LLMs are a dead end with clear limitations that won't bring Apple or anyone else to that contextual awareness + common sense that people see in commercials or dream about.

Apple can forget about releasing an "improved" [sic] Siri if it is only as good as the competition's LLM-powered AI chatbot assistants (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, whatever dogchow). And Apple's senior management already knows this which is why they have balked on this so-called "improved" Siri.

Apple needs to do something that differentiates themselves from the rest of the pack, beyond just preserving privacy. That is a super tall task and I bet Apple senior management accepts this challenge.

A second place AI chatbot assistant is garbage because 1st place is still a massive failure 40% of the time. It's easy to laugh off/dismiss obviously stupid AI suggestions like eating rocks or using glue as a pizza topping. The more insidious issue is triaging through answers that are completely wrong that still sound right. That's A.) a waste of time, and B.) a massive hit to user trustworthiness.

Apple knows all of this which is why the much-anticipated "improved Siri" has zero presence at WWDC 2025. Apple senior managers vaguely deflected this to 2026 but that really implies late 2026, like December if we're "lucky". So possibly 2+ years late.

All the while their competitors will be feeding Joe Consumer dogchow.

cpsro said:

Starting at 0:50, whatever processing was done has added awful vertical stripes to his head. Through the rest of the video that I've glanced through, which is front view, the processing hints at trying to do the same. This can't be state of the art.

My assumption is that the video processing budget for the Steve Jobs Archives is rather limited and they weren't inclined to spend top dollar on the industry's best post-production services.

Most likely the original footage was shoved through a cheap or free AI-powered upscaling software like Topaz Video (maybe $99 on sale) or Waifu2x-Extension-GUI (donateware, basic functionality free of charge).

For most of us this is adequate. After all, this is just a video of a talking head not an action film, it's more about what he's saying than the visuals themselves. It's not like there's much going on at a speaker podium at a university commencement ceremony.

However you are free to contact the Steve Jobs Archives and offer to underwrite a higher quality re-release of this video recording.

Sbutler is correct.

Even Steve himself thought of Apple as primarily a software company. Apple has always followed Alan Kay's mantra "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware."

Apple is a software-first company whose software and services run best of their proprietary hardware. Let's not forget that Apple used to charge for the operating system itself (retail box and upgrades) as well as the iWork suite (today the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software is included with the system).

Apple's software focus is plainly evident in Apple's philosophy of simplicity and integration. Remember that the underlying hardware is nearly the same as what's in a PC or competitor's smartphone (CPU, graphics processor, memory, storage, communication chips, audio/video, display, networking, etc.). The differentiation comes from the software.

This was plainly evident on Monday at this year's WWDC where *ZERO* hardware products were announced. All of the focus was on software.

As others have said, most of this functionality has been available for years. My guess is that a native macOS Phone app will make it easier for Apple Intelligence to use all of this data, much more so than a browser-based interface. There are privacy and security implications in having a lot of this done on a server/in the cloud. By having your Mac do this locally, Apple bypasses some of these pitfalls.

It's good to see Apple making telephony more robust for their users. I was an early adopter of GrandCentral back in 2005 and followed the service when it was acquired by Google two years later, eventually rebranded as Google Voice. I still use that GrandCentral-assigned phone number as my primary phone number. Over the years, Google Voice has added new features, they were one of the first to do voicemail to text transcription (it still works pretty poorly for many messages though).

debonbon said:

I will resist updating till I’m forced if the released version looks like this. Horrible choice.

Apple never points a gun at your head and says you need to update software.

NEVER.

You are free to run the original software that your device shipped with.

Moreover there are mitigations in the Accessibility settings that can reduce the amount of "eye candy" that any Apple OS delivers. This is not specific for Apple's "26" operating systems, they have been around for years.