Apple Intelligence - Who is this for?
Got round to watching the Apple WWDC Keynote for this year. I have thoughts.
Firstly, the good stuff - mainly I appreciated the opening 15 minutes or so that were aimed at performance and quality improvements across macOS, iOS, etc. This felt like a small acknowledgement that Liquid Glass brought many regressions, bugs and overall degradations in both the UI and the way things actually functioned across Apple devices. It wasn't a mea culpa or anything, but it was about as close as Apple gets these days.
However, it didn't take long to move straight into the AI smorgasbord of features that Apple is once again trying to peddle as 'Apple Intelligence'. This time seemingly more intertwined with Siri, featuring an upgraded offline AI model of some sort to provide additional privacy.
Everyone knows Apple is perceived as being 'behind' in the AI race; Google showed off a whole kitchen sink of Gemini-powered AI crap at their most recent Google IO event, most of which felt quite brazenly aimed at commercial applications. Again, giving Apple some credit here, I don't think they are actually 'behind' because I don't think anyone else has truly figured out the killer app for a lot of this stuff. Certainly AI in general is having a significant issue with profitability and productivity in enterprise, and I've no reason to think this won't be an issue on a personal level too. I also liked that Apple at least appears to take the moral high ground on AI and privacy; several statements in the WWDC keynote felt like direct shots at Google, OpenAI, Meta, Grok etc.
But regardless of whether you're an AI booster, investor, hater, whatever, I had one niggling question at the back of my mind as I watched Apple's endless demos of Apple Intelligence with Siri; Who is this all for?
So many of the demonstrations looked like solutions in search of a problem, or new and more convoluted ways to solve problems that had already been solved. At best, the demos were essentially just 'better search', and at their worst they either rehashed existing functionality or existed seemingly to remove every last ounce of human agency and creativity from interactions that people enjoy.
Let me explain.
If you haven't seen the WWDC 2026 keynote yet, why not follow along as I rant?
Example 1 - Slightly quicker search.
In the first example we are shown how you can talk to Siri in natural language to casually ask about the latest concert by a certain artist in a specific location. OK, so what?
Hasn't this been a thing in search engines for years? Is this quicker? Maybe slightly, but would you trust that floating disconnected blob of text at the top of the screen above with no references? I certainly wouldn't, and I'd probably want to track down the artist's official site and browse their tour dates to be certain. It's a snippet of possibly unreliable information, surfaced with no obviously verifiability and really not much quicker than an existing Google search.
Example 2 - Solutions in search of a problem + Rehashed Functionality
Continuing on from the search for a concert, we're then expected to believe Siri has accurately extrapolated that there is some sort of lottery waitlist to buy a ticket and it knows the exact time these go on sale...so far so tenuous. But let's buy into this and assume Siri has found the correct information it then goes on to...set a reminder.
Holy shit, stop the AI bus, I want to get off, it's all moving too quickly!
Are people incapable of setting their own reminders?
Has everyone's short term memory been damaged so much by TikTok that they can't hold a date and time in their brain for 15 seconds while they open the Reminders app and create a new one?
Is this a problem that needed solving?
Are users clamouring to get help setting reminders because they're so overwhelmed by a device that is already renowned for having one of the most intuitive and accessible touch-based UIs in history?
I thought we were getting autonomous, self-learning, Artificial Intelligence that could run complex, multi-step processes...what we have here is not AI, not by a long shot.
We've been able to create events using a natural language phrase in Calendar on macOS for years. It's called 'Quick Event'. I even entered the text from the WWDC demo into Quick Event on my MacBook and look, it's doing the same thing:
I'd almost bet it's invoking the same API behind the scenes too. I'd also point out that this only works with the stock Apple Reminders app... So to recap, we have a web search, a small amount of natural language processing and text parsing, sent over to an existing Reminders API integrated with Siri...
Example 3 - More Rehashed Functionality + Removal of all human agency and the joy of discovery
The demo then goes on with Siri being asked to play one of 'her' (Suki Waterhouse's) new singles. My first complaint here is that this is more existing functionality.
I just asked Siri to play one of Suki Waterhouse's new singles on my iPhone 15 (zero Apple Intelligence here), and it did the same thing as the demo.
We've been waiting for Apple to pull its finger out for the next great AI-powered Siri for over two years now. A lot of us have been waiting for Apple to just improve Siri in some meaningful way since its launch almost 15 years ago. So far we have a demonstration of a set of features that already exist with a small dusting of contextual awareness.
My other more philosophical complaint is that simply asking Siri to play a recent song by a particular artist almost completely removes the joy of discovering music through a blog, or a music shop, or a review, or by chance encounter, serendipity, studious research of the charts, word of mouth from friends, being loaned a vinyl, going to a gig and seeing a support band...
Or even just navigating to the artist in Apple Music and actually looking through their catalog, sitting down, and listening to an album in its entirety. It's such a flimsy interaction with the music and it's just a bit sad.
And who is going to initiate a Suki Waterhouse listening session based on that previous flow of Siri interactions? It's a bit weird right? You knew you wanted to enter a lottery to buy a ticket for this artist but had to quickly listen to 30 seconds of the artist on your crappy iPhone speaker? This doesn't seem like how most people start listening to music, surely?
So who is this for? Who is the demographic? Is this useful or time saving for anyone? I just don't buy it. I think most users just Google her name with 'tour dates' at the end, look through the list, and then maybe set a reminder themselves.
Example 4 - More Solutions in search of problems + BONUS mega-tenuous scenario
If you've stayed with me thus far thank you. I need to get all this off my chest.
So we then delve into another Siri scenario (Sirinario?) that involves some sort of image recognition (Google Reverse Image Search has been around for years but anyway.) In this confected parallel universe, I am supposed to have stumbled across a photo on Instagram and I have no clue where it's been taken (beside perhaps location metadata, the photographer's caption on the photo, or maybe just asking the bloody person in the comments section).
Oh it's Natural Bridges State Beach! Who knew?! And guess what...I've got a friend who just moved in nearby and he only uses iMessage and he sent me his address recently so it's all indexed and searchable by Siri.
Thank goodness for that.
Jeff took the time to send you his new address and what did you do? Nothing. You saved it nowhere. What sort of a friend are you?
I'm feeling spontaneous though, so I'm going to get Siri to plan a road trip to the Natural Bridges State Beach via Jeff's house.
Now we have the culmination of this Siri interaction...an Apple Maps route:
Colour me unimpressed.
Once again I have to ask; who is this for and has it saved any time?
Step outside of the Tech sector, and I have to emphasise to Apple - this is not how I see anyone using phones in public.
Perhaps they're doing it in private? But in private you are normally at home where you may have more time to focus on the super intense task of copying and pasting Jeff's address into Maps, adding a second destination, and typing the first few letters of 'Natural Bridges St...' to plan your journey.
If you're out in a shop, on a bus, at a friend's house, in the park, at work, or pretty much anywhere else, have you ever seen someone using their phone like this? I think people would be too embarrassed. I also think we've had pretty capable voice assistants on phones long enough now to know whether this stuff will really take off.
What do I see?
People open apps, they type, they copy and paste, they flip between apps. And guess what? It works. It's an interface people get very familiar with and they understand how to interact with it.
If shipping out your voice queries to a cloud model with LLMs and natural language processing and image recognition is saving me 5 seconds in a 60 second process, does anyone care?
Example 5 - Who, again, is this for?
We then move onto another long-winded 'World Cup match party meal planning' scenario. I won't go into as much detail as it covers similar kinds of multi-step, contextually aware Siri interactions as before, and it also re-treads a number of things Siri can already do (like searching for World Cup match times and recipes, and sending group iMessage chats).
The gist of the entire interaction is that I supposedly have a bunch of football loving foodie friends, who all chat with me on an existing iMessage group. I use Siri AI to search up ideas for cuisine combining two sports teams and it can use an LLM and generative AI to come up with cutesy names and recipes. It will the send the menu to my group iMessage chat.
There's a lot to unpack here and an awful lot of things that need to be in place or could go wrong.
Will all my friends be on iMessage? No.
Will the recipes that Siri concocts be edible or sane? Possibly not.
Will all the items in the recipe be something I can buy from Tesco? Questionable.
Will my perfect daughter have recently sent me her own recipe for cookies? My children hate me.
What if two of my mates reply via WhatsApp with dietary requirements? Anaphylactic shock.
And finally, who is the target-user?
Is it a football fan? They'll probably buy a 24 pack of lagers, some crisps and a dip from the supermarket, and send their mates a message on the WhatsApp group.
Is it for 'foodies'? Because they sure as hell won't use AI to craft a menu. They'll look through their favourite food blogs or recipe books for something more special.
All these Siri AI use cases target some nebulous demographic of time-poor, middle income, reasonably tech-savvy, plan-loving people. They'll somehow have no time to remember to save Jeff's new address to their Contacts, but plenty of time to go on a 2 hour 40 minute road trip with a friend. They have no time to plan a match party menu, but enough time to hold the actual match party and prepare all the fucking food for 10 people? I don't buy any of this crap. It's all generic nonsense use cases built for non-existent people.
I know Apple are not alone in demonstrating this kind of crap, and they themselves have a long history of showing off their product features with fabricated scenarios, but AI has just been sprinkled all over this crap as though it's set to magically improve everyone's lives.
At the end of both these demonstrations, I was left thinking, even if this all worked flawlessly, and it's a big IF - what time have I saved? Has it made my interactions with people of a higher quality? Am I producing better things? I can't honestly see myself using these features, nor anyone I know in my immediate circle of friends and close family.
I bet Apple could save the average user more time across your device in, say, one month, through focussing on under-the-hood performance optimisations, quicker animations, and easier to find GUI buttons, instead of all of these Siri AI features.
Constantly keeping a 8GB LLM in the RAM on my iPhone or having a lean, blazing fast, responsive operating system? I reckon I know which one will make me more productive.