The company that prides itself on announcing products only when they’re ready grossly underestimated the demands of personalising its virtual assistant
After ChatGPT broke cover in late 2022 and the tech industry embarked on its contemporary rendering of tulip mania, people started to wonder why the biggest tech giant of all – Apple – was keeping its distance from the madness. Eventually, the tech commentariat decided that there could be only two possible interpretations of this corporate standoffishness: either Apple was way behind the game being played by OpenAI et al; or it had cunning plans to unleash upon the world its own world-beating take on the technology.
Finally, at its annual World Wide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) on 10 June last year Apple came clean. Or appeared to. For Apple, “AI” would not mean what those vulgar louts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta raved about, but something altogether more refined and sophisticated – something called “Apple Intelligence”. It was not, as the veteran Apple-watcher John Gruber put it, a single thing or product but “a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services”. Putting it all under a single, memorable label made it easier for users to understand that Apple was launching something really novel. And, of course, it also made it easier for Apple to say that users who wanted to have all of these fancy features would have to buy an iPhone 15 Pro, because older devices wouldn’t be up to the task.
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