Genuinely fascinating how crap Apple Intelligence is. So remarkable that a company with such an extraordinary innovation and design track record is rolling out such an incredibly disappointing product.
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Everyone thinks Apple is still winning because of the mountain of cash they sit on. If you pull back the curtain a little you'd see they're losing on all tech fronts - LLM, IoT, AI.
This is the cycle. iPhone 1 sucked big time. Remember the time before the App Store?
Apple’s most dominant skill is erasing failures from public memory and powering through less than exciting launches in very impressive “fake it til you make it” style.
I loved iPhone 1, even before the App Store. Back in the day, though there were no native apps, there were web apps that worked great on iPhone 1, I used them a lot. Obviously the App Store enhanced the experience, but iPhone 1 far from sucked. It was the best cellphone on the market at that time.
Jobs' initial insistence that all third party apps would be built as websites was hilarious. Not even with his vaunted Reality Distortion Field could he sell us on that. And with hindsight it's even more hilarious since that's basically where we ended up anyways
Do not see the need for Apple intelligence and won’t use it or any other type of AI.
I have survived on this earth thus far using my own inbuilt intelligence, it has served me well.
Indoor plumbing actually serves a purpose. It’s in no way comparable to the generative AI bubble that’s being precariously sustained through hype and misleading marketing.
Sorry to break it to you but #AI is everywhere in the digital ecosystem (YouTube etc) so you’re using it. Heck, even #Bluesky uses it for content moderation. The illusion that people are only using their own “inbuilt intelligence” is part of the problem with #SocialMedia.
Hate to break it to you but I am not some tech Luddite and know exactly why it is used the fact that platforms use it to deceive and misinform is the issue I have.
Apologists for dumbing down the consumer and feeding them constant streams of garbage I can do without.
Fine, it was just the way you said it. You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t!) at the number of people who don’t understand AI is already embedded everywhere.
But are we really surprised? Look at all the “AI Integrated” bs that we’ve been promised when it’s really just an LLM API with a few conditional checks. Did we really expect more?
Apple hasn't truly innovated anything since Jobs died and made the dreadful mistake of putting Tim Cook in the chair. Cook thinks dressing like Jobs makes HIM just like Jobs. All he's done is make the iPhone more like Samsung phones.
If the M1 chips never existed and they weren’t rolling out their own cellular modems you might be right but I guess that’s not flashy enough even though it’s actual innovation.
The first problem here is that you think 20 something year old edge lord tech bros could produce anything usable or functional while busy chanting “we’re ultra smart and we don’t need QA”
What were you expecting from this gaggle of liars, thieves and cheats?
It’s because nobody at Apple actually cares about AI beyond what’s necessary to shut the shareholders up, and they’re right to be that way. It’s far better to put that money into Hardware or useful software, and guess what Apple’s currently dominating in?
Apple is still doing a certain core number of things incredibly well. Its recent hardware achievements are impressive. But something is seriously wrong in the software arm.
My guess is that it started somewhere around the yearly software release drumbeat, though it may have deeper roots.
That’s facts. The hardware is really solid and honestly unmatched (have you used an Android tablet?). The constant churn of software really has resulted in junk though.
I’d love an iOS that has rock solid functionality instead of releasing a totally revised Photos app no one asked for.
It’s awful. I don’t have any experience with Alexa. I’ve heard it’s bad, not as bad as Siri and Apple AI. There was a report about AI medical transcription that had an error rate of close to 60% and “hallucinated” random text. Personally I don’t want AI hallucinating on my medical record.
Look at the number of people continually being surprised by this. You’d think they’d have stopped using it by now? But no, the flow of reports of its failures continues.
Superior marketing trumps actual product superiority every time.
Every masterpiece has its rough draft. If anyone can turn ‘meh’ into magic, it’s Apple—proof that even giants need stumbles to fuel the next leap forward. Let’s not write off Act 1 of what could be Act 3 brilliance.
Just too big and unwieldy, likely, to move fast enough. But that mass has inertia, they’ll get there and most of the public and consumers won’t know it took them “x”tries.
Not trying to sound antagonistic, all apple really does nowadays is remove features from their products first. No more buttons, all touch screen motions, no headphone jack, specialty charger that the EU forced them to move to type c. I'm not surprised their AI system is crap too lol.
I think the technology behind it is still very innovative, though the product is nascent. Imagine being able to run a multimodal large language model on a small device for various tasks.
I remember that at the time Google would give laughable travel times. I think it would assume that you’d go 30 MPH on a city street if that was the speed lim, hitting every green.
Agree. I have always thought of Apple as a company that primarily refines hardware and software. So there innovation was in design and messaging but they are not innovating in hardware or software. Maybe they need to wait until someone else does it right and then just refine that.
I respectfully disagree. I love my Apple products. They work, they’re simple to use, I don’t have to worry about weird crashes like I did when I had Windows products, and they last a long time. Are they super innovative? Probably not - but I’m not looking for that.
Tbh this is the main real use for Apple, people who only want computers so they can do one or two specific and commercial things with them and neither care about nor want the hassle of actually owning the thing they buy as long as it does what they want with no trouble
Ios18 is a complete and utter mess. Apple are playing catch up. Their headline feature of IA is a staggered release and not available to all countries.
Get with the times, Apple hasn't been innovative since the early 2000s...
And no, deciding what "features" to shove down their customer base's throats is classified as NSFW, not innovation.
Not true, they have innovated all kinds of ways to screw their customers over, like not fixing known issues that bricks your device, or like serializing every single component in the device so you can't repair them by taking parts from other dead phones.
I don’t see how people can have takes like this and still hope to be seen as serious people. They’re constantly innovating which is why a Mac is a way nicer experience than a Windows machine. Let’s not forget the whole iPhone thing. And the iPad pretty much owns the tablet market
Yep. The 90s were dark days for Apple. When Jobs returned he cancelled most of their products. Just goes to show that if you make products people like, they will buy them. Which is why Apple is hugely rich now - because they make things people like. Do you get it yet? They’re GOOD products
Most of their "innovation" has been refinement of existing technology in a slicker, aesthetically pleasing, package. And then charging twice what it's actually worth.
AI doesn't fit into that paradigm. It's inherently plagiaristic for everyone, so they've lost their advantage. 🤷♂️
The difference is in the data a company is willing to collect and use for training. You see a substandard product, I see an adherence to norms around privacy.
I don't consider the company that releases the same overpriced product every year (but slightly more overpriced) to hold an "extraordinary innovation track record", at least not since 2007
The rough and unpolished ChatGPT integration is a shame. With all their money they should have signed a big deal with ChatGPT and made a good integration
I think they were caught off guard by the ChatGPT 4.5 w/ Voice in Nov '23, and this was their attempt to close the gap quickly. This is not a fully baked solution, and it's really bad. But, with their install base and iterative ability. I expect it will be completely unrecognizable a year from now.
That sounds completely inverse compared to how Apple been said to act before. Before it was always "Yes, Apple is slow and secretive but at least they do it right", but now you're saying they've done a 180 on how they develop stuff?
It is antithetical to their established approach for sure, and why it’s currently not a great experience. I think they spent a ton of $ and human capital on Auto and Vision Pro and were asleep at the wheel on where AI could be by now. They have the $ to pivot quickly, but it needs time to mature.
I don't agree with that's why the experience isn't great. I left macOS years ago because it was clear to me that Apple doesn't actually value UX/UI the same anymore and they've massively dropped the ball there.
This is just another symptom that there is something deeply wrong in the organization
Also, I would feel a bit uncomfortable eating an intelligent apple. I hope they don't come up with pizza intelligence or even bacon intelligence - that would be a disaster!!!
Apple stopped innovating more than a decade ago.
Their focus since then has been on gouging their locked-in user base with perpetual hardware upgrades, and harvesting customer data.
Not so much perfecting them as making a proprietary, unfixable black box version of them that looks more Scandinavian and selling them for twice the price
Innovation? They color everything white, round the corners, and finally implement features others phones had 2-3 generations earlier. I think their biggest innovation was the 30% rent seeking in the app store. They really led the way on that.
They used to be the aspirational underdog, sweating the details. Now they’re just another complacent megacorporation, standing on the shoulders of giants.
I refuse to get anything AI. I think us Gen Xers remember The Terminator a little too well. Or as Arthur Weasley says in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”
I think part of the problem is that Apple sold itself as the guardian of its users information. Anything they do aggressively to data mine, aggregate for use cases would likely begin to undermine this stance. They've put themselves at an extreme disadvantage posture wise.
They have been forced to do it, but it's really not necessary for them to keep their core business going... we're in an AI hype era so they've done the bare minimum and kept the markets happy.
The UX for Apple Intelligence is horrendous. The text operations are where ChatGPT was in the November of its birth. The image and emoji toys are uncompelling and copycat at best.
They failed miserably with Apple VisionOS and they've 100% failed embarrassingly with Apple Intelligence so far.
The only extraordinary thing about the company is how they can keep rolling out cheap imitations of their competitors and their customers will keep calling them innovative
eh it may not be the fanciest but at least my iphone has an internet browser so i can fact check myself before making obviously-incorrect claims on social media, a feature some phones apparently lack
When was the last time Apple released an extraordinary innovative or designed product?
Not since Steve Jobs died, as far as I can tell.
I suspect as soon as enough people realize adding a new camera to an iPhone is not innovation, Apple will collapse. But I've been saying that for years, so 🤷♂️
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Apple’s most dominant skill is erasing failures from public memory and powering through less than exciting launches in very impressive “fake it til you make it” style.
Signed,
Apple Ecosystem Citizen
Like a palm pilot but 4x larger and heavier.
I could freehand in graphitti as fast as typing.
I'd sync it to pc via cradle anytime I was home. Never worried about data loss.
You're adorable.
My palm pilot recognized my handwriting.
Stop attempting to retcon reality.
I have survived on this earth thus far using my own inbuilt intelligence, it has served me well.
Apologists for dumbing down the consumer and feeding them constant streams of garbage I can do without.
Have a good new year
you are talking about steve jobs apple, not current apple, tell me one innovation that apple did in last 10 years
https://www.thebusinessanecdote.com/post/when-microsoft-saved-apple-inc-from-bankruptcy
*I just like reminding people that "precious great apple" was saved by "Evil MS!" *
What were you expecting from this gaggle of liars, thieves and cheats?
Lower your expectations to zero.
They’ve had a decade of code bloat that has caught up to them. The whole thing is about making the line go up from here on out.
My guess is that it started somewhere around the yearly software release drumbeat, though it may have deeper roots.
I’d love an iOS that has rock solid functionality instead of releasing a totally revised Photos app no one asked for.
Superior marketing trumps actual product superiority every time.
They names it AI. No not that AI, different AI.
Or did I type Al? Only a serifed font would know.
#Innovation
#Apple
#Patience
I guarantee there’s NSFW AI that generates less “AI looking” things.
Idk why apple is so washed up.
If you're a tinkerer local AI being ran on this little $249 puppy:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-orin/nano-super-developer-kit/
As for Apple, I've got nothing.
If cutting edge technology is what you're after, you're looking at the wrong place.
Or the clunky and obsolete power pcs?
I'm confused.
Maybe you mean the Intel apples that wont support cutting edge parts coz there's no one competent making drivers for OSX?
Maybe you should stop buying locked underperformed rebranded arm phone chips disguised as a new powerful product for 10x the price.
But hey, as Apple users say: Dumb is their target audience. Coz "everything is so simple and intuitive".
Best of luck.
And no, deciding what "features" to shove down their customer base's throats is classified as NSFW, not innovation.
https://www.thebusinessanecdote.com/post/when-microsoft-saved-apple-inc-from-bankruptcy
AI doesn't fit into that paradigm. It's inherently plagiaristic for everyone, so they've lost their advantage. 🤷♂️
This is just another symptom that there is something deeply wrong in the organization
Their focus since then has been on gouging their locked-in user base with perpetual hardware upgrades, and harvesting customer data.
They failed miserably with Apple VisionOS and they've 100% failed embarrassingly with Apple Intelligence so far.
Not since Steve Jobs died, as far as I can tell.
I suspect as soon as enough people realize adding a new camera to an iPhone is not innovation, Apple will collapse. But I've been saying that for years, so 🤷♂️