Anticipating new OS, iOS, tvOS updates, but also wonder if any product announcements will come along… Holding off on AirPods Pro for now.., But Father’s Day is coming!
Apple rarely announces new products at WWDC. But I hope they try to right the foundering Apple Intellignce ship.
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Yes, they seem to be slow on the AI game, but I haven’t seen the need, so far, hopefully, they are using extreme caution, making sure it’s right, before actual release.. Any mishaps would be tough to recover from, so better safe than sorry…
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I haven’t seen the need, so far, hopefully, they are using extreme caution, making sure it’s right, before actual release.
There was a time when pundits would accuse Apple of “falling behind”, and then, rather than put out some lame me-too product just to satisfy the pundits, Apple – mainly Steve Jobs, himself – would explain why those things were bad ideas, e.g.
- a touchscreen Mac laptop (people don’t like to divide their attention between hands on keyboard and fingers on screen)
- music rentals (people want to own their own music)
- movies on iPods (viewing movies on the tiny screen would be a bad user experience)
- Netbooks (Apple doesn’t make crap)
In some cases, Apple simply dropped the idea despite news or rumors of development
- The Apple large screen television.
- The Apple Car
Some things did eventually appear, like music rentals and movies. You could make the argument that the iPad is effectively a touchscreen Mac – although it isn’t.
I’m not saying that AI won’t eventually be useful, though I’ve said time and again that I’m skeptical of its uses right now. Rather than kow-tow to pundits, who themselves haven’t come up with a compelling use for AI as far as I have seen, I kind of wish someone at Apple would explain why the current state of AI isn’t compelling enough for Apple to come out with a consumer product, maybe along the lines of
"What are the current well-known use cases for AI? Plain language input, both verbal and typed, seems to be the best case. Grok, OpenAI/ChatGPT, Perplexity – LLMs are very interesting and are an active area of research, yes. Eliza has come of age. But that gives rise to text summarization on the one hand and writing tools on the other. Here at Apple, we wonder whether that’s a can of worms we really want to open, and we ask whether we as humans, as students, as citizens, and as workers should be able to read and write adequately on our own. And let’s not forget, in the slightest, the possibility of students cheating at writing papers or taking exams by using AI. If Apple resides at the intersection of the humanities and technology, it isn’t apparent to us that that means that technology should remove the burden of the arts and letters – by writing and reading for us – rather than help us, with new tools and means of dissemination and new media. A world in which documents are written by AI and subsequently read by AI sounds like a world developed for AI.
“What’s left? Image generation? Same idea. An argument can be made for Microsoft’s Copilot as an aid to application development, and we’ve looked at that. But that’s the intersection of technology with technology, and it is, so far, not a very consumer-facing product. Despite its inclusion in Office, we’ve not seen evidence that it has revolutionized how we write word processing documents or spreadsheets in ways that haven’t happened before…”
A study at The Impact of Microsoft Copilot and Generative AI. indicates that Copilot makes self-reporting workers more productive in the sense of producing documents faster, but the study also indicated the workers self-reported higher quality work, which bothers me, honestly.
Edit: My 2 cents, obviously.
-awlabrador
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I missed the actual WWDC Opening today, but managed to catch up here… At least on the OS, iOS, AppleTV+ segments, once I saw I could jump around in the timeline of the video… Have to wait a bit, but it’s on the way… Tahoe!
Because this is developer conference, software and not hardware conference. They announce special events for hardware.
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The apple car is not a rumor. Apple spend years, money (billions) and energy and they never achieved the traction. They dropped the project because it is a failure.
If you haven’t seen a compelling use case for AI, then you are not looking at the right place. When $GOOGL, $META are saying there are billions of people already using their AI solutions, or 100’s of 1000’s of developers using Claude of Anthropic, or OpenAI just today announced they have hit $10 B revenue run rate, or Perplexity…
Clearly you have no idea of what you are talking about… multi-modal AI is here. If you paid attention to today’s Apple’s announcement you would have realized Apple is still investing and delivering(!?) on physical AI.
Apple is behind in AI. Plain and simple. They still have the biggest ecosystem, toll bridge, and slowly releasing features that will let the developers develop APP’s that will leverage their foundational AI features and they will collect their toll from the ecosystem and App store. However, so far they have failed. Something has to change to make sure $APPL realizes its AI potential. There is a non-trivial probability of Apple failing here also exists.
For now, they have another year or two to get their act together.
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I wrote
Well, maybe not the C-suite, but someone in research at Apple is looking into it:
-awlabrador
The Macification of iPad - finally! (or closer to it anyway):
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Apple’s white paper on the shortcomings of currently-overhyped (IMNSHO) AI — “ The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity” at https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf — is well worth a read and deeply investigates some of the limitations on AI/LLMs that I’ve long suspected and occasionally come across myself.
It’s a long paper, but it looks denser on the page than it actually comes across through reading. i.e. it’s a long but not very difficult read, and you can skip the appendix without losing too much. Like any well-written research paper, the methodology is clearly explained, the conclusions are reasonable explanations of the observations, and the authors acknowledge potential shortcomings.
I strongly recommend the paper, regardless of whether you share my skepticism of AI and claims that Apple is “falling behind in AI”.
However, if you don’t want to spend the time reading — or if you want to watch something in addition to reading — the following YouTube video does a fair job of summarizing the paper, explaining and expanding on the paper, and of summarizing critiques of the paper, so all sides are given fair play.
-awlabrador
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