Apple squandered the Holy Grail

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/squandered-holy-grail/

by caust1c • 2 years ago

423 550 2 years ago

bitpush2• 2 years ago

Apple was always going to fail this, and even more so going forward.

LLM are built on data, and copious amounts of it. Apple has been on a decade long marketing campaign to make data radio active. It has now permeated the culture so much so that, Apple CANNOT build a proprietary, world-class AI product without compromising on their outspoken positions.

It is a losing battle because the more apple wants to do it, the users are gonna punish them and meanwhile, other companies (ChatGPT, anthropic) are gonna extract maximum value.

wmf• 2 years ago

LLMs are mostly trained on public data while Apple's privacy stance applies to private data. There's no conflict between them.

(Meta can probably train on private data but OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be doing OK without it as far as we know.)

shuckles• 2 years ago

No, Apple’s privacy stance is about giving users control over data in ways they understand. Posting on Reddit or Arxiv is not a blank check to have your words be reused for LLM training, even if it’s technically public.

astrange2• 2 years ago

All the LLM advances these days are from synthetic or explicitly created data too. You need public data mostly because it contains facts about the world, or because it's easier to talk about a book when it's "read" the book. But for a known topic area (as opposed to open Q&A) it's not critical since you can go and create or license it.

october8140• 2 years ago

It’s ok to just say you don’t like Apple Intelligence.

browningstreet• 2 years ago

Author isn’t being reductive.

jimmydoe2• 2 years ago

Author has strong opinion of where GenAI should be used vs not, eg they doesn’t like the feature to remove a person from a photo. That’s respectable but I see many people may feel differently.

ghaff9• 2 years ago

There's a big difference between features that journalists should never use vs. consumers cleaning up their vacation snaps.

ripped_britches4• 2 years ago

Article definitely has a lot more depth of meaning that this gives credit for

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Apple has started going downhill from the time they released Vision Pro.

So that means all of the big tech companies are going down: Facebook, Google, Apple.

Only Microsoft remains strong though for how much longer remains to be seen.

A great time for startups.

FreePalestine1• 2 years ago

Doomposting aside, why do you actually think all these companies are going downhill?

I think they're all doing pretty well at the moment.

ripped_britches4• 2 years ago

Yea I mean they are financially doing better than any group of companies at any time in human history, kind of like the exact opposite of this downhill claim

Even with Googles monopoly legal issues, they are more valuable than ever.

dismalaf3• 2 years ago

Is Microsoft that strong? They've got a stranglehold on medium to large businesses but that's about it. Very few people actually want to use their products, they just think they have to...

But yes, it's a great time for startups. I'd argue it always is and always has been.

ripped_britches4• 2 years ago

that’s about it

Just 3 trillion or so dollars, that’s about it

leptons3• 2 years ago

Apple wishes they had anything close to Windows (or Android's) market share. Yes, people want PCs because a lot of software just won't run on Apple hardware, and Apple hardware is too expensive.

timomaxgalvin• 2 years ago

Nothing comes close to Microsoft Excel. It's bizarre to be honest how bad the competition is in core business applications.

karlgkk• 2 years ago

You know, there’s a lot to be said about this topic, but…. “Microsoft is strong”???? Lmao

ghaff9• 2 years ago

Outside of various bubbles, Microsoft still dominates desktop computing and Azure has pretty strong market share itself. I actually find it fairly remarkable that, in spite of the Windows OS not mattering as much any longer--especially on the server--and Microsoft absolutely tanking in mobile, the company is still very strong and relevant.

AlexandrB2• 2 years ago

I don't get the "Math Notes" example. Why does this need AI? Isn't this just Calca[1] but with extra steps?

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calca/id635757879

krackers2• 2 years ago

Also seen in Soulver.

wahnfrieden3• 2 years ago

Soulver is text entry not drawn

wahnfrieden3• 2 years ago

Calca is text entry not drawn

bathtub365• 2 years ago

Math notes also works with text entry.

bigiain• 2 years ago

Why does this need AI? Isn't this just dividing by two, which you can easily do in your head?

(I get that not everybody bothers doing vaguely complex mental arithmetic, but dividing by two? Come on!)

jitl2• 2 years ago

The point is algebra system, it’s quite good for unit conversion, budgeting, etc - lots of things a spreadsheet does great but seems a bit overkill for. Algebra big improvement over basic arithmetic calculator power.

anon7000• 2 years ago

Cala with less steps, technically. No extra apps or text syntax to learn. Just drawing the math you learned in school as if on paper

AlexandrB2• 2 years ago

The extra steps are the (probably at least) 10x compute this requires to do the same thing.

cornstalks6• 2 years ago

The "Math Notes" thing is absolutely infuriating to me. I use TextEdit on macOS for various notes and the forced math autocomplete (with no way to turn it off) has pushed me away from TextEdit entirely.

dmd2• 2 years ago

Do you mean Notes? TextEdit doesn't support this functionality at all.

ferbivore• 2 years ago

Forced AI garbage seems to be Notes team's SOP at this point. They destroyed the handwriting experience on iPads, in iOS 18, with an incompetent spellchecker that can't be turned off. At least this math thing is somewhat unobtrusive, the spellchecker straight-up destroys notes. No acknowledgement of radars and no fix in sight, as expected of Apple I suppose.

musesum• 2 years ago

Apple also squandered maps ... until they didn't.

nxobject2• 2 years ago

I agree. I think we believe that Apple's days of long-term skunkworks development is over... I don't think it's as dramatic as, say, the years since the PA Semi acquisition, or the "secret" Intel port, but they do some long-term planning.

(Apple Originals, their production house, is also an example. A huge bank of original prestige TV, subsidized by iPhones... they're just still finding a way to market it.)

knowaveragejoe• 2 years ago

Years ago I remember a detailed comparison of Apple and Google maps, showing a lot of flaws with Apple Maps around contrast, lack of detail, misleading iconography, and other issues.

Has it improved that much? Does anyone remember what I'm talking about?

astrange2• 2 years ago

That's Justin O'Beirne's site. It has mostly improved but he wasn't really that negative on it. He just used to work there so he was being extra critical since he knew them.

On the contrary he often seemed undeservedly uncritical when he talked about Google, like going "wow this is so detailed, they must be super geniuses who did this with computers" about something like POI locations they'd actually done by hiring a ton of contractors to do by hand.

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

It still sucks. No amount of fancier graphics can make up for their lack of ground truth in terms of opened and closed businesses. I just spot-checked the newest cafe in my neighborhood, which opened 3 weeks ago, and it's still not present on Apple Maps, and another place that closed months ago remains on Apple Maps. It is a demonstration of the fact that you can abuse your monopoly to push a third-rate product on 10% of your users.

plonq• 2 years ago

My hypothesis is that certain products need users and feedback to be good. Maps is one of those, hence why they had to release it in a ‘bad’ state. Apple AI I think is another such product.

ragazzina• 2 years ago

Or Siri.. no wait.

ghaff9• 2 years ago

Though, in fairness, I don't find any of the voice assistants very useful. Siri is probably not quite as good as Alexa though. I mostly care more about Siri because I use CarPlay when driving.

ValentineC4• 2 years ago

Apple needs to review whichever firm they outsourced review of Maps locations to, because my report got my local hackerspace marked "permanently closed" when all I did was correct the address, map pointer, and capitalisation of the name.

marxisttemp3• 2 years ago

I haven’t had any issues with the Maps review. Seems like perhaps you submitted a change that was normalized as an entirely new business due to having a different address, location and name. Have you tried to zoom in and see if there’s a new marker with the info you submitted?

You can imagine, if a business has changed its address, location, and name, that users would appreciate a “Closed” pin for the previous name and location instead of wondering what happened to the business that used to be there.

zimpenfish2• 2 years ago

I wish they'd sort out the rendering of road names (and this isn't specific to Apple, mind) - they're still seemingly stuck in the olden times rules for rendering street names ("only put a road name if the road is wide enough and only every N inches and starting at M inches from a junction") rather than "can we put a road name on this road that's visible on screen without it going over something else?" which would be 500% more useful.

e.g. https://imgur.com/a/1Y7HviK - what rules govern this half-arsed speckling of road names?

eviks2• 2 years ago

They still "did"

cageface2• 2 years ago

Depends on where you live. In SE Asia it's useless.

ripped_britches4• 2 years ago

The core of why ChatGPT works as a product isn't the AI. It's the experience of each word being typed one at a time by the AI and saving your conversations with the AI for later.

Really loved this article overall, but I have to super-disagree here. The core of ChatGPT is you can have a conversation with a computer program.

Take away saving history and you can still have a conversation with a computer program (see ephemeral chats).

Take away typing one word at a time and you still have a conversation with a computer program (see non-streaming API / batch API).

But major props for writing this live on a twitch stream, benefit of the doubt there my friend.

badgersnake• 2 years ago

Yep you can tell it that it gave you the wrong answer and it will apologise and give you a different wrong answer.

xena15• 2 years ago

Article author here. Thanks! I've found writing on stream to be really hard, but it's getting easier with practice. One of the more frustrating parts is trying to get the pure thought nuance out onto the page in a way that reflects the nuance as it is in my head. I think I'm getting closer to it, but who knows.

trash_cat• 2 years ago

I agree with the premise that it is not the text stream or the coversation history that makes the ChatGPT useful - It is multifaceted. It's an interface, and also a intelligence at your disposal. Even if you took some abilities away from ChatGPT, such as spitting out real world facts, it could still be used for summarizing text.

hb-robo4• 2 years ago

These models are stochastic though, so saving conversations with elaborate context so they're actually useful in the domain you need them to be useful in is a fundamental feature. The alternative to that is saving a document to copy-paste in as a "startup prompt" of things it needs to know contextually, which is kind of silly.

vachina• 2 years ago

Apple shipped “Apple Intelligence” before Apple even invented the term.

Before the AI craze you could search Photos on iOS based on content and metadata. You could lift subjects off photos with a long tap and copy them, recognize faces and make montages based on inferred relationship with them. And all of this is done on-prem, on your device.

These are very subtle, nice features. Apple had to put a name on all these otherwise there would be no marketing material.

nxobject2• 2 years ago

Yes, Apple does a lot of feature-related marketing these days, which changes their naming priorities.

I remember reading it was a post-Jobs transition thing, where the key message about products transitioned away from vibes and overarching slogans ("shuffle", "the internet comuter"), to features ("iPhone X", "iPhone XS", "iPhone XR", "iPhone XS Pro (??)").

I'm sure that a lot of the old-guard exec team knows it's a loss... I'm sure how they feel about it or why.

wtmt2• 2 years ago

This is true. Craig Federighi and others have said in the past that they’ve added machine learning based features for a long time in the OS (with examples). It’s just that generative AI took off very quickly and now some people are imagining that it’s the only (or major) AI.

ghaff9• 2 years ago

Aspects of AI normalize over time. There was a time when the route finding in digital maps would have been considered almost magic.

WillAdams4• 2 years ago

They also (poorly) implemented address recognition in their app --- c.f., an application which had this at its core:

https://simson.net/ref/sbook5/

(and the source of which is available)

layer82• 2 years ago

They have now released half-baked features they only released to fill “Apple Intelligence” with something, and that they likely wouldn’t have released in the current state otherwise.

saagarjha• 2 years ago

If this OS were shipped to consumers, you would have a nearly unhackable system that would make it basically impossible to tinker with.

I mean you can hack it the same way you would hack any other Darwin platform

xena15• 2 years ago

I more meant untinkerable than unhackable. Oops, oh well.

015a2• 2 years ago

I think it is concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad. Being last to the party is a very normal Apple thing; quality and Doing The Right Thing takes time. Announcing something then taking months to ship it is very not-Apple, but it has happened a few times. That thing they finally ship being bad is, geeze, horribly un-Apple.

One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays. So I generally do have hope for Apple Intelligence. At the end of the day, there are some disparate competing utilities in this class on the Samsung and Google phones, but no one is shipping something that is obviously game-changing and in first place; they all kinda suck, they're all tech demos, and it'll inevitably take many years to get this technology honed in to something that is truly useful to consumers.

wtmt2• 2 years ago

One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays.

This depends on where (which country) you live. For all the ways Apple has been vocal about the Indian market and local production, Apple Maps literally sucks even in major cities in India. Google Maps is decades ahead and gets updated very quickly. Apple Maps cannot even find regular addresses or places.

Apple has its share of incompetencies and willful blind spots, and that shows up in specific areas often related to its services (Apple Intelligence is also a service). The organization and its people are not built for handling these effectively or quickly.

That said, I have more hope in Apple Intelligence improving quicker (at least in English, while competitors are already ahead in other languages, including several Indian languages) than I have in Apple Maps improving in India.

AlotOfReading• 2 years ago

Google maps also sucked in India until a couple of engineers flew there to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of mapping/routing and spent a bunch of time implementing regionalized fixes for them. Apple expresses some very clear preferences in what regions they support well in Apple maps, which exclude most "difficult" areas.

AliAbdoli• 2 years ago

Gemini is pretty good on Android nowadays. No real complaints

SebFender• 2 years ago

Can't talk for all regions of Apple Maps, but here in Canada I still get many errors when using it - especially when using bikes, buses and so on. It remains impossible to confidently use compared to Google Maps. When it comes to Apple AI stuff - too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a tragically bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple. I wouldn't be surprised it will be presented in the future as one of the greatest miss from Tim and his gang.

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a tragically bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple.

I think it is more complicated than that. I think the Apple Vision is a kind of albatross. No one wanted this thing. I happen to think the executives didn't want it either. For all the years and effort put into it (and, well, there was project "Titan" before that) killing it might have hurt worse than their lackluster shipping of it.

Flush with cash (and I can't think of a phrase that really carries the weight of just how flush with cash they are — embarrassingly wealthy?) it was a rounding error for Apple to hire everyone they could in The Valley and keep them busy (and filing patent applications as they worked). It kept them from the competitors.

And I don't believe you could have instead put the engineering hires to "fixing Maps" or whatever pet peeve you and I have about the current Apple ecosystem. You're 1) likely not hiring the type of engineers for those tasks and 2) just throwing more people on the thing is not necessarily going to be the right answer (The Mythical Man-Month, too many cooks (ha ha) and all that).

On the whole I think Tim has steered the Apple ship to align with the times we have been living in.

nfca• 2 years ago

In Metro Vancouver, Los Angeles and the state of Washington, my experience with Apple Maps has been far better than Google Maps; the latter seems to have stagnated completely.

Apple Maps provides me with more accessible info. e.g. "turn right at the next traffic light", "stay in the second lane from the left" vs. "In 200 metres, turn right onto 1st Avenue" (where it's always off by 50m) and nothing about lanes

hobs• 2 years ago

MobileMe/iCloud sucked for half a decade at least, it was well known internally and was something Jobs supposedly bitched about a lot.

jimmydoe2• 2 years ago

Jobs seemed very tolerant in this case, he was quite mad at Eddy Cue at times, but did not fire him.

torben-friis3• 2 years ago

Apple has a potentially interesting use case for generative AI in their professional creative apps: heavy integration in logic pro or in final cut. Perhaps even create simpler tools with similar functionality but aimed at non professional users.

The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in arts/humanities, and most other use cases are really unneeded - who needs text summarizing for something as simple as personal texts from friends? casual use is not really complex enough to warrant an assistance.

xena15• 2 years ago

Author of the article here. I do video work occasionally and I use Davinci Resolve to do it. Davinci resolve uses generative AI as tools to help you. It makes all my subtitles and if I'm not going into domain specific terminology that often, it'll be 95% of the way there in about 15 minutes. This is massive, especially when combined with "edit by word" editing.

ChadNauseam• 2 years ago

The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in arts/humanities

I don’t anticipate this being a problem. Have you used generative fill in photoshop or lightroom? It’s a complete game changer. In Egyptian mythology they weigh your soul against a feather when you entered the afterlife, and with professional tools I think moral hangups about AI are going to get about the same weight. It’s just too good not to use.

duped2• 2 years ago

I have this deep feeling that engineers have a fundamental misunderstanding of the arts, which is reinforced when there is a suggestion that "heavy integration" of generative AI into multimedia production apps is somehow desirable. It's not just contrary to the design and use of these applications, but contrary to art as an endeavor - and users find it revolting.

Apple already has simpler tools aimed at non professionals, they don't need generative AI either.

jiehong2• 2 years ago

While I do like Apple Maps, and I agree it has improved, it constantly get the speed limits very wrong in France (just 2 weeks ago).

The public transport part of Maps got much better in Germany, though.

tonyedgecombe• 2 years ago

It's the same in the UK. Also I have been trying to get them to list my address for two years now. Google were able to update it but any requests to Apple seem to go into a black hole.

iTokio• 2 years ago

What I want is simple :

A smart assistant, that can understand and speak to me like Advanced Voice Mode, use a vast knowledge database, is tailored to my needs and can act on my behalf.

And it would be great if it’s able to run locally.

Someone2• 2 years ago

If that is simple, start a company to build it and become a billionaire.

I don’t think any company has a smart assistant that’s reliable enough to act on your behalf except for some very constrained tasks (examples: dish washers, auto-parking cars)

tmzt2• 2 years ago

I would say Gemini Live is getting there. It's lacking integration with NotebookLM and Keep. It would be amazing if I started a project conceptually and wanted to move to code it could fire up VS Code and let me get to work.

Gemini's home automation works nicely and it can understand comments like it's too dark in here or it's cold inside and act appropriately. This is using the Android app as an assistant, not live mode.

OpenAI's implementation is apparently similar but I haven't tried the voice mode as a free user.

I haven't tried Apple Intelligence yet on my M1 and don't have an iPhone, so I can't compare.

I've been looking at offline capabilities with open weight models but they aren't there either. A full speech-to-speech model [1] working on an M1 Mac would be incredible.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00037

hoseja• 2 years ago

How is a corporation going to profit off that?

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

There is a lot in the Apple universe that is shoddy. iTunes, for instance.

iOS has a refinement that Android lacks but I am unimpressed with MacOS. Windows is stuffed full of terrible crapplets and Windows users largely recognize that these are terrible crapplets and don't use them. Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Even Apple fans lately claim it's been getting worse in the last few years.

(That said, I love the innovation in the M-series chips from Apple just as much as I appreciate Microsoft's commitment to the long-term viability of Windows for all of us who invest in it. Occasionally at work we still use Access '98 to handle old files and it works great, the installer works great, in fact Office still tries to take the desktop over the way it did back in the day. Clippy still works. The borderless windows look just a little funny because the compositor changed. No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98)

dangus4• 2 years ago

Mentioning "iTunes is bad" is like a trigger word for me because it's so misinformed at this point.

For one thing, the iTunes name doesn't technically exist anymore except on Windows. And anyone complaining about it being bad on Windows...I mean, that's like complaining that Microsoft Remote Desktop (Now called the Windows app for some reason) sucks on Mac, right? Like, can we just put the Windows version aside please? Even then, I'm not really sure what specific thing iTunes for Windows sucks at besides not looking like a Windows app. People just say that because they were saying it in 2005.

On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the streaming service) is fantastic and has supported Apple's "classic" digital music workflow longer than anyone else has been willing to support their users. The Apple TV app (again, not to be confused with TV+ subsciption service) is now the home for the music/TV show store/rental place and the home of your TV/movie library, which is a big improvement from shoving that functionality in iTunes. in that sense, Apple has cleanly separated use cases and functionality in a way that iTunes didn't previously, which is one reason why a lot of people said "iTunes sucks."

I have a family member who recently switched to Android because of frustration with Apple as a whole. They are a big digital music collector, they don't believe in streaming or "renting" their content.

I tried to help them with their music collection on Android. Theoretically it should be easier right? No weird restrictions on sync direction, basically dump your stuff on an SD card/transfer over USB-C and you're off to the races.

But still, they switched back to Apple secondarily because it's the only place left that actually makes that "purchased digital music" experience user-friendly, or possible at all. (Primarily they switched back to iPhone because the modem in their Google Pixel sucks and/or is poorly tested with their major US carrier and would drop international calls every 15 minutes exactly for no reason)

Google Play's music store doesn't exist anymore. Every jukebox app on Android depends on 100% manual file management. None of them have the polish of the Music app (the app not the service). Almost none of them have decent jukebox companion apps available on desktop computers. A whole bunch of other digital music stores have closed entirely.

Apple's system for synchronizing content is actually pretty amazing for continuing to support an offline cloudless workflow. You still just hit one button/plug in your device to sync your music, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and photos content. It also supports WiFi syncing, and it furthermore supports every iPod that ever existed so long as you have the right cable/adapter.

You can back up your iPhone's full image to your computer if you don't want to use iCloud backups just like it was an iPod. You can synchronize your Photos library and avoid iCloud storage fees, deleting synchronized photos from your phone to free up space to take new photos and videos. It works just like you were using a digital camera in 2005. Yep, you can still rip and burn CDs!

Furthermore, the way Apple moved device synchronization functions to Finder and split out Music from Podcasts and Audiobooks is helpful for organizing the whole process. It used to be that iTunes was the home for all this synchronizing of non-music-related content, but now it more sensibly exists in Finder.

I think a lot of people don't realize that Apple basically still allows you to send over personally owned non-DRMed or even pirated content to Apple's own modern apps very easily this way, you just have to be willing to synchronize using "the old way" like your iPhone is an iPod. They've even kept ancient hosted services like iTunes Match going just in case you still need that sort of thing (it essentially allows you to sync music to your iPhone that is either pirated or not part of a known label music catalog via a cloud service rather than having to do a local sync via cable or WiFi).

And this workflow is very simple for non-technical users who don't really know how to traverse complicated file management structures. Yes, I would really like if apps like Photos was more flexible on file management, but on the other hand if you follow the prescribed workflow the results are quite user friendly for someone who really doesn't want the cloud but also can't handle setting up a home NAS. In this use case you have a reasonable photo storage system by syncing your device and then backing up your computer in a relatively hands-off manner using Time Machine.

One final point here is that Apple Music the subscription service can be hidden entirely from the app. Apple will just give you a 100% owned music jukebox app. Google doesn't do that, and with Microsoft you're probably using a legacy app like Windows Media Player that looks like it belongs on Windows Vista.

azeirah• 2 years ago

No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98

Can you give me a few examples of linux binaries from 98? I would like to give this a go, I think I have a pretty reasonable way to go about achieving this.

arm• 2 years ago

(No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Have to strongly disagree on this point. Cog¹ is my music player of choice on macOS; not only does it have a clean GUI, but it supports almost every format² I’ve ever wanted to listen to audio in, including game music in formats like GBS (Game Boy Sound System) and 2SF (Nintendo DS Sound Format).

――――――

¹ — https://github.com/losnoco/cog

² — https://cog.losno.co/

behnamoh2• 2 years ago

Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Nah, Apple users knew from the beginning that Siri sucked and still sucks. Almost no one I know uses Siri except for setting alarms and asking for weather forecast.

UltraSane2• 2 years ago

iPadOS is truly terrible and wastes the amazing hardware of apple silicon iPads

cageface2• 2 years ago

I was unhappy with the state of music players on macOS too so I wrote my own:

https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon

thaumasiotes2• 2 years ago

(No good music players for MacOS for instance)

What are the good music players off MacOS?

I figured the entire field had withered and died from lack of public interest.

jchw4• 2 years ago

No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98

The key problem for desktop Linux is that nobody knows exactly how to build binaries that will run on any reasonable Linux desktop system today, so it's hard to keep that non-existent reasonable subset of ABI stable for an extended period.

That said, you CAN do this. The kernel itself does present a mostly pretty stable ABI to userland applications, so you can grab a Debian chroot from 1998 and be on your way. Debian even still serves repositories for everything on archive.debian.org, and Dockerhub has OCI images you can `docker run` for Debian from 1999, under the debian/eol repo. You can `docker run` and `apt-get install` 25+ year old binaries on modern Linux!

What would be sweet is if we could build and ship compatibility tools that make these old binaries work mostly transparently. Today, double clicking a binary on Linux won't do anything particularly sophisticated, and there are no compatibility options. But actually, it would be totally doable to write a variety of useful compatibility shims without doing anything horribly grotesque. The DT_INTERP and DT_NEEDED fields of binaries would often give sufficient information for how you might get such a binary to run. It's not like it would be that useful, but I would personally be very pleased if you could just double click e.g. some old Kylix application and have it just run, perhaps after downloading some (shims for?) old libraries. You could extend this to transparently running CPU emulators too, not unlike the tricks people do with binfmt_misc, just possibly with more batteries included (and a bit less transparency.)

Another really great feature would be useful error messages when executing an application fails. Today if the DT_INTERP is missing, it looks like the binary itself can't be found since it returns the same errno, and you won't see linker errors if you execute a file in a GUI file explorer. What a great improvement it would be if all of that could be fixed, and there is no technical reason it can't be.

Of course, frustratingly, for more reasons than just this, the more likely thing to happen is that nobody bothers since containers are the future anyways, and Win32 instead becomes cemented as the true stable ABI of Linux. Which, in my opinion, is a bummer. We could always have two stable ABIs of Linux...

matthewdgreen2• 2 years ago

There is a point where supporting legacy software stops being impressive and just starts to be counterproductive. I'm glad my Mac doesn't support Mac OS 8 software anymore, especially since it means I can use a much faster processor architecture.

jiveturkey2• 2 years ago

iTunes, for instance.

assuming you mean on macOS, given your comment after this. (there is no iOS app called iTunes anyway)

yes, on both iOS and macOS, Apple intentionally hobbled iTunes/Music, incrementally making it worse each update, after Apple Music gained an initial foothold.

not that it was ever "great" after 1.0 maybe 2.0, but it certainly used to be good. Now, if you're not an Apple Music subscriber, you're left with a pretty basic player. I get that they want to segment the market, but to remove features and actively make it worse? horrible.

mrkpdl• 2 years ago

Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)

Many of the long term users of macOS/OS X/etc etc are highly critical of its downfalls, but still use it because of the available options they prefer it. Myself included. You can use something while also being aware of its shortcomings.

bolognafairy2• 2 years ago

Please don’t spoil this enjoyable nuanced conversation about Apple’s flaws with the usual laundry list of, frankly, unintelligent copy-pasted 2000s Mac vs PC online forum flame war talking points.

You’ve referred to iTunes in the present tense when it hasn’t existed for years, refer to ‘Apple fans’ as some sort of completely separate group of clearly defined people, and spend an unjustifiable amount of your comment talking about your quite niche professional Windows backwards compatibility use case.

We don’t need to rehash this whole thing. Please. Don’t take all the oxygen out of the room.

isjamesalive• 2 years ago

No good music players for MacOS for instance

Slightly OT but Doppler is quite good in my opinion.

hb-robo4• 2 years ago

It still really isn't that close to Google Maps, with public transit in particular Apple Maps is pretty much useless. GM is typically more complete with paths and building data outside of North America too.

robertoandred2• 2 years ago

Huh? Public transit has been better on Apple Maps. Does Google even have station entrances/exits yet?

dcrazy5• 2 years ago

I was able to navigate the transit systems in Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama near-flawlessly with Apple Maps in 2018. I only recall encountering one correctness issue.

gazchop• 2 years ago

Huh. Just used it fine for public transport in 8 European cities recently.

Google maps won’t even work properly when there’s no data.

jairuhme• 2 years ago

I have had a really good experience using Apple Maps for public transit. Earlier this year I went to NYC for the first time as an adult and it was super easy to use for finding which train to get on. Had a similar experience in Europe this fall as well.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

Apple sent me to a rural cornfield once instead of a church where baptism was taking place. It was funny because we weren’t the only ones, everyone using Apple Maps was sent to the same cornfield.

These type of rare but common enough edge cases make me super hesitant to use it in the Midwest.

jmull2• 2 years ago

I agree that Apple Intelligence generally stinks, but I'm not seeing anything actually generally more useful from anyone else.

If no one is good enough, does it really matter who's the worst?

behnamoh2• 2 years ago

Google Assistant and Gemini have been great.

ifyouwantto4• 2 years ago

Shrug. If I had to go back to desktop Linux, and I could pay to have Preview, Safari, Terminal(! yep, I like it better than my Linux options), Digital Color Meter, Apple's office-alike suite, Notes, and various other first-party Mac apps, on Linux, I'd absolutely click the "buy" button. And I spent 20 years on Windows and Linux before seriously giving Mac a shot, and still regularly use both for various reasons, so it's not that I don't know what else is out there—Apple's first-party apps are my favorites in their categories more often than not (big, glaring exception for Xcode, hahaha). They're mostly really good, stable, and don't eat my battery like it's free.

robocat• 2 years ago

concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad

The very initial success of Microsoft was that everything was reliably mediocre. Most things Microsoft delivered that were truely bad were fixed within a few major versions. It was a superpower.

The same model works for most purchases on a bad|average|best spectrum: we never want to buy bad, best is difficult to buy, so we settle for average quality.

Aside: I think MS has gone downhill and is now bad on multiple dimensions for me

enlyth• 2 years ago

Is it actually that bad?

I've been really enjoying the AI notification summaries, they're a nice combination of time saving and comedy

wileydragonfly• 2 years ago

Who can forget the time that Apple Maps took me down a road that had never been finished.. that became gravel in a field.. and I realized I had driven into a homeless camp. Ever seen a zombie movie where they swarm a car? It’s happened to me.

soylentcola• 2 years ago

Maybe it was all the people who'd followed the same navigation.

BirAdam• 2 years ago

MobileMe.

paul79863• 2 years ago

I can have a whole human like conversation with chatGPT via their app on the same iPhone where Siri still is total horse-poo. I have iPhone 15 Pro and running 18.3 .... Siri is so pathetic.

I chat with GPT (especially in the car) to get things done; assistant and a knowledgebase. Siri makes me have nerd rage (lol) trying to use her the same.

If GPT came out with an AI Phone Apple would be out of my life. I want an AI Phone where on the lock screen I see a facetime like call with my AI Assistant (can skin how they look to be whoever). They do everything for me via voice, text, hand gestures, facial expressions and etc. It would be less icon focus and way more AI focused of a UX.

widdershins2• 2 years ago

I think it's much easier for Apple to sort out their AI and add this to iPhone than it is for OpenAI to figure out an entire mobile ecosystem where Apple has a ~15 year headstart and use their AI in it.

I agree Siri isn't good, but adding good AI into the existing ecosystem is clearly where the market is headed, and I don't think it will be long before Apple gets there.

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

That thing they finally ship being bad is, geeze, horribly un-Apple.

It was actually quite common Apple during the days Steve Jobs was no longer at the helm, they weren't even able to create a new OS, had to buy another company to rescue them.

And had they gone with Be instead of NEXT, most probably we would be talking about Apple in the past tense nowadays.

Nowadays they might have more money than ever, but it won't last forever if they cannot do anything else than reboots of existing products.

BeFlatXIII• 2 years ago

IMO, this happened because Tim needed to please in ~~morons~~ investors. It wasn't ready, but the stock market may push for regime change if Apple didn't have "a compelling AI story" or some similar garbage.

r00fus• 2 years ago

There is also the possibility that LLM models (which is what Apple Intelligence is leveraging mainly) are overblown and honestly a local minima for AI.

apricot13• 2 years ago

I feel like they have a plan, get the backend up to scratch to appease the tech people and they're leaving the ways to interact with it purposely vague and incomplete for those non-tech folk.

They don't want to scare any part of their audience away from future uses of Apple intelligence. Their audience is tech and non-tech folk alike.

If the tech folk say it's safe and the non-tech folk get comfortable with the basic AI features then they're onto a winner.

How many people's parents/grand parents have iPhones because they're simpler for them to understand who are also scared or don't understand this 'AI thing'. I think Apple have been quite savvy in introducing it slowly and are probably watching the metrics like a hawk!

I suspect image playground is so creepy in an attempt to mark the images as clearly AI generated when they get posted to social media?

daft_pink• 2 years ago

Their problem is that they are just behind now, because they released too early. They haven’t finished iOS 18 yet. They are still working on it, which likely means that iOS 19 isn’t going to get much attention either, because they should be working on iOS 19 now, not still developing iOS 18.

They have set themselves up for a loser in the next year or two, because they can’t double their resources to catch back up to a normal release schedule.

yalogin• 2 years ago

They just built a trusted/secure backend to push compute to and it luckily coincided with the AI craze. They just packaged their backend as apple intelligence and exploited the situation. It doesnt look like they have anything worthwhile to showcase that backend though. They will get there eventually, this is apple after all

VectorLock3• 2 years ago

I find it super interesting that Apple is x-raying the PCBs for their compute nodes. Guess they took Supermicro inserting malicious devices into their servers very seriously.

jsheard• 2 years ago

* allegedly inserting malicious devices according to a report that was never substantiated

VectorLock3• 2 years ago

I, personally, am convinced it has and is happening.

armada651• 2 years ago

Word processors like MacWrite absolutely transformed the ways that everyone used computers.

MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.

Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at. Part of the reason people are disappointed with Apple these days is because of this fantasy image of Apple as an inventor.

Clamchop3• 2 years ago

Author does say word processors "like" MacWrite, so falls short of saying it was the first at anything (and it wasn't), but WordPerfect and WordStar are interesting choices for comparison. Of the three, only MacWrite is a GUI-based WYSIWYG word processor that would be immediately familiar to modern audiences. (WordPerfect wouldn't get GUI until 1991.)

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Yeah, this.

I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write.

WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)

leptons3• 2 years ago

And before Macwrite, or Macintosh computers existed, there was Xerox PARC and their GUI-based WYSIWYG editor called "Bravo", which Steve Jobs no doubt would have seen when he visited PARC.

WillAdams4• 2 years ago

It's interesting to note that when WordPerfect got a GUI, it had to be worked up separately for each platform --- the NeXTstep version was quite nice, took full advantage of Display PostScript, and was coded up by a couple of programmers in six weeks or so.

DidYaWipe• 2 years ago

But the example functionality is backspacing, which of course in no way requires a GUI. You could just as easily cite AtariWriter or Bank Street Writer, which came out before WordPerfect.

blihp• 2 years ago

It was implied by the phrase 'transformed the ways everyone used computers'. True, to younger computer users MacWrite would be the most familiar of the three. However, in terms of total unit sales and percentage of users for their day, MacWrite was practically rounding error in the word processor market. It was WordStar and then WordPerfect that dominated (and therefore 'transformed...') until the early/mid-90's when MS Word took over.

ja27• 2 years ago

WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently it was an in-house port.

chongli2• 2 years ago

MacWrite was a WYSIWYG word processor. You could change the fonts or other formatting and see the results updated on the screen.

WordStar and WordPerfect were for DOS. They were not WYSIWYG. Sure they were powerful word processors for professionals, but they were not “like” MacWrite. MacWrite was a tool for regular people.

shakna5• 2 years ago

I absolutely would have described WordStar as a WYSIWYG editor. [0] You have no content markings, you do have pages in sight, and flowing text. You set the text to bold, and the font displayed is bold, etc.

I don't think I'm alone in that judgement, as Wiki says:

"WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG." [1]

So... You might need to expand why you think that this is not true.

[0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/words...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar

tokinonagare2• 2 years ago

Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at.

Exactly. And often the first version is often kind of meh (iPhone, Watch, Vision Pro) but they keep iterating and later versions become really good. Sometimes it's a hit directly (M1), it's still very iterative on whatever came before.

tim3332• 2 years ago

And of course the M1 Air is basically another in the line of Macbook Airs but with a better processor.

leptons3• 2 years ago

I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.

This is the famous "reality distortion field" you may have heard of. It's basically a form of tribalism taken to an absurd level.

bennythomsson• 2 years ago

It goes on.

the new standard that companies like Samsung and Google would clone the same way they cloned the hardware and software design of the iPhone.

That's misrepresenting history in ways it's not even funny.

Stopped reading at that point. The article took too long to even sketch it's main point anyway.

Clubber• 2 years ago

IIRC, all the Google/Samsung phones had keyboards because they copied the Blackberry. Once the iPhone was released with the screen keyboard, all the Google phones changed to that.

They didn't clone everything, but they cloned a lot in the early days. Rounded corners was another one. Now it seems like Apple is cloning Google/Samsung more.

scosman5• 2 years ago

I get not loving the "Apple invented everything" mantra some people have, but the iPhone genuinely redefined the smart phone category. The industry has 100% coalesced on the model invented by Apple. Nothing like this existed as a full package before the iPhone and now are almost universal:

- No physical keyboard + touch keyboard

- Modern OS kernel (not embedded specific kernel)

- Desktop browser engine

- Capacitive touchscreen + finger instead of stylus - one or two phones had capTouch before, but they were far from standard, and they still had physical keyboards for typing

- Vertical by default orientation

- Short 1 day battery life in favour of more power/features (weird to list, but was a bold move everyone mocked then followed)

They totally took out the existing market (Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, a variety of OEM OSs). Android succeeded but came after, still had keyboards on its flagships the years after iPhone came out (G1, Droid), and took these design cues from iPhone.

The Mac GUI with mouse+keyboard+windows was also huge. Admittedly not first to invent it (Xerox PARC), but first to ship it as a package is still hugely impressive. Few people commercialize a new product before it existed in some lab.

n144q• 2 years ago

I started to have doubts about the article as soon as seeing the Samsung Galaxy vs iPhone comparison. The author exaggerates things and rewrites history too much.

quesera9• 2 years ago

Apple has always done both -- invented and refined.

Claiming that Apple does not invent is as gobsmackingly wrong as claiming that Apple invented everything.

randunel• 2 years ago

What did apple invent? Is it really more than a couple of things? (Applying existing ideas to new systems isn't inventing)

adamc12• 2 years ago

Yes, but having used both in that time period... tools on the mac were graphical and easily explored (open a menu and see what was available). People made plastic keyboard templates for WordPerfect and WordStar just to remember the commands. On top of that, you could easily task switch on a Mac. There were some tools for doing that with DOS, but they were awful by comparison.

I worked in a lab that used PCs while I owned a Mac Plus. There was no comparison.

runjake4• 2 years ago

MacWrite was released in 1984. 7 years before comparable graphical, WYSIWYG competitors.

WordPerfect for Windows was released in 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical.

WordStar for Windows was released in about 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical.

What made MacWrite special, is that it was graphical, highly WYSIWYG (especially when paired with an Apple printer), had a lot of great fonts, and the software was intuitive.

Of course Apple didn't invent any of it, but they made one of the best word processing products at the time.

jpadkins3• 2 years ago

How do you measure best? Based on usage, sales, or fraction of published text created - Wordperfect or Wordstar were way ahead of MacWrite.

MacWrite was the best in a niche market of personal newsletters that wanted graphical elements. More professional desktop publishers used Aldus PageMaker. And big publishing houses didn't use PCs or software, they used offset lithography presses.

deng• 2 years ago

MacWrite was released in 1984. 7 years before comparable graphical, WYSIWYG competitors.

You realize there were other systems besides PC and Mac?

Signum for the Atari ST came out in 1986. It was a fully fledged WYSIWYG text processor with special printer drivers for regular dot matrix printers. Even with a 9-pin you could create great looking output, if you had the patience (a single page took minutes to print). Signum was way ahead of MacWrite and was very popular with people needing special fonts in science/math and the humanities (you could quite easily design your own fonts). Also, it allowed for Right-to-left text, and of course the Atari ST was way cheaper than the Mac.

RichardCA2• 2 years ago

With all due respect, I think you are falling into the nostalgia trap. MacWrite was never a true WYSIWYG editor because of the way it relied on Quickdraw for the on-screen rendering but the big deal at the time was the Laserwriter being the first Postscript printer (Adobe still had a proprietary lock on Postscript which lasted until around the end of the 80's). In 1985 Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT. One of their first products was the WriteNow word processor which was ported back to the Mac platform by a company called T/Maker (the Silicon Valley rumor mill of the time was that Steve Jobs and Heidi Roizen were an item for a while). WriteNow was the first one to offer a polished experience with proper font rendering and kerning that didn't look rasterized. God forbid you tried to print from MacWrite with font smoothing turned on, a one-page print job could take several minutes to render because of how the Laserwriter had to execute all that Postscript code in real-time.

Aloisius3• 2 years ago

7 years?

Microsoft Word for Mac was released in 1985. It was comparable to MacWrite.

Also Microsoft Write for Windows was released in 1985, but it was clunkier.

j452• 2 years ago

Apple certainly doesn’t invent everything.

Calling what they do as mere refinement may be equally understating it in some cases.

They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners.

Anyone can start with an Apple, because it’s what it’s designed to do.

I have my own biases that extreme usability started earlier with other movements like WebOS and Palm contributing to it as well.

Still, if we look for watershed moments where huge numbers of people in the mainstream adopt technology, whether it’s the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, watch, laptops, they don’t need to be the first, just the best for the most number of people.

Being able to integrate hardware and software closely creates a different and reliable result for the many, as much as I might not like having complete agency.

If anything, Apple helps invent beginners in the mainstream.

dexterdog2• 2 years ago

They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners.

I used to think that about Apple which is why I got the iphone 4s when it came out assuming that I would be able to use it via voice while driving and have a good experience. I disabled it after the first day and never went back. It was not remotely ready for a wide release. I still use a mac as my main device, but I've been on Android since the 4s.

philistine9• 2 years ago

You're basically explaining why the Macintosh stayed niche when it came out. People saw the barebones WYSIWYG of WordPerfect 4.0 on PC in 1984 compared to the true WYSIWYG of MacWrite and they said: It's what we already have, why would I need a Mac?

jjulius• 2 years ago

I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.

This is entirely tangential and probably a pointless gripe in this thread, but...

For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that Apple took MP3 players, called them an 'iPod' and suddenly everyone ate them up like they were the second coming of christ and we'd never had them ever before.

kmeisthax2• 2 years ago

As someone who was There At The Time, the UX of the iPod was really, really good. There were few, if any, other companies that could match it. The vast majority of competing music players were what DankPods calls "nuggets" - i.e. barely functional e-waste that were either saddled down with horrible software (e.g. anything Sony made), had horrible controls, were bulky and painful to use, or some combination of those above dealbreakers. A lot of companies treated developing an MP3 player like any other kind of music player, and ignored the fact that these things could hold 100x as much music as anything else on the market, which necessitated a completely new UX.

To be clear, there were good non-Apple MP3 players, but they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI/UX people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product category: smartphones.

I suspect history would have been different had, say, MiniDisc hadn't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod, portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just barely fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least, people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod.

[0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a repeat of DAT getting banned

alain94040• 2 years ago

Have you used the previous generation of MP3 players? I had one with a tiny LCD screen that would only fit half the song title (no space for the artist). To go to then next song, you had to press the "next" button (which makes sense). Except that action would take at least 0.5s. You press next, you wait, you see the display refresh with the next song's partial song name. Not the song I want, press next again. Very quickly, to skip 10 songs takes 10 seconds of effort. It was a painful device to use.

The iPod cam with a large screen and a click wheel. I could find songs on it. That was a revolution for me.

MP3 was the enabling technology (if you can't fit many songs on a small device, then this is moot).

entropicdrifter2• 2 years ago

In addition to the already very thorough and well-considered comment replying to this, I just wanted to say that the iPod was one of the first MP3 players that was widely available with a full-blown hard-drive. The vast majority of MP3 players at the time had like 32-64MB of flash memory, if that (and still cost hundreds of dollars). The iPod had 5GB and 10GB models. Suddenly you could bring your entire CD collection with you anywhere. Yeah, there were a couple of competing models with similarly-sized hard drives, but the other comment covers why people spending >$400 on a fancy new gadget preferred the iPod at the time for its excellent UI/UX.

giantrobot• 2 years ago

In addition to the points made by the sibling comment, the iPod was a quality product well executed, early competing MP3 players were not great.

Flash based players were smaller but limited in size and expansion media was expensive. Hard drive players were hobbled with USB 1.1 connections and an obsession with drag and drop for management.

The iPod by default just synched with your iTunes library. The FireWire (and eventually USB 2.0) did so quickly. The navigation was as good as the metadata which iTunes made easy to edit. The UX on the device made scrolling through long lists of songs very easy.

The iPod made using an MP3 easy and approachable for normal people. The Rio, Nomad, and a multitude of others did not. They included a bunch of checklist features but didn't focus on usability until Apple dominated the market.

wnevets• 2 years ago

I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.

Happens all the time with the iPhone. Apple gets celebrated as an innovator for adding features that have existed for years on Android.

jmull2• 2 years ago

WordPerfect and WordStar were text-based at the time MacWrite came out as a WYSIWYG word processor.

Not to say MacWrite wasn't based on prior work (it was, though not actual products that I know of), but it isn't really comparable to prior text-based word processors.

SeanLuke• 2 years ago

MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.

Um, hello, Wang OIS? WordStar and WordPerfect didn't invent anything. They were copies of terminal-based word processors.

But MacWrite was different in two important ways. First, like Bravo and Gypsy before it, it was WYSIWYG, a million times better than WordStar/WordPerfect. And it worked with the LaserWriter. But more importantly: it was free. This made MacWrite revolutionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)

snowfarthing3• 2 years ago

Nowadays, as someone who has heavily used LaTeX, I think WYSIWYG is rightly dismissed as WYSIAYG (ie "What You See Is ALL You Get").

There's a certain power that comes when you can designate that something is a section header, or a title, or a paragraph, or an equation -- and that power is felt when you decide you want to change the style for all the titles and section headers, or change how you number and reference equations and theorems.

Word processors (to the best of my knowledge -- it's been years since I've used one) can't do this. This kind of power comes from markup languages, like LaTeX or HTML/CSS (if you organize your documents correctly).

Having said that, there are LaTeX editors that both provide a certain amount of "What You See Is What You Get" (I think one is called "LyX", and I think GUI Emacs provides this, too) but nonetheless allow you to use LaTeX directly when you need it; I guess this is equivalent to the "Show Codes" ability that WordPerfect provided. (I wouldn't know, though, because I prefer to use Vim to write my documents.)

Also, I would agree that when things become freely available, that can be a game-changer, but as someone who grew up with a terminal and a giant computer with 8-inch disks and an Atari 800XL, when a neighbor showed off his Macintosh, it would be out of the question for my family to think of that as "free".

gordon_freeman2• 2 years ago

Siri had so many years to iterate and get refined that by now I'd assume it would have been as omnipresent assistant as in "Her" movie (without negative impact of course) but see where we are today: I am still using it for only weather and setting alarms and even in that it sometimes works and sometimes does not.

buryat• 2 years ago

Inventions are pretty cheap without the refinement of the product that directly contributes to the customers' demand additionally backed by robust supply chains and delivery of cutting edge tech like the M-line up of chips, and the tremendous camera quality, battery life, reliability of the operating system, specially curated app store, security and privacy, etc. Inventions are not what people want to pay for, people want to pay for additional value added in all sorts of form. Apple creates products for humans and people pay back by seeing the offering as a higher valued product.

robenkleene2• 2 years ago

I think what Apple excels at is providing a set of software development tools, a platform, and an audience, for third-party developers to then use to build innovative products, the best of which either become platforms of their own if they're lucky (e.g., Adobe suite), or are copied by Apple and made part of their operating systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)).

In addition to Watson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), there's also Cover Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow), Shortcuts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcuts_(Apple)), Konfabulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Widgets), Growl (https://growl.github.io/growl/), and of course my favorite LaunchBar (https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html, LaunchBar would be my pick as the most innovative app of the last 25 years), for apps that were incorporated into macOS.

While Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Lightroom, Premiere, and PowerPoint are all examples of software developed and released first for the Mac that then went on to become software behemoths in their own right (too big to Sherlock). (Well Sketch turned out differently, because Figma happened, but it's still a great example of third-party innovation facilitated by "a set of software development tools, a platform, and an audience".)

The point here being I think of Apple as more providing a platform for innovation rather than innovating themselves (but I'm aware that's probably a minority opinion).

zelphirkalt• 2 years ago

Apple fans do this to justify their decision to buy Apple products to their circles and most of all, to themselves. Or it is just delusion from not actually knowing better.

mrcwinn• 2 years ago

This post makes the point that the foundations of Apple Intelligence are really well designed. I think anytime you make the right underlying technology choices, there is always hope for the product.

It's also worth noting that Apple traditionally is not a first mover and looks for "inspiration" from smaller competitors. In this case, there is no comp to reference. There is no startup mobile OS innovating in integrated AI. That, and the supposedly rushed timetable, probably explains a lot.

tokinonagare2• 2 years ago

I wish the same. That being said, given how useless Apple Intelligence is, how it isn't deployed in the EU and how it's gatekept by newer hardware, it's still very easy to ignore it. It's even easier on Mac where new versions doesn't bring anything worth upgrading for a non Apple-only developper (still running Sonoma).

dangus4• 2 years ago

But the point is that the foundation gives it hope to be a class-leading product in the future.

The lengths Apple went to build a secure and private system will make it stand out and help it hold up to regulatory scrutiny. Doing this now is better than doing it later.

In, let's say, 3 years, the features are more legitimately useful, the gatekeeping on new hardware will be a non-issue. In 3 years the majority of Apple's users will have an iPhone 15 Pro/iPhone 16 or newer. They are probably already mostly on M1 or newer Macs.

On the other hand, I totally agree that it's pretty useless as it stands right now. I also think that if their launch strategy is to have an amazing WWDC and then deliver 5-10% of the features in September, that's going to turn Apple into just another company that promises the moon and delivers gimmicks.

infecto2• 2 years ago

I am hoping the foundation they built will lead to greater things. So far it definitely has fallen flat compared to their demos. All I wanted was a way to talk/text to siri in a natural way to get things done. It's better but far from perfect. I want to be able to easily create calendar events and interact with other native iOS APIs.

furyofantares• 2 years ago

They could be doing a lot better but it's a bit of a cursed problem.

Natural language as input doesn't give you any information about where the boundaries are or what's possible. Meanwhile natural language can express anything, most of which any current implementation won't be able to do.

So the user gets a blank canvas and all the associated problems with learning what to do, except it's worse because many things they think up will fail.

And the main tool we have to guide the user through this fraught path is LLM output. Oof.

I am hopeful that Apple will demonstrate their expertise in using some traditional UI to help alleviate some of these problems.

Someone2• 2 years ago

It's better but far from perfect.

I’m not aware of any competition that’s perfect.

I guess you meant to say the competition is better. I think it is, but that doesn’t mean their product isn’t a huge improvement.

A simple example is text search in Photos.app. It probably misses text in some photos, but it helps me find quite a few photos. Similarly, face recognition in Photos.app is far from perfect, but way better than not having that feature.

I want to be able to easily create calendar events and interact with other native iOS APIs

It’s not in Apple’s DNA to release a product here that mostly works. Chances are they’re working on something like that but don’t find it good enough to release it yet.

What surprises me, though, is that they released the “get an AI summary of this web page” feature. That definitely produces some results that are very bad.

infecto2• 2 years ago

Not talking about the competition. They failed to deliver what they had in demos. Clearly they were hoping to get it right in the last minute but seems far from the truth. All I wanted was a better Siri that played really well with native iOS apps. We dont have that yet and I am not sure if its purely a lack of power with on device models or if apple completely missed the mark in implementation.

est31• 2 years ago

I think part of this issue is that people expect a lot from Apple. They exposed the technology to many people who aren't early adopter types, but more "mainstream" types. With an entirely new product and brand, the tolerance for bugs is higher, but here the expectation is that of other Apple products.

In the end, even if the features aren't perfect, they still raise the bar for competitors, so Apple is less in danger of being disrupted.

Also, there is plenty of AI driven features that people do not talk about, but those "just work" so you don't see them as well.

enragedcacti4• 2 years ago

In the end, even if the features aren't perfect, they still raise the bar for competitors

Honestly I'm not sure that they do. Everything I've seen with notification summaries for instance has given me the feelings of "wow I guess I'm really not missing much". LLMs as an answer engine has a big benefit that it feels fast and fluid even when its wrong (and many won't bother verifying) but with notification summaries most users in messaging contexts will eventually go back to the conversation and see the responses in full detail. Mistakes in that context are identifiable by mainstream users as having made the product worse.

officeplant2• 2 years ago

Sometimes I wish I could check an alternative universe where Apple refused to acknowledge AI slop and just doubled down on privacy and protections of the user. It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend and let everyone else burn money until the hype dies down.

chairhairair• 2 years ago

Several large companies could benefit from ignoring GenAI. Unfortunately, "benefit" would only mean "save money and produce better products for customers" instead of "make stock price go up".

Instead, all of these companies are effectively forced to play hype ball.

mjburgess• 2 years ago

To be honest, apple's approach to AI seems pretty close to this recommendation. I don't see much more than "here's a few nice features to some apps" -- vs., MS's "now all our machines must be AI capable so that we can scan 1000s of screeshots of your device"

adamc12• 2 years ago

As someone who has gone back and forth between Windows and Mac OS... if Apple would stop trying to force me to log-in to use features I don't need, they would have a more compelling case. Windows is indeed a horrific data mining operation, but Apple's own endless push to enmesh me in their ecosystem is about as irritating. And Windows has WSL, which has value to me at work.

(And outside of work, Apple punted on games, which means I will always buy a Windows or Linux computer.)

isodev• 2 years ago

Replacing emojis with stickers and no way to tell them apart didn’t feel so nice.

zimpenfish2• 2 years ago

It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend

I wish they had but on the other hand, can you imagine how many think pieces there'd be about how Apple was stagnating and how they were "such, like, a 20th Century Company(tm)" and you'd probably get activist investors bleating about how Apple were leaving money on the table and and and etc.

coldtea3• 2 years ago

So? They had been getting 10 such pieces a day when Jobs run things too...

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

I don't doubt the pressure they are feeling at the upper levels at Apple is real — but I agree, this initial rollout is also-ran and they underdelivered.

I disagree that Apple should have sat on their hands. LLMs are already shipping apps that are beginning to integrate with the OS (looking at you, ChatGPT icon in my MacOS menu bar). How much user privacy should Apple allow me (well, their customers generally) to cede before they step in?

officeplant2• 2 years ago

Greatly prefer users installing these functions and apps themselves. Instead Apple me has double checking settings on every update so I can toggle off stuff that should have been opt-in. At least I can continue to refuse to opt into the MacOS AI implementation for now.

Now they've gone and doubled[0] the recommended space AI needs on base model phones shipping with under spec'd storage in the first place. If it goes up any more you'll be looking at giving up nearly 10% of a base model 128gb phone's storage to AI.

[0]https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/03/apple-intelligence-now-requir...

hollandheese• 2 years ago

Step into what? Most users don't use or want to use these apps.

jacobsimon2• 2 years ago

Honestly, I think Apple played their cards perfectly. They didn’t try to be first to market with R&D, but they’ve launched just enough features to excite customers about new phones, while appeasing investors and subduing potential competitors like OpenAI who are rumored to be working on hardware devices, too.

Cthulhu_• 2 years ago

I'm not sure, they've been revolving around "AI" stuff for ages; Siri, photo manipulation, identifying people and things in photos (but on your own device), all of which are widely popular. This feels like a logical next step for the path they were on for ages.

kemayo• 2 years ago

Yeah, they've been a bit slow on LLMs, but "machine learning" has been one of their buzzwords for years now.

layer82• 2 years ago

It would have been okay if they continued to release features that just happened to use ML under the hood. But instead they are expressedly marketing “Apple Intelligence”, with most of the features released under that umbrella so far not really working well (notification summaries, mail categories, Genmoji, …).

johan914• 2 years ago

I do wish they continued on this track instead of apple intelligence. I should be enable to click generate audiobook in iBooks and have an audiobook made in any voice of my choosing. Open source solutions are far too slow on macOS, and subpar in other languages.

liontwist• 2 years ago

Just last year everyone was saying they were “behind in technology” because they didn’t “understand AI”.

philistine9• 2 years ago

It's what people always say: when the 5S came out, pundits were saying that was the death of the iPhone because the Samsung Galaxy was much bigger. Next year, the 6 was bigger and somehow Apple survived a year with a smaller device.

mattgreenrocks2• 2 years ago

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

It's that sentiment all over again. Specifically, a naive belief that the specs/tech of something are just as important than the execution. Maybe they are if you are very tech online, but for most people, tech/specs don't matter as much.

Ultimately, this is another distortion of reality by the comment section.

kmeisthax2• 2 years ago

The particularly strange thing about this is that Apple has been shipping neural network accelerators since the iPhone X. The one actual selling point of Microsoft's "Copilot PCs" is copying Apple and putting an NPU into Windows laptops so they can have all the AI features Apple had already shipped way before they coined the term "Apple Intelligence".

The LLM hype is so powerful that it got people to think the market leader in consumer-facing AI features was falling behind because you couldn't ask your iPhone to summarize notifications poorly.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

Apple... doubled down on privacy and protections of the user

You mean like is documented on https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/apple-intelligence-an...?

mattgreenrocks2• 2 years ago

They keynote where they announced these features was pretty awkward. The typical conviction they delivered things with just wasn't there. You could almost feel that their hand was forced and they gave it a go, but they deeply resented not being the ones to make that choice.

dyauspitr2• 2 years ago

Calling it a trend in a casual way is not going to make it go away.

stocknoob• 2 years ago

At this point, anyone calling AI a trend sounds like someone calling electricity a trend.

Believe it or not, there are paradigm shifts in technology every now and then. Not everything is 3D television.

coldtea3• 2 years ago

Apple is so derivative and marketing-type driven now, that it even got into the VR shit, after it had already resulted in nothing for Facebook and others peddling it for years. Given that, there was zero chance that they'd skip AI slop.

cratermoon3• 2 years ago

I could pick on quite of few nits here but I'm going to focus on one in particular that I'm very familiar with as a photographer and mass media studies student.

I want the data coming off of the sensor to be the data that makes up the image. I want to avoid as much processing as possible and I want the photo to be a reflection of reality as it is, not reality as it should have been. Sure, sometimes I'll do some color correction or cropping in post, but that doesn't change the content of the image, only its presentation.

First nit: the iPhone camera, and all digital cameras, are deeply influenced by computational photography techniques. What this means is that you essentially never get the raw pixel values, although there are exceptions. The image you get is already significantly manipulated.

Second nit: color correction, color in general, dynamic range, focus, depth of field, and more are all manipulations made by default, even long before digital cameras when film was king. There is no "correct" image version of what our eyes see, there is only pleasing to the photographer and the audience.

An example: the negative for Ansel Adams' well known "Moonrise Over Hernandez , New Mexico" looks like, at first glance, something a professional would trash for lacking detail.

Here's contact print vs the version most of use will probably recognize: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a35...

Here are four different versions Adams printed over the course of 3 decades: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a35...

I will mention, but won't even get into a topic that will surely bait HN commentors: Kodak designed and standardized its color film to represent Caucasian skin tones. It wasn't until chocolate and furniture makers complained that everything looked like the same gross mud in their expensively-produced product catalogs that Kodak took a look at rendering dark brown/red/yellow tones more pleasingly. Notice I said "more pleasingly", not "correctly".

sbuk2• 2 years ago

That quote intrigued me too. Surely RAW (which can be produced with an iPhone [and others...]) is what the author is looking for. Case of not RTFM'ing?

xena15• 2 years ago

I shoot in raw from my iPhone and Canon EOS R6 mark 2. For my iPhone I usually use Halide's Process Zero to remove all the computational photography garbage that I can from my images.

cratermoon3• 2 years ago

RAW is minimally processed data, but it's still processed. Also, it has a wider dynamic range than the 12 stops a human eye can produce within a given scene. The ability of the iris to change size and the brain's ability to process what the eye sees gives the impression of a wider dynamic range. In short, no image, with no process, accurately represents how the eye sees a scene.

Animats• 2 years ago

Kodak designed and standardized its color film to represent Caucasian skin tones.

That may be an urban legend. There was a popular reference card that had a light-skinned woman, but that wasn't the problem. This is closer to the old Technicolor vs. Eastmancolor debate.

Here's the trailer for Disney's "Song of the South" (1946) [1] That's three-strip Technicolor. Good dynamic range, with each of three colors on its own strip of black and while film. Here's the trailer from "Shaft" (1971) [2]. That's single-strip Eastmancolor. Dynamic range is not as good, as you can see in the street scenes where lighting wasn't controlled. Eastmancolor took over in the 1950s because the cameras are much smaller and production is easier and cheaper.

NTSC Color TV really did have something to standardize skin tones. NTSC color TV transmits an intensity value and two vector components which determine the color. The color vector components are rather low bandwidth (only about 10 full range color changes across the width of the tube), and so some NTSC receivers had a gimmick which, when the vector is near the "skin tone line" for a standard skin tone, pulled it to a fixed value.[3] The effect was that all faces had roughly the same skin tone in UV color space, but intensity could vary.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxwqH47Ne70

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlsufZj9Fg

[3] https://bramstout.nl/en/webbooks/vectorscopes/#yiq-and-the-s...

cratermoon3• 2 years ago

I knew someone on HN would come along with a poorly-researched and misdirecting "nuh uh".

LeicaLatte• 2 years ago

The biggest problem I have with Apple Intelligence is battery life. Since Apple has no software chops in building LLM models, I expect them to throw hardware solutions for the battery life problem.

But the demands of intelligence and the general trajectory means no amount of hardware - storage, RAM or battery size would be enough to generate the high fidelity experiences or solutions that fans and customers have come to expect from the company.

Hilift• 2 years ago

Power consumption is the defining characteristic of AI. The power consumption by the US had recently plateaued at 4,000 billion kilowatt hours 2000 through 2023. That will likely accelerate by 20% or more with 2024/2025 data. It's probably one of the few guardrails. Electricity is about five times more expensive in the UK than the US. So the US is the natural home for the models and other regions are not.

hb-robo4• 2 years ago

I'm kind of skeptical the US grid can even handle this industry growth if it becomes the only realistic place these models are ran. A lot of the infrastructure is pretty wobbly. And forget the tax benefits and cheap land from Texas, their private grid is liable to bust at any time.

kstrauser• 2 years ago

Power consumption is the defining characteristic of AI.

I'm not so convinced. I've been playing with running Ollama + llama3.1 8B on my 2023 M2 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM, and I don't notice much difference in battery life with or without it. I'm not querying it continually with a shell script in a loop or anything like that, but neither am I shy about throwing all kinds of prompts at it. My laptop keeps chugging away on battery.

Training AI may be ferociously resource intensive, but I haven't seen that querying those models is especially bad. I'd think that a model that Apple had tailored specifically to run well on its hardware would be relatively "light".

jacobsimon2• 2 years ago

Hah I’ve been having the same issue as the author with those scammy “package delay” texts getting summarized in my notifications.

Didn’t realize how widespread that type of spam was until now. Why hasn’t someone implemented better spam detection at Apple like we have for email? It would be nice if they could classify texts as spam, promotions, etc and organize them the way Gmail does.

xena15• 2 years ago

My guess: that requires bigger models than can run on local hardware, and the appetite for sending emails out to a server for classification is negative zero.

enragedcacti4• 2 years ago

The spam filtering for texts in Google Messages is run on device and in my experience works pretty well

CamperBob22• 2 years ago

SpamBayes worked great as an Outlook plugin back in the day.

KennyBlanken• 2 years ago

Hell, the iPhone is a fully capable cinema camera these days

No, it's not. The sensor in an iPhone is AI/ML'd up the ass to hide all the noise because it has 1µm sensor wells.

A Panasonic video-oriented mirrorless micro 4/3rds (so not even anywhere near 35mm) like the GH5 is 3-4x that.

A Sony Alpha 7 III? six times the sensor well size.

I don't care how many megabits of video bandwidth you throw at it or how fancy you think "raw" shooting is, or how fancy your sensor technology is; nobody these days has anything that is even close to 2x better than anyone else. The top sensor from all the major players are pushing the limits of physics, and have been for a long time.

No amount of AI/ML shit will give you depth of field and bokeh that looks as nice as a big sensor and a fast lens with nice shutter leaf shape.

jjkaczor• 2 years ago

Well - while Apple has made rough starts in the past (Maps on iOS devices comes to mind) - they do have a solid track record.

Having used "smart devices" since the Apple Newton 2.0 days, followed by Windows Mobile, a very brief Android excursion (Motorola Milestone - early enough Android that I was often frustrated trying to copy/paste text between apps), then another side-pivot into Windows Phone for awhile (mainly because the development was incredibly easy - and Microsoft gave me a free one), I have been in the iOS mobile phone ecosystem ever since the iPhone 6.

And - the software has gotten increasingly better over time - I wouldn't have (for me) alot of content/subscribers on TikTok, if iMovie on my phone did not exist - attempting to edit videos using OpenShot was taking forever (While I have Davinci Resolve installed, it seems "daunting" for someone who doesn't want to be a professional videographer/editor).

But then I tried iMovie "Magic Movie" on my phone and ... "it just works". Still not great for long-form YouTube style content, but for quick things, slice-of-life videos - it does the job rather well.

... I expect that Apple will improve these AI offerings dramatically over the next couple of years as people upgrade their devices.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

Y'all know I'm a fast, if error prone, writer. I still enjoy using AI writing assistants to help me with the occasional phrase that's awkward, grammar detail ("it's lower g in 'god' if I am talking about Thor or Huxian right?") and choice of words ("I need a word for agriculture that starts with C...")

LLMs make different mistakes than I do so I've thought about using one as a copy editor but I've had terrible experiences with copy editors: I've hired more than one when I was writing marketing copy who injected more errors than they fixed. (A friend of mine wrote an article for The New York Times that got terribly mangled and barely made sense after the editors made it read like an NYT article.)

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

"Apple Intelligence failed"

"Apple Intelligence" is less than a year old. Give it some time, for chripe's sakes.

brcmthrowaway• 2 years ago

How about Vision Pro, did that fail?

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

Yeah, it happens.

As far as Apple Intelligence goes, I've liked the features in my Apple products so far. It doesn't feel like it "goes too far".

llm_nerd2• 2 years ago

I'm going to admit that I just skimmed past 90% of this article. Being dismissive of AI is currently easy content, so there's too much noise in the space.

Having said that, I actually paid attention to the image playground criticism. Image playground is literally a playground. It is meant to make fun, low-effort images for friends and family, largely for social type interactions.

"It uses a placid corporate artstyle and communicates nothing." It's a hot taco holding a beer. What is it SUPPOSED to communicate? Looks like a pretty great image to me. But of course this piece was leading into the anti- angle, so suddenly it's "horrifying". I guess I didn't get the special training to understand what was wrong with a clearly lighthearted, fun image.

Similar asinine, overly-jaded complaints about the cartoonish, memoji style portrait generation. I think the image is actually pretty hilarious. Actually used image playground to make my social media image, and I care not what this guy thinks about it, or that it is "soulless" (as if a cartoonish representation is supposed to be soulful?)

enragedcacti4• 2 years ago

as if a cartoonish representation is supposed to be soulful?

That is basically the entire point of a cartoon, so yeah

xena15• 2 years ago

It's an AI generated taco smoking beer, I don't think it really needs defense. If I were to create such an illustration for my blog from scratch, I'd probably use that to communicate abusurdism in a light-hearted manner. I'd also probably make the hand-hooves consistent or at least plausibly cartoon-logic. At the very least it would mean:

* The taco holding the beer glass to its lips and sipping on it to smoke it

* Consistent eye shapes (likely the eyes would be closed to smoke the beer)

* Better bokeh for the elements in the background (if that is the stylistic choice I'd go for)

* Have the smoke coming out of the beer, not out of the taco "taco smoking beer"

* Stylize the image such that it has individual flair, there's something about the Apple Intelligence artstyle that just has an unperson corporate vibe that I don't like.

* The levity comes from "hey tacos don't have faces, hooves, arms, or legs and you can't smoke a beer", this would be used to communicate absurdism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism, specifically by means of the taco smoking a beer whilst holding it in its hooves

Maybe I've just been exposed to way more AI imagery than you, but guacamole does not look like that in the image. There's more fever dream images that I have locally, but I didn't want to saturate my article with them and haven't fully implemented "image gallery" support yet.

And yes, a cartoon is normally meant to communicate something, quite literally the definition of soulful. Look at this for example: https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3ldgzieehjc2... When I made it, I was trying to communicate a lo-fi peaceful vibe accentuated through traditional artstyles. In a more finished piece I'd probably recreate this through watercolor in Procreate and apply a bokeh effect (emulating the depth of field for a subject with forward light being looked at from an 85mm portrait lens at about f/2.8).

The point of art is to communicate something. If a work does not communicate something, it is categorically not art.

ghostly_s• 2 years ago

"Apple Intelligence failed?" The far-reaching project that just had its initial release like 60 days ago? Why would anyone read beyond a first sentence like that?

xena15• 2 years ago

The purpose of a thesis statement is generally to establish a conclusion and then over the rest of the article, the goal is to build up evidence to support that conclusion.

wat100003• 2 years ago

There has to be some plausible path to actually doing so. Unless this person is writing in the future, there isn’t.

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

The thing is for a product to fail means the failure is widely accepted, like how Stadia failed or how AirPower failed. The verb "to fail" is simply wrong in the case of a product when you really intend "to be bad". It can't be established yet if Apple Intelligence has failed.

adamc12• 2 years ago

Because it's true. When you ship a product and people look at it and go "meh", the product launch failed. There is literally no value in launching products people don't find value in.

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

Is there any actual empirical evidence that this is the case?

fredsted• 2 years ago

It's what Apple does. The first version of a product often sucks somehow, but is generally usable. They're masters at iterating.

srmatto• 2 years ago

I agree. Case in point is that the author jumped in at the iPhone 7 which is a lot closer to current era iPhones than the original iPhone and had been refined over that many generations. My first iPhone was the 5s, my first Apple Watch was the 6. I tend to hang back and wait a few generations before adopting a new product from Apple. I suspect Apple Intelligence will be a lot better 1-2 years from now.

bitpush2• 2 years ago

This is true, but sometimes the opposite is also true. Case in point, HomePod sucked so much they never became useful. It was discontinued

sbuk2• 2 years ago

Which one was discontinued?

This one: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod Or this one: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod-mini

I find them better than the multiple Echoes we have. Though they don't do as much, what HomePods do do is generally better than Amazon's attempts. Can't comment on Google's equivalent.

lo_fye• 2 years ago

"Clean Up is best explained by this famous photo editing example . . . This tool allows you to capture a moment in time as you wish it happened, not as it actually happened."

FALSE. Apple defines a photo as a record of something that actually happened. iPhones take photos. They doen't auto-swap a high-res moon in for the real one like Samsung phones do.

Clean Up (like crop) is just an editing feature, manually applied after a photo already exists, and using it effectively changes the image from a photo into an "edited image", the same way using Photoshop does.

Definitions of What a Photo Is:

Apple - "Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated." - John McCormack, VP of Camera Software Engineering @ Apple

Samsung - "Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop." - Patrick Chomet, Executive VP of Customer Experience @ Samsung

Google - "It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond." - Isaac Reynolds, Product Manager for Pixel Cameras @ Google

Definitions via https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252231/lets-compare-app...

arkensaw4• 2 years ago

I hate that we have spent the last 20 or so advancing digital cameras to the point where a everyone has an amazing DSLR in their pocket and now we're at the point in history where we have to define what a photograph is, because everyone is trying to shoehorn some shitty AI image gen thing into our cameras for a quick profit

selykg3• 2 years ago

Frustrating to me, too, as someone who has recently gotten back into photography and it's difficult to know whether the photos I am using as inspiration are actually real or so highly edited that I'd never be able to achieve something similar.

It's one thing to use masks to edit highlights/shadows/color balance for certain areas (skies, buildings, people, etc) but it's an entirely different thing to completely replace the sky, or remove objects because they aren't "appealing"

rkangel• 2 years ago

We're at that point in history BECAUSE everyone has a DSLR in their pocket.

Image quality on modern phones is in large part due to a lot of image processing done by the phone. Multiple photos being taken, combined for least blur and best dynamic range, colour balanced to best represent skin tones etc.

The line between the sort of algorithms that run on an iPhone and inserting a moon is largely philosophical rather than technical. It's an extremely important philosophical line! But the sort of things that have been added are the logical continuation of the sort of work that the camera teams have been doing.

[For context, I'm a Google Pixel owner, but of those three statements the Apple one is the one I agree the most with]

enragedcacti4• 2 years ago

This tool allows you to capture a moment in time as you wish it happened, not as it actually happened.
the Clean Up tool gives users a way to remove distracting elements while staying true to the moment as they intended to capture it.

idk, seems like the author described it the exact same way Apple does in their marketing copy.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-intelligence-is...

InvisibleUp• 2 years ago

I’d agree with your assessment of what Apple considers a photograph if I could turn off the post-processing that turns everything in the background into a smeary, blobby mess.

xena15• 2 years ago

https://halide.cam/ has Process Zero, which is about as close as you can get to straight off the sensor. Here's a photo I took with it: https://bsky.app/profile/xeiaso.net/post/3le3dd53zlk2c

Easily the best camera app I've ever purchased. It makes me not want to pull out my mirrorless camera as much to get decent photos.

dcrazy5• 2 years ago

That’s Portrait Mode. You only get that if you change from Photo mode to Portrait mode in the Camera app, or in later OSes by retroactively applying a Portrait effect in Edit mode. The addition of the latter feature also made it possible to retroactively remove the Portrait Mode effect from a photo, as long as you have the actual source asset and not a rendered JPEG/HEIC with the effect baked in.

gnopgnip• 2 years ago

If you mean the fake bokeh that blurs the background, turn off portrait mode.

You can toggle "pro raw" in the default camera app. It captures a lot more information from the sensor. The files are a lot larger, it isn't throwing away information that isn't visible like in the shadows. This gives you more flexibility like changing color balance and exposure after the fact because of that extra data. But there is still some sharpening and post processing.

You can use the camera app inside lightroom or "procamera" or other apps and take raw photos, where it records all of the sensor data without any post processing. Most people don't want this, you need to develop the images using software like lightroom to look good.

hawkjo• 2 years ago

This comment and the article they came from are a perfect snapshot of this moment. The fact that major players at each company have made public statements about the philosophical definition of what a photo is. I mean, of course they have. Of course. The times be wild.

adamc12• 2 years ago

I was an early user of Macs; the first computer I owned was a Mac Plus. I didn't own a PC until the 1990s.

Most of the intro to this is credulous hooey. Macs weren't "bicycles for the mind" in some magic way that was different from PCs. What the early ones had was 1) a better and much more standardized interface, and 2) task switching that worked.

As for the AI tools, image generation might occasionally be useful for a D&D game, but otherwise nothing on offer at the moment has much value. And the value of image generation (for me) is pretty small.

arkensaw4• 2 years ago

I was giving this my attention until the author included a long quote from Steve Jobs from the author's own dream

Sorry, what?

Apart from the level of dream-detail recalled being highly dubious, quoting your own hallucination of Steve Jobs to help with your argument about generative AI being useless (and missing the irony) is downright weird.

Also Math notes is basically the same thing search engines have been able to do for over a decade now. Enter a sum, get an answer.

xena15• 2 years ago

No, I'm aware of the irony. I also wrote it down when I woke up, and you can see on stream that I copy it from a Discord message when I'm looking for it (https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8?t=14677).

I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up (albeit unconsciously) than something a machine made up using linear algebra without understanding any of the words that it's using.

arkensaw4• 2 years ago

I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up (albeit unconsciously) than something a machine made up using linear algebra without understanding any of the words that it's using.

I mean, any article written by a human is something the brain made up. And I'm fine with that. But it reads like trying to give your opinion extra weight by associating it with Steve Jobs. It just came off weird.

I'm with you on most points. I'm not an iphone user but I can certainly appreciate that Apple Intelligence does not match the hype. That seems to be a recurring theme with AI though. Release a thing, shout from the rooftops about how great it is, and then wait for people to start posting about glue in pizza recipes or urging people to kill themselves or generating fictional news alerts.

chrisbrandow• 2 years ago

the example he gave was multiline with variables. That's somewhat different than what search engines do.

Also, it's almost exactly what Solver has done for years.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

It does seem a little sloppy, but the actually interesting part of Apple Intelligence isn't out yet so I'd withhold judgement, even on the initial release.

gdubs3• 2 years ago

So far it feels very unfinished, but having followed Apple for a long time I've seen many products launched and iterate over time. Maps, for instance, had a fairly disastrous early period but eventually became my preferred navigation app.

adamc12• 2 years ago

That used to be the standard apology for Microsoft products, where Mac OS app developers "sweated the pixels", i.e., delivered products that were pretty much on target at launch.

gdubs3• 2 years ago

I mean, Apple Intelligence looks good ha.

Yea, I'm not saying it's great or that this is the preferred approach. Just highlighting that it's not the end of the world as many frame it every time something like this happens.

Software sometimes takes a few iterations.

robertoandred2• 2 years ago

It is unfinished, several parts haven't shipped yet.

gdubs3• 2 years ago

Agreed – they've even said as much. But some of the marketing is conflicting there, and I've had friends IRL confused that their new phones don't contain all the Apple Intelligence features they've heard of.

gigel82• 2 years ago

If you have any modicum of site reliability experience, this seems like an unsatisfiable set of constraints. It seems literally impossible, yet here they are claiming that they have done it.

His first instinct was right. It seems impossible, because it is. Unless I can run the entirety of the "Private Cloud Compute" on my own hardware in my own firewalled network, I 100% believe that the pipeline is compromised; our data is siphoned off and sold off to advertisers, especially now that they know they can do it and get less than slap on the wrist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578929

hbn• 2 years ago

It's a bit funny his favourite "Apple Intelligence feature" is something that wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't even invoke the actual model at all under the hood.

Parsing text for variables when it sees an equals sign and running basic calculations on them? I feel that could have been a novel feature 30 years ago.

shadowfacts• 2 years ago

Soulver has indeed been doing this without large language models (so far as I know) for many years: https://soulver.app/

horsawlarway• 2 years ago

I also struggled with this for similar reasons. His favorite AI feature is essentially writing valid js for calculations (his example is literally valid js if you just drop the equals on the last line - you can paste it right into the console on his site and see the answer).

The whole article feels like it suffers from a similar lack of coherence. Ex - I am hardly an apple fanboy (I strongly dislike the company) but the complaints here are basically

The service sometimes has outages

The image gen is not as customizable as he'd like

He's morally opposed to cleanup in photos

Notifications summaries are bad (and how dare I get my texts 5 seconds slower).

---

None of that is really related in any way to the security footprint of the tooling he discusses up front, and it's also hardly distinct from most other current AI offerings, and it's not really a consistent complaint about the tech.

My opinion of Apple is that they do a crappy job with the vast majority of their apps...

They build good hardware, and they abuse their small hardware footprint to make decent device experiences and a decent (but getting worse) OS - but their actual applications are generally mediocre at best (mediocre copies of a previously successful, usually better, app that they will put out of business through shady store practices if I'm being blunt).

---

If anything, the failure here is that Apple marketed a thing that AI can't really do (yet, maybe at all), and most of the things AI can do without being incredibly invasive aren't actually all that useful to most folks. Very useful to a handful of power users in specific circumstances, but otherwise essentially novelty apps.

So... it's not an implementation failure. It's a marketing failure. And this is hardly unique to Apple right now. The only difference is that usually Apple doesn't play their hand until this inflection point with new tech is over, so it's more obvious this time around just how bad the product fit is for general use.

the-chitmonger2• 2 years ago

Minor (in terms of how relevant this is to your comment, not in importance) correction: the author is a woman (actually prefers they/them according to their GitHub (https://github.com/Xe).

the-chitmonger2• 2 years ago

Minor (in terms of how relevant this is to your comment, not in importance) correction: the author is a woman (actually prefers they/them according to their GitHub (https://github.com/Xe).

Multicomp• 2 years ago

I mean some of this Math Notes equation features have been in OneNote since what? 2007? Maybe all the way back in 2003?

BenFranklin100• 2 years ago

I’m withholding judgement on Apple Intelligence until iOS 18.4 is shipped in May. That is when they plan to release a revamped Siri with better contextual and personalized responses. For instance, AI/Siri will be aware of what is currently on the screen when responding and also integrate personal data across apps.

Ultimately Apple’s strategy of a privacy focused AI will be a winner for a consumer device with access to sensitive personal information. It’s a question of whether they can pull it off technically.

asimpletune2• 2 years ago

What's interesting is how I opened Safari's reader mode to digest this 5000+ word polemic, and then noticed for the first time a new option to summarize its contents. A few seconds later I had a clear idea of what the author's thesis is, without being under the false impression that it had conveyed its finer points.

msangi• 2 years ago

I read the article. After reading this comment I tried to get it summarised. The result wasn't pretty. The summary claimed that there is skepticism over the security of Private Cloud computing, which the article actually praises.

asimpletune2• 2 years ago

Strange that we received two very different summaries. There was a part in the article where the author mentioned that Apple's private cloud compute claims were "literally impossible", but that was hardly the general takeaway of the article.

Mine basically said Apple has fallen short of their vision because of the inherent limitations in relying on web services.

tim3332• 2 years ago

Then they casually dropped the holy grail of trusted compute...

By which I think he means the AI stuff runs on your machine rather than the cloud. For me that's not a holy grail at all or even something I'm terribly interested in. I downloaded Apple AI on the macbook, found it quite meh and am now seeing if there is a way to remove it as it uses quite a lot of GB or memory. I can see for someone wanting to use LLMs on confidential corporate data that would be important but that's a specialist use case that I don't think Apple Intelligence is particually good for.

hb-robo4• 2 years ago

That corporate context is a good candidate, yes, but I think it's simpler than that. Assuming whatever Apple and Google cook up these next few years is essentially identical from a user standpoint, you can assume that Google's will be selling off every microscopic datum they collect from you, and know for a verifiable fact that Apple's will not (and cannot).

eviks2• 2 years ago

They sell bicycles for the mind.

Given the lack of a single good supporting example (what, did PCs have no word processors that reacted to backspace keys?) it seems like these are fantasy bicycles...

And since no evidence is needed to believe, you can of course believe in Intelligence that can act better than your brain (what are "those pics from San Francisco", you've snapped a hundred there, which 5 would you like to post?)

And yet the disillusionment comes a bit faster than expected, why not give Apple a few more decades to iron out some kinks on such a revolutionary fantasy path?

djaouen• 2 years ago

This is why I switched to Guix lol

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

Apple has a history of releasing early proofs of product concept or basic table stakes products built with a high enough quality they feel like they’re “done,” but then proceed to methodically iterate on them for years to decades until they fade into the background. It’s hard to imagine the iPhone essentially started as a click wheel iPod - comparing the two is night and day in terms of capabilities, function, and form. They take weird side ways jaunts - but generally shift back into a path that is sensible. I was interested to see what they did with Apple intelligence, but assumed it would be establishing of a basic set of capabilities, the effective proposals for APIs, and the seeding of product discussions with their customers over a long time. People seem to think a few years into the current cycle of AI technology we are seeing the final fruits rather than seeing the infancy - for those who develop these sorts of tools it feels very much like iPhone gaming felt in 2009. At some point over the decade we will hit the nadir, then descend into total enshitification (and yes those who think AI has already reached peak enshitification you are totally wrong). Along the way though we will see a lot more truly stunning advances towards the final arrival at pervasive exploitation.

xivusr• 2 years ago

Mac’s being able to export PDF’s for free was a huge deal back in the acrobat days :-P

I’m hoping with what they’ve built in infrastructure and custom chips is a step towards making personal LLM also highly available to non-technical people. I think this is where Apple has always shined - making things not just better, but accessible and grokable for normal people.

aaroninsf2• 2 years ago

This is sardonic, as yes, Apple could have chosen different monopolies than it currently has, at different points, and had a different (maybe not better?) trajectory, some of of us are old enough to remember the antipathy towards Microsoft when to the Office suite it added default Explorer,

But also, maybe our system fundamentally rewards the "wrong" things if one's definition of "right" includes things like innovation. Or maybe, the welfare of the commons and the common good.

Cipater• 2 years ago

Apple is not a private company.

aaroninsf2• 2 years ago

Sorry, ambiguous phrasing, I meant private not in terms of "public issue," but as opposed to quasi-governmental corporations... which I imagine in China and perhaps elsewhere (state oil companies in petrostates?) may have a greater value. Though it depends on how you compute value when there aren't shares as well!

LudwigNagasena• 2 years ago

Why Apple Intelligence failed even though everything it's built upon is nearly perfect

Because that’s a laughably false premise.

deergomoo2• 2 years ago

The “play the podcast my wife sent me the other day” example is interesting to me. That shouldn’t be difficult to do without AI. Yeah asking a thing is always gonna be quicker (provided it works), but a well designed app should make that possible within like ten seconds.

I can’t help but wonder if the reason “agentic” systems seem so appealing to people is because as an industry we’ve spent the past fifteen years making software harder to use.

teach• 2 years ago

I had a similar example the other day. I was visiting Arizona for the first time and was driving in a rental car from Phoenix south to Tucson.

I have the latest Google Pixel, and was using Google Maps to navigate.

I pressed the "voice search" button from within Google Maps and said "What is the name of the mountain on the left that I'm about to drive past?"

Instead of a context-aware answer, my phone simply did a Google search for that exact phrase and showed the results to me. The top hit was a Reddit thread about some mountain near Seattle. :)

SamBam• 2 years ago

I'm wondering if you actually thought that there was a chance that Google Maps was going to answer you correctly?

I guess we're entering an age where people might have a reasonable expectation that any app is a context-aware LLM, but personally I don't have that assumption yet.

wat100003• 2 years ago

I’m not sure. If the word “podcast” wasn’t used then it might be tricky, but an LLM might figure it out from context.

It also depends on the context of the action. If you’re sitting in front of your computer, yeah, no big deal. Type “podcast” in the search field of the messages app and click the thing it finds. But if you’re busy cooking dinner or cleaning out the cat box, it’s a pain to get your phone out and poke around. The main draw of voice assistants (at least to me) is that they let you do things quickly when you don’t already have a device in your hands.

xadhominemx• 2 years ago

The problem is that this only works if your spouse used an apple application to tell you this information. If she used messenger/IG chat/whatsapp or gmail or her work email there’s no way for Siri to know about it.

viccis• 2 years ago

The "bicycle for the mind" goal, and the Steve Jobs quote that inspired it, is really just another restatement of McLuhan's idea of media as being extensions of man. The bicycle (or wheel, more generally) is an extension of the legs, a phone is an extension of your voice, etc.

The problem with interpreting AI through that lens is that AI, as it is being used here, is not an extension of your mind. Plenty of other things are (organizers for example), but AI does not extend your thoughts. It replaces them. Its notification summary feature does not improve your ability to quickly digest lots of notification information, it replaces it with its own attempt, which, not being your own judgment, can and does easily err.

There are some uses of AI that do act more like a McLuhanesque medium. Some copilot applications, in which suggestions are presented that a user accepts and refines them, are examples of this. But a lot of the uses of both image generation and LLM tools serve to limit what your mind does rather than expand it.

voidfunc• 2 years ago

Many companies want to make computers that you can use to do computer things. Apple makes tools that you use as an extension of your body in order to do creative things. They don't just sell computers, they sell something that helps enable you to create things that just so happen to be computers.

An Apple marketing executive is smiling somewhere. Brainwashed another one!

throitallaway• 2 years ago

Right, this is such cringe. Almost like Apple's "What's a computer?" kid come to life. Apple sells overpriced tech to people that don't know any better.

cudgy• 2 years ago

Uh … the new base model Mac mini is an unbelievable deal. I hope Apple doesn’t read this …

kennyloginz2• 2 years ago

I’m sure you can build a “budget gaming pc” for 100 bucks cheaper. But the m4 Mac mini is a decent piece of gear at 599. The overpriced complaint is obsolete.

power78• 2 years ago

why are some apple users so cringey?

jedberg• 2 years ago

A somewhat tangential observation:

Apple has done such a good job with marketing that my 10 year old thinks that AI stands for Apple Intelligence.

We live in the Bay Area so she's seen a bunch of billboards with that. I have to constantly remind her that that is not what it means in most cases.

BlueTemplar4• 2 years ago

Considering how quickly the definition of "AI" changes (several times per decade now ?), and what happened to smartphones, it's possible that she becomes right in a few years...

gwern2• 2 years ago

It's astonishing to see Apple settle for DALL-E 3 (or worse?! these remind me of the Bing samples) for the image generator part. Hasn't the incredible extent of mode-collapse and the horrible DALL-E 3 style become universally known and disliked yet?

xena15• 2 years ago

No, it's worse than DALL-E 3, it's an on-device model that can only reproduce placid soulless images. The ones I put in the article have been heavily cherry-picked. The worst ones get far worse. DALL-E 3 can at least do text.

Original prompt to Image Playground: "Enron logo" with the Enron logo as img2img input https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3lf472e2yfc2...

gwern2• 2 years ago

Oh, I assumed the image gen at least was running on the fancy remote GPU server.

But it being on-device doesn't prove it's not a DALL-E 3. Just like GPT-3 & GPT-4 & Llamas come in many sizes, some of which are (probably) feasible to run on-device...

Still, I suppose that probably does imply that it's some Apple half-hearted image-gen model (trained on a lot of DALL-E 3 contaminated data?), since I'm not sure OA would want to risk leaking even years from now a tiny, terrible, hyper-optimized-for-size DALL-E 3's weights.

llm_nerd2• 2 years ago

Image Playground uses a tiny on device model. It certainly isn't DALL-E 3. In no universe are on device models intended to compete with massive cloud models.

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

The image playground app is an embarrassment

aucisson_masque2• 2 years ago

I'm still having to look for thunderbolt cable all around my house to charge that one freaking device that is iphone when everyone else switched 10 years ago to USB C.

How is apple intelligence going to help me with that ?

neilalexander• 2 years ago

Your comment is a bit pointless on a post that has nothing to do with charging, but regardless, the iPhone 15 and 16 models both have USB-C.

aucisson_masque2• 2 years ago

Oh I'm just astonished reading this article how Apple can spend a huge amount of money and lot of time making a private cloud LLM yet can't be arsed to implement simple things like USB C without literally having the Europe force them to do.

ericd• 2 years ago

I normally really like this blog, but what’s all this noise about? They’ve done the hard part of lining their entire foundation up, now all they have to do is build the applications on top, and let others do so as well.

In the meantime, they’re shipping the best non-workstation computers, by far, to run models locally.

They don’t have to be the ones to implement all of this themselves, you can install ollama right now, and BoltAI can integrate those models into other parts of the OS. And Apple will watch, and Sherlock the best parts of what others do into the OS, and sell gobs of machines.

They haven’t squandered anything, the foundations are still there.

bentt2• 2 years ago

This article makes great points, but the outcome seems to be “in progress” and not final. They have the tech stack and the right philosophy, they just botched the execution out of the gate. This is the same company that didn’t think 3rd party apps on the iPhone would be a thing. They managed to course correct.

lallysingh• 2 years ago

Ref: both apps and Apple Maps.

gordon_freeman2• 2 years ago

Apple Maps is still not good compared to Google Maps. If I want to go somewhere for the first time I can't trust to use Apple Maps. (tried a lot, always come back to Google)

rylan-talerico• 2 years ago

While I agree with the post's sentiment, its assessment of Apple Intelligence overlooks its incomplete rollout, with most of the meaningful, step-change features (e.g., Siri’s contextual awareness) scheduled for release in 2025 at the earliest.

In my view, Private Cloud Compute and Apple Intelligence, together with the ubiquity of Apple devices, position Apple as a leading candidate to realize the widespread, AI-enabled transformation of personal computing discussed in the post — with tasks requiring less energy and cognitive load than they do today for the general consumer.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

I agree. the idea of being short Apple's ability to create an AI product seems to miss the one thing they are excellent at: the simple things. what they understand is you don't want AI to be impressive, you just want the things you already do today to work really well and be satisfying to use- and not know or care if there is AI behind it.

steve jobs understood you have to do really hard things very well to do anything simple beautifully. I'm pretty sure most of their AI play is still in front of them.

twobitshifter• 2 years ago

Meanwhile Siri is worse than before and can’t fond my flights to add to my calendar any longer.

015a2• 2 years ago

Execution matters. Microsoft was best-positioned to reap the widespread, mobile-enabled transformation of personal computing. They didn't, and today with the discontinuation of the Surface Duo, they have literally zero strategy in mobile.

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

Worse, because of that bad decision they don't have any endpoints to sell AI and XBox services.

When Windows Phone was killed it had about 10% market share in Europe, it was slowly becoming the device that people that didn't like Android, and lacked the funds for an iPhone.

Turns out 10% is better than 0%, but they decided otherwise, and selling Microsoft Android was always hard to swallow.

choonway• 2 years ago

It's not just about the man on a bicycle, it's a man on a bicycle on a flat road.

nordiczordic• 2 years ago

Imagine how much better you would be at typing if you didn't have a backspace key.

keepamovin• 2 years ago

Stepping back the way I see it is it’s a cultural thing. Apple loves to own the whole stack and even though circumstances forced them to use the hot new thing because it’s useful, Apple as an organization doesn’t really wanna do that. It wants to have its own stuff, and so it could never really make something succeed that wasn’t its own and that’s why it failed. So far.

archeantus• 2 years ago

It feels very apparent to me that Apple was caught completely flat footed by ChatGPT’s release. As a result, they were very far behind and have been unable to catch up.

What they released as Apple Intelligence wasn’t a well-planned, cohesive product as much as the only thing they could possibly do, given the timelines they were up against. Maybe they’ll catch up, but they’re definitely behind and it’s a shocking thing to behold.

tehjoker• 2 years ago

This is very funny. The picture of Stalin and Yezhov was exactly what was going through my mind as an Apple Store sales guy explained the photo clean up feature to me. It felt rude to bring it up though.

twodave2• 2 years ago

They failed IMO as soon as they started marketing this stuff as AI. Nobody _actually_ cares about that. They just want new and exciting device capabilities. The fact that they haven’t done anything compelling enough to detach it from the AI moniker means they don’t have anything. Yet. The overall foundation is sound. Maybe in a generation or two we will have a truly compelling use case. Part of me doubts it, though, because Apple isn’t the company they used to be when it comes to innovating.

para_parolu• 2 years ago

Funniest part is that bar is too low. People just wanted siri not to be utterly stupid

widdershins2• 2 years ago

Interesting note: they don't market it as AI. They market it as Apple Intelligence. I think this is deliberate. So it seems they've already taken your advice (albeit with the 'wink' of using the same initials).

twodave2• 2 years ago

I mean, I wrote my comment knowing this and that it's bullshit, so I don't really see the difference personally.

fijiaarone• 2 years ago

Math notes is a Fortan repl. It’s only impressive to someone who has never seen a calculator.

nbzso• 2 years ago

The Apple bicycle is the Apple user. They know how to ride it well. And how to take the Money.

Generative AI is a dud. ML has a lot of applications. I use my smartphone for calls, chat and banking apps. I use my iPad only for drawing, mail and some games.

For everything else, I have computers. With real OS.

henry_viii2• 2 years ago

Except for Math Notes. Holy crap. I love Math Notes so much. I wish other note-taking apps had it. It's easily the best feature they've ever come up with.

The Cursor editor literally has this.

bdangubic2• 2 years ago

you use Cursor as note-taking app?

henry_viii2• 1 year ago

Yes. Features I use all the time when taking notes in Cursor / VS Code:

- Ctrl + click -> open link in browser

- Alt + shift + click -> create multiple cursors

I keep Cursor minimized when I'm not using it the rest of the time.

kennyloginz2• 2 years ago

This is Apple being smart and hedging their bets.

They are dedicating “AI” hardware to their current devices, and are building a framework for many different futures. In regards to software, they are first building the safety, then MVP’s to provide APIs to their chips.

So yah, maybe they aren’t holding the holy grail at the moment. At least we won’t be drinking from lead goblets .

Apple squandered the Holy Grail

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