> This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been... They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar by actually using your apps, not through some brittle API layer that breaks every update.
And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Let other companies figure out the model. Let the industry figure out how to make it secure. Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
Right now we are still in very, very, very early days.
I don’t believe this was ever confirmed by Apple, but there was widespread speculation at the time[1] that the delay was due to the very prompt injection attacks OpenClaw users are now discovering. It would be genuinely catastrophic to ship an insecure system with this kind of data access, even with an ‘unsafe mode’.
These kinds of risks can only be _consented to_ by technical people who correctly understand them, let alone borne by them, but if this shipped there would be thousands of Facebook videos explaining to the elderly how to disable the safety features and open themselves up to identity theft.
The article also confuses me because Apple _are_ shipping this, it’s pretty much exactly the demo they gave at WWDC24, it’s just delayed while they iron this out (if that is at all possible). By all accounts it might ship as early as next week in the iOS 26.4 beta.
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/8/delaying-personalized-s...
Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into fire trucks.
This is so obvious I'm kind of surprised the author used to be a software engineer at Google (based on his Linkedin).
OpenClaw is very much a greenfield idea and there's plenty of startups like Raycast working in this area.
Being good at leetcode grinding isn’t the same as being a good product person.
iOS 26 is proof that many product managers at Apple need to find another calling. The usability enshittification in that release is severe and embarrassing.
Or maybe, while being as good as they are at their jobs, they were forced to follow a broken vision with a non-negotiable release date.
And simply chose to keep their jobs.
Which also suggests that they need a new calling
shots fired!
Ouch. You could have taken a statistical approach "google is not known for high quality product development and likely therefore does not select candidates for qualities in product-development domain" - I'm talking too much to Gemini, aren't I?
I'm not that surprised because of how pervasive the 'move fast and break things' culture is in Silicon Valley, and what is essentially AI accelerationism. You see this reflected all over HN as well, e.g. when Cloudflare goes down and it's a good thing because it gives you a break from the screen. Who cares that it broke? That's just how it is.
This is just not how software engineering goes in many other places, particularly where the stakes are much higher and can be life altering, if not threatening.
It is obvious if viewed through an Apple lens. It wouldn't be so obvious if viewed through a Google lens. Google doesn't hesitate to throw whatever its got out there to see what sticks; quickly cancelling anything that doesn't work out, even if some users come to love the offering.
Regardless of how Apple will solve this, please just solve it. Siri is borderline useless these days.
> Will it rain today? Please unlock your iphone for that
> Any new messages from Chris? You will need to unlock your iphone for that
> Please play youtube music Playing youtube music... please open youtube music app to do that
All settings and permission granted. Utterly painful.
You'll need to unlock your iPhone first. Even though you're staring at the screen and just asked me to do something, and you saw the unlocked icon at the top of your screen before/while triggering me, please continue staring at this message for at least 5 seconds before I actually attempt FaceID to unlock your phone to do what you asked.
I think half your examples are made up, or not Apple's fault, but it sounds like what you really want is to disable your passcode.
I LOVE the "complaining about apple ux? no way, YOU'RE the problem / you're doing it wrong / you must not be a mac person".
Thanks for keeping this evergreen trope going strong!
well if you're making complaints that aren't true, or asking for functionality that exists already, your complaints don't seem very credible to me.
"Will it rain today? Sorry, I can't do that while you're driving."
Do you want people being able to command your phone without unblocking? Maybe what you want is to disable phone blocking all together
I want a voice control experience that is functional. I don't want every bad thing that could happen-- especially those that will only happen if I'm careless to begin with-- circumscribing an ever shrinking range, often justified by contrived examples and/or for things much more easily accomplished through other methods.
That would be very useful but is not a trivial problem.
Probably need VoiceID so only authorized people can talk to it.
Oh no, what if they put on Christmas music playlist in February? the horror!
There should exist something between "don't allow anything without unlocking phone first" and "leave the phone unlocked for anyone to access", like "allow certain voice commands to be available to anyone even with phone locked"
Playing music doesn’t require unlocking though, at least not from the Music app. If YouTube requires an unlock that’s actually a setting YouTube sets in their SiriKit configuration.
For reading messages, IIRC it depends on whether you have text notification previews enabled on the lock screen (they don’t document this anywhere that I can see.) The logic is that if you block people from seeing your texts from the lock screen without unlocking your device, Siri should be blocked from reading them too.
Edit: Nope, you’re right. I just enabled notification previews for Messages on the lock screen and Siri still requires an unlock. That’s a bug. One of many, many, many Siri bugs that just sort of pile up over time.
Can it not recognize my voice? I had to record the pronunciation of 100 words when I setup my new iPhone - isn’t there a voice signature pattern that could be the key to unlock?
It certainly should have been a feature up until now. However, I think at this point anyone can clone your voice and bypass it.
But as a user I want to be able to give it permission to run selected commands even with the phone locked. Like I don't care if someone searches google for something or puts a song via spotify. If I don't hide notifications when locked, what does it matter that someone who has my phone reads them or listens to them?
Personal Voice learns to synthesize your voice, not to identify it.
Not really. Giving the weather forecast or playing music seems pretty low risk to me.
Siri doesnt make me unlock the phone to give a weather report.
Right, but you understand why allowing access to unauthenticated voice is bad for security right?
But you understand why if I don't care about that, I should be able to run it, right?
you can, you can turn locking off.
But the point is, you are a power user, who has some understanding of the risk. You know that if your phone is stolen and it has any cards stored on them, they can be easily transferred to another phone and drained. Because your bank will send a confirmation code, and its still authorized, you will be held liable for that fraud.
THe "man in the street" does not know that, and needs some level of decent safe defaults to avoid such fraud.
I understand why you'd want to do it.
Oddly enough I also understand Apple telling you, good luck, find someones platform that will allow that, that's not us.
re: youtube music, I just tried it on my phone and it worked fine... maaaybe b/c you're not a youtube premium subscriber and google wants to shove ads into your sweet sweet eyeballs?
The one that kindof caught me off guard was asking "hey siri, how long will it take me to get home?" => "You'll need to unlock your iPhone for that, but I don't recommend doing that while driving..." => if you left your phone unattended at a bar and someone could figure out your home address w/o unlock.
...I'm kindof with you, maybe similar to AirTags and "Trusted Locations" there could be a middle ground of "don't worry about exposing rough geolocation or summary PII". At home, in your car (connected to a known CarPlay), kindof an in-between "Geo-Unlock"?
I pay for YouTube Music and I see really inconsistent behavior when asking Siri to play music. My five-year-old kid is really into an AI slop song that claims to be from the KPop Daemon Hunters 2 soundtrack, called Bloodline (can we talk about how YT Music in full of trashy rip-off songs?). He's been asking to listen to it every day this week in the car and prior to this morning, saying "listen to kpop daemon hunters bloodline" would work fine, playing it via YT Music. This morning, I tried every iteration of that request I could think of and I was never able to get it to play. Sometimes I'd get the response that I had to open YT Music to continue, and other times it would say it was playing, but it would never actually queue it up. This is a pretty regular issue I see. I'm not sure if the problem is with Siri or YT Music.
Its hard to come up with useful AI apps that aren't massive security or privacy risks. This is pretty obvious. For an agent to be really useful it needs to have access to [important stuff] but giving an AI access to [important stuff] is very risky. So you can get some janky thing like OpenClaw thats thrown together by one guy and has no boundaries and everyone on HN thinks is great, but its going to be very difficult for a big firm to make a product like that for mass consumption without it risking a massive disaster. You can see that Apple and Microsoft and Salesforce and everyone are all wrestling with this. Current LLMs are too easily hoodwinked.
I think you're being very generous. There's almost 0 chance they had this actually working consistently enough for general use in 2024. Security is also a reason, but there's no security to worry about if it doesn't really work yet anyway
The more interesting question I have is if such Prompt Injection Attacks can ever be actualy avoided, with how GenAI works.
Removing the risk for most jobs should be possible. Just build the same cages other apps already have. Also add a bit more transparency, so people know better what the machine is doing, maybe even with a mandatory user-acknowledge for potential problematic stuff, similar to how we have root-access-dialogues now. I mean, you don't really need access to all data, when you are just setting a clock, or playing music.
They could be if models were trained properly, with more carefully delineated prompts.
I'd be super interested in more information on this! Do you mean abandoning unsupervised learning completely?
Prompt Injection seems to me to be a fundamental problem in the sense that data and instructions are in the same stream and there's no clear/simple way to differentiate between the two at runtime.
Perhaps not, and it is indeed not unwise from Apple to stay away for a while given their ultra-focus on security.
Apple's niche product, consisting of like 1-4% of computer sales compared to its dominant MacBook line, is now flying off the shelf as a highly desired product, because of a piece of software that Apple didn't spend a dime developing. This sounds like a major win for Apple.
The OS maker does not have to make all the killer software. In fact, Apple's pretty much the only game in town that's making hardware and software both.
Really doubt it has a significant impact on mac mini sales…
And being fair ClawBot is a complete meme/fad at this point rather than an actual product. Using it for anything serious is pretty much the equivalent of throwing your credit cards, ids and sticky notes with passwords and waiting to see what happens…
I do see the appeal and potential case of the general concept of course. The product itself (and the author has admitted it themselves) is literally is a garbage pile..
> Using it for anything serious
One man's trash is another man's serious
What are you referring to?
Probably the Mac Mini. A few OpenClaw users are buying the agent a dedicated device so that it can integrate with their Apple account.
For example: https://x.com/michael_chomsky/status/2017686846910959668.
Why would it need more than 1? Couldn't they do this with any Mac with an Apple account?
It appears he is selling a service where he comes to you (optionally with a Mac Mini which is probably why he's buying multiple) and sets up OpenClaw for you.
That truly cant be it right? This is like satire? How much do you even charge for that?
Unfortunately not satire, and the answer is $500
Mac Minis are perfect for locally running demanding models because they can effectively use ordinary RAM as VRAM.
but people dont use OpenClaw with local models
They definitely do. A common configuration is running a supervisor model in the cloud and a much smaller model locally to churn on long running tasks. This frees Openclaw up to lavishly iterate on tool building without running through too many tokens.
Unless you're running a large local model in 192GB+ this just won't be ideal, based on real-world experience.
Considering there are 1.5M openclaw agents, created by 17,000 humans, it seems like some people really would use more than 1.
Are you saying that software is THAT inefficient so that you can’t run a few hundred of them on a single Mac Mini? : D
if you are counting reported moltbook accounts there are not, the API was spammed by scripts to create accounts
This was on HN a few days ago, I wasn't counting anything:
https://www.wiz.io/blog/exposed-moltbook-database-reveals-mi...
There are few open source projects coming along that let you sell your compute power in a decentralized way. I don't know how genuine some of these are [0] but it could be the reason: people are just trying to make money.
0. https://www.daifi.ai/
There have been countless projects to sell distributed compute power. I don't know of any that have gotten much traction. Everyone keeps trying to create new ones instead of developing for the existing ones.
The one you linked to looks clearly like a pump-and-dump scam, though.
That one definitely looks like a crypto scam.
The entire point of the article is about the Mac mini sales flying through the roof because of this.
Mac-Minis
[flagged]
So you might be discriminated against by some ignorant teenagers? Probably for the best.
who's "afraid" of green bubbles? it's like saying a toyota corolla driver is afraid of the ford pinto
No it’s like someone owning a Ferrari and looking down on someone who drives a Corolla. Or that’s how they see it, anyway. Plus there’s the annoyance with interoperability: it’s not just about status, it’s about all your iMessage group chats that don’t play nice with android
Apple chose the colors well. For whatever reason the shade of green they chose just gives a bit of ick.
"Nissan" might have fit better than Ford Pinto here.
It's a real thing, you're either too old and/or not dating young people. Some do care a lot.
IMO it is pretty shallow to pick dating partners based on their mobile OS but yeah it does happen.
iMessage lock in is a huge thing. When it was new and was still e2ee I ended up buying iPhones for everyone I regularly messaged.
These days it is insecure however because they backdoored the e2ee and kept it backdoored for the FBI, so now Signal is the only messenger I am reachable on.
Blue bubble snobbery is presently a mark of ignorance more than anything else.
I agree that it’s stupid to judge people for it, but you do have to admit that especially with not all people having RCS, the feature set of SMS and MMS that you have to deal with when not using iMessage is pretty barbaric. From the potato-quality videos (ironically, I recall QuickTime was heavily involved in that spec, lol) to the asinine way Apple lets you apply a reaction and then sends it as a verbose text… From an iPhone user’s point of view, a “green bubble” means “this conversation will work like it’s 2003.”
Yes, I know 99.999% of Android users are on WhatsApp (or WeChat, Line, or Telegram depending on cultural background) but at least half of iPhone users aren’t on those, so we still have to keep using Messages for a lot of people.
People are buying mac minis so their openclaw instances can date?
I assume the suggestion is that they need to run their bot on a machine that's up 24x7 (and they don't want to do that with a laptop since they probably carry it places and such), AND they want it to manage their texts by interacting with the Mac version of the Messages app.
But if you connect those dots you've got people trying to date by having an AI respond to texts from potential dates which seems like you're immediately in red-flag-city and good luck keeping that secret for long enough to get whatever it is you want.
I don't follow this logic.
Forget about dating. If you want the AI to be able to send texts from your number, and you own an iPhone, I think your only other choice would be to port your number to Google Voice?
> But if you connect those dots you've got people trying to date by having an AI respond to texts from potential dates
Yeah I’m trying to wrap my head around what sort of reads like “It is messed up that people avoid talking to eachother because of software because it messes up people’s ability to use software to avoid talking to eachother”
You're saying I might have trouble getting a date if I don't have a Mac mini?
Imo using android is a great way to filter out extremely boring and vapid individuals from my dating pool.
Do you want to know how I can tell you didn't read the article?
Do you want to know how I can tell that you did not read the hacker news guidelines.
> ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while since we've seen this model of software development from Apple succeed in recent years. I'm not at all confident that the Apple that gave us Mac OS 26 is capable of doing this anymore.
Best privacy in computers, ADP, and M-series chips mean nothing to you? To me, Apple is the last bastion of sanity in a world where user hostility is the norm.
Apple is certainly the least worst but man... Liquid Glass. Windows bordering on the circular...
As said elsewhere, success in hardware does not translate to success in software.
Privacy is definitely good but it's not at all an example of the success mentioned in the parent comment. It's deep in the company culture.
Airtags were released in 2021, I'd say that counts, but generally I agree.
Their hardware division has been killing it.
The software has been where most of the complaints have been in recent years.
Their software efforts have little ambition. Tweaks and improvements are always a good idea, but without some ambitious effort, nothing special is learned or achieved.
A "bicycle for the mind" got replaced with a "kiosk for your pocketbook".
The Vision Pro has an amazing interface, but it's set up as a place to rent videos and buy throwaway novelty iPad-style apps. It allows you to import a Mac screen as a single window, instead of expanding the Mac interface, with its Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial world.
Great hardware. Interesting, but locked down software.
If Tim Cook wanted to leave a real legacy product, it should have been a Vision Pro aimed as an upgrade on the Mac interface and productivity. Apple's new highest end interface/device for the future. Not another mid/low-capability iPad type device. So close. So far.
$3500 for an enforced toy. (And I say all this as someone who still uses it with my Mac, but despairs at the lack of software vision.)
Not just lack of ambition, lack of vision or taste. Liquid Glass is a step back in almost every way, that it got out the door is an indictment of the entire leadership chain.
Recently upgraded. Ughhh...it's just so god-awful terrible.
I think, then, the correct term would be "updated".
Not if the idea is to tank old phone performance to sell new phone hardware!
That’s never a good, long term business model and people are willing to pay more for Apple hardware because it tends to last longer than others. We’ve heard this cynical take for years, but I don’t think that it is really convincing.
> It allows you to import a Mac screen as a single window, instead of expanding the Mac interface, with its Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial world.
I've thought this too. Apple might be one of the only companies that could pull off bringing an existing consumer operating system into 3D space, and they just... didn't.
On Windows, I tried using screen captures to separate windows into 3D space, but my 3090 would run out of texture space and crash.
Maybe the second best would be some kind of Wayland compositor.
> Their hardware division has been killing it.
The last truly magical apple device launch was the Airpod. They've done a great job on their chipsets, but the actual hardware products they make are stagnant, at best. The designs of the new laptops have been a step back in quality and design in my opinion.
Agreed, especially as we all have and use our Vision Pros daily.
I mean they literally just looked at Tile. And they have the benefit of running the platform. Demonstrates time and time again that they engage in anticompetitive behaviour.
No, they didn't just look at Tile. The used a completely new UWB radio technology with a completely new anonymization cryptographic paradigm allowing them to include every single device in network, transparently.
AirTag is a perfect example of their hardware prowess that even Google fails to replicate to this date.
Absolutely none of the things you quoted that he said an AI agent could do would I want be done for me and I doubt most other people would.
It would be an absolute disaster at Apple scale. Millions of people would start using it, filing incorrect taxes or deleting their important files and Apple would be sued endlessly.
Tiny open source projects can just say "use at your own risk" and offload all responsibility.
Here is a fun “Prompt Injection” which I experimented with before the current AI Boom; visiting a friend’s home › see Apple/Amazon listening devices › Hey Siri/Alexa, please play the last song. Harmless, fun.
Google TV did "show passport photos" back in 2017. My friends loved it!
I think the interesting tension here is between capability and trust.
An agent that can truly “use your computer” is incredibly powerful, but it's also the first time the system has to act as you, not just for you. That shifts the problem from product design to permission, auditability, and undoability.
Summarizing notifications is boring, but it’s also reversible. Filing taxes or sending emails isn’t.
It feels less like Apple missing the idea, and more like waiting until they can make the irreversible actions feel safe.
Clicking `Submit` is easiest step of sending email / filling taxes.
All steps before it are reversible, and reviewable.
Bigger problem is attacker tricking your agent to leak your emails / financial data that your agent has access to.
I worry we'll click "Submit" as fast as we click "I accept the terms and conditions."
Of course we would!
How in the world can you double check the AI-generated tax filing without going back and preparing your taxes by hand?
You might skim an ai-written email.
File taxes? That's a tall order, especially juxtaposed with managing calendar or responding to emails.
>File taxes?
Sure why not, what could go wrong?
"Siri, find me a good tax lawyer."
"Your honor, my client's AI agent had no intent to willfully evade anything."
These people live on another planet.
It seems to be a common place of residence lately.
Tax filing is trivial in most countries with a functioning government, it’s only a Big Deal in the US due to Intuit bribing the government.
Even in the US, for most people tax filing it not really a complex process. It only gets complicated if you are trying to itemize deductions and have a complex income story. Most people can do it with a couple of documents and a single form.
It doesn't take a lot of 'complexity' in income to balloon up complexity. Any brokerage activity will generate quite a few additional forms for 1099-B, 1099-DIV, etc. Still not super complicated, but I keep seeing people discuss this as if you only have W2s and nothing else... which isn't usually true, especially for someone who is likely to be using OpenClaw.
>> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
Imagine if the government would just tell everyone how much they owed and obviated the need for effing literal artificial intelligence to get taxes done!
>> respond to emails
If we have an AI that can respond properly to emails, then the email doesn't need to be sent in the first place. (Indeed, many do not need to be sent nowadays either!)
If a user chooses to reach out about an issue that an AI agent can completely solve, why should they not be allowed to do so via email? I much prefer it over all other support communications channels.
How can government know how much you owe them when they don't know all your tax deductibles?
We could also ask how the government could later tell someone they improperly deducted something! The government can either use that same means to tell taxpayers in advance, or else we could figure out a superior taxation system that wouldn’t require these steps.
You being personally ignorant of this specific argument which gets litigated every single time this comes up but only by Americans because most other countries have zero difficulty doing exactly that is not a valid argument.
91 percent of American filers take the standard deduction. The IRS already has all their information, already knows how much they withheld, already knows what they owe back. For all these people, TurboTax is just filling in 10 fields in the standard form.
"All your tax deductibles" is irrelevant for the vast majority of the country, and always has been.
The 35 million remaining americans who do itemize are free to continue using this old system while the rest of us can have a better world.
By knowing all your tax deductibles?
For which you have to file them first, for which you need to know the specific rules applying, for which people are using an expert, or AI.
No, the other party should file them. Charities can file the lists of donors etc.
What other party? They often don't even know you or if you can use something for tax or not. Pretty much everything can be used for tax deduction, it all just depends on circumstances. I know, many countries have a really broken privacy-situation, but I don't think it would be realistic that every shop is preventive filing every receipt and forces every customer to give them their tax-number so they can link them..
But the lobbyists
Yeah the whole filing taxes thing is an epic XY-problem. Governments can make this as easy as a digital signature, there’s zero need for an agent of any kind.
Actually most of the things people use it for is of this kind, instead actually solving the problem (which is out of scope for them to be fair) it’s just adding more things on top that can go wrong.
Seriously. The best solution is not having the problem in the first place. Something something Tao Te Ching.
> Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Funny seeing this repeated again in response to Siri which is just... not very good.
hey siri can set the egg timer 90% of the time corectly! Find me another multitrillion dollar company that is able to pull that off!
.
How do people manage to pick such bad examples? Who in their right mind would ever allow an LLM to FILE THEIR TAXES for them. Absolutely insane behavior. Why would anyone think this is probably coming? Do you think the IRS is going to accept "hallucination lol" as an excuse for misfiling?
Because private taxe filling software, like used in the USA, are exempt from filling errors?
If you're quick at responding and fixing the problem, the IRS forgives much..
People forget that “multi touch” and “capacitive touchscreens” were not Apple inventions. They existed prior to the iPhone. The iPhone was just the first “it just works” adaptation of it
Not a great example as multitouch in its modern incarnation was a niche academic technology, the most refined version of which was built by a 2 person startup that Apple quickly acquired. There was still a long way to go to make the tech as ubiquitous as it is today and that was all heavy lifting done by Apple.
Well, the heavy lifting was supervised by the same people, but while receiving Apple paychecks :)
This is generally true only of them going to market with new (to them) physical form factors. They aren’t generally regarded as the best in terms of software innovation (though I think most agree they make very beautiful software)
Personal intelligence, the (awkward) feature where you can take a screenshot and get Siri to explain stuff, and the new spotlight features where you can type out stuff you want to do in apps probably hints at that…
> And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Except this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, when you look at Siri. FOURTEEN years and it is still spectacularly useless.
I have no idea what Siri is a "much nicer version" of.
> Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
And in the case of Apple products, oftentimes "because Apple won't let them".
Lest I be called an Apple hater, I have 3 Apple TVs in my home, my daily driver is a M2 Ultra Studio with a ProDisplay XDR, and an iPad Pro that shows my calendar and Slack during the day and comes off at night. iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra.
But this is way too worshipful of Apple.
In that list of Apple products that you own, do none of them match the ops comment? You’re saying none of those products are or have been in their time in the market a perfected version of other things?
There are lots of failed products in nearly every company’s portfolio.
AirTags were mentioned elsewhere, but I can think of others too. Perfected might be too fuzzy & subjective a term though.
We're talking about Apple Intelligence here and its ... "precursor" ... Siri.
Both of which have been absolutely underwhelming if not outright laughable in certain ways.
Apple has done plenty right. These two, which are the closest to the article, are not it.
Remember the time when the former members of the Siri team demoed a prototype for a more capable version of Siri and Apple didn't even use it
Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I feel sure that Siri was much better a decade ago than it is today. Basic voice commands that used to work are no longer recognised, or required you to unlock the phone in situations where hands free operation is the whole point of using a voice command.
There were certain commands that worked just fine. But they, in Apple's way, required you to "discover" what worked and what didn't with no hints, and then there were illogical gaps like "this grouping should have three obvious options, but you can only do one via Siri".
And then some of its misinterpretations were hilariously bad.
Even now, I get at a technical level that CarPlay and Siri might be separate "apps" (although CarPlay really seems like it should be a service), and as such, might have separate permissions but then you have the comical scenario of:
Being in your car, CarPlay is running and actively navigating you somewhere, and you press your steering wheel voice control button. "Give me directions to the nearest Starbucks" and Siri dutifully replies, "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
I would guess, and it is a guess, that there are two reasons apple is “behind” in AI. First, they have nowhere near the talent pool or capability in this area. They’re not a technical research lab. For the same reason you don’t expect apple to win the quantum race, they will not lead on AI. Second, AI is a half baked product right now and apple try to ship products that properly work. Even Vision Pro is remarkably polished for a first version. AI on the other hand is likely to suffer catastrophic security problems, embarrassing behaviour, distinctly family-unfriendly output.
Apple probably realised they were hugely behind and then spent time hand wringing over whether they remained cautious or got into the brawl. And they decided to watch from the sidelines, buy in some tech, and see how it develops.
So far that looks entirely reasonable as a decision. If Claude wins, for example, apple need only be sure Claude tools work on Mac to avoid losing users, and they can second-move once things are not so chaotic.
> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
If you trust openclaw to file your taxes we are just on radically different levels of risk tolerance.
> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar
> And this is probably coming, a few years from now.
Given how often I say "Hey Siri, fast forward", expecting her to skip the audio forward by 30 seconds, and she replies "Calling Troy S" a roofing contractor who quoted some work for me last year, and then just starts calling him without confirmation, which is massively embarassing...
This idea terrifies me.
Also in the good old days if you sealed the wrong number you had some time to just hang up without harm done. Today the connection is made the moment you pressed the button or in this case when Siri decided to call.
Happened to me too while being in the car. With every message written by Siri it feels like you need to confirm 2 or 3 times (I think it is only once but again) but it calls happily people from your phone book.
>It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
I think you repeated their marketing, I don't believe this is actually true.
> Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Apple doesn't take proven ones of anything. What they do is arrive at something proven from first principles. Everyone else did it faster because they borrowed, but Apple did it from scratch, with all the detail-oriented UX niceties that entails.
This was more prevalent when Jobs was still around. Apple still has some of that philosophy at its core, but it's been eroding over time (for example with "AI" and now Liquid Ass). They still do their own QA, though, and so on. They're not copying the market, they have their own.
Can you understand how this commoditizes applications? The developers would absolutely have a fit. There is a reason this hasn’t been done already. It’s not lack of understanding or capability, it’s financial reality. Shortcuts is the compromise struck in its place.
> Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
That's a pretty optimistic outlook. All considered, you're not convinced they'll just use it as a platform to sell advertisements and lock-out competitors a-la the App Store "because everyone does it"?
every time i've heard someone's speculations about what apple intelligence could have been, it's a complex conspiracy. its problem is that it sucks and makes them no money, so they didn't ship it.
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Apple literally lives on the "Cutting Edge" a-la XKCD [1]. My wife is an iPerson and she always tells me about these new features (my phone has had them since $today-5 years). But for her, these are brand new exciting things!
https://xkcd.com/606/
How many chat products has Google come out with? Google messenger, buzz, wave, meet, Google+, hangouts… Apple has iMessage and FaceTime. You just restated OP’s point. Apple evolves things slowly and comes to market when the problems have already been solved in a myriad of ways, so they can be solved once and consistently. It’s not about coming to market soonest. How did you get that from what OP said?
Pointless argument given that android isn't just "android". Never has been.
It's a huge, diverse ecosystem of players and that's probably why Android has always gotten the coolest stuff first. But it's also its achilles' heel in some ways.
Except operating system and security updates…
Android isn't all about Google. Where I live everyone uses WhatsApp and Telegram, both of which have nothing to do with Google.
"It’s not about coming to market soonest. "
First Mover effect seems only relevant when goverment warrants are involved. Think radio licenses, medical patents, etc. Everywhere else, being a first mover doesnt seem to correlate like it should to success.
Network effects.
See social media, bitcoin, iOS App Store, blu-ray, Xbox live, and I’m sure more I can’t think of rn.
Network effects are maybe akin to "phsyical effects". Non-monopoly but physical space is also another 'first mover' type of moat.
A very tired “red versus blue” take here.
There are plenty of Android/Windows things that Apple has had for $today-5 years that work the exact same way.
One side isn’t better than the other, it’s really just that they copy each other doing various things at a different pace or arrive at that point in different ways.
Some examples:
- Android is/was years behind on granular permissions, e.g. ability to grant limited photo library access to apps
- Android has no platform-wide equivalent to AirTags
- Hardware-backed key storage (Secure Enclave about 5 years ahead of StrongBox)
- system-wide screen recording
Android is an OS, not hardware tho so some of those can't really be judged equivalently.
Half of my examples were 100% software based, and this list is by no means comprehensive.
Google has been making their own phone hardware since 2010. And surely they can call up Qualcomm and Samsung if they want to.