mpantone

I don't really think the hardware is the roadblock here. It's the software (as usual). If Joe Consumer plugs in a brand new Philips Hue smartbulb into a dumb socket, the smarthome network needs to be able to configure flawlessly. HomeKit adoption isn't going to grow if the pairing procedure is fussy or inconvenient, even if it's a one-time only thing.

Hell, look at Zoom video conferencing. It took off because it was far less fussy than other video conferencing competitors.

Remember that no one wants to get off the couch, walk to some wall-mounted terminal and fidget through a couple of menus just to dim the lights. That makes no sense. Heck, there's a dimmer switch that controls the two main lights in my living room. I can simply reach over with one hand and adjust.

Everything must go through the phone (or maybe smartwatch) because those are the two devices that people gladly carry on their person. There's no logic trying to wean people from their smartphones. PEOPLE LOVE BEING ATTACHED TO THEIR PHONE.

AI isn't a selling point for smartphone hardware (yet) so it's not like any delay will result in less marketshare.

However irresponsibly inept software implementations will erode customer trust. That's the big issue. TRUST IS EARNED. They can't just slice a hundred bucks of the price of the entry level iPhone and get it back.

Apple Intelligence has to be reliable, trustworthy and private. Yes, all three, not just two of them. Just like a personal assistant. If you had a human assistant that was missing one of those three attributes, you'd probably fire them. I certainly would.

And yeah, I'd rather not have a personal assistant until I could hire someone who checked all the boxes.

"Fake it until you make it" is not a real world business plan. That's something Elizabeth Holmes would do.

 

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.

kkqd1337 said:

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

Obviously Patrick Spence.