6 ms·

Sometimes I wish I could check an alternative universe where Apple refused to acknowledge AI slop and just doubled down on privacy and protections of the user.

Sometimes I wish I could check an alternative universe where Apple refused to acknowledge AI slop and just doubled down on privacy and protections of the user. It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend and let everyone else burn money until the hype dies down.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend I wish they had but on the other hand, can you imagine how many think pieces there'd be about how Apple was stagnating and how they were "such, like, a 20th Century Company(tm)" and you'd probably get activist investors bleating about how Apple were leaving money on the table and and and etc.
- coldtea 2y ago
  So? They had been getting 10 such pieces a day when Jobs run things too...
chairhairair 2y ago
Several large companies could benefit from ignoring GenAI. Unfortunately, "benefit" would only mean "save money and produce better products for customers" instead of "make stock price go up". Instead, all of these companies are effectively forced to play hype ball.
mjburgess 2y ago
To be honest, apple's approach to AI seems pretty close to this recommendation. I don't see much more than "here's a few nice features to some apps" -- vs., MS's "now all our machines must be AI capable so that we can scan 1000s of screeshots of your device"
- adamc 2y ago
  As someone who has gone back and forth between Windows and Mac OS... if Apple would stop trying to force me to log-in to use features I don't need, they would have a more compelling case. Windows is indeed a horrific data mining operation, but Apple's own endless push to enmesh me in their ecosystem is about as irritating. And Windows has WSL, which has value to me at work. (And outside of work, Apple punted on games, which means I will always buy a Windows or Linux computer.)
  - philistine 2y ago
    I'm sorry to say, but logging in with a centralized account to use a device is a given in 2025. The benefits are far too good to disregard. Apple is no longer in the business of selling you devices, they're in the business of selling you add-ons to your Apple Account. And people always say that we risk our accounts being locked out, but when was the last time Apple was heard closing Apple Accounts?
    - adamc 2y ago
      No, this is garbage. I have plenty of real accounts I need to log into already, I don't need another one that is there just so the vendor can track me and try to enmesh me in their ecology.
      - philistine 2y ago
        > that is there just so the vendor can track me That's your point of view. I see access to so many services because I have a phone, laptop, watch and headphones. Apple doesn't use accounts only to track you, it uses accounts to do things like seamlessly switch your AirPods between devices.
        pishpash 2y ago
        You do not need an internet account to coordinate devices.
        cma 2y ago
        You couldn't just pair the device to all of them and then seamlessly switch? The only thing the account is adding is removing that initial step on first pairing, but even that could be done without an account if the new device C was paired to host A and came in proximity to host B that was in connected at some point with host A.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > I'm sorry to say, but logging in with a centralized account to use a device is a given in 2025. It's really not. Of all the devices I own, the only one that really wants a centralized account is a Chromebook on its way out. Even Android is willing to work without a Google account.
- isodev 2y ago
  Replacing emojis with stickers and no way to tell them apart didn’t feel so nice.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I don't doubt the pressure they are feeling at the upper levels at Apple is real — but I agree, this initial rollout is also-ran and they underdelivered. I disagree that Apple should have sat on their hands. LLMs are already shipping apps that are beginning to integrate with the OS (looking at you, ChatGPT icon in my MacOS menu bar). How much user privacy should Apple allow me (well, their customers generally) to cede before they step in?
- officeplant 2y ago
  Greatly prefer users installing these functions and apps themselves. Instead Apple me has double checking settings on every update so I can toggle off stuff that should have been opt-in. At least I can continue to refuse to opt into the MacOS AI implementation for now. Now they've gone and doubled[0] the recommended space AI needs on base model phones shipping with under spec'd storage in the first place. If it goes up any more you'll be looking at giving up nearly 10% of a base model 128gb phone's storage to AI. [0]https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/03/apple-intelligence-now-requires-almost-double-iphone-storage/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/03/apple-intelligence-now-requir...
  - philistine 2y ago
    For the time being if you want an easy switch out of AI, you can just change the language of your device to English(CA).
  - wang_li 2y ago
    There needs to be a setting in the OS with a slider that allows you to set some value of 1-10 of your privacy preferences and all settings in all applications and future updates to a particular device are bound by. With each setting having well defined meanings, such as "1 - no interaction with internet based services at all. opt-out of everything", "2 - only security online services used. opt-out of everything", all the way up to "10 - this device is a loaner but i want all of my content to be available to me on any device anywhere and i want all of my content screen for 'safety'. opt-in to every thing."
- hollandheese 2y ago
jacobsimon 2y ago
Honestly, I think Apple played their cards perfectly. They didn’t try to be first to market with R&D, but they’ve launched just enough features to excite customers about new phones, while appeasing investors and subduing potential competitors like OpenAI who are rumored to be working on hardware devices, too.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I'm not sure, they've been revolving around "AI" stuff for ages; Siri, photo manipulation, identifying people and things in photos (but on your own device), all of which are widely popular. This feels like a logical next step for the path they were on for ages.
- kemayo 2y ago
  Yeah, they've been a bit slow on LLMs, but "machine learning" has been one of their buzzwords for years now.
  - philistine 2y ago
    You hear other companies saying they're pivoting to making AI-ready CPUs soon and I'm like dude, my iPhone SE 2 has machine learning processing!
- layer8 2y ago
  It would have been okay if they continued to release features that just happened to use ML under the hood. But instead they are expressedly marketing “Apple Intelligence”, with most of the features released under that umbrella so far not really working well (notification summaries, mail categories, Genmoji, …).
- johan914 2y ago
  I do wish they continued on this track instead of apple intelligence. I should be enable to click generate audiobook in iBooks and have an audiobook made in any voice of my choosing. Open source solutions are far too slow on macOS, and subpar in other languages.
liontwist 2y ago
Just last year everyone was saying they were “behind in technology” because they didn’t “understand AI”.
- philistine 2y ago
  It's what people always say: when the 5S came out, pundits were saying that was the death of the iPhone because the Samsung Galaxy was much bigger. Next year, the 6 was bigger and somehow Apple survived a year with a smaller device.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  > "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." It's that sentiment all over again. Specifically, a naive belief that the specs/tech of something are just as important than the execution. Maybe they are if you are very tech online, but for most people, tech/specs don't matter as much. Ultimately, this is another distortion of reality by the comment section.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  The particularly strange thing about this is that Apple has been shipping neural network accelerators since the iPhone X. The one actual selling point of Microsoft's "Copilot PCs" is copying Apple and putting an NPU into Windows laptops so they can have all the AI features Apple had already shipped way before they coined the term "Apple Intelligence". The LLM hype is so powerful that it got people to think the market leader in consumer-facing AI features was falling behind because you couldn't ask your iPhone to summarize notifications poorly.
fragmede 2y ago
> Apple... doubled down on privacy and protections of the user You mean like is documented on https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/apple-intelligence-and-privacy-iphe3f499e0e/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/apple-intelligence-an...?
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
They keynote where they announced these features was pretty awkward. The typical conviction they delivered things with just wasn't there. You could almost feel that their hand was forced and they gave it a go, but they deeply resented not being the ones to make that choice.
dyauspitr 2y ago
Calling it a trend in a casual way is not going to make it go away.
- stocknoob 2y ago
  At this point, anyone calling AI a trend sounds like someone calling electricity a trend. Believe it or not, there are paradigm shifts in technology every now and then. Not everything is 3D television.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    There are. But until the current crop of AI can actually do something useful, it isn't one. Right now it's hype driven development in search of a compelling use case.
    - kakapo1988 2y ago
      I hear this a lot, but don't understand it. In my own field (biomedical research), AI has already been a revolution. Everyone - and I mean everyone - is using AlphaFold, for example. It is a game changer, a true revolution. And everyday I use AI for mundane things, like summarization, transcribing, and language translation. All supremely useful. And there is a ton more. So I never understand the "hype" thing. It deserves to be hyped imo, as it is already become essential.
      - kenjackson 2y ago
        I think there is a group of people that don't want AI to be useful and think that by telling other people that its not useful that these other people will believe them. Unfortunately for them, more and more people are finding value with AI. It literally saved my father-in-law's life. It's become my kid's best school tutor. But there will still be people telling me that it has no value.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      it boggles my mind this is still being written over and over here on HN. like an echochamber everyone like fears AI will replace them or some BS like that. I cannot even begin to tell you how much AI has been useful to me, to my entire team, to my wife, to my daughter and to most of my friends that are in various industries that I personally guided towards using it. on my end, roughly 50% of things that I used to have to do are now fully automated (some agents, some using my help along the way)… in every thread here on HN there will be X number of people posting exactly what you wrote and Y (where Y is much smaller than X) number of people posting “look, this shit is fucking amazing, I do amazing shit with it.” if I was in group X I would stop and think long and hard what I need to do in order to get myself into group Y…
coldtea 2y ago
Apple is so derivative and marketing-type driven now, that it even got into the VR shit, after it had already resulted in nothing for Facebook and others peddling it for years. Given that, there was zero chance that they'd skip AI slop.

zimpenfish 2y ago

> It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend I wish they had but on the other hand, can you imagine how many think pieces there'd be about how Apple was stagnating and how they were "such, like, a 20th Century Company(tm)" and you'd probably get activist investors bleating about how Apple were leaving money on the table and and and etc.

coldtea 2y ago
So? They had been getting 10 such pieces a day when Jobs run things too...

chairhairair 2y ago

Several large companies could benefit from ignoring GenAI. Unfortunately, "benefit" would only mean "save money and produce better products for customers" instead of "make stock price go up". Instead, all of these companies are effectively forced to play hype ball.

mjburgess 2y ago

To be honest, apple's approach to AI seems pretty close to this recommendation. I don't see much more than "here's a few nice features to some apps" -- vs., MS's "now all our machines must be AI capable so that we can scan 1000s of screeshots of your device"

adamc 2y ago
As someone who has gone back and forth between Windows and Mac OS... if Apple would stop trying to force me to log-in to use features I don't need, they would have a more compelling case. Windows is indeed a horrific data mining operation, but Apple's own endless push to enmesh me in their ecosystem is about as irritating. And Windows has WSL, which has value to me at work. (And outside of work, Apple punted on games, which means I will always buy a Windows or Linux computer.)
- philistine 2y ago
  I'm sorry to say, but logging in with a centralized account to use a device is a given in 2025. The benefits are far too good to disregard. Apple is no longer in the business of selling you devices, they're in the business of selling you add-ons to your Apple Account. And people always say that we risk our accounts being locked out, but when was the last time Apple was heard closing Apple Accounts?
  - adamc 2y ago
    No, this is garbage. I have plenty of real accounts I need to log into already, I don't need another one that is there just so the vendor can track me and try to enmesh me in their ecology.
    - philistine 2y ago
      > that is there just so the vendor can track me That's your point of view. I see access to so many services because I have a phone, laptop, watch and headphones. Apple doesn't use accounts only to track you, it uses accounts to do things like seamlessly switch your AirPods between devices.
      - pishpash 2y ago
        You do not need an internet account to coordinate devices.
      - cma 2y ago
        You couldn't just pair the device to all of them and then seamlessly switch? The only thing the account is adding is removing that initial step on first pairing, but even that could be done without an account if the new device C was paired to host A and came in proximity to host B that was in connected at some point with host A.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > I'm sorry to say, but logging in with a centralized account to use a device is a given in 2025. It's really not. Of all the devices I own, the only one that really wants a centralized account is a Chromebook on its way out. Even Android is willing to work without a Google account.
isodev 2y ago
Replacing emojis with stickers and no way to tell them apart didn’t feel so nice.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

I don't doubt the pressure they are feeling at the upper levels at Apple is real — but I agree, this initial rollout is also-ran and they underdelivered. I disagree that Apple should have sat on their hands. LLMs are already shipping apps that are beginning to integrate with the OS (looking at you, ChatGPT icon in my MacOS menu bar). How much user privacy should Apple allow me (well, their customers generally) to cede before they step in?

officeplant 2y ago
Greatly prefer users installing these functions and apps themselves. Instead Apple me has double checking settings on every update so I can toggle off stuff that should have been opt-in. At least I can continue to refuse to opt into the MacOS AI implementation for now. Now they've gone and doubled[0] the recommended space AI needs on base model phones shipping with under spec'd storage in the first place. If it goes up any more you'll be looking at giving up nearly 10% of a base model 128gb phone's storage to AI. [0]https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/03/apple-intelligence-now-requires-almost-double-iphone-storage/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/03/apple-intelligence-now-requir...
- philistine 2y ago
  For the time being if you want an easy switch out of AI, you can just change the language of your device to English(CA).
- wang_li 2y ago
  There needs to be a setting in the OS with a slider that allows you to set some value of 1-10 of your privacy preferences and all settings in all applications and future updates to a particular device are bound by. With each setting having well defined meanings, such as "1 - no interaction with internet based services at all. opt-out of everything", "2 - only security online services used. opt-out of everything", all the way up to "10 - this device is a loaner but i want all of my content to be available to me on any device anywhere and i want all of my content screen for 'safety'. opt-in to every thing."
hollandheese 2y ago

jacobsimon 2y ago

Honestly, I think Apple played their cards perfectly. They didn’t try to be first to market with R&D, but they’ve launched just enough features to excite customers about new phones, while appeasing investors and subduing potential competitors like OpenAI who are rumored to be working on hardware devices, too.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

I'm not sure, they've been revolving around "AI" stuff for ages; Siri, photo manipulation, identifying people and things in photos (but on your own device), all of which are widely popular. This feels like a logical next step for the path they were on for ages.

kemayo 2y ago
Yeah, they've been a bit slow on LLMs, but "machine learning" has been one of their buzzwords for years now.
- philistine 2y ago
  You hear other companies saying they're pivoting to making AI-ready CPUs soon and I'm like dude, my iPhone SE 2 has machine learning processing!
layer8 2y ago
It would have been okay if they continued to release features that just happened to use ML under the hood. But instead they are expressedly marketing “Apple Intelligence”, with most of the features released under that umbrella so far not really working well (notification summaries, mail categories, Genmoji, …).
johan914 2y ago
I do wish they continued on this track instead of apple intelligence. I should be enable to click generate audiobook in iBooks and have an audiobook made in any voice of my choosing. Open source solutions are far too slow on macOS, and subpar in other languages.

liontwist 2y ago

Just last year everyone was saying they were “behind in technology” because they didn’t “understand AI”.

philistine 2y ago
It's what people always say: when the 5S came out, pundits were saying that was the death of the iPhone because the Samsung Galaxy was much bigger. Next year, the 6 was bigger and somehow Apple survived a year with a smaller device.
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
> "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." It's that sentiment all over again. Specifically, a naive belief that the specs/tech of something are just as important than the execution. Maybe they are if you are very tech online, but for most people, tech/specs don't matter as much. Ultimately, this is another distortion of reality by the comment section.
kmeisthax 2y ago
The particularly strange thing about this is that Apple has been shipping neural network accelerators since the iPhone X. The one actual selling point of Microsoft's "Copilot PCs" is copying Apple and putting an NPU into Windows laptops so they can have all the AI features Apple had already shipped way before they coined the term "Apple Intelligence". The LLM hype is so powerful that it got people to think the market leader in consumer-facing AI features was falling behind because you couldn't ask your iPhone to summarize notifications poorly.

fragmede 2y ago

> Apple... doubled down on privacy and protections of the user You mean like is documented on https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/apple-intelligence-and-privacy-iphe3f499e0e/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/apple-intelligence-an...?

mattgreenrocks 2y ago

They keynote where they announced these features was pretty awkward. The typical conviction they delivered things with just wasn't there. You could almost feel that their hand was forced and they gave it a go, but they deeply resented not being the ones to make that choice.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Calling it a trend in a casual way is not going to make it go away.

stocknoob 2y ago
At this point, anyone calling AI a trend sounds like someone calling electricity a trend. Believe it or not, there are paradigm shifts in technology every now and then. Not everything is 3D television.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  There are. But until the current crop of AI can actually do something useful, it isn't one. Right now it's hype driven development in search of a compelling use case.
  - kakapo1988 2y ago
    I hear this a lot, but don't understand it. In my own field (biomedical research), AI has already been a revolution. Everyone - and I mean everyone - is using AlphaFold, for example. It is a game changer, a true revolution. And everyday I use AI for mundane things, like summarization, transcribing, and language translation. All supremely useful. And there is a ton more. So I never understand the "hype" thing. It deserves to be hyped imo, as it is already become essential.
    - kenjackson 2y ago
      I think there is a group of people that don't want AI to be useful and think that by telling other people that its not useful that these other people will believe them. Unfortunately for them, more and more people are finding value with AI. It literally saved my father-in-law's life. It's become my kid's best school tutor. But there will still be people telling me that it has no value.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    it boggles my mind this is still being written over and over here on HN. like an echochamber everyone like fears AI will replace them or some BS like that. I cannot even begin to tell you how much AI has been useful to me, to my entire team, to my wife, to my daughter and to most of my friends that are in various industries that I personally guided towards using it. on my end, roughly 50% of things that I used to have to do are now fully automated (some agents, some using my help along the way)… in every thread here on HN there will be X number of people posting exactly what you wrote and Y (where Y is much smaller than X) number of people posting “look, this shit is fucking amazing, I do amazing shit with it.” if I was in group X I would stop and think long and hard what I need to do in order to get myself into group Y…

coldtea 2y ago

Apple is so derivative and marketing-type driven now, that it even got into the VR shit, after it had already resulted in nothing for Facebook and others peddling it for years. Given that, there was zero chance that they'd skip AI slop.