Comment by latexr
12 hours ago
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.
Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114
Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.
> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.
Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.
> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.
The difference is it’s incredibly easy to opt out of apples AI-like services. For instance, I have never had Siri on on my iPhone no matter how many years go by. And every time I’ve gotten a new one, it stayed off. One tap, that’s it.
They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.
Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing
Good point. Yes, I also have all of that turned off and can ignore it. Not that Apple is without its pushiness, though, I still get frequent nags to “upgrade” to Tahoe and iOS 26 without an option to turn those off, and every time I go to System Settings to update to a new macOS 15 version and click to show more details, they sneakily select macOS 26 checkbox.