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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.

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Is Apple Intelligence's local models better than free ChatGPT?
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You can't imagine a singular person and reason who would want an improved Siri?
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On their laptop? No, not really. I guess the selling point is that your computer now suggests file names for you?
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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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And people really trust the bot to do that stuff for them? They risk letting down their kid by not being there to pick them up just to save half a minute of finding the right email? That sounds crazy to me, creating a reminder isn't exactly hard
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It shows where it found the information. In this case, it included a link to a text message from the school which had this info, and quoted it so I could see that it got it right, and it shows the reminder it created so I could see that it's correct. I don't really have to trust it, I can see that it's working.
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Maybe you have 5 relevant calendar events but it lists 3 and calls it a day. That is from my experience far bigger type of problem with AI. Hallucination by omission
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That's exactly what big tech executives and AI bros don't get: It would be useful to use AI for the grudgy but verifiable sub-steps of such a task, e.g. have it help with the email search, and have it suggest a reminder. Or even better, suggest creating a reminder when receiving/reading the email. But leave the user in control, and provide evidence and transparency. Instead, many companies put their bets on the long-shot, do-it-all assistent AI, but technology is just not there yet, or maybe never will even.
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I could definitely imagine using a system where I could type in Spotlight "that message about early release from school", hit enter, and have the e-mail or SMS or Signal message or whatever show up in front of me. Boring, non-sexy "better search" style "AI" which is actually useful but doesn't appeal to investors.
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I had better success with earlier versions. For me Siri has regressed so much and had become so unreliable, that having to constantly repeat or rephrase or delete whatever nonsense it was doing was so frustrating, I stopped using it years ago.

Its quite the paradox when Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence so hard, yet their assistant that's been around for 15 years can't do even basic things now.

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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).

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What does your users want your app to do with a language model?
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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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Is this based on user feedback for your app? Do they want your app to feature home automation or making short summaries? Since you were using your app as an example I mean
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Not OP, but in my case they are features we already provide that we can make cheaper (for ourselves) by doing it on the user's device rather than paying OpenAI for it.
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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.

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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.

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> disk space

I honestly do not understand what the 28GB Tahoe update contained. Like, I cannot imagine what all the code does. It'd take a lifetime to actually go through it all, and yet, here I am just using the same programs I did before it, just with rounder corners and some other pretty things. Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.

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>> Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.

The new liquid glass ui also fails a lot of basic accessibility checkpoints like contrast, readability, and increases cognitive load.

The rounded corners you speak of also hamper tap and touch targets for users with motor disabilities. The rounded corners make icons and other elements less distinct, increasing the possibility of touch or tap errors.

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I don't take this abuse any longer. My last Mac is on macOS 14 and it will stay there for the remainder of its existence. I'm on Linux now and I'm not missing much compared to Mac. I'll put it this way: If a move to Apple Silicon would make me lose most of my apps anyway, then I might just as well move to an OS where I'm the boss again. Also, gaming got way better with Steam's Proton and the Heroic Game Launcher for GOG and others. I'm not going back.
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Same here!
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