The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language.
The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does not like AI for its own sake or the weirdos who ramble about putting them into a permanent underclass. The user likes messaging their friends and playing music.
To much of this hype cycle has no user in mind.
This isnt unprecedented, its what happened in the dotcom bubble as well. But then that tech started getting used properly as well. So i think its a matter of time before claude code levels of value is avialable to normal users
They lost the plot long ago. They're firmly in extraction mode now: how much value can they get from end-users?
Please elaborate
Reverse dictionary
Stack Overflow clone, except you're guaranteed to get an unreliable answer promptly instead of waiting for a human to give it
OCR, with new and exciting failure modes
Machine translation, with new and exciting failure modes
Endless possibilities for exploiting the stupid and ignorant while destroying the web in the process
Note that only the first two are unalloyed good, and they can be done with embeddings without generative AI.
Isn’t this the proverbial ”faster horse”? Ie let me do exactly what I can do now, in a very slightly different, possibly very slightly more convenient way?
If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a trebuchet, you lose, no matter how fast the trebuchet would technically get them to their destination.
(Arguably the car affords you better control than an unruly horse. Self-driving cars are moving us closer to the horse again. ;))
As UX / UI professional of 17 years I think design is a dying field the above would kill digital UI design quicker. Yet the UX would be less steps / friction to complete tasks which is the harbinger of UX design…less is more.
On a side note I’m just in medical school studying a mid level Concentration. I don’t foresee a LONG term future in digital design and development much anymore.
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to auction off Siri's back end the way Apple does Safari's search bar in iOS?
But this is contingent on the same services not being able to replace Siri and being able to reserve its APIs for Apple's exclusive use, and they have a pretty tenuous grasp on that these days.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/05/ios-27-will-let-you-choose-be...
I’m picturing a combination of on-board facilities and online services from the Apple cloud that Apple product holders could use to flag and filter LLM slop. As a value added prospect, iPhone users who read HN or used TikTok would be seeing clear UI-level indications of when they’re interacting with slop with options to kill it.
In my estimation it would provide platform benefits without losing capabilities, leverage Apples hardware and not advertising positioning, fix critical issues of spam and scams, and let them market a higher calibre of online experience. Also, they could un-eff Siri - “play album X starting at track Y”, come on, it’s 2026.
Even then it would still realistically pick up unintentional commands.
"You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products.
I remember my first meeting I went to at another company that was just a guy talking with a PowerPoint. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have the data or time to ask probing questions. We’re just supposed to take this guy for his word? Crazy
SRI -> SiRI Inc.
[1] https://www.sri.com/75-years-of-innovation/75-years-of-innov...
answer... ditch phone/screen, just have an earpod you talk to.
All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get away with it for a while, but only insofar as hardware prevents advanced use. Once we get that hardware[1] there will only be two types of AI companies: hardware manufacturers, and labs. Just like sync became trivial and ancillary, so will AI inference.
If the signal is clear – if you have observed the same person facing the same problem in the same workflow – then the AI feature deserves its place in the product by automating one step that they hate. The outcome does not necessarily need to be AI-powered. The user simply stops facing that problem anymore.
The Gruber's logic works on the level of the whole product. But there is also a diagnostic implication here – the louder the product sells its AI capabilities, the less the team understands what exactly the product does.
It may well be that the user interface of your "phone", and how you use it, changes over time as we progress toward AGI, but as long as Apple keep to the Job's aesthetic of making well designed products that get out of the way and just "do the thing", they should be fine. Of course Apple will eventually fall, as all companies do, but I don't think the reason for it will be that the "phone" market was rendered obsolete by AI.
Perhaps if phones becomes more of a "pocket assistant" than a device to run discrete apps, then they will becomes harder to differentiate based on software, and more of a generic item rather than a status/luxury one ... who knows? Anyone else have any theories of how Apple may eventually fall?
There is one potential AI risk to Apple, that they are at a disadvantage due to not having their own frontier models and datacenters to run them on, but I think there will always be someone willing to sell them API access, and they will adapt as needed. Good enough AI is only going to get cheaper to train and serve, and Apple not trying to compete in this area may well turn out to have been a great decision, just as Microsoft seem to be doing fine letting OpenAI take all the risk.
It's not going away in the next few years. Which means Apple doesn't have to rush to release an AI product for the sake of it à la Giannandrea.
We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, and the perspective in the daring fireball post aligns exactly with this author’s perspective:
https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-e...
They don't have a social network business because they tried that and failed. [1]
Staying on hold for you. Google Lens on that coat or bag. Warning you in the middle of a text convo with a stranger, if the conversation veers into typical scam patterns. Better text/email spam detection than Apple. Hanging up spoofed calls posing as your bank. Magic Cue. Magic Eraser. Better transcriptions and translations, in far more languages.
And who could forget, a good touchscreen keyboard. Those are real "AI as a feature". Not a better Siri.
> By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”
Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable? I basically think it's just people that want to broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds it takes to hail an Uber. Its like all that "productivity optimization" porn that people spew online to show how focused they are.
I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. This stuff is generally considered "life", not some back breaking drudgery like washing clothes in a stream that I'd like to automate.
These folks like Levy who view this dystopian future as some sort of nirvana (and not because they view a different future, they actually want all this nonsense) can go F themselves. You can also tell how incredibly sheltered these people are because you can see they're rarely interacting with people outside their bubble. For example, a lot of people that open the Uber app make their decision based on data in the app, like "surge pricing, nevermind, I'll just walk" or "this looks expensive, let me try Lyft". You could argue an agent could learn all those rules, but again, these minutia of life are not exactly a nuisance to most people.
It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.
I'd be absolutely thrilled to e.g. not have to interact with the Uber app and all its dark patterns if there were somebody or something I could trust to competently represent my interests.
That said, that's a big if, i.e., whether commercial LLMs or agents will be able to do that, given the overwhelming pressure to just take money from both sides of the transaction and skew the decision.
But if it does happen, I actually see this as a huge potential factor strengthening smaller suppliers directly competing with large platforms. If my agent can independently figure out if a given supplier is trustworthy, whether their terms and conditions are reasonable etc., I'd be much more willing to engage with them outside of a large platform.
If AI allows more people to have such a premium experience, that's a use of technology that makes a lot more sense than all the "AI will take over your job" scaremongering.
Some of this is weird techno delusion. Some of it is because the people describing it do a poor job of explaining how it might work.
If a couple decades ago someone told you that you’d have an always listening device in your pocket to answer your questions from all the world’s information, it would have sounded dumb, and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.
The “agent knows where you’re going and calls a car for you” sounds dystopian as hell if done totally autonomously. But you could also imagine that an agent pops up a message on your watch “hey, you’ve been at dinner for an hour, if you’re winding down I can call you a car in 15 minutes” and suddenly it’s not that absurd.
I agree with Gruber's take, if the seller is Apple.
I think this article is too soft a criticism by half. The iPhone defining the mobile era was not an artefact of the Apple logo being on it. Every bit of Apple's relentless productization went into what features the phone actually had and how they were integrated. This guy, in 2006, would have been telling Apple 'just release a feature phone like BlackBerry does, so you can define the era of feature phones like you did MP3 players'.
I would like to tell it to turn off certain light in a certain room, but unless I get the exact string name of those light correct when I speak, Siri doesn't know what I'm talking about. And it can't do multiple things in a command. I can't say "turn off all the lights in XYZ room" or turn of "this light and this light".
Meanwhile, I can vaguely tell a computer behind my tv to do very complicated things (build me an service that ...) and it can execute on it fairly well. But in apple's "product vision" which I am apparently too dumb to decide for myself what I want, I can't ask for two lights to be turned off at the same time.
Oh that’s silly thinking.
I already have Alexa and Hue lights. Only thing I use voice is „play music/stop music”.
Turning off all lights or on all lights sometimes. Turning on specific lights app. If I spend time to name lights specific names that are quick to pronounce maybe I would use it more.
Silly part is imagine trying to order Lyft on airport when everyone tries to do the same …
Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.
Let's all pretend there was an intentional coherent strategy, and not because Apple's lagged its peers due to its secretive corporate DNA, internal silos, and restrictive publishing policies actively repelling AI talent at a critical time.
No chance. Currently Nvidia’s market cap is higher by about 1T.
"Steve Jobs handling a tough question at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference."
The more invisible AI inference becomes in systems, the more they start feeling more practical.
I personally find it more engaging to have an agent visualize things for me using matplotlib.
The problem is that too many startups are trying to do to OpenAI and Anthropic, what merchants do with commodities in the market.
Seems more driven by profit in mind than by actual value creation.
The final final form factor is probably a pair of glasses (or an implant), but I still think that's pretty far away. Before that can happen, we need computer chips and batteries to become almost microscopically small.
For the foreseeable future—still long term, but much closer than glasses—I think the logical form factor is a smartwatch. For photos, it would have an under-screen front-facing camera, and an outward facing camera on the wrist band. The screen would be a bit larger than today's largest Apple watches, and it would fold out like a folding phone when you need more space.
Even unfolded, the screen would have to be smaller than what we're currently used to on smartphones. However, this would be less important if most interaction was done via AI, just as limited-interaction iPods and Blackberries never commanded massive screens. People who want to watch movies, read longer books, or play games on larger screens could still carry folding tablets in their pockets on some occasions, but the watch would be the central device everyone always has.
Apple, of course, already makes smartwatches, arguably the best ones on the market. But an Apple Watch is very much not the device I'm describing, and I'm not sure if Apple will let it get there. Apple is stuck in the innovator's dilemma, where the iPhone prints so much money they can't afford to cannibalize it. For the moment, the iPhone has been so good that this hasn't caught up to them. I think—and for the sake of innovation, I hope—that this doesn't last forever.
Maybe for certain tasks or certain people. But in general i disagree with that take. The fact that i can stow away my phone into my pocket, not creep out bystanders (they know my camera isn’t recording them, etc), and forget about my phone for a while is a FEATURE.
Yet you've only offered examples of what they _shouldn't_ do with "AI." You've offered no clear ideas on what they should do, only intimated that Apple, by pure osmotic magic, would be better at it than others if they made similar investments.
There's something about language models that causes smart people to wantonly turn their brains off.
That’s the thing; the LLM itself - the chat window - can’t be the whole product for an industry. It’s a technology that you build things with.
Today I wanted to book a public transport ticket in Germany but it was simply too hard to keep copy pasting screenshots from the app to ChatGPT. This seems to be a very easy problem to solve and standardise at the OS level but no one seems to want to do it.
I agree its not a totally different "product" but does require some thought. Apple can't sleep on this.
To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.
Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.
A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.
In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.
But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.
Coding adjacent, but my small town's small businesses have all dramatically improved their websites with LLMs. Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to.
Yes. Code looks intimidating if you aren't used to it (and don't have an IDE). And there are lots of steps between having a file of code and having a hosted website.
But you specified America, so I guess no.
Internet
- made the communication possible, all the information diffusing was only possible because of internet
- all sorts of small interactions and serendipitous communication through social media was due to the internet
- computation and simulation required was possible with the internet
Sometimes things make other things possible in subtle but real ways which are overdetermined. You can't articulate how AI will help a person materially in first order effects. But it will.
Um iMessage?
Quote tweeting a NYTimes post detailing war crimes "As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed for 34 hours. Most people in Gaza had no way to reach the outside world..."
Gruber wrote "F*k around and find out."
Quote tweeting a post by the UN Human Rights account about Israel's flooding of tunnels with saltwater could have severe adverse human rights impacts,
Gruber wrote "One side is pumping salt water into the tunnels. The other side has put innocent civilian women and children hostages in the tunnels. Also: "salt water" has a space when used as a noun"
Quote tweeting a post by a StopAntisemitism page that posted about 'pro-Palesinian agitators showed up to secreteary of Defence Lloyd Austin's home..."
Gruber wrote "These people are surely a lot of fun at parties"
Gruber is a big fan of collective punishment, it seems. But at least he's very specific about the use of grammar.
Looking back, it just reads as sinophobic.
