mpantone

By now it's clear that Apple Intelligence (and other AI) isn't really driving smartphone hardware sales. There was no big pop in sales when the Apple Intelligence capable iPhone 16 family debuted. So a slow rollout of Apple Intelligence features likely won't impact iPhone sales greatly.

At least in early 2025 consumer-facing artificial intelligence (in general, not just Apple's offering) is still essentially alpha software. Even Apple labels Apple Intelligence with a "Beta" badge but it's barely that (look at the news headlines summary debacle).

Clearly you don't need Apple Intelligence for AI assisted writing tools, the third party AI offerings are perfectly capable of that.

It's worth noting that Mac sales aren't really affected by Apple Intelligence either; the macOS implementation trails the iOS implementation.

Here are the things that consumers prioritize in smartphones: cameras, display, battery life, and price. It's not rocket science. Not peak download speeds on mmWave 5G networks. Not how many polygons it can paint on the screen, not how many TFlops of calculations, not Geekbench scores.

I still believe that AI has great potential in the enterprise market and I know it has been used by some very large corporations over several years now. But a context-aware AI chatbot assistant is still years away based on my experiences with 7-8 chatbots. Those tools have way too many mistakes to make them trustworthy so the user ends up spending a lot more time double or triple checking their output. These chatbots aren't trustworthy. They will make up falsehoods and pass them off as fact without any sense of remorse or hesitation.

One piss poor tendency that AI designers have programmed into models is the inability for an AI assistant to understand when a question is beyond its capabilities. Trust is earned and a lot of LLM-powered AI chatbot assistants squander some of that trust every time they hallucinate or shovel out some B.S. as an answer.

Sure, the engineers say "we can fix that" but what they can't fix is the loss of trust. Some of them are belatedly understanding this and now adding more and more boilerplate to answers saying "okay, we might be wrong so please double check the answer." That's right, consumers are being asked to do debugging for piss poor LLMs. But for some of us, it's already too late. That trust ship sailed months ago.

I think a handful of Apple executives are realizing this. Half-assed AI will ultimately be more damaging than a delayed version of something actually useful and trustworthy.

My guess is within five years, 75% of these AI companies will have disappeared from the landscape. Some of the technology will likely be absorbed by some of the giants for internal use on proprietary tasks. But a large number of these consumer-facing AI services will be laughable memories.

And in five years a lot of AI engineers will be changing careers because they won't get hired by another company. AI will be writing most of the code. The people who get AI right won't want to hire the people who got it wrong. This is a critical time for Apple. They have to figure out if the right person is driving the stagecoach right now. They can't afford to keep passing the reins over to someone else or it'll end up like Project Titan (Apple Car).

Today's Siri is the result of years of neglect by Apple. They probably tried to bolt on some AI capabilities to Siri which is like putting lipstick on a pig. And then they belatedly realized that they were looking at a pig with lipstick.

Now they realize that they need to rewrite Siri from scratch, a decision they should have made 3-4 years ago. Well, at least AI has come far enough where a lot of the coding can be done with AI and Apple certainly has enough cash to get enough GPUs for such an undertaking.

My belief is that many of these AI companies have blinders on and are currently following narrow paths in terms of LLM development that will eventually lead to an end of the road.

Time will bear witness to these misguided decisions. Apple really needs to deliver something stunning at WWDC this year. If they can't, they should consider shipping versions of iOS and macOS that have zero Apple Intelligence features. Just cut out all that resource-hogging code.

I will say this: my iPhone 12 mini running iOS 17.7.2 runs faster than a newly acquired iPhone 16 running iOS 18.3.2. For this reason, I have balked on making the iPhone 16 my primary phone. I'm sticking with the 12 mini for the time being. Right now, I view iOS 18 as a downgrade from iOS 17.

macplusplus said:

More personalized Siri... Easy to utter, extremely hard to conceive and implement. The biggest drawback of current LLMs is their lack of "context retention". Ask any of the most powerful LLMs they will list that among their limitations. Even in a single session they have difficulty on maintaining an established response pattern in repetitive tasks. 

In using various LLM AI chatbots over the past year or so, I've noticed some glaring holes.

LLM-powered AI chatbots have no common sense, no artistic taste, no situational awareness (which includes context retention).

A week before the Super Bowl I asked seven chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B) "What time is the Super Bowl kickoff?"

Not a single chatbot was able to answer this question correctly. They all pulled up previous Super Bowl historical data and many still provided fuzzy, long winded answers.

That's a complete lack of both common sense and situational awareness. A normal human being (like a schoolkid or intern or the guy sitting next to you  at the DMV) would assume that I was asking about the upcoming event.

There are other trial questions I've asked AI chatbots that have failed laughably. So you really, Really, REALLY need to be super specific about how you frame and write a question because LLM powered AI chatbots are dumb as rocks. There's really no intelligence behind it, it's just a fancy probability calculator.

Asking 6-7 chatbots the same question and getting multiple wrong answers takes way more effort than using a standard Internet search engine plus your own brain and common sense to figure out what's B.S. and what's legit. And even if 1-2 chatbots gave the right answer, you'd still have to go back and verify the accuracy.

These work great for topics that are mathematics and engineering oriented but for many ordinary topics, they are a complete waste of time here in early 2025. Another glaring shortcoming of LLM AI is its apparent inability to identify junkmail. I look through my junkmail folder several times a day and 99% of the bogus messages can be identified just by glancing at the subject line. No e-mail provider has shown any inclination at using AI to permanently and automatically deleting junkmail because no AI operator can trust LLMs to get things right.

So even with my very modest cognitive capabilities I'm much better than an LLM in identifying spam.

Someday they will get better but the notion that AGI is a year or two away is pretty ludicrous. I think it's more AI company CEOs trying to hype up their capabilities to get more funding.

Sure, AI is great for answering math questions but I'm not in school and I don't have any math questions to ask.

Apple needs to deliver an Apple Intelligence service that is better than their AI competitors. Just providing something comparable is a disservice to their users. It's possible that they might have realized that they are incapable of doing just that in 2025.

9secondkox2 said:

If you’re not a studio or a streaming pioneer, then you’ll just get killed.

Sonos should just stick with what they are good at. They don’t have the ecosystem to support something like this. 

Yes, even Google/YouTube knows that creating original content is very challenging so YouTube is focused on being the hosting site not the content creator. Amazon has made more investments (like buying MGM) into owning and creating content.

Sonos does not that fat checkbook like Amazon though. Even streaming pioneer Netflix struggles mightily to compete in offering original content.

For most content television viewers are notoriously fickle.

I think Apple is starting to understand this and thus divert more focus into offerings like sports leagues (MLS in particular) because sports has an established and dedicated fan base and television audience. Soccer (a.k.a. football elsewhere) has larger worldwide audience anyhow than some niche drama series.

kkqd1337 said:

Good lord. Who in Sonos thought a video streaming service was a good idea?!

Obviously Patrick Spence.