I love my iPhone. I have the 14 Pro and its fantastic. Of course I’m not alone here. The iPhone is one of the most successful products in history, and Apple’s obsession with detail is legendary.
With the emergence of Chat GPT and generative AI, however, the functionality bar has been raised considerably. Just download the Chat GPT app on your iPhone and you’ll immediately see how apps like Siri and Alexa are pretty much obsolete.
Apple hasn’t been a leader in generative AI, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that we didn’t hear much from Apple about adding this technology to the iPhone for a while. Apple doesn’t try to be first. The company takes its time and focuses on quality. That said, Apple watchers were certianly anxious to see Apple dive into the generative AI pool.
So when Apple announced Apple Intelligence last year, the news cause quite a stir and certainly made consumers like me excited about how cool the new iPhone could be with AI features built in.
Needless to say, I’m quite happy that I delayed purchasing a new iPhone. It seemed pretty obvious at the time that Apple was rushing out their announcement to appease the market, and that we had to see just how much the new phone and AI features would live up to the hype. New flash – it didn’t come close.
Apple has a reputation for for polished, seamless product launches, but instead we’ve seen the rocky rollout of Apple Intelligence. Features promised with the iOS 18 update, such as advanced Siri capabilities or on-device AI processing, have been pushed back. Some are not expected until later in 2025 or beyond! Some are trying to downplay this, but this is nothing short of a disaster for Apple.
Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explain these issues well in the latest episode of Hard Fork, one of the best tech podcasts out there. Newton focuses on the challenges of LLM models handling specific tasks and intgrating that with Apple’s hardware. They also have some fun mocking the summarization features for text messages.
Meanwhile, Amazon has announced an Alexa update which makes Apple look even worse here with all of the issues surrounding Siri. Now we’ll have to see just how good the new Alexa can be, and I’m skeptical when it comes to issues like privacy. Still, Apple’s dominance is now threatened a bit with this debacle.
For now, as I mentioned about, you can use AI voice apps on your phone. The promise of a soup-to-nuts Apple AI solution on your phone may be years away.
