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This lede makes no sense: > Remember when Apple blamed EU tech rules — and more specifically the Digital Markets Act — to justify the fact that Apple Intellige

This lede makes no sense: > Remember when Apple blamed EU tech rules — and more specifically the Digital Markets Act — to justify the fact that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be available in the European Union? Maybe that was just an attempt to turn EU users against their regulators as Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April 2025 along with local language support. If they were NEVER bringing it to the EU, maybe I'd understand the cynicism. But that it's part of a phased roll-out where it just takes more time to come to the EU does not make it MORE likely that the cynics were correct. It's impossible to know for sure without some kind of Apple memo/emails, but I don't understand pointing to the new release date as proof of some ulterior motive.

epolanski 2y ago
I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence. Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users. That being said I think that it's the kind of thing that many will want to have once they see a power user playing with it and achieving many things with their voice or few gestures.
- r00fus 2y ago
  People aren't excited because it's just been released stateside. Wait for the customer success stories to appear before determining desire.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Gemini's been a thing for android and Samsung has something too. I've heard nilch about "success stories". I've even heard it loses some accuracy on voice commands compared to Google Assist. These are features to excite shareholders, not users.
    - kaba0 2y ago
      Apple’s intelligence has the benefit of a much deeper integration (if they can live up to their wwdc), which will pretty much bring the sci-fi assistent to life. Just say “when will my plane depart” and when siri replies ask it to “send that info to X” is absolutely possible with current LLM tech exposed to a standardized API against which it can execute commands. Give it some personalized context and that’s absolutely reachable tech. I don’t know, if apple can pull it off, that will bring a huge change to human-device interactions.
      - whalabi 2y ago
        Ah we were typing at the same time but strong agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974935
    - whalabi 2y ago
      Personally I picked my next phone based on which had the most useful AI this year. I've been waiting my whole life for, basically, the computer from Star Trek, and I think it's on the way. Gemini was really disappointing. It could do some incredible things but it was more like the first hints of what will be possible. For example, I could ask it to show me the biggest files in my Google Drive. And as far as I could tell, it had access to Google Drive APIs, and _could decide how to use them_. That's extremely powerful, that means it could think of what to do to accomplish any goal you have and determine how to do it. If the API can do anything the UI can do, then the AI can do anything you can do, and you don't have to point and click and type like it's 2024, and we're suddenly in the 24th century. But, it was too early. Many of my requests were met with "I'm sorry I can't access x y z" when it could and did at other times. The unreliability is what got to me. So I went with an iPhone (my first ever, I'm not American) because I think in the short term, iOS is going to have the experience which is closer to this intelligence. Because it can drive behavior in other apps and will increasingly do so as features roll out. Don't be fooled though Apple Intelligence is currently very, very limited. Side note: I don't care about the text and image gen capabilities at all. Though the notification summaries are pretty handy and occasionally hilarious. .... I might write a piece for http://unlikekinds.com http://unlikekinds.com about this.
  - isodev 2y ago
    People aren't excited because most of it already exists with native apps like chatGPT itself or even Copilot (Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard for example, can generate memes, images, guess emoji etc) Integrarion through Siri is not transformational because few actually use Siri - Siri in Europe is dumb as a bucket, even when it correctly understands what you're asking.
- drexlspivey 2y ago
  The market looks excited, the stock is almost 40% up since a few weeks before the announcement in May
  - eastbound 2y ago
    Yes, any company not having an AI offer appears as a loser. Ex: When you see travel pictures with tourists on it… You know it’s a iPhone. Android users have pristine pictures of the Coliseum without anyone in it. Crowded photos are the green bubbles of iMessage.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      Am I the only one who want to have photos that represent my experience, regardless of the amount of tourists ir traffic or road/building work done at the scene? The photo of one of my family in law whatsapp group which we also framed in our corridor is a photo of me with my partner and her sister in a scenic historical street with a dog peeing at a light pole on the right corner. Another almost identical picture was taken without the dog but we just decided the "imperfect" one was better. If I wanted a picture of a momument without tourists, I could just buy the damn postcard or download it somewhere.
      - rootusrootus 2y ago
        > Am I the only one Definitely not. Relatedly, the best advice I ever got about taking pictures of not-people is to put people in them. There are countless pictures, many of them better than I will ever get, of almost every mountain/building/whatever in the world. Put yourself, friends, and family in the shot, or it will be forgettable. We just went through my late mother's albums of pictures a few months ago, and ultimately we ended up discarding a rather large number of them because they were just random pictures of landscapes.
      - asyx 2y ago
        The target audience is influencers that make the Apple look and feel of photos the default. They want pretty pictures and perfect scenes and then you have a bunch of teenagers going for the $1000+ iPhone instead of a Pixel for half the price with better AI but a different post processing pipeline
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  > I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence. So what? Users don't know what they want, or need. People claim phones haven't "noticeably improved" in 5 years and then spend $600 more on a new phone instead of buying an old one.
  - kaba0 2y ago
    ‘Informed users’ has always been a joke.
- hggigg 2y ago
  Assuming it works well enough to be useful.
- runjake 2y ago
  > I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence. Because the vast majority of the user base hasn't really heard of Apple Intelligence and definitely doesn't understand what it is. It's been out in tangible form for a few hours, and 99% of the people haven't had a chance to update yet.
- Someone 2y ago
  > Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users. I think that’s part of the reason Apple calls their stuff ‘intelligence’, not AI. Users do not want better cameras, they want better pictures, and a large part of what gives that to them is smart software. for example https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/depth-pro https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/depth-pro (“Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second”), if it works across huge ranges of pictures, will enable features that users like, but users may not call that AI.
- thefourthchime 2y ago
  I just installed 18.2 and now that Siri can fallback to ChatGPT (with search results) you can have Siri can actually answer things, all while still setting timers and turning on lights. The integration seems well thought out, I think people will find it useful.
KoolKat23 2y ago
Some of the bigger models require certification due to EU laws and are delayed as a result, but I can't see Apple Intelligence falling in this category.
isodev 2y ago
Apple burned through collosal amount of developer/core fanbase good will with this little mauver. More than a year of hostile actions against developers, consumer choice and then anti EU PR stunts etc. Many of their services like News and Fitness+ are still not available in all EU countries even.
Calamityjanitor 2y ago
It wasn't a conspiracy theory, it's the official reason Apple told the press: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-says-regulatory-concerns-may-prevent-rollout-of-ai-features-in-europe-0b0aaf5e https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-says-regulatory-concerns-m...
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  The conspiracy theory is that it was to turn users against their government. The argument that it was delayed so they could work out compliance with regulations is entirely plausible.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Part of that line of thought was that it just came on the heels of meta announcing they would no longer bring AI products to the EU at all. So I can imagine the thinking behind this. But for Apple it's pretty normal to release later in the EU. They almost always do this with new products and services.
  - layer8 2y ago
    The exact quote was: “Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.” What didn’t seem plausible is that Android manufacturers didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing out comparable features, and Apple never elaborated on where exactly they see the difficulties. The whole wording reads more like deflecting blame to the DMA for the delay, rather than taking it on themselves by saying “sorry, we’re already late to the game as it is, we’ll need more time to work through this, and it’s all beta this year anyway”. It certainly seemed like a welcome excuse for why they’ll only release a US version this year. Personally I don’t really care about those features, but Apple’s communication in recent years has gained a bit of a passive-aggressive side towards the EU.
    - dialup_sounds 2y ago
wkat4242 2y ago
Also, many many Apple products and services have been released in the US first. The iPhone, the iPad, the vision pro (still not available in most European countries), the 3D maps, the ECG on the watch etc etc. AppleCare+ was not available here for years, nor are some of the other services (someone mentioned Fitness+). Releasing later in the EU is just standard operating procedure for Apple. Sure the law makes this more difficult but clearly not impossible. This doesn't just go for AI but for all products. They all need different certifications etc than in the US. The big difference between this and other stuff is that AI is so hyped everyone wants it right now. That's why it seems to stand out. There does seem to be a narrative against the EU legislation from the AI companies though. I'm not sure if Apple can be counted as one.
- simonask 2y ago
  I would bet that a major driving reason for delayed release in the EU is not regulations, but simply linguistics. Localization is a huge effort, even more so around the types of AI features they seem to want to deliver. As a native Danish speaker - a relatively small language spoken by about 6 million people - Apple had by far the most cohesive and thorough localization story of any tech corporation. Google and Microsoft come really close, but I’ve never seen a single instance of awkward word choice, ambiguous grammar, sloppy punctuation, or imprecise phrasing in an Apple product. Anybody can do that in Spanish, German, or French, or any of the other major languages. My pet belief is that this is a big reason why Scandinavia, like the US, is dominated by iPhones, in contrast to the rest of Europe, where Android leads.
  - yurishimo 2y ago
    This is a good point now that you mention it. I’ve found the Dutch translations and spoken voices on iOS to be outstanding. A few more people than Denmark, but in the scale of Apple, 6 vs 14 million is a rounding error. I think the relative wealth of northwest Europe also plays a role in the adoption of Apple hardware. Or at least it certainly helps.
    - simonask 2y ago

epolanski 2y ago

I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence. Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users. That being said I think that it's the kind of thing that many will want to have once they see a power user playing with it and achieving many things with their voice or few gestures.

r00fus 2y ago
People aren't excited because it's just been released stateside. Wait for the customer success stories to appear before determining desire.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Gemini's been a thing for android and Samsung has something too. I've heard nilch about "success stories". I've even heard it loses some accuracy on voice commands compared to Google Assist. These are features to excite shareholders, not users.
  - kaba0 2y ago
    Apple’s intelligence has the benefit of a much deeper integration (if they can live up to their wwdc), which will pretty much bring the sci-fi assistent to life. Just say “when will my plane depart” and when siri replies ask it to “send that info to X” is absolutely possible with current LLM tech exposed to a standardized API against which it can execute commands. Give it some personalized context and that’s absolutely reachable tech. I don’t know, if apple can pull it off, that will bring a huge change to human-device interactions.
    - whalabi 2y ago
      Ah we were typing at the same time but strong agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974935
  - whalabi 2y ago
    Personally I picked my next phone based on which had the most useful AI this year. I've been waiting my whole life for, basically, the computer from Star Trek, and I think it's on the way. Gemini was really disappointing. It could do some incredible things but it was more like the first hints of what will be possible. For example, I could ask it to show me the biggest files in my Google Drive. And as far as I could tell, it had access to Google Drive APIs, and _could decide how to use them_. That's extremely powerful, that means it could think of what to do to accomplish any goal you have and determine how to do it. If the API can do anything the UI can do, then the AI can do anything you can do, and you don't have to point and click and type like it's 2024, and we're suddenly in the 24th century. But, it was too early. Many of my requests were met with "I'm sorry I can't access x y z" when it could and did at other times. The unreliability is what got to me. So I went with an iPhone (my first ever, I'm not American) because I think in the short term, iOS is going to have the experience which is closer to this intelligence. Because it can drive behavior in other apps and will increasingly do so as features roll out. Don't be fooled though Apple Intelligence is currently very, very limited. Side note: I don't care about the text and image gen capabilities at all. Though the notification summaries are pretty handy and occasionally hilarious. .... I might write a piece for http://unlikekinds.com http://unlikekinds.com about this.
- isodev 2y ago
  People aren't excited because most of it already exists with native apps like chatGPT itself or even Copilot (Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard for example, can generate memes, images, guess emoji etc) Integrarion through Siri is not transformational because few actually use Siri - Siri in Europe is dumb as a bucket, even when it correctly understands what you're asking.
drexlspivey 2y ago
The market looks excited, the stock is almost 40% up since a few weeks before the announcement in May
- eastbound 2y ago
  Yes, any company not having an AI offer appears as a loser. Ex: When you see travel pictures with tourists on it… You know it’s a iPhone. Android users have pristine pictures of the Coliseum without anyone in it. Crowded photos are the green bubbles of iMessage.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Am I the only one who want to have photos that represent my experience, regardless of the amount of tourists ir traffic or road/building work done at the scene? The photo of one of my family in law whatsapp group which we also framed in our corridor is a photo of me with my partner and her sister in a scenic historical street with a dog peeing at a light pole on the right corner. Another almost identical picture was taken without the dog but we just decided the "imperfect" one was better. If I wanted a picture of a momument without tourists, I could just buy the damn postcard or download it somewhere.
    - rootusrootus 2y ago
      > Am I the only one Definitely not. Relatedly, the best advice I ever got about taking pictures of not-people is to put people in them. There are countless pictures, many of them better than I will ever get, of almost every mountain/building/whatever in the world. Put yourself, friends, and family in the shot, or it will be forgettable. We just went through my late mother's albums of pictures a few months ago, and ultimately we ended up discarding a rather large number of them because they were just random pictures of landscapes.
    - asyx 2y ago
      The target audience is influencers that make the Apple look and feel of photos the default. They want pretty pictures and perfect scenes and then you have a bunch of teenagers going for the $1000+ iPhone instead of a Pixel for half the price with better AI but a different post processing pipeline
knallfrosch 2y ago
> I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence. So what? Users don't know what they want, or need. People claim phones haven't "noticeably improved" in 5 years and then spend $600 more on a new phone instead of buying an old one.
- kaba0 2y ago
  ‘Informed users’ has always been a joke.
hggigg 2y ago
Assuming it works well enough to be useful.
runjake 2y ago
> I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence. Because the vast majority of the user base hasn't really heard of Apple Intelligence and definitely doesn't understand what it is. It's been out in tangible form for a few hours, and 99% of the people haven't had a chance to update yet.
Someone 2y ago
> Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users. I think that’s part of the reason Apple calls their stuff ‘intelligence’, not AI. Users do not want better cameras, they want better pictures, and a large part of what gives that to them is smart software. for example https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/depth-pro https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/depth-pro (“Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second”), if it works across huge ranges of pictures, will enable features that users like, but users may not call that AI.
thefourthchime 2y ago
I just installed 18.2 and now that Siri can fallback to ChatGPT (with search results) you can have Siri can actually answer things, all while still setting timers and turning on lights. The integration seems well thought out, I think people will find it useful.

KoolKat23 2y ago

Some of the bigger models require certification due to EU laws and are delayed as a result, but I can't see Apple Intelligence falling in this category.

isodev 2y ago

Apple burned through collosal amount of developer/core fanbase good will with this little mauver. More than a year of hostile actions against developers, consumer choice and then anti EU PR stunts etc. Many of their services like News and Fitness+ are still not available in all EU countries even.

Calamityjanitor 2y ago

It wasn't a conspiracy theory, it's the official reason Apple told the press: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-says-regulatory-concerns-may-prevent-rollout-of-ai-features-in-europe-0b0aaf5e https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-says-regulatory-concerns-m...

rootusrootus 2y ago
The conspiracy theory is that it was to turn users against their government. The argument that it was delayed so they could work out compliance with regulations is entirely plausible.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Part of that line of thought was that it just came on the heels of meta announcing they would no longer bring AI products to the EU at all. So I can imagine the thinking behind this. But for Apple it's pretty normal to release later in the EU. They almost always do this with new products and services.
- layer8 2y ago
  The exact quote was: “Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.” What didn’t seem plausible is that Android manufacturers didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing out comparable features, and Apple never elaborated on where exactly they see the difficulties. The whole wording reads more like deflecting blame to the DMA for the delay, rather than taking it on themselves by saying “sorry, we’re already late to the game as it is, we’ll need more time to work through this, and it’s all beta this year anyway”. It certainly seemed like a welcome excuse for why they’ll only release a US version this year. Personally I don’t really care about those features, but Apple’s communication in recent years has gained a bit of a passive-aggressive side towards the EU.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago

wkat4242 2y ago

Also, many many Apple products and services have been released in the US first. The iPhone, the iPad, the vision pro (still not available in most European countries), the 3D maps, the ECG on the watch etc etc. AppleCare+ was not available here for years, nor are some of the other services (someone mentioned Fitness+). Releasing later in the EU is just standard operating procedure for Apple. Sure the law makes this more difficult but clearly not impossible. This doesn't just go for AI but for all products. They all need different certifications etc than in the US. The big difference between this and other stuff is that AI is so hyped everyone wants it right now. That's why it seems to stand out. There does seem to be a narrative against the EU legislation from the AI companies though. I'm not sure if Apple can be counted as one.

simonask 2y ago
I would bet that a major driving reason for delayed release in the EU is not regulations, but simply linguistics. Localization is a huge effort, even more so around the types of AI features they seem to want to deliver. As a native Danish speaker - a relatively small language spoken by about 6 million people - Apple had by far the most cohesive and thorough localization story of any tech corporation. Google and Microsoft come really close, but I’ve never seen a single instance of awkward word choice, ambiguous grammar, sloppy punctuation, or imprecise phrasing in an Apple product. Anybody can do that in Spanish, German, or French, or any of the other major languages. My pet belief is that this is a big reason why Scandinavia, like the US, is dominated by iPhones, in contrast to the rest of Europe, where Android leads.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  This is a good point now that you mention it. I’ve found the Dutch translations and spoken voices on iOS to be outstanding. A few more people than Denmark, but in the scale of Apple, 6 vs 14 million is a rounding error. I think the relative wealth of northwest Europe also plays a role in the adoption of Apple hardware. Or at least it certainly helps.
  - simonask 2y ago