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.

Needless to say, this columnist fell for it and upgraded. (Verily, one sucker is born every minute.) As a piece of kit, the new phone was impressive: the powerful new processor chips, neural engine etc worked a treat. And the camera turned out to be astonishingly good. But the Apple Intelligence features enabled by the upgrade seemed trivial and sometimes irritating. It immediately started messing with my photo collection, for example, imposing categories on images that were intrusive, unwanted and annoying. And there was a new pre-installed app called Image Playground that apparently “makes communication and self-expression even more fun” – which might possibly be true if one were a four-year-old with a short attention span, but is otherwise a turkey from central casting and should have been strangled at birth.

There was one feature, though, that looked interesting and possibly useful – a serious enhancement of Siri, Apple’s attempt at a virtual personal assistant. Henceforth, the company announced: “Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to the user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say, ‘Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,’ and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, ‘When is Mom’s flight landing?’ and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.”

On closer inspection, though, Siri – even running on my expensive new phone – could do none of these useful things. In fact, it mostly seemed as banal as ever. And then, on 7 March, came an announcement from Apple: “We’ve also been working on a more personalised Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that “what Apple showed regarding the upcoming ‘personalized Siri’ at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis”. And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video – the so-called “Knowledge Navigator” video – it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history.

Until – says Gruber – now.

Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isn’t in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cook’s stewardship of the company. If there’s one thing Jobs’ Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. It’s clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadter’s Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

What I’ve been reading

A million monkeys…
ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving is a marvellous essay by John Warner on AI and writing.

Machines of loving grace?
AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End? Read Stephen Fry’s unmissable inaugural lecture to King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute on the obsession du jour.

It’s written in the cards
Jillian Hess’s account on her Substack of Carl Linnaeus’s groundbreaking note-taking practice is illuminating.