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Apple Intelligence is proving to be anything but intelligent

MacDailyNews

Jan 7

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Complaints and ridicule have been mounting about mistakes by the iPhone maker’s hyped feature, and its flaws risk a serious setback, Dave Lee writes for Bloomberg Opinion on Tuesday.

Dave Lee for Bloomberg Opinion:
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If you’ve seen any of Apple’s marketing lately, you’ll know the latest iPhone is billed as the first “built for Apple Intelligence.” The “for” in that sentence is doing a great deal of work. It couldn’t be “with” because Apple’s AI features weren’t ready when the device came out, and some are still yet to be released. The first were added to devices in iOS version 18.1, which came out in October.
These AI bells and whistles require users to physically opt in, and Apple has deemed the product in “beta” despite marketing it as the main reason to buy its latest device. “Hello, Apple Intelligence” is the message greeting visitors to Apple.com today. If you go into a store, it’s what the sales representatives push most excitedly.
But just like the Maps fiasco, Apple’s AI isn’t ready for the real world. Complaints and ridicule have been mounting…
The shared experience of Apple users when it comes to the company’s much-hyped AI is that it is, for a large part, an annoyance. Not only are users still being flooded with notifications, they are now flooded with notifications that are wrong…
Just as annoying for users as bungled news summaries are the other day-to-day errors Apple’s summaries make. One viral example showed how one mother’s text saying a “hike almost killed me!” was shortened to say “attempted suicide, but recovered.” Recently, Apple Intelligence told me my Amazon package was defying time and space, at once being “eight stops away, delivered, and will be delivered tomorrow.” (Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad metaphor for AI hype.)
If Apple’s AI capabilities were so poor, the best thing would have been to wait. Instead, it now risks having users turn off Apple Intelligence and lose confidence for who knows how long…
It’s a tired cliche, but I’d love to know what Steve Jobs would have made of Apple Intelligence and the position in which Apple finds itself. Perhaps he would have seen the AI trend coming sooner, or he would have had the spine to resist Wall Street pressure to make an AI play before the company was ready.

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MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs would have seen the AI trend coming sooner, period; no “perhaps” about it.

The rest of Lee’s opinion piece is basically a tamer version of what we’ve been saying for quite some time now:

Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, [someday] surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024

Apple was caught flat-footed, due to a lack of vision on the part of leadership… So, the only solution is to partner with a [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.] for the real GenAI stuff while pretending (marketing) really hard that some on-device AI Apple has whipped up in a few months is “insanely great Apple innovation” that’s at the heart of Apple’s 2024’s AI announcements when it’s really just an adjunct… Watch Apple make a big show of its on-device AI at WWDC and run many ads touting it from June onwards.

Apple hopes to buy time for the data center buildouts and investments that will be required for them to someday own their own AI technology and not have to license it from the likes of [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.].

This is what happens after a decade plus with a caretaker CEO at the helm after he hits the last page of his iteration playbook, yet attempts to stay in the game for too long. – MacDailyNews, April 1, 2024

Clearly, Apple is not as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs who even started the company’s work on Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro, but, thanks to Jobs and Cook’s subsequent management of iterations of products and services conceived during Jobs’ tenure, including the retail store buildout which is responsible for a significant portion of Apple’s growth, the company now has more than enough money to make up for Cook’s lack of vision. – MacDailyNews, April 23, 2024

The new “AI features” for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS to be revealed at WWDC is mainly a marketing exercise. The pressure is on Apple’s marketing team to position the company as an innovator in the space (“only Apple does so much on-device AI which enhances users’ privacy to ‘stunning’ effect,” etc.) that also makes “smart partnerships” with other AI companies (OpenAI, for example; even though it’s currently forced to partner if they want to offer any real GenAI features). Now, more than ever, finding themselves so far behind, Apple needs to sell, sell, sell! – MacDailyNews, May 28, 2024

When you’re caught flat-footed like Tim Cook’s Apple, you pop into scramble mode to try to catch up. Early on, you hit it with a big marketing flourish (WWDC24) in order to buy some more time. Then you dribble out features as they get finished and actually exist. Classic vaporware. – MadDailyNews, July 31, 2024

MacDailyNews, September 10, 2024:
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Executing a vaporware strategy is an unfortunate necessity without a visionary CEO and it takes time to actually realize (code, test, build out datacenter infrastructure, etc.) a grand marketing vision.
You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years.
Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date.
Sigh.
You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024
Larger displays on iPhone 16 Pro models, and hundreds of millions of iPhones that are 4+ years old, will do the heavy lifting for iPhone sales and iPhone’s average selling price (ASP).

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