that works like NotebookLM. You could even see it being integrated into Shortcuts. Another thing Perplexity has that would be worth integrating into Shortcuts is labs. Let users vibe code simple tools and link them up with Shortcuts actions. The company has also built out a surprisingly robust financial product that could power a next generation Stocks app. You can see lots of ways that Perplexity could be infused into Apple platforms. It could, in theory, put the iPhone on more equal footing with Android far faster than if they went it alone. You could no longer say Android was that much further ahead on the AI side anymore.

I can see the pros and cons here and agree with Parker, Apple needs to do something, their Apple Intelligence hasn't been that successful and is more of a gimmick, buying and integrating Perplexity into their OS might just be what they need.