Apple Intelligence Is Not It.
Or, Old Tech, an addendum.
Apple Intelligence is AI for the rest of us. (Get it? Now Apple owns “AI”!). It is more personal, because it is, to quote apple: “grounded in your personal information”. I really love when tech companies ground themselves in my personal information.
During the keynote, Apple announced that they are bringing AI to the iPhone. The shareholders like AI, and Apple is willing to deliver. They started the keynote by announcing genuine improvements to the way that Apple devices can work for individuals:
- Move home screen icons where we want
- Add 3rd party app toggles to control center
- Change the flashlight button on the home screen
- Lock Apps
- React with any emoji, instead of the 6 that apple allowed you to use
- Schedule messages
- Use modern messaging protocols
- Use the calculator on iPad
In addition, Apple announced incredible new features that I genuinely believe will enhance human connection. Specifically, AirPods are now able to isolate voices, you can decline calls with head shakes, you can search photos more naturally, Facetime can transcribe live, and you can stay in touch without cellular, which is also an incredible safety feature. In this update, we saw a genuine side of Apple, one that values the human experience. But I can’t say the same about the AI features they announced in the same breath.
I think the perfect embodiment of the AI craze in Cupertino must be XCode. If you ask any developer, they will be able to rant for hours on end about the issues with this software. Huge amounts of storage and RAM consumption, nondescript errors, and crashing are all par for the course. Instead of fixing this, they added a copilot clone, so that my app can crash in new and spectacular ways.
I don’t think anyone will say no to an improved Siri, but nobody was asking for this:
Despite Apple’s feigned enthusiasm, anybody who unironically embeds the results of this into anything will instantly become the target of much internet mockery. This isn’t impressive. This doesn’t do anything to make people more productive, or provide entertainment (outside the entertainment derived from the disastrously awful output, that is). It just… exists, because AI.
They describe the ways that Siri can unify apps, bringing images and content between them. This is really cool, except that for it to work, Siri must also work, which historically hasn’t been the case. Generative AI won’t help either — we’ve seen how the Rabbit R1 and hu.ma.ne pin went. Instead of this, it would be really cool if Apple gave us proper interapp communication APIs that work outside of a specific developer’s ecosystem, like there is on Android.
They brag about how their AI can rewrite emails, to be more “personal”. You know what makes things more personal? The evidence of thought. Generative AI is completely contrary to this. The usage of it means that the person on the other end of the wire does not value you enough to commit time.
Like James, who chose a particularly apt time to send me a wonderful example of this. The funniest thing is it wasn’t automated — I have completely custom anti-bot protection on my email. Somebody valued me for 15 seconds to click on the contact page and send me marketing, without even bothering to read the first name in the header.
But anyway, surely at least Apple is doing this privately, right? They spent the first 10 minutes dropping a lot of buzzwords and talking about local LLMs, but all this did little to quell the bomb of “in some cases, you need models that are larger than what fits in your pocket today.” Still, Apple values privacy, right? They relate to my concerns when they say that “even if a company says it’s not misusing your data, you are unable to verify their claim.” Since they understand this, I hoped they would revolutionize the industry with new technology, so that the consumer can verify their claim, as they did with Homomorphic Encryption? Not quite. The mechanism for consumer verification goes as follows: Independent [apple approved] experts will be allowed to do internal investigations. While this is better than nothing, I don’t find this argument to be particularly compelling, especially when followed with the announcement that they’re integrating ChatGPT into Siri. Can those independent experts verify that Microsoft isn’t storing your personal information as well?
AI can, undoubtably, help consumers. I don’t think, however, that consumers want it shoved in their face everywhere they go. Most just want it in places that improve their lives quietly—tasteful applications that subtly and unobtrusively enhance the user experience. Like automatic music recognition. Or transcription. Or an improved Siri. Or photo cataloguing, a feature I make use of daily. Here, I see a company rushing to avoid being left behind, quickly banging together something good enough to qualm the fear of investors who want to see AI everywhere. But Apple’s whole shtick is to “Think Different,” to avoid fads and freely do what they think best. I don’t think that happened today. I’m sure in the coming years, after the AI craze has come and gone, the remaining features from the technological enhancements it beckoned in will be genuinely great. But I’m not impressed with what I saw today, I don’t see the cool, composed and calculated company I want it to be. Apple can do better, and the investors appear to agree.
