My thoughts on Apple joining the world of AI
As a single observer of life offering trillion-dollar company advice on its go-to-market proposition, I’m acutely aware it will sit as a post in its little corner of the internet mostly ignored.
However, as an interested party who has recently jumped ship from Google to the Apple ecosystem, I have a vested interest and can point out some things Google has done right and some things they have not.
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The Good
Where does AI excel within the current environments it’s deployed in? On most occasions, it’s when it compliments an existing service. The best example is the editing functionality within Google Photos on Android. Microsoft while giving everything a “copilot” is annoying the example within Github where AI is helping develop code and augment the user’s experience works well.
Apple would do well to take a leaf out of Googles book very soon and add AI editing capability within Photos with similar features across the Mac/iPhone/iPad not just on the phone.
A refresh of the “Office Suite” of apps Keynote, Numbers and Pages to add AI functionality to lay the groundwork for good output and within Apple Mail to add a tone to emails already written or providing a summary of what you would like in an email or message and having AI produce that.
If Apple could add these features to be fluid across its Laptop, Tablet and Phone platforms (and maybe iCloud One?) this consistency across the platform would be a great example of something the Apple ecosystem already does well with cohesive interoperability.
The Bad
Where AI on many platforms has become a problem is when it fragments a platform and creates a tier of haves and have-nots who both use the underlying platform.
A couple of examples of this include recent Google choices with its hardware platforms.
The first example is with the Chromebook, Google took the decision to create a range of Chromebook Plus devices, and on the face of it it made sense, the company wanted the product to be seen as more than a bargain basement, but it was not sure what you’re going to get laptop and more as a viable alternative to a Windows or Mac device. It does this by ensuring there are minimum specs for the devices so consumers know that a Chromebook Plus device has all the “good hardware”
Unfortunately what Google ended up doing is creating two tiers of devices, the plus devices are more expensive and they get the AI feature bells and whistles first. Everyone else on a budget gets none of these things.
If you feel that’s just savvy marketing, then the Pixel phone may be different. Google is pushing Tensor as their M1 “hey look we make our own chips too” platform, and the Pixel 7 pro has a Tensor chip on it, however its devoid apparently of any of the AI additional functionality seen on the latest Pixel 8 devices.
While Google announced stretched updates available of 5+ years, very few of the new AI features will make it to the Pixel 7 because its SoC platform does not support them.
In a time when we are trying to reduce waste, are keeping phones longer and using them for more. Much like the chromeOS devices very quickly people will get left behind.
Apple needs to be careful it doesn’t create a multi-tier hardware issue, or put an AI tax and fragment its platform as this WILL make purchasing a phone, tablet or laptop really difficult for an already premium product.
The branding is also important here, Gemini was Bard, Co-Pilot was on everything, then it wasn’t then it meant something different. Apple is great at using other words to mean things the rest of the tech industry has nouns for “Spacial Computing” comes to mind, so I’m sure whatever they do it won’t just be called “AI”
I’d also suggest a chatbot with an LLM isn’t needed in the traditional sense of the word, there are plenty out there, but it’s a fragmented area. Apple have nothing to lose by making their chatbot 100% voice-based with Siri, with Siri’s hoots into Homekit and other Apple software having a voice-only chatbot would be a huge win for the business. Again it’s taking something people already know how to use and adding to the experience, not providing another new product.
The completely avoidable
There are also some avoidable pitfalls which Apple needs to steer clear of
Google Assistant was heralded for many years as being the new smart assistant, and for a while it was, then almost in the space of weeks, it got so useless most people turned off its speech features. This was a reshuffling of resources to move people over to Bard as this became part of Google Assistant however this killed a brand and a lot of trust from people who had invested in Google Home as an idea.
Google's subsequent focus group-driven rebranding of Bard to Gemini, was another miss and something Apple could very much avoid by taking an Augmented approach to AI rather than the generative approach is the “Training issues” Gemini has had with Black, Female Nazis being shown when people use just the right language on the platform.
Thoughts
The underlying premise here is about augmenting the experience from a user’s experience and providing services using an AI model which assists the user and is not forced as a new service upon the user. Having nothing new to learn, yet providing a cross-platform OS-level framework which any Apple app could tap into I believe could provide Apple with an edge moving forward with any AI.
