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Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event
- taylodl 1y agoI think this is the correct approach on a phone. I don't want AI front-and-center. I want it in the background quietly making everything better. To me, that's a much more useful form of AI.
- nathan_douglas 1y agoI have a similar philosophy about home automation. Every few years I geek out and set up a bunch of crap and spend a bunch of money and waste a lot of time, and then it tends to fall apart fairly quickly and I repent of everything... ...except for the motion-activated lighting in our foyer and laundry room. $15, 15 minutes to install, no additional charges, no external services, no security issues, and just works year after year with 100% reliability.
- goodells 1y ago"Any sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting."
- scyzoryk_xyz 1y agoAnd I want it turned the fuck off, quietly not doing anything with my personal shit. I want to reach for my tools when I want to use them.
- bayindirh 1y agoI'll argue that face recognition, event detection and share recommendations are nice features. They are all done locally on your device for the last decade, at least.
- mort96 1y ago[flagged]
- micromacrofoot 1y agothat stuff is also essentially machine learning, just more parameters and better marketing
- mort96 1y agoI don't think it's marketing's primary purpose to be off-putting? Anyway, it's not the same thing: I'm fine with machine learning to give me better image search results, I'm not fine with machine learning to generate "art" or machine learning to generate text. Everyone has collectively agreed to call the latter "AI" rather than machine learning, so the term is a useful distinction.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoit's a misleading distinction that's causing people to spiral out and think they're talking to an actual intelligence and is also being used to bamboozle lawmakers into allowing massive amounts of content theft
- derefr 1y agoYou're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then, as every ML thing has been retroactively rebranded as "AI." Remember the term "smart" as applied to any device or software mode that made ~any assumptions beyond "stay on while trigger is held"? "AI" is the new "smart." Even expert systems, decision trees, and fulltext search are "AI" now.
- mort96 1y ago> You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then Not really, I'm taking the hint. If they call a feature "AI", there's a 99% chance it's empty hype. If they call a feature "machine learning", there may be something useful in there. Notice how Apple, in this event even, uses the term "machine learning" for some features (like some of their image processing stuff) and "AI" for other features. Their usage of the terms more or less matches my line of features I want and features I don't want.
- tartoran 1y agoYeah, the annonying movies IPhone does from my photo library is something I'd love to opt out of. I get that some people love this feature but I don't. And as you say, I could ask the phone to do that for me on request.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoDisable “show featured content” in Photos.
- foogazi 1y agoI love this feature on both Photos and Google Photos
- nerdjon 1y agoI think it is just generally the correct approach. It was not that long ago that ML (outside of research) was often talked about but it being ML was not the focus. The focus was on the actual benefits and what it did. Of course this is going to be spun and turned into a negative, but I basically want ML to be invisible again. The benefits being clear, but the underlying tech no longer mattering.
- Razengan 1y agoActually if Siri ever worked when I really need it, they could finally catch up with their promises made in 2011.
- akomtu 1y agoIndeed, a good AI Snitch runs in background on your phone. The era of intelligent spyware.
- Yeul 1y agoI have a Samsung A55 but I shudder to think that soon the AI crap will trickle down to midrange devices. Samsung is "all in" on AI.
- grey-area 1y agoGood.
- xutopia 1y agoThat's because people don't trust AI that much... and most people don't differentiate between a really cool feature and AI so it's more confusing marketing than anything.
- mdotk 1y agoI think it's more because they're way behind on AI and they literally have nothing to actually tell us.
- kergonath 1y agoThey’re not way behind on AI, they’re way behind on LLMs. Several features they presented depend heavily on AI.
- frizlab 1y agoThat’s not true. There were multiple AI features presented, just very well-known ones like the babel fish AirPods Pro. Nothing fancy, but it’s still AI and it’s useful.
- runako 1y agoAs an Apple user, what are they behind on? What features are other makers shipping that Apple is missing? (Genuinely curious, perhaps there are third-party apps I can use to bridge the gap.)
- kergonath 1y agoThey did talk about ML in their image processing software for their cameras, though. And I don’t think they mentioned AI when talking about their babelfish AirPods, but it’s clearly there, as well.
- Jtsummers 1y agoThey talk about "Apple Intelligence models" running on the phone. They dropped that name for their AI stuff in a few other spots, too.
- kergonath 1y agoYeah. I think they talked about ML for the Watch workout feature as well (or was it the AirPods?) And I think for other features as well but I am not certain and I am not rewatching the whole thing. They’ve been putting AI in a lot of places over the years.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- futureshock 1y agoThis is a non-story. This was a hardware event. Apple is releasing many new AI features as part of iOS 26 which will launch along side the new iPhones. AI is software. And yet, a number of the features are clearly powered by AI models such as camera enhancements, health monitoring and live translation. Also GPU performance continues to increase in the A19, with CPU remaining presumably fairly flat since no numbers were given, so that’s a win for on-device inference.
- russellbeattie 1y agoIf Apple had an insanely great AI feature that truly differentiated itself from their competition, we all know they'd take a lot of time focusing on how their hardware enabled or enhanced that functionality. The expectation is that Apple will eventually launch a revolutionary new product, service or feature based around AI. This is the company that envisioned the Knowledge Navigator in the 80s after all. The story is simply that it hasn't happened yet. That doesn't make it a non-story, simply an obvious one.
- MisterSandman 1y ago> This was a hardware event. So was last year’s, technically, but that didn’t stop apple from making it all about AI.
- pryelluw 1y agoYou’re absolutely correct!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 1y agoIf you've read the Steve Jibs biography, you’d know his obsession with creating the future products. I feel like he’d be obsessively working to combine AI, robotics and battery technology into the classic sci fi android. Instead, modern Apple seems to be innovating essentially nothing unless you count the VR thing and the rumors of an Apple car, which sounds to me much like the Apple Newton.
- nxobject 1y agoI'd disagree: his obsession was with watching everyone fail to create the products of the future, learning from their mistakes, and only then committing to a product strategy (e.g: iPod, iPhone, iPad).
- chasd00 1y agoI feel like they don’t want to get burned the way they did with the AVR/metaverse thing. Those headsets are worthless. Probably a lot of ptsd going on with people thinking how Jobs would have had their ass over it. I suspect they’re being very cautious with “AI”.
- adastra22 1y agoHow did they get burned with AVP?
- chasd00 1y agoLate to a reply but the tech went nowhere. I’m not a financial expert but I don’t think they could have come close to breaking even on that product. I know no one that has it and there hasn’t been an article here talking about it in years (guessing here but I don’t recall seeing one).
- pradn 1y agoApple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs: * Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access. * Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate. * iPhones already have specialized hardware for AI acceleration. I want to be able to tell my phone to a) summarize my finances across all the apps I have b) give me a list of new articles of a certain topic from my magazine/news apps c) combine internet search with on-device files to generate personal reports. All this is possible, but Apple doesn't care to do this. The path not taken is invisible, and no one will criticize them for squandering this opportunity. That's a more subtle drawback with only having two phone operating systems.
- some_random 1y agoI agree completely, it's really unfortunate how AI on apple devices has been going. The message summarization is borderline useless and widely mocked, meanwhile their giant billboard ads for it are largely stupid and uncompelling. Let me choose to give it access to my data if I want to do really useful stuff with on device processing. They've been leaning into the privacy thing, do the stuff that would be creepy if it left my device, generate push notification reminders for stuff I forgot to put in the calendar, or track my location and tell me I'm going to the wrong airport. Suggest birthday gifts for my friends and family, idk. Edit: And add strong controls to limit what it can and cannot access, especially for the creepy stuff.
- pradn 1y agoThey're stuck on the privacy angle, because what it means is you can't call remote services. You'll always have access to more resources at a data-center than a phone. So, while the frontier of what's possible with purely-local models will keep advancing, it'll never exceed what's possible with remote models. People care about extra privacy when the delta in capability is minimal. But people won't allow a massive discrepancy, like the difference between a 8B model and a 700B model.
- esafak 1y agoThis is what I like about Apple. They just use technology judiciously without making a big deal about it, and talk up the product instead. As it should be.
- bni 1y agoGood.
- xela79 1y agothey just casually mentioned they have always been on the forefront of AI.... however that might have been a poor choice of words. If they would have just swapped it with "Machine Learning" and then referring to the ML chip and on device learning & analysis. A Win. just using "AI" as term... they are so on the forefront that they sent your data to ChatGPT, otherwise you would be too ahead of the pack...
- kotaKat 1y agoMaybe some day Apple will realize they need to fire the San Francisco consultant they turned Siri into - offended at any request and absolutely useless to provide you a meaningful answer.
- nikole9696 1y agoLet me know when Siri can do even the most basic things using natural language. It can't even properly answer things like "hey siri, is apple juice already on my shopping list" or answer most questions that require a web search. Summarize it for crying out loud, I asked you because I'm not right next to my screen to click search results. THAT would make me take an upgrade. Until then, I'm just keeping this phone until it goes out of support.