One year ago, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, a bold leap into the generative AI arena, aiming to rival the sophisticated chatbots and systems sparked by ChatGPT’s arrival. Promising seamless integration across its ecosystem, the announcement generated buzz about a new era of intuitive, privacy-focused AI for Apple users. However, the rollout has fallen short of expectations, grappling with technical hiccups, limited functionality, and a failure to fully capture the transformative potential of generative AI, leaving many to question whether Apple under CEO Tim Cook can even catch up, much less hope to keep pace in this rapidly evolving landscape.
Apple Intelligence stumbled out of the gate while rivals like OpenAI, Google and Meta have continued to make headway launching new generative-AI models.
“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now,” Apple services chief Eddy Cue said in court last month in one of the government’s antitrust case against Google, adding that AI was a “huge technological shift” that can upend incumbents like Apple.
The Apple Intelligence rollout was rocky. The first features launched in October — tools for rewriting text, a new Siri animation and improved voice, and a tool that generates slideshow movies out of user photos — were underwhelming.
But the biggest stumble for Apple came in early March, when the company said that it was delaying “More personal Siri,” a major improvement to the Siri voice assistant that would integrate it with iPhone apps so it could do things like find details from inside emails and make restaurant reservations.
Apple had been advertising the feature on television as a key reason to buy an iPhone 16, but after delaying the feature until the “coming year,” it pulled the ads from broadcast and YouTube. The company now faces class-action suits from people who claim they were misled into buying a new iPhone.
JPMorgan Chase analyst Samik Chatterjee said in a note this week that investor expectations were set for a “lackluster” WWDC, as the company still needs to bring to market the features it announced last year, versus “addressing the more material issue of lagging behind other large technology companies in relation to advancements in AI.”
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, at this year’s WWDC, Apple can clear as low a bar as we can remember.
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