Though the Get a Mac ads of the mid-late 2000s are probably only a memory to most of us, Apple has, with its latest keynote, further impressed on us business types that whatever a PC can do, a Mac can do better - and actually make that thing fun and worthwhile.
Enter Apple Intelligence, a content and context-sensitive AI tool baked into iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, which is headed for launch in October 2024 with US English support and other languages soon after.
It’s much like Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company’s AI platform we’ve been conditioned to want to bother with at work, but geared towards consumers.
Generative AI, very much still the buzzword in the tech world, comes to Apple users in the form of ‘Writing Tools’, with the company showing off a demo of writing emails. The (slightly tenuous) B2B link we’re going for here is that Apple showed it being used by a new graduate to send an email to a recruiter. The e-mail is only four sentences long, which makes the whole thing err on the side of bleak, but yes, this is a thing that can be done now.
It’s not a new concept, allowing AI to replace the expression of any and all identity, but consider what makes Apple Intelligence different; that “many of the models that power Apple Intelligence run entirely on device,” which means that your expensive designer computer will now be bogged down by stuff preventing you from truly applying yourself to the things we invented computers to help us do in the first place.
Apple's dedicated cloud compute for Intelligence
There’s also the fact the company noted its “Private Cloud Compute offers the ability to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated Apple silicon servers”, which should mean this is a predominantly Apple operation, with no nVidia chip or server involvement.
This is actually commendable; in running its own server infrastructure, Apple appears to be trying to achieve something, even if it isn’t necessarily innovating. ChatGPT is baked into the all new Siri and those ‘Writing Tools’, though, so you can’t have everything.
And yes, while we still mourn the Windows Phone, iOS gets in on the fun too. All that boring stuffy boardroom stuff about recording and summarising Microsoft Teams calls has now trickled down to the consumer; this now works on phone calls, with participants informed during. No word on whether this works across platforms or only between iOS devices. Natural language prompts can now be used to create photo galleries from descriptions, while automated clean-up features, well, exist.
AI belongs in the B2C space more than B2B
To me, AI’s place has always been to replace tedium. B2B writers and audiences find it easy to apply this to the world of work, as computers have, ironically, complicated our working lives far more than they’ve simplified them.
However, there is still merit in passing AI on to those who have access to technology but are often far too overwhelmed to be able to use it well. They’re bombarded with information like notifications, they’re bad at organising photos and documents, and they’re bad at making home movies and photo albums. As quite possibly the biggest household name on the planet, Apple is probably about to send AI truly to the stratosphere. In isolation, this is good. TechRadar Pro is annoyed that we shouldn’t really be writing about what Apple has planned, but it could make people more tech-proficient, which will help them get jobs in a firmly digital world, which is a B2B concern.
It doesn’t necessarily make people more tech-literate, which is a big concern for the sustainability of tech and AI infrastructure going forward, though I don’t really know how people can be driven to understand that Siri isn’t a living breathing superbeing, how bleak AI is for the environment, or that a lack of respect for the copyright of training dataset material are a living nightmare for anyone trying to earn money from their work. It’s bad™ that there’s ignorance around these things, and Apple bringing AI to however many more billions of people can only perpetuate this.
But, if AI is going to exist, then I’d rather the consumers have it first. The human element in all of the work that makes the work go round can be invaluable; the idea that AI can really take over purposeful written expression seems laughable, and the idea that it can replace infrastructure where some element of human compassion and analysis is actually beneficial seems definitely terrifying, and then some. But if you want to find every picture of your cat and throw them in a photo slideshow with just one sentence? Yeah, why not.
