Apple lost the plot
Remember how six months ago we made fun of most companies during their CES keynote by counting how often the word AI was used? Want to play the same game with Apples WWDC keynote? I would strongly advise against making it a drinking game though, the alcohol poisoning would land you in a hospital.
What really made me chuckle was Apples poor attempt to pretend the big, bad EU commissions are at fault that new Siri features are not coming to the EU. Sounds a bit different if you read the statement Regnier made in response.
Let us look at Apples AI timeline:
- hype Siri during WWDC and tell people to buy an iPhone 16 for its AI capabilities
- fail due to missing the train and have teams fight each other internally who cannot even demo basic features
- delay Siri (remember how we all should have bought iPhone 16s for its AI capabilities?)
- give up and buy Gemini
- pretend your Gemini is so much better than Googles Gemini because you added a proxy
This list does not claim to be complete. But a few random thoughts in no particular order.
Apple is trying again and again to keep their system as closed as possible. I mostly appreciate that. Others do not. The law clearly requires compatibility. If you think you can strong arm the EU or make people go to the streets starting to protest on your behalf, you must suffer from a larger reality distortion field than Jobs ever had.
If a user decides to install a different LLM and give it access to a calendar, messages and todos that is fine. Guess what they are already doing today? People just jump through a few more hoops, copy and paste stuff, run it on their Mac or simply upload half their hard drive to one of the large AI players. That is their choice. Like developer mode and side loading, keep things locked behind a switch. I wouldn't toggle it, but anyone who wants to should be able to.
Siri in Germany has been trash since its inception. You need to set Siri and your device to the same language, but personalization did not work if not set to English. Generally any form of mixed language just falls apart. And as Apple wants to do a lot of stuff on device Gemini’s capabilities will not fix this. What is a better press release? That you still cannot ship something that supports "erinnere mich die backend roadmap fertig zu machen" (‘remind me to finish the backend roadmap’) and half of your demos will never work in the EU, or that the bad commission hates user privacy?
I find this whole kicking and screaming by Apple annoying at best, but it makes me question if I should bother with new Apple hardware. Siri is a dumpster fire no third party LLM can fix. Delusional Apple shills believing this is a big loss for EU citizens (Hi John, still love your podcast, but come on...) will not be able to spin the narrative based on Apples press releases. I take actual freedom of choice over pseudo privacy and "freedom for companies to do whatever they want". As much as I dislike many things the EU and the DMA do, there are good parts.