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

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

#41

We have a family friend who is blind and a programmer. It's interesting to hear his perspective. His hope and expectation are that it will greatly increase usability. I've been thrown into the usability deep end due to my wife also losing her sight due to an autoimmune disorder, and my dad losing his sight due to Macular Degeneration. Honestly, it sucks, and I mean like rage quitting, phone throwing sucks. (Try it. T…

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.

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

#42

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…

What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…

LLMs are a tool though, so it benefits getting in early and gaining experience using the tool. Companies need to either train up people using a tool, or buy that expertise with the tool. Not to mention all the LLM adjacent tools as well. It's a big, messy, wide field of new software things at this point.

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

#43
most AI products haven't been integrated to the point where they can actually be useful (largely because they still completely fuck things up and no one trusts them) — I don't want AI to write words for me, I want it to perform the middling multi-app tasks for me.

Not "write this text for me" but "put together a kids music playlist and start it when I connect to carplay" or "take the last few photos of the kids and send them to my mom's photo frame", "respond to all political texts from unknown numbers with STOP", "write a bash script that does XYZ so I don't have to manually workaround this dodgy hard drive issue every time my computer restarts"

the promise was personal assistants, but they're still mostly chat bots

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

#44
post #2

Apple has tons of user engagement data. You would think they would have a heatmap showing them where their customers are spending a lot of time trying to accomplish a task. I would focus Apple Intelligence, amongst other tools, to reduce the time needed to accomplish that task. If I were the PO, that's how I'd proceed. I'd want my customers to be able to reduce the time they're spending using the phone and yet gettin…

> Apple has tons of user engagement data.

I suspect they don't have as much as you'd imagine. Stronger privacy means they have less data, and the data they have is less useful, and their legal teams will restrict things the data can be used for.

I think that's why Apple Intelligence is bad. They built it on mostly synthetic data.

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

#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 not good. I had to ask it something like five times what time one of yesterday's football games was going to be.

- Visual intelligence isn't even a thing. I can't believe they're advertising it like it's interesting. It's just asking ChatGPT about an image (which the ChatGPT app already supports) or using Google Lens (which the Google app supports).

What I am impressed by is how much gets run on device. About half of the writing tools are fully on device and the image playground was running entirely on device. That was very neat to me. Tested by turning of all data connection and seeing what was unavailable (ran into this with writing tools).

I'm still super hopeful for Siri to use my personal context. I think that one is set for March 2025 in the US. If they can pull that off, that will be the most valuable personal use case of AI for me so far. If I can just ask "When does my flight leave?" and it can immediately know I'm talking about my flight next week to visit family for the holidays and either use the email or my calendar to pull it, that's just incredibly neat to me.

Other than that, I've been enjoying the iPhone and some of their other machine learning features that have been around before Apple Intelligence. Searching in the Photos app is blowing my mind. I think Google Photos would do that too if I had backed up my images, but have this on device on the iPhone is just insane. I can't believe all of y'all have had this for years.

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

#46

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…

What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…

Gotta check the “Does your product have AI” on the Gartner Magic Quadrant surgery.

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

#47
Recently upgraded my iPhone 11 to 16 (mostly because battery was not great anymore). I've turned off all of the gen AI stuff and enjoy the longer battery life and a better camera. I'm not an gen AI skeptic - I use it in other contexts (e.g. CoPilot, chatGPT). I just don't find Apple's current AI experiments that appealing really (e.g. emojis?? really?). I guess gradually they'll find the natural fit of these technologies in places where they actually bring value. At the moment it just feels like a salespitch to justify the over spec-ed phones we keep buying.

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

#48
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…

LLMs are a tool though, so it benefits getting in early and gaining experience using the tool. Companies need to either train up people using a tool, or buy that expertise with the tool. Not to mention all the LLM adjacent tools as well. It's a big, messy, wide field of new software things at this point.

Sure, but does it make sense that your cubicle row of data entry guys are on the cutting edge knowledge of LLM expertise? Because the way LLMs are being pushed in every spreedsheet software would imply that's something someone is asking for.

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

#50

We have a family friend who is blind and a programmer. It's interesting to hear his perspective. His hope and expectation are that it will greatly increase usability. I've been thrown into the usability deep end due to my wife also losing her sight due to an autoimmune disorder, and my dad losing his sight due to Macular Degeneration. Honestly, it sucks, and I mean like rage quitting, phone throwing sucks. (Try it. T…

LLM-based AI is not needed, or even useful. We know how to make voice interfaces that work, and work well: have done since the 80s. It's just expensive; and it's an expense that nobody in the industry is willing to pay, therefore nobody needs to do it in order to differentiate their product.
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