It should've been a home run for Apple. ChatGPT starts with zero existing apps, Apple has one of the biggest app ecosystem, and with (Siri) Shortcuts they already have most of the necessary interfaces available for years.
They have your context. OpenAI doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you bought or when you last called your wife, it can’t know your heart rate or your work schedule.
Apple can turn it around.
Great AI is a good model with lots of context. Your model can be the best, but if you need the user to provide the context it’ll never be a great experience.
After working with Claude code for a while now, I’ve become much more aware of how to convey context to a machine, and just how poor some humans are at doing it in conversation.
Your AI product is toast if you need people to make it work.
If Apple doesn't get their act together with the next iOS release, it could be too late.
I also live near a large city and a couple of smaller cities with busy downtown areas. In each of them the main streets are virtually impossible to perform a u-turn on because of the large amount of traffic. Apple Maps will insist on giving directions which involve taking u-turns on these streets. Google Maps will instead route you the easier way around the block instead of insisting on an impossible u-turn which in the end is slower because of the difficulty in actually performing the maneuver.
Also I find the directions from Apple Maps when taking an exit which further splits into multiple exits to be highly confusing. The spoken directions from Google Maps is much better in these circumstances.
Every new release I try Apple Maps again just to see if it has gotten better in these circumstances and every release I am disappointed.
I think it's really annoying and a major reason I have stopped using it even though I was an advocate at first. Apple can't be bothered to invest as much as Google did to have a proper open map system, with a good web version where people/business can post/add data easily. At this point the privacy stick is tiring because we don't get anything from it and they will comply/sell the data the minute they can profit from it anyway (as they have shown).
So, you just end up paying more for a product that is clearly worse and won't become much better because of Apple's ideology and how stingy they are. They generate a lot of cash but are unable to invest it in proper competitive software.
There are many bad things to be said about Google, but at least they manage to serve pretty good software that is open to everyone...