chasm

That said, the iPhone 16e was brought out as an inducement for iPhone 10/11/12 users to upgrade, and on that front it should be a big success, so people with the most recent Apple TV box aren't likely to be blown away by the next one -- but people with older models are likely to upgrade when the new one comes out.

What you Cana-DO (lol) is put off upgrading your present equipment for a while. I am lucky, I bought an iPhone 16 Pro just before all this nonsense started. I am hopeful that a resolution to the standoff will be reached before the Orange Menace is out of office, because I'd like to upgrade my Mac and iPad, but they still work fine and receive the latest updates for a few years yet, so I can wait it out if I have to.

Likewise, the M4's incredible single-core performance -- which is what most apps prioritize -- is again well above any rivals. That said, AMD and Intel tend to perform better when you're using apps that need the best multi-core performance, but at a high "price" in terms of energy and battery cost, as well as having to run much hotter.

I don't have access to any "Ultra" M-series chips nor any need for them myself, but the reading I've done suggests that the M3 Ultra beats the best Intel and AMD have to offer by significant double-digits overall on multi-core. That's really pretty incredible, particularly when you remember that M-chips didn't exist in the market in 2019.

Hard to imagine what the NEXT five years will bring us. If you'd told me that Apple would someday be the innovation leader in the chip industry a few years back, I'd have laughed.

FWIW, so far I've found what features ARE present in Apple Intelligence now are quite good. Genmoji and Image Generator do exactly what they say on the tin, though I will not likely have any use for them -- but they exist, and work completely as advertised.

The Writing Tools are so far EXCELLENT, and in an age of decreasing literacy are more needed than any other feature (apart from Siri upgrades). I absolutely LOVE the proofreading tool and find the rewriting tools very high-quality when needed (with me personally, making things more concise is sometimes very useful).

Siri is a little better than it was previously, but as acknowledged in the article is far behind what was promised. As near as I can tell, this is the only part of what was promised in Apple Intelligence that hasn't already been delivered, and to be fair it's the big marquee feature. I get that that's disappointing, but to be entirely fair it was ALWAYS going to have be an incremental-over-time upgrade as Apple responded to user feedback.

I'm not trying to paper over the fact that they missed their own deadline on the Siri improvements, but I think there's a lot of hope for it being mostly complete by the end of this year.

It's important to remember that other AI engines can develop much faster because they don't have those silly privacy concerns -- indeed, they collect and market tons of data about what you request -- and they don't seem too concerned about the ratio of misinformation/"hallucinations" they put out compared to accurate info. Anything 50 percent right is "good enough" for Apple's competitors, but isn't good enough for Apple (and we hold them to a very high double standard on stuff like this).

In these areas, I'm okay with Apple being slower but getting it right rather than faster and "experimenting" on me, or selling my data. Unlike many (especially on Reddit I notice), I can be patient when I think the reward will be worth it.