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Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

9to5mac.com

361–370 of 407 posts

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#361

The only “benefit” of Apple Intelligence so far is that it apparently requires a lot of memory, causing Apple to bump up their minimum Mac Mini configurations to 16 GB memory. I’m loving my Mac Mini so far - but that’s entirely due to the M4 chip inside rather than any Apple Intelligence feature. I have not used a single Intelligence feature beyond just trying them out initially and being completely underwhelmed.

You don’t find the LM based spelling and word suggestions much better than the old ones?

No, I have not noticed any difference.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#362
If you make the user "go to the AI" and activate it somehow, you did it wrong.

A good AI/LLM experience is one which meets you where you are already working. Github Copilot is FAR from the best LLM at coding, but it is amazingly useful the way it integrates with my workflow.

On the other hand, Apple's Image Playground, Genmoji, and writing tools all make you visit the AI feature to use it. Same problem with chatGPT. It's absolutely painful to visit a web UI and copy/paste information in and out of the thing to get anything done.

I actually do get a little value from Apple's notification group summaries. AI/LLMs need to be blended into existing places. Bring the AI to the user, don't make the user go to the AI.

To put it another way. AI is not a feature. It can make a feature better. Somehow everyone wants it to be a standalone feature. It is not.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#363
post #22

I disagree, I think the problem with surveys like this is the focus on billing everything as "AI" instead of just what it used to be as a nice feature. A lot of the small things that Apple has introduced, are things that blend in and are not screaming "AI" at you. Which is a good thing. So many of the things that are being pushed by other companies are AI crap that is flashy to show off but either the utility of it i…

I think you are downplaying just how many eggs Tim Cook has put in this basket to pitch to shareholders vs. the perceived low % of apple engineering staff that seems to have been involved in its creation. ATT has been advertising "get the new iPhone with Apple Intelligence" before it was even available for sale! And now it's here, and it's a tiny bump in feature set. A super missed opportunity to rebrand/completely r…

> A super missed opportunity to rebrand/completely revamp Siri, and instead an implicit acceptance of defeat that Siri is still so dumb

I don't understand how Siri is so bad. If you just hooked it up to ChatGPT then Siri would actually be incredibly useful. The only reason why Siri still exists is because iOS doesn't let you replace it.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#364

Notification and mail summaries definitely nice to have, thought I can live without that. What I'd really love to have is Siri superpowered with contextual natural language capabilities and multi-commands in a natural sentence. It _is_ getting there: Siri is better than it used to be and has somewhat of a contextual knowledge so far (compared to zero, before the update) but it's not there yet. It sometimes fails mise…

Siri has gotten better, but it's still so bad. I really hope they continue to iterate, or at least allow apps to replace Siri (never going to happen).

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#366

The ONLY Apple AI feature that was even remotely interesting to me was the photo clean up. Works pretty good for removing objects from a photo, which would be hard to do on a phone otherwise without opening in another app or messing with it on a desktop application

In my experience it's pretty bad at it. The replacements have really bad repeating patterns/textures that aren't even part of the image. 6-year-old Photoshop content-aware fill was so much better on 10-year-old hardware.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#367
post #45

I'm new to iOS - just switched from Android about 10 days ago. I didn't move for Apple Intelligence, but it's a feature I've played with. - Writing tools are neat, but I don't have much use for them. They worked pretty alright. - Image playground is neat, but I haven't and probably won't use it outside of goofing around and showing a buddy. - The new Siri is awful. I don't know the old Siri very well, but it's just n…

> The new Siri is awful. I don't know the old Siri very well, but it's just not good.

Yeah, don't buy into Apple's marketing, Siri is still crap. The only interesting thing that it gained is that it will usually work if you say "no actually I want that on Wednesday."

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#368
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about what is happening in your family. I think your perspective is spot on. VUI (voice user interfaces) will absolutely change the way we interact with computers. After all, talking comes naturally to humans. The digit divide (old people, very young people, illiterate) still exists. And will likely get bigger if VUIs don't get wide spread adoption.

> Sorry to hear about what is happening in your family. Non-sequitur, but I cannot be the only person to find this sort performative empathy odd/out of place in this the context of HID accessiblity discussion.

Non-sequitur, but you seem like someone who says 'virtue-signalling' unironically.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#369
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in order to cure Macular Degeneration we have to develop many different technologies that can be used for power control, it's inevitable as our history shows cyclical nature and behaviors of humans are predefined throughout the history because conceptually the same ideas and thoughts are being encoded and rehashed and decoded by newer generations.

Is this generated by AI? Also how does power control or history cycles have anything to do with curing macular degeneration?

yeah, I was thinking about something and got carried away, apologies

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#370

This is emblematic of the LLM race in general. We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work, and it’s crammed into every Microsoft product. I’m thankful that my iPhone is old enough not to use LLMs. Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race, but that doesn’t actually mean that the technology actually present use-cases which most people need. (Worse are the meeting summaries or emails which ar…

3 years ago, I and many people were using GPT-3 on our iPhones and Apple Watches (see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDB3uIEgU0E&t=36s ). For 3 years I wondered why Apple wouldn't make it a native feature. - Was it because they didn't want to use a third-party AI system? No, because Apple Intelligence uses ChatGPT anyway. - Was it because Apple didn't know how to add AI features to iOS? No, if anything t…

Thinking AI is silly is not the wrong trajectory. AI IS silly. The law of large numbers applies. 99% accuracy means that thousands or millions of queries daily are just wrong. So AI is not suited for large scale deployments.

When I was working with a company delivering a product to thousands (not millions) of customers, we still encountered very rare stuff like data corruption due to memory bit-flips. Quite regularly. Even though that's quite a rare event, much much less than 1% likely.

A 1% failure rate for something deployed to millions of places is utterly abysmal. And no, they will not keep improving indefinitely. They've already hit a wall.

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