All of the following things are true:

• All of Apple Intelligence is labelled “beta”.

• People generally know what “beta” means.

• Apple is promoting the hell out of Apple Intelligence to consumers, and its advertisements hide, rather than emphasize, its “beta” quality.

• The promotion of a feature is an implicit encouragement to, you know, actually use it.

• Apple Intelligence has to be opted into, and once enabled, can be turned off.

• Apple Intelligence notification summaries are marked with an icon/glyph, sort of like the “↪︎” Unicode glyph with a few horizontal lines to suggest text encapsulated by the arrow — a clever icon to convey an abstract concept, to be sure.

• The meaning of that icon/glyph is not at all obvious unless you know to look for it, and most users — even those who opted in to Apple Intelligence understanding that it was “beta” and might produce erroneous results — don’t know to look for that particular glyph.

Thus, even to a user well aware of what they opted into, when they get a notification summary from “BBC News” that claims, say, that Luigi Mangione shot himself, it is perfectly reasonable for that user to presume it was the BBC News reporting that Luigi Mangione shot himself.

I’ve been using the Apple Intelligence notification summary feature since it was made available in public release (I don’t use developer or public beta versions of Apple operating systems).

The very first time I saw a summarized notification with that little glyph Apple uses to indicate one as such, I was able to recognize immediately what it meant, that it was indicative of AI editorializing,1 and that I should, thus, take the message with a grain of salt.

Because I am extremely familiar with the iOS interface, new exactly what I was doing in enabling Apple Intelligence, and am very familiar with AI and the way it works to know not to take output at pure face value.

For the average user, I don’t think the interface Apple implemented creates enough of a difference in experience to highlight all of the above obviously.

Apple and the iPhone have spent over 15 years teaching us that the little messages that show up on your lock screen are verbatim notifications from the app indicated by the icon.

Even I, knowing everything I indicated above, have caught myself once or twice because the way summarized notifications are presented is so close to the way normal notifications are presented. This is especially true if quickly glancing a notification on an Apple Watch.

I think a better UX approach would be to lean into the rainbow border that Apple has added to Siri and other Apple Intelligence functions to indicate the use of AI. If any summarized notifications had that obvious multicolored visual cue, I think it would be easier both for users to differentiate and for many of us to raise an eyebrow and say “really?” To those who struggle to do so.

AI is new and, while those of us who use technology to its extreme have become intimately familiar with many of its facets over the last couple years, most non technical users of consumer electronics devices just accept automatic updates and press “yes” when their phone recommends turning a feature on. With something that changes the paradigm so much as do many AI features, the difference should be made more clear.

These are all good features. But let’s say you never heard of LLMs or ChatGPT. And instead, at WWDC this year, without any overarching “Apple Intelligence” marketing umbrella, Apple had simply announced features like a new cool-looking Siri interface, typing rather than talking to Siri, being able to remove unwanted background objects from photos, a “proofreading” feature for the standard text system that extends and improves the years-old but (IMO) kinda lame grammar-checking feature on MacOS, and brings it to iOS too? Those would seem like totally normal features Apple might add this year. But not tentpole features. These Apple Intelligence features strike me as nothing more than the sort of nice little improvements Apple makes across its OSes every year.

Apple reiterated throughout last week’s “It’s Glowtime” keynote, and now in its advertising for the iPhone 16 lineup, that these are the first iPhones “built for Apple Intelligence from the ground up”. I’m not buying that. These are simply the second generation of iPhone models with enough RAM to run on-device LLMs. LLMs are breakthrough technology. But they’re breakthroughs at the implementation level. The technology is fascinating and important, but so are things like the Swift programming language. I spent the first half of my time testing the iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.0 and the second half running 18.1 with Apple Intelligence. A few things got a little nicer. That’s it.

I might be underselling how impossible the Clean Up feature would be without LLMs. I am very likely underselling how valuable the new writing tools might prove to people trying to write in a second language, or who simply aren’t capable of expressing themselves well in their first language. But like I said, they’re all good features. I just don’t see them as combining to form the collective tentpole that Apple is marketing “Apple Intelligence” as. I get it that from Apple’s perspective, engineering-wise, it’s like adding an entire platform to the existing OS. It’s a massive engineering effort and the on-device execution constraints are onerous. But from a user’s perspective, they’re just ... features. When’s the last year Apple has not added cool new features along the scope of these?

Apple’s just riding — and now, through the impressive might of its own advertising and marketing, contributing to — the AI hype wave, and I find that a little eye-roll inducing. It would have been cooler, in an understated breathe-on-your-fingernails-and-polish-them-on-your-shirt kind of way, if Apple had simply added these same new features across their OSes without the marketing emphasis being on the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella. If not for the AI hype wave the industry is currently caught in, this emphasis on which features are part of “Apple Intelligence” would seem as strange as Apple emphasizing, in advertisements, which apps are now built using SwiftUI.

If the iPhone 16 lineup was “built from the ground up” with a purpose in mind, it’s to serve as the best prosumer cameras ever made. Not to create cartoon images of a dog blowing out candles on a birthday cake. The new lineup of iPhones 16 are amazing devices. The non-pro iPhone 16 and 16 Plus arguably offer the best value-per-dollar of any iPhones Apple has ever made. This emphasis on Apple Intelligence distracts from that.

The problem isn’t that Apple is marketing Apple Intelligence a few weeks before it’s actually going to ship. It’s that few of these features are among the coolest or most interesting things about the new iPhone 16 lineup, and none are unique advantages that only Apple has the ability or inclination to offer.⁷ Every phone on the market will soon be able to generate impersonal saccharine passages of text and uncanny-valley images via LLMs. Only Apple has the talent and passion to create something as innovative and genuinely useful as Camera Control. 

I can’t agree more with Gruber’s take. My issue with “AI” (a term which, applied today, seems to refer exclusively to a specific class of generative models) is not the fact that it seems useless or fails to offer a few exciting new ways to interact with our devices, it’s the lack of a “breakthrough effect.”

As someone who has studied and implemented machine learning since long before the 2022 ChatGPT-driven AI hype wave began, my propensity to be unimpressed should be taken into account. That said, I have yet to experience a feature or use case for generative models that has me thinking “This. This is the future.”

Good features, to be sure. I like the idea of smarter Siri. I love the idea of integrating App Intents with AI to create more seamless application interaction and make our own devices smarter. But is any of this outside of the expected progression? Had Apple shipped Jarvis, straight out of Iron Man, then that would be groundbreaking. As it is, they’ve shipped some modest and much overdue updates to their virtual assistant that take advantage of a new paradigm for machine learning.

Gruber makes a great contrast with Camera Control - a feature that I agree is much more Apple and, personally, way more intersecting. I have the 15 Pro and don’t plan to upgrade. I considered it for Camera Control. Even if my phone were not on the Apple Intelligence list, I would not have considered it for those features. Maybe I’ll change my mind after they ship.

Another contrast: Apple Intelligence vs. Apple Vision Pro.

The minute I first used Vision Pro, it became obvious to me that this was something truly special. Computing with floating screens, 3D graphics placed specially, and doing everything with hand gestures and voice commands isn’t “like sci-fi;” it is sci-fi.

Marshaling the hardware, engineering, and software expertise, not to mention the creativity and pure momentum that a multi-trillion dollar company can bring to bear required to create a product like Vision Pro is truly something only Apple could have achieved. Everything else would have seen corners cut or limitations put in place that strike at the very heart of what they sought to accomplish - just look at every other VR/AR platform on the market.1

If I were to bet right now on what concept (forget product lines for a moment) is going to drive the next wave of true sustained growth for Apple, my money would be on spacial computing. The value of the technology for entertainment alone is breathtaking in how untapped it is. Imagine the money to be made selling sideline tickets to the Super Bowl or the potential for full-on movies produced to the level (or beyond that) of Apple Immersive Video.

Meanwhile, AI can write emails for me. I know which gets me more excited - and I know what people will spend more money on.

The latter is often cast in a negative light: “stop reacting and start acting,” “how to take back control over your time,” etc. It is well known that people who truly have control over their time only ever take planned and deliberate action. Reaction at the behest of external pressures is the sad domain of the delegate who has yet to attain true agency over her life.

While this concept emerges - I believe - from a grain of good intention, as usual the “optimizers” have scoped themselves out of reality.

Why?

Because there has never and will never be a time when one can totally eliminate the need to react, when one can gain complete and certain unobstructed control over all of one’s time.

It Happens to the Best of Us

Allow me to present a simple example: what would you do if a water pipe in your home burst right now?

Emergency repairs, cleanup, dealing with your insurance company, landlord, or both, rescheduling meetings and cancelling plans, and easily twenty plus hours out of your next 1-4 weeks (if you’re lucky) would be the order of the day.

No matter how well planned that particular week was, no matter how much “control” you have over your meeting schedule, inbox, or daily routine, you would need to shift into react mode.

And this is the point. Crises of varying shape and size will emerge from time to time. Pretending that they will not or that we can somehow optimize our lives in a manner such that they will not impact us is folly.

So, rather than seeking to eliminate by draconian control - control which I hope the above has convinced you is ultimately not possible - seek to understand and anticipate.

Know Your Risk Factors

Everybody’s life carries different factors which increase or decrease one’s likelihood of an event occurring which requires some kind of drop-everything reaction.

When you acknowledge and (to the degree you can) plan for and anticipate the need for reaction time in your day-to-day and week-to-week, you take back actual control.

Do you have kids or aging parents? Clients? To what degree do you set the terms of your own work? Does spring usually bring a new round of unexpected home maintenance? Does work have a busy season?

The answers to these questions and others like it (which only you know to ask) drive how much you need to balance and plan for reaction vs. action in your day.

For example, I know that on any given day I’ll need to set aside about two hours for unplanned work.

A client will ask for something new, a colleague will need something from me that only I can support, an HR issue will pop up that needs immediate fixing, or my refrigerator will stop working.

This isn’t steady, of course. There will be days when nothing unexpected happens and there will be days when something completely explodes and I’m occupied for hours. Overall, two hours a day is a reasonable expectation for me.

By knowing this, anticipating this, and not resenting this, I can plan.

I can allocate only about eight hours of work into my daily planning (I generally plan to work about ten hours each day - I realize others do things differently), leave gaps in my meeting schedule, and otherwise pre-accommodate for a fire the shape of which I cannot predict, but about the existence of which I am quite certain.

Control?

Nobody can honestly say they have 100% control over their time.

The more resources somebody has, the more likely they have a higher degree of control and agency. At the end of the day, however, something will always stop even the most well-equipped person.

So know your risk profile, your threat model for what might get in the way of a well-planned day or week, and plan it in.

This will vary for everyone. Some people’s work is more resilient and predictable, some people have PAs to take care of personal issues that pop up though have 24/7 jobs. There exists no one-size-fits-all approach. What does apply universally is the need to be aware of what impacts you and accommodate for it in your planning

To me, it comes down to intentionality. You can accept, intentionally, that there are times when you will be forced to react to a situation without giving up agency over your work or your non-work life.

Those who claim that you must have control over every minute of your day to maintain agency are selling a bill of goods that simply does not exist.

As I sat in my living room, transformed for a moment into a lakeside outdoor movie theatre with a 100 foot screen, I realized something else.

In my previous home, I had set up the full suite of smart devices: speakers, door lock, thermostats, etc. Most importantly and impactful on a daily basis: lights. I could turn any light in the house on or off from a device or by calling out to one of the Siri orbs I had in each room.

Since moving last autumn, I’ve missed the lights the most. It’s less the “tremendous effort of needing to get up and press a light switch” and more that a subtle shift had to happen in how I thought. Remembering to turn the lights off downstairs, getting up to “set” the room up for a movie, etc.

That thing I realized while demoing the Vision Pro’s movie capabilities: I hadn’t turned off the lights. My living room was as brightly lit as it had been when I was preparing dinner a few hours previously.

And it didn’t matter, because the device had transported me to a darkened movie theatre.

It’s not just the pure VR experiences, too. When viewing photos or focusing on things in certain apps, the device automatically “darkens” the space around you. It’s as if you dimmed the lights in your room, except you didn’t touch them.

Augmented reality is leapfrogging our need to control physical spaces.

I’ve already seen examples online of people placing a “TV” on an empty wall using the device, or hanging “art” around their workspace. I recall school dorm rooms when students, disinterested in purchasing full sized posters (let alone having anything framed) would simply print out art they liked on the library’s colored printers and tape the images to the wall. We’ve reached the next step.

As the technology we’re talking about here gets better, I believe it will fundamentally change the way we think about physical spaces. Same way that the modern personal computer completely amended communication, data management, filing, etc. (I was recently at an art museum that featured a desk from the 1700s. The sheer amount of storage space for “documents” one would need on a daily basis was staggering. All obsolete now.”

It is not out of the question that this will have a fundamental and real impact on almost every aspect of life just as computers, and just as mobile devices have already had.

I believe, as more people experienced this, more people will begin to understand quite how much things are about to change. I understand why Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are pushing so hard on this technology. (I also think that Zuckerberg has access to prototypes in Meta labs that are way, way better than what they are shipping right now).

Truly a remarkable frontier. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

Recently, and for the first time in many years, I had to endure the car dealership purchasing experience. There are exactly two car dealers within any reasonable driving distance of where I live, and one of them was a brand that I happen to own and had a good experience with. The first thing I said to the salesperson at the dealerhsip was that I cared primarily about the reliability of the service center and the fact that if I purchased a vehicle from their brand, I would not need to drive one hour plus for any maintenance needs.

In that moment, what the salesperson should have done was stand up walk me over to the service department, introduce me to the maintenance manager, and ensure I was fully satisfied with their service process, offerings, and levels.

The pitch should have been about the service, because that was what I said I valued.

Instead, he continued to talk me through all the really cool features of a Chevy Traverse. (Beyond “drives in snow” and “pairs with iPhone,” I really didn’t care).

This experience mirrors a common pitfall in professional services. As service providers, we often focus on what costs us money, where we dedicate our project efforts, and what we believe constitutes our greatest value-add. We forget that our clients rarely care about the realities of our business at the expense of their own.

It’s a salient lesson: listen to your customers. It’s not a hard thing to say, though far more challenging to do in reality.

I say proposal. As Gruber writes:

I’ve emphasized throughout this piece the word proposals. That’s key, because no one, including Apple, knows whether the European Commission is going to find any or all of them compliant with the DMA. Apple has met with EC representatives dozens of times across several years regarding the DMA, but the way the EC works is that (1) they pass laws; (2) companies do all the work to attempt compliance with those laws; and only then (3) does the EC decide whether they comply. Companies like Apple don’t get to run ideas past the EC and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. They have to build them, then find out.

Which brings me back to my lede, and Sebastiaan de With’s quip that he couldn’t tell if a gripe about “overly powerful, rent-seeking gatekeepers” was about Apple, or about the EU.

The delicious irony in Apple’s not knowing if these massive, complicated proposals will be deemed DMA-compliant is that their dealings with the European Commission sound exactly like App Store developers’ dealings with Apple. Do all the work to build it first, and only then find out if it passes muster with largely inscrutable rules interpreted by faceless bureaucrats.

Irony indeed.

Apple, recognized for its commitment to user privacy and revenue generation through exceptional products, leverages control over the App Store to extend privacy protections to third-party apps, albeit to a certain degree. However, certain applications, such as surveillance and “parental control” apps impacting device functionality without user knowledge, are prohibited. Apple’s App Store rules also exert some restraint on companies like Facebook, engaged in collecting and selling user data.

Consider a scenario where app sideloading is off by default, yet the only way to install Facebook is to sideload it, potentially circumventing privacy protections. Similarly, envision educational institutions or employers mandating individuals to sideload invasive applications that would otherwise be disallowed on an iPhone. The mere existence of this option could coerce certain users, for various reasons, into compromising the security and privacy of their devices.

Amidst this, the argument that Apple creates an anticompetitive environment is underscored by the dominance of Android in Europe’s mobile operating system market, where sideloading has been enabled since inception. Critics argue that the EU’s move is not a measure to protect consumers but a result of technically illiterate lawmakers succumbing to simplistic anti-corporation sentiments without delving into the intricacies of the situation.

Many developers emphasize the dependence of their businesses on access to app stores guarded by Apple, Google, and others. However, the proposed measures, which could force companies to reduce security and privacy, are deemed far from a reasonable solution to addressing business risks in the industry.

I think so. And not in the way VR and AR have historically been presented.

The counter argument is very easy to articulate: do people really want to spend substantial time in a completely or even partially virtual world? The metaverse looks like an awful place to spend five minutes let alone hours at a time. And so on.

The use cases and demos from the likes of Meta have been lacking in exactly the ways which tend to push “normal user” opinion away from new platforms, including those that end up being successful in the long run.

The technical limitations of the hardware, priced to be affordable (Meta has sold close to 20 million of their Quest headsets) are holding back software that is itself still unimaginative and unsophisticated.

The issue: a disconnect between companies and their customers.

The engineers and leaders who sit at the forefront of hardware and software development for these new devices make the mistake of getting excited about innovation for innovation’s sake. They have seen the technology built from below the ground up so even the current state of the technology is worth celebrating to them.

They’ve fallen into the trap of mistaking what they value (the sheer innovation they’ve pulled off) with what their customers value (a good user experience).

People will not make the move from traditional devices to spatial computers (Apple’s term for AR/VR devices, which I quite like) until the latter provide not just an equivalent experience but a better one.

Make that logical leap and a spatial computing future is less difficult to make out.

We already stare at illuminated rectangles of various sizes throughout our day, using them for work, entertainment, and personal connection.

Today, doing the same on a spatial computer is clunky. You need to put on a pair of heavy goggles with short battery life. The software and interfaces usually fall short of what we expect from our phones, tablets, and laptops, and nobody else is using them so you are the odd one out.

(Slight aside, I am curious about how many of those drawbacks Apple’s Vision Pro skates past – at the obvious new drawback of price).

Imagine, for a moment, that putting on a pair of “AR goggles” is as easy as putting on a pair of glasses. That the potential of spatial operating systems are realized, expanding your workspace, canvas, or FaceTime call beyond the current bounds of the size of the rectangle you happen to be using at the moment. 

The first personal computers were a pain. The first cell phone was a $4,000 brick. These things get better. Early adopters will use the first iterations and five or ten years down the road, we’ll wonder how we got on without them.

A closing thought: I like looking to science fiction and fantasy when considering paths of innovation. It doesn’t always work given our imaginations are often limited by experience (as Ford said, people would have asked for faster horses, not the Model T). If something shows up often enough in our fiction, however, it could be considered to sit on humanity’s wish list. What’s the last futuristic movie you watched that doesn’t feature holographic displays, communication, or workspaces? 

Spatial computing is part of the future. Whether our most recent attempt at it gets us to that future remains to be seen.

There is another more important concept here:  Survivorship bias.

(Insert the famous pictures of the bombers and their bullet hole pattern)

It is very easy to study successful people, successful companies, and based on commonalities alone, attempts to draw conclusions about causality.

These analyses generally ignore three important things:

1)  Believing the Narrator

While it is all well and fun to ask people “to what do you owe your success.”  There is very little value in the exercise.  Without empirical evidence that the individual being asked has participated in a thorough analysis of their own personal strengths and weaknesses, their own failures and their own successes, there is no guarantee that their answers at the question will be at all accurate.

2)  Statistical Rigor

Just because you can empirically prove that a successful group of people or companies always do one specific thing, you still need to disapprove the statement that unsuccessful people or companies do those same things.  I see this mistake made often in “studies” that claim to “have analyzed the common traits among X-group of successful Y” only to fail to demonstrate that those highlighted characteristics only exist (or exist with statistically significant difference in frequency) in the group that they are analyzing.

3)  Luck

Very, very few entrepreneurs, media sensations, professional sports players, and other extraordinarily successful individuals like to admit it:  Luck always plays a factor in success.  Admitting it does not diminish your accomplishments nor give others the right to diminish them.  However, many, many (if not all) success stories contain a fair bit of being in the right place at the right time in addition to rigor, discipline, and immeasurable amount of hard work.  Success brings both of these into play.

My friend, Dr. Param Dedhia uses this phrase a lot:  “A few things done right.”  I like this much more than “habits of successful _____.”  We are not claiming to be following in exactly the footsteps of someone else nor are we claiming success by emulation.  We are simply establishing a set of habits, actions, and skills that we are committing to do consistently, correctly, and for our own benefit.

Furthermore, these things need to be up to each person, each organization and will certainly vary based on the situation.  (Though, if you are looking for a few good things to do right as an individual, I highly suggest you check out more of Dr. Param’s content).