AI is a Feature
A bit of reflection on the AAPL WWDC announcements
Apple finally entered the AI chat. I wanted to give it a week or so to let their announcements sink in. There are enough “hot takes” out there.
The WWDC last week was a breakthrough day for AAPL, according to a lot of press coverage, industry analysts and some other voices that usually make sense to me. It seemed like the world was sort of expecting a competitor to ChatGPT, but what they got was a clearer roadmap for the future.
As someone who is still long on AAPL, I was happy to see the bump in the stock as the street seemed to realized this was a smart evolution that would ultimately drive both service revenue lines and the hardware cycles. (though it was fun to see the immediate drop in the stock during the presentation, and the bounce at the end of the day).
AI Is A feature
If AAPL watchers were waiting for a big product reveal, the “one more thing”, they were pretty disappointed. No AI Appstore, no competitor to ChatGPT (Siri has been here for years; Don’t Call it a Comeback). No new hardware.
Meanwhile, a lot of AI startups focused on a narrow use (AI assisted writing, headshot apps, etc) will get sherlocked as capabilities - like writing/grammar assistance, image generation, summarization - get woven into the rest of the apps.
What Apple showed was a future where AI will be woven into everything a human does on a screen. It’s there like electricity.
AAPL watchers get a reminder of what AAPL does better than any company in history: They make the tech disappear behind an experience that turns us into creators, makers, doers, not tech bros.
It’s going to make our current tools more interesting, smarter, more flexible. It’s going to do the same to us, hopefully.
In their future, AI just works. Seamlessly. The way you would expect it to, the way you want it to. At scale.
Actually, A Couple Hot Takes
Apple the Brand Champion - I love the jujitsu of Apple’s naming effort, calling their approach to AI “Apple Intelligence”. It not only is instantly memorable due to the initials lining up, but it also creates a clear positioning statement: this is how AI should be done, the “Apple” way. It’s broad enough to cover everything they’re going to do in the next few years, too, across their consumer apps, the app store, the hardware side, the chip work, etc.
Apple the Aggregator - Siri and Apple Intelligence will be the interface to all the rest of the large models (e.g. Claude, Gemini, whatever) and the smaller, more narrow models to come. They’ll all just plug into the ecosystem, but the user won’t have to make choices.
Second or Third Mover Advantage - I like how Apple’s strategy was one of follower (not even “fast” follower). Apple’s strategy and execution should be an anti- case study for those that keep pushing on “first mover advantage”. There’s a whole essay to be written about the power of waiting, of playing to your strengths, of playing a long, long game.
Agentic - I want to dig deeper into examples of features/products where AI is taking specific actions on our behalf. In the AAPL examples, the apps will not only recognize your mom’s late plane will conflict with your dinner reservation, Siri will change the dinner reservation. It will eventually be able to book the tickets, make the payments, always be scanning for deals or availability, send the messages, alert our friends, etc. It’s a little scary, and there are some pretty bad “worst case” scenarios, but it’s gotta be coming soon.
Many People Are Saying
Here’s a couple thoughtful takes on what AAPL did last week:
John Herman of NYMag Intelligencer - “How Siri Made Apple Cautious About AI”. This is such a thoughtful piece that should remind a lot of us eager tech nerds to chill out a bit. It’s sobering to be reminded that what AAPL showed last week is strikingly similar to what they’ve been talking about since 2011 and before. “Maybe Apple really is just lagging behind, and what we saw on Monday is the best the company can do. Or maybe there’s some institutional memory there about the last time such things seemed closer and more inevitable than they actually were.”
David Armano - How AI Goes Mainstream - Armano does a nice job of contextualizing the adoption of another transformative tech wave (Artificial Intelligence) as part of the broader digital transformation that's been happening for years. I also like his final reminder, that AAPL consumer experience has, again, raised the bar for everyone else, everywhere. We'll all assume every digital experience - at work, at school - should be as good (and powered by AI) as AAPLs.
Greg Swan - Apple Intelligence is AI without the Buzz - I like, specifically, the way Greg highlights Apple's language as an example of clarity and human-centeredness vs. focusing on the tech.
Ethan Mollick - Uses the AAPL announcements to go through the differences between Large foundational models (like Gemini, ChatGPT) and more focused, “narrow” models (like those focused on doing specific things; he lumps Siri into this camp). It’s a long essay, but a great conceptual framework for non-nerds like me to use. He points out that AAPL is prioritizing safety, trust, practicality of the narrow models (vs. “lets create a sentient being” approach of Altman et al): “what we are seeing from Apple is a clear and practical vision of how AI can help most users, without a lot of effort, today. In doing so, they are hiding much of the power, and quirks, of LLMs from their users.”
Dave Karpf - Not talking about AAPL directly, but jabs at all the hype in a really sobering essay that pumps some brakes on the wide exuberance: “My hunch is that once the hype bubble fades, these large language models are mostly going to be understood as a substantial-but-incremental advance over existing machine learning tools.”
It feels like it’s all still in the very earliest stages…. Pretty exciting.