Comment by mort96
4 hours ago
Absolutely 100%. Now I'm very biased against this "AI" stuff in general, but even fans of "AI" can't want this, right? I mean I know some people who are heavy "AI" users and they all either have a setup with Cursor/Codex/Zed/VSCode/whatever or their preferred local model, they'd never ever want to use "whatever Apple happens to ship with the OS". Same with the model Google bundled into their browser, growing Chrome from roughly 200MB to over 4GB. Who's the target audience here?
It's investors isn't it.
I actually like AI tools, but I don’t use Apple Intelligence. It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft. They are shoving it on us when we don’t want it and it’s worse than everything else out there. It’s the Windows Media Player of the AI industry.
> It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft.
1. I was around in the 90’s; nothing today is that bad.
2. Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. You don’t realize how useful personal context is until you have it.
Something like “When was the last time I went to that pizza place downtown?”—it just works.
When you call the airline about your flight, your flight info automatically shows up.
I was around in the 90's too, which is why I can confidently say it is that bad. What Apple is doing with AI today is exactly the same formula as some of the worst stuff Microsoft put out back then. I'm not talking about the big things. More like the bundled apps where they see someone else getting traction with something and then they go and bundle their own K-Mart version of it that no one asked for.
Yet something like "Call <name of a person>" will still immediately call someone with a completely different name without even letting me cancel, right?
Siri is completely useless.
No, there are a tonne of Apple users that aren't developers, that will probably love this. They'll currently be using paid subscriptions to OpenAI, but only via the web app, and will happily switch to using Apple Intelligence.
I’m a developer.
The pitch isn’t that it will replace claude or codex runing 284 agents vibeslopping for me. It’s that Siri is pretty damn good now, with safe access the data I kinda wish could be accessed safely by an assistant.
It has a ways to go on some of the productivity stuff, and third parties have work to do, but that’s fine. They built a better foundation than anyone else has for its purpose.
Is Apple Intelligence's local models better than free ChatGPT?
Wrong question, even though Siri AI has a plugin for ChatGPT you don’t need an account for, even if you have one.
At the same time, ask stock ChatGPT when your next dentist appointment is. It can’t but Siri AI can.
You can't imagine a singular person and reason who would want an improved Siri?
On their laptop? No, not really. I guess the selling point is that your computer now suggests file names for you?
The selling point is being able to say things like "remind me about the next early release from school the night before" and it'll dig up the info from your emails and then create the reminder.
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It's pretty nice from an app developers perspective.
It allows me to save money by calling a model on the users device rather than spending tokens (or forcing the user to spend tokens).
What does your users want your app to do with a language model?
I can imagine lots of things- mainly around making short summaries so the user can choose things more easily, or maybe as a smart autocomplete.
I can imagine a home automation app helping you build a workflow with an LLM. Or an RSS reader giving you a short summary of each article. A health app being able to pull recipes into a standard format. Maybe a fitness app being able to search your workout history if you give it good tools.
Idk I usually use my phone for reading HN on the toilet and listening to podcasts while cleaning, not much else. I don’t know what else people even do with a phone lol. But those are things I’ve done in the past that LLMs could be helpful for!
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Lots of use cases. Image understanding / labeling is what I had in mind.
But also voice-to-text, (certain kinds of) search, document summarization, are common things that I could see many apps using Apple Intelligence for.
I think a large part of our ecosystem is:
1. Lose the user, make him struggle to find items in the Start menu (Windows), struggle to type words on the keyboard (iOS), or struggle to manage find their subscription (Atlassian),
2. ???
3. Profit
If it's a dark pattern, I'd like to know what step 2 is. Who knows, maybe the goal is to overwhelm the user and it's a spy operation from the KGB.
> it's a spy operation from the KGB.
time-travelling KGB operatives from 1991.