Please STFU About Apple "needing" AI
I keep seeing Takes(tm) from tech journos about Apple being "behind" in AI, no doubt driven by Apple Intelligence being a huge flop that Apple seemingly bet the farm on with the launch of the iPhone 16.
I really, really, wish with all of my heart that we could go back before Apple announced any kind of intentions with generative AI, and I wish Apple would have responded thusly:
"We've been at the forefront of AI for years now, building it into our products since 2017. We call it Machine Learning, and it has powered many features of iPhone and iPad for quite some time. We've been here from day one."
Maybe not exactly like that, but something close. Apple's been doing what I consider to be beneficial AI development for a long time now. I know we used to make fun of them for that WWDC where all they could seem to say is "machine learning", but I really do think this was Apple skating to where the puck was going to be.
The current AI craze is nothing more than a bubble. It's a shareholder bauble that investors and techbros (and the journalists who lap this shit up) insist is going to change everything and help the human race ascend to be supreme beings or some nutjob shit like that. But all it is, is a product of desperation.
Technology for the most part has plateaued. You buy an iPhone these days, you can run it for three years without noticeable slowdown, easy. MacBooks and iPads? 5 years, no problem. They age like fine wine in the age of Apple Silicon. But even looking over at Windows machines, my main laptop is a Dell Latitude with a 10th gen Intel CPU. It runs perfectly fine for everything I need to do. My main computer? All the components are from 2021, and it still plays modern games just fine and will likely continue to run great for several more years.
Longer ownership cycles is of course bad for capitalism, so of course investors and techbros are looking for the next big thing to drive people to ditch their old devices. AI is something they hoped would do exactly this. They hoped that people would mega want this garbage, and lap it up by the truckload. Except...that didn't really happen.
Obviously this is my own point of view here, but the only issues AI claims to solve are things that were already being done under the guise of machine learning: Scanning data to make it searchable, going through vast amounts of data to index it and make it more readable to a human going through it, so on and so forth.
Apple was already doing this stuff. Hell, I remember text in photos being searchable before this giant AI craze even started. Apple isn't behind, but because they're not developing some chatbot that will give you confidently incorrect answers, or because they're not developing some magical thing that will give you crappy artwork based on a text prompt, they're "behind" and "doomed to fail".
Where have I heard that before?
Oh yeah, Netbooks. Remember Netbooks?
Where are all the netbooks now? Oh yeah, there aren't any, because that product category failed. Because it was a fad. A fun one, but still a fad.
Generative AI is just that, a fad. Unlike netbooks, though, it's a toxic fad. It's bringing out the worst in humanity. It's enabling people to make deepfakes on a scale we've never seen before.
Brandon Harris (of Nexus War and Wikipedia fame) wrote a pretty excellent essay about crap like this. When things like ChatGPT were being developed, the people behind them either never stopped to consider how this might be used for evil, or worse, just didn't care.
Apple doesn't need to be a part of this. In fact, they should put as much distance between them and that clusterfuck as possible. Alas, Apple partnered with OpenAI and legitimized them more, so I guess we know where they stand on that. (Though this might be a result of the industry going full stupid for AI and facing pressure from shareholders that they're gonna "miss the next big thing".)
To me, Apple Intelligence is the byproduct of what happens when Apple caves in and says yes to stupid fads they really should just ignore. There is nothing to be gained by being late here if it is a thing that sticks around for the foreseeable future. Do you think Apple invented the smartphone? The MP3 player? Absolutely not! But they became the juggernaut they are by watching their competition struggle and lay the path, and then introducing their own take on it, taking care to not repeat the same mistakes others made.
That's how the iPhone took the world by storm. We already had smartphones! But Apple wanted to do their own take on the smartphone and design something that was far more intuitive to use and lower the barrier to entry for mere mortals. And they did!
Apple today still is a total juggernaut, and they easily could have rode this out and waited for the AI bubble to settle down. With the failure of Apple Intelligence (and the lack of it during the iPhone 17 event), it seemed like they were doing exactly that: Stepping back, letting things play out rather than trying to jump into this blindly like they already did last year. This would be the logical thing to do.
But now, of course, you get the dumb articles that made me write this post. The ones saying that Apple is going to fail because they're not huffing the same supply the techbros are all getting blazed as shit off of. The ones that say Apple is behind in AI and therefore is going to fail.
It's fucking netbooks all over again and these people need to shut the fuck up.