Originally published at: Apple Intelligence "not driving sales" - Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
It’s not surprising to me that an unreleased feature is not driving sales. I am agnostic at this point on Apple Intelligence. Maybe it will be great, maybe it will be lousy, maybe it will be mildly useful, maybe it will be Siri 2.0. Why this is news is what is surprising to me.
2 Likes
It’s news in the sense that a major corporation selling hardware that’s compelling in and of itself sincerely believed that software that’s still in the"solution in search of a problem" phase would significantly increase sales.
People who follow business news should understand that Apple’s vaunted marketing team has drunk the “AI” Flavoraid and over-promised device sales as a result.
8 Likes
I’m not very enthusiastic about increased integration of so-called “AI” regardless of what it’s running on, but how much of a difference would it really make for user experience if a virtual assistant was “on-device” or not, aside from a miniscule amount of communication lag? The Amazon Alexa isn’t really on-device, and neither is most of Siri’s more useful functions.
There’s the privacy aspect, I guess, but it’s hard to believe that what you’re doing on your phone is ever especially private these days.
4 Likes
Assuming I even wanted to use Apple Intelligence, what can I buy that even has it?
1 Like
Indeed; one of my back-burnered projects is having a fully on-prem voice assistant, but setting it up is tricky, and has a lot of moving parts.
2 Likes
Nothing. That’s the problem. The iPhone 15 and 16 supposedly support it, but until iOS does, it’s just vaporware.
2 Likes
odd; the 15 I ended up getting does not have the hardware built in for it, which is why I got it instead of a 16 specifically.
What I want to know is if the hardware can be repurposed for something else when this finally blows over, or if it’s an ASIC that can only do one thing in a sorta crappy manner.
3 Likes
To be clear it’s targeted for all iPhone 16 models, and 15 Pro models. 15 non-Pro doesn’t apply. I’m less excited for Apple Intelligence than I am a version of iOS 18 that isn’t a buggy mess.
My expectations are very low right now. AI today is about 90% hype and 10% substance. I don’t expect anything amazing from Apple. I don’t like generative text because it doesn’t have my voice. Image generation is a gimmick at best, dystopian bullshit at worst. Some of the image analysis stuff can be cool but you already get that today, it’s just becoming local to the device. Maybe Siri will suck less? (I barely use it.)
3 Likes
The stock market drops and FBN blames Biden. What a bunch of morons.
1 Like
“Apple Intelligence” seemed like a particularly weird hype train to already be pinning hopes on both because it’s effectively unreleased at this point and because ‘AI’ seems like an area where Apple’s traditional “We’re arguably less sinister than Google and more tasteful than Microsoft” pitch seems like it has less of an audience.
This isn’t to say that they are outright lying about being more privacy-preserving than the arrogant titans of server-side algorithmic regurgitation; but ‘AI’ is an area where the hardcore hypebeasts don’t really seem to care about the privacy implications; and the people who find the matter deeply distasteful are put off by things more visceral than the specifics of OpenAI’s terms and conditions.
3 Likes
So they were banking on a feature that isn’t released yet to boost sales? What a strange business model.
3 Likes
I’m not sure about the details of the implementation(though presumably it’s the same fast relatively low precision math with high memory bandwidth that every does when they want an ‘NPU’; and it’s hard to say ahead of time what Apple will or will not end up deigning to allow); but the hardware is apparently a descendant of what they’ve been including as the “neural engine” since the A11 (iphone 8 era); so we probably already have some information on whether they let anyone else do anything with it and how useful it is.
3 Likes
I am something of an adopter of AI for specific tasks. I’ve used it for art and writing. So I should be an ideal customer for AI in more places.
I am 100% against it in large application suites and services. And most especially in random interfaces! I didn’t ask for it there, I don’t need it and I don’t want it. I don’t want it in Google, Facebook/Instagram, Microsoft, Apple, or anywhere else. I’ll choose when and where I want it, ty very gd much.
6 Likes
It’s not out yet. If it’s any good, word of mouth will boost sales. It’s an aspirational item for many, I would not be surprised at all if folks were “wait-and-see” before dropping hundreds of dollars on it. And that’s assuming the supply chain changes aren’t just “oh, more people buying colour X than Y” or “More people buying Pro’s vs. non-pros”
Do you want to declare victory for the mediocrity of current LLM’s and ML models? Wait until the feature is out. If then people yawn, that’s a pretty strong sign indeed!
4 Likes
Existing apple devices already have a lot of the AI assistance in them, and have for several versions of iOS. The Photos app is probably the most obvious example, but I have seen other programs make inferences as well.
1 Like
Exactly. It hasn’t been rolled out, and it’s probably a stretch to think it would drive people to accelerate their next planned phone upgrade. I’m much more interested in camera improvements as a reason to upgrade, myself. I do think, however, that Apple’s approach of doing a lot of the processing on-device and sending it anonymously to their servers is likely to be better for user privacy,
3 Likes
I’ve found ChatGPT very helpful in writing batch scripts, Excel formulae and Visual Basic, and general Help in apps such as Premiere and After Effects, where the official Help files were written by someone with an extreme case of constipation. ChatGPT allows me to have a dialogue with the interpretation of an existing body of structured work.
Conversely, my Android phone often pops up its new AI voice assistant, seemingly at random but actually because I accidentally pressed some button know was there, and don’t want. Then I have to waste a couple of seconds making it go away. Sometimes while swearing.
Basically, AI can fuck off. I don’t want it trying to engage with me on its own terms. I want it to be there for specific help when I ask.
3 Likes
1 Like
