Apple Intelligence is also a symptom of a bigger problem. It used to be that back in the earlier days of iOS and overall tech industry, a combination of common decency and App Store rules meant notification spam wasn't really a thing (you wouldn't consider doing it, and if you would then you may very well get booted off the store).
This meant that at the time there was frankly no need to run notifications/etc through a summarizer (or even make notifications persist after unlocking the screen).
But then Apple gave up on enforcing the rule, and the push for more "growth & engagement" meant that common decency was also out the window, so now notification spam is normal and even Apple itself engages in it to advertise Apple Music/etc.
I’ve removed every app I can over this because. Highly recommend.
For the remaining apps that I can’t avoid like Uber, I turn notifications off. There’s a 5 minute window where I’ll have to switch between the Uber app and whatever I’m doing, but I’ll file it under fidgeting.
I think it’s important to call out abuse of notifications for what it is. Notifications are for important events that a user expects. If a service wants to lie to me about what’s important, what else are they lying about?
Amusingly, this is only conditioning me to use fewer apps on a phone, which is making switching to an Android with alternative firmware slowly become easier.
Yep, I did this some time ago when I realized how few things actually need apps, when the website does the same thing without notifications and tracking.
Today Facebook Messenger sent me a second notification about a message because I hadn't responded to the first one 6 hours earlier. They are hell-bent on making the experience as miserable as possible to drive engagement.
The rule about promotional push notifications being opt-in still exists in the App Review Guidelines, it may just take some public shaming to get Apple to enforce it.
(While many apps from big publishers skirt the rule, DoorDash is the most egregious I've noticed: if you opt out of promo notifications, they'll try to trick you into turning them back on every time you place an order, suggesting that you won't receive delivery updates otherwise.)
Yep, no use on my computer. Can’t think of a feature that would be helpful they announced. A better Siri would
benefit me but I don’t have a new enough iPhone. I did try “who did I meet with for lunch last week” on my iPad and it failed miserably, but I think that’s because the feature wasn’t released…too bad the commercials came out way before the feature was launched
The clumsy rollout of this is surprising considering Apple's conservative approach to new technology. I thought Apple was one of those companies that could afford to ignore the Gartner hype index.
As for the ham-fisted summarization on display in the OP example, I am reminded of the video of a dog that goes up to a shopkeeper and hands him a leaf, in exchange for a biscuit. The dog doesn't understand currency or context: he's simply seen hundreds of people hand the shopkeeper a leaf-like substance and walk off with a cookie.
Apple used to take their time, and build out a feature to excellence. They never tried to be first to market, but you could feel that when they did launch it was worth your attention. After Vision Pro and Apple pretending they cared about siri the voice activated timer for 15 years i think the era of apple intelligence is over. I just hope new companies can build something interesting before computers become as thrilling as toasters.
The top 3 levels at Apple all need to fly off for an offsite on their private jets and ask themselves if they are perhaps out of touch and have lost their way.
> This current AI wave is a major case of the Emperor's New Clothes. Who wanted summaries of two sentence long text messages? Who wanted summaries of news headlines? Who wanted help writing two sentence long emails to coworkers? This is all useless baby stuff, yet multibillion and multitrillion dollar companies are going bananas trying to solve made up baby problems that nobody was actually having. There isn't a single company out there bold enough to push back against this silly wave and say what a waste it is.
> These companies are mortified of being left out of the make-believe party they made up themselves. It's incredibly bizarre.
Who wants fluent conversations with AI to get help for realtime translations or location based information (e.g. when traveling)?
Who wants to delegate tasks to AI so it can help work with everyday productivity tools like calendar, emails, etc.
I understand that some of the stuff is not there yet. But dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff? Reminds me of what people were saying of web, web 2.0, etc.
My productivity has taken giant leaps since two years, probably because I'm willing to regularly invest some time into understanding & exploring which workflows can be optimised. It might actually not be trivial, and even some AI companies are not able to showcase their tech in realistic problem solving scenarios. But it's there.
Apple is just really really bad at this atm. Their leadership has transformed the company into a mindset of mirco-optimisations, no more taking risks etc.
The entire industry is in a very cart-before-the-horse mode here because this is less "cool new tech being able to mature" and more "frantic economic bubble that happens to manifest through new tech"
New tech tends to start with garage scale startups and targeting the enthusiasts, the experimenters, the hobbyists, the ones willing to put the effort into playing with it, map what is and isn't possible, and file off the rough edges. And when you're making a product like that, you probably have to package and market it entirely differently-- a world of datasheets, programmer's references, and schematics, to give that audience the tools to get the most out of it.
If and when you're lucky, you get to the VisiCalc moment, when someone finds a way to deliver a mainstream value proposition so compelling that people line up waving their Mastercards. There's a 200% chance that value proposition will not be the one you put on the marketing flyer to sell the kit to early-adopters, and it may not even come from the firms who launched the market in the first place.
Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI are all trying to short-circuit that process. You can't just throw a trillion dollars at a product and shove their early-stage products in front of customers and expect to magically win the future.
It's like trying to make desktop computing happen in 1977 by busting into every house in the country, bolting an Imsai 8080 to random appliances unsolicited, and telling them to enjoy their new computing-enabled future.
> dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff?
But that's not Apple. Apple is the company that watches everyone screw up and then comes out with something brilliantly simple that just works. Not only is Apple Intelligence a mess, a lot of it is vaporware [1].
Siri used to be useful enough that I could ask her to send short texts and place calls. But now, when I ask it to message someone I am regularly in touch with, it spouts out a message to someone with a similar-sounding name I haven't spoken to in years.
> But dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff? Reminds me of what people were saying of web, web 2.0,
Nobody was saying that about the web. The web in 1994 had email and instant messaging out of the box, it replaced letter mail and consumer fax overnight.
We're several years into the GenAI wave, what has it changed for Apple users?
I find using LLMs for summaries of news headlines to be quite helpful. Many headlines in my RSS feeds have turned awfully "clickbaity" over the years. Using an LLM at the individual article level, it's usually a pretty great way to produce a new informative headline from the full article body. It makes the information much more relevant, and better allows me to decide whether I want to read the full article or not.
(Just as an example of practically useful functionality, while I agree that the technology still falls short of expectations and dreams in many other domains)
On the other hand, summarizing news is one of the exact things people have been pushing back on, since AI can misinterpret what happened or outright make stuff up[0] (like saying someone had come out as gay or that someone had won a tournament before it began.)
Me too, somehow Siri got worse with the addition of Apple Intelligence. It now just drops audio commands that old Siri could handle reliably. The new Siri voice sounds much colder and much more robotic. Siri’s response time is slower too.
Apple Intelligence is also a symptom of a bigger problem. It used to be that back in the earlier days of iOS and overall tech industry, a combination of common decency and App Store rules meant notification spam wasn't really a thing (you wouldn't consider doing it, and if you would then you may very well get booted off the store).
This meant that at the time there was frankly no need to run notifications/etc through a summarizer (or even make notifications persist after unlocking the screen).
But then Apple gave up on enforcing the rule, and the push for more "growth & engagement" meant that common decency was also out the window, so now notification spam is normal and even Apple itself engages in it to advertise Apple Music/etc.
I’ve removed every app I can over this because. Highly recommend.
For the remaining apps that I can’t avoid like Uber, I turn notifications off. There’s a 5 minute window where I’ll have to switch between the Uber app and whatever I’m doing, but I’ll file it under fidgeting.
I think it’s important to call out abuse of notifications for what it is. Notifications are for important events that a user expects. If a service wants to lie to me about what’s important, what else are they lying about?
Amusingly, this is only conditioning me to use fewer apps on a phone, which is making switching to an Android with alternative firmware slowly become easier.
Yep, I did this some time ago when I realized how few things actually need apps, when the website does the same thing without notifications and tracking.
Today Facebook Messenger sent me a second notification about a message because I hadn't responded to the first one 6 hours earlier. They are hell-bent on making the experience as miserable as possible to drive engagement.
The rule about promotional push notifications being opt-in still exists in the App Review Guidelines, it may just take some public shaming to get Apple to enforce it.
(While many apps from big publishers skirt the rule, DoorDash is the most egregious I've noticed: if you opt out of promo notifications, they'll try to trick you into turning them back on every time you place an order, suggesting that you won't receive delivery updates otherwise.)
Yep, no use on my computer. Can’t think of a feature that would be helpful they announced. A better Siri would benefit me but I don’t have a new enough iPhone. I did try “who did I meet with for lunch last week” on my iPad and it failed miserably, but I think that’s because the feature wasn’t released…too bad the commercials came out way before the feature was launched
Have you considered buying a new phone? For some reason I notice my older model getting slower /s.
The clumsy rollout of this is surprising considering Apple's conservative approach to new technology. I thought Apple was one of those companies that could afford to ignore the Gartner hype index.
As for the ham-fisted summarization on display in the OP example, I am reminded of the video of a dog that goes up to a shopkeeper and hands him a leaf, in exchange for a biscuit. The dog doesn't understand currency or context: he's simply seen hundreds of people hand the shopkeeper a leaf-like substance and walk off with a cookie.
Apple used to take their time, and build out a feature to excellence. They never tried to be first to market, but you could feel that when they did launch it was worth your attention. After Vision Pro and Apple pretending they cared about siri the voice activated timer for 15 years i think the era of apple intelligence is over. I just hope new companies can build something interesting before computers become as thrilling as toasters.
The top 3 levels at Apple all need to fly off for an offsite on their private jets and ask themselves if they are perhaps out of touch and have lost their way.
Have McKinsey come along to facilitate.
At this point they need McKinsey et al.
Top comment is well worth reading.
> This current AI wave is a major case of the Emperor's New Clothes. Who wanted summaries of two sentence long text messages? Who wanted summaries of news headlines? Who wanted help writing two sentence long emails to coworkers? This is all useless baby stuff, yet multibillion and multitrillion dollar companies are going bananas trying to solve made up baby problems that nobody was actually having. There isn't a single company out there bold enough to push back against this silly wave and say what a waste it is.
> These companies are mortified of being left out of the make-believe party they made up themselves. It's incredibly bizarre.
Who wants fluent conversations with AI to get help for realtime translations or location based information (e.g. when traveling)? Who wants to delegate tasks to AI so it can help work with everyday productivity tools like calendar, emails, etc.
I understand that some of the stuff is not there yet. But dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff? Reminds me of what people were saying of web, web 2.0, etc. My productivity has taken giant leaps since two years, probably because I'm willing to regularly invest some time into understanding & exploring which workflows can be optimised. It might actually not be trivial, and even some AI companies are not able to showcase their tech in realistic problem solving scenarios. But it's there.
Apple is just really really bad at this atm. Their leadership has transformed the company into a mindset of mirco-optimisations, no more taking risks etc.
The entire industry is in a very cart-before-the-horse mode here because this is less "cool new tech being able to mature" and more "frantic economic bubble that happens to manifest through new tech"
New tech tends to start with garage scale startups and targeting the enthusiasts, the experimenters, the hobbyists, the ones willing to put the effort into playing with it, map what is and isn't possible, and file off the rough edges. And when you're making a product like that, you probably have to package and market it entirely differently-- a world of datasheets, programmer's references, and schematics, to give that audience the tools to get the most out of it.
If and when you're lucky, you get to the VisiCalc moment, when someone finds a way to deliver a mainstream value proposition so compelling that people line up waving their Mastercards. There's a 200% chance that value proposition will not be the one you put on the marketing flyer to sell the kit to early-adopters, and it may not even come from the firms who launched the market in the first place.
Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI are all trying to short-circuit that process. You can't just throw a trillion dollars at a product and shove their early-stage products in front of customers and expect to magically win the future.
It's like trying to make desktop computing happen in 1977 by busting into every house in the country, bolting an Imsai 8080 to random appliances unsolicited, and telling them to enjoy their new computing-enabled future.
> dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff?
But that's not Apple. Apple is the company that watches everyone screw up and then comes out with something brilliantly simple that just works. Not only is Apple Intelligence a mess, a lot of it is vaporware [1].
Siri used to be useful enough that I could ask her to send short texts and place calls. But now, when I ask it to message someone I am regularly in touch with, it spouts out a message to someone with a similar-sounding name I haven't spoken to in years.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
> But dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff? Reminds me of what people were saying of web, web 2.0,
Nobody was saying that about the web. The web in 1994 had email and instant messaging out of the box, it replaced letter mail and consumer fax overnight.
We're several years into the GenAI wave, what has it changed for Apple users?
Apple should show some guts and cancel Apple Intelligence.
I find using LLMs for summaries of news headlines to be quite helpful. Many headlines in my RSS feeds have turned awfully "clickbaity" over the years. Using an LLM at the individual article level, it's usually a pretty great way to produce a new informative headline from the full article body. It makes the information much more relevant, and better allows me to decide whether I want to read the full article or not.
(Just as an example of practically useful functionality, while I agree that the technology still falls short of expectations and dreams in many other domains)
On the other hand, summarizing news is one of the exact things people have been pushing back on, since AI can misinterpret what happened or outright make stuff up[0] (like saying someone had come out as gay or that someone had won a tournament before it began.)
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o
Me too, somehow Siri got worse with the addition of Apple Intelligence. It now just drops audio commands that old Siri could handle reliably. The new Siri voice sounds much colder and much more robotic. Siri’s response time is slower too.
Why does it keep re-enabling after each OS update?
Because someone’s RSU’s increase due to whatever metric it affects.
Exactly. I stopped updating because of this.