– Giant company is late to
massive technological shift, fails to adapt, falls behind
and never recovers, dies. That is a tale as old as time
and it does repeat itself. Now, Apple is the biggest
tech company in the world. They’re worth $3 trillion. They have more cash on hand
than anyone can ever spend. They are extremely
successful in many categories and they’ve taken down many other tech companies along the way. But now, the year is 2025 and between missed deadlines
and deleted commercials, it seems like even they
are having some troubles with an emerging technology
and is fascinating to watch. (gentle music) So artificial intelligence, you guys don’t need me to say it. You already know. The explosion of consumer AI in the past couple years has been nuts. How many times have you heard those two letters next to each other? So suddenly, everyone for
the past 2, 3, 4 years has been talking a lot more about AI, and two years doesn’t even
really sound like that long. But tech moves fast. Remember Skype? Remember how Skype was like the default for online video calling? And then the pandemic happened in 2020. And then, like, two years
later, everyone used Zoom. How did they blow that? Like,
that’s how fast tech moves. Now, Apple is a lot bigger than Skype was, but none of these companies are immune. Like, every one of these
big public tech companies, all these companies are beholden to making as much money as possible. They have shareholders,
they have investors. And if they don’t think you’re
doing everything you can to grow as much as possible,
they’re not gonna be happy. So when a certain ChatGPT comes along and gets a hundred million
users in two months and seems to prove that AI is
definitely the next frontier of consumer technology, well,
then you start seeing a lot of tech companies suddenly
talking a lot more about AI. (mellow music) So now you’re Apple, and this is all happening,
all eyes are on you. There’s a lot of pressure to
show some sort of AI something. Now there is some conventional
wisdom that would say, “Hey Apple, take a
second, sit back, relax, do your typical second mover thing. You don’t have to rush this.” Because there are a lot of examples where Apple’s not necessarily
first to something. They sort of sit back and let someone else do the working on it, and the maturing of
the technology happens, and then they jump in and
implement it their own way. So they were not first to
do OLEDs in their phones. They were not first to
do wireless earbuds. They were not first to make a tablet. The iPhone itself is a perfect example. There were so many other
smartphones before the iPhone, but they just executed on it in a way that differentiated them so well that people wanted theirs. The thing is this second mover strategy is very much a hardware strategy, at least it typically has been. And this AI thing is different. It is very much just been
these companies iterating as fast as possible and just moving and trying to
implement as much as they can with these little on-device models to give people whatever useful features they can come up with and
just throw ’em out there. So on a Google device, that
looks like Circle to Search and Gemini assistant and Gemini Live and the Add Me camera feature that lets you take two pictures and fuse them together to get
everyone in the group shot, stuff like that. On a Samsung device, that’s Galaxy AI. You know, they have things, like, that really impressive object removal. On a Windows 11 computer,
that’s gonna look like Copilot, you know, adding an AI
editor into Microsoft Paint, stuff like that. Now certainly, not all of
this has gone super smoothly. There’s been plenty of
weird rocky launches with companies like the
Recall feature from Windows, got some backlash and people didn’t love, lots of stuff, has not been ideal. There have even been whole startups that were born and died just trying to jump on the AI
bandwagon as best they can. But at this point, basically,
every big tech company has something that they
do that they can point at and be like, “All right,
look. See, we do AI. You can see we’re being
useful to our customers, so you investors can relax. We’re on the forefront of it now.” So then, what does Apple do? Well, same idea, right? At WWDC 2024, they announced
Apple Intelligence, which again is, you know,
just a branding umbrella term for all the AI stuff they’re gonna do across iPhones and iPads and Macs, things that involve
using generative models and large language models. On the surface, it’s kind
of along the same lines, a couple silly features here and there, Genmoji, Image Playground to just generate random cartoonish images. But there have also
been some useful things, like Writing Tools and
ChatGPT integration. And then big promises
of significant upgrades to make Siri actually good ’cause it’s been lagging
behind and bad for years. So on the surface, you
know, feels right in line with a lot of these other
companies are doing. A lot of it, kind of
silly and easy to ignore, especially if you’re not an investor, but some of it, potentially really cool. I know I for one would
like Siri to be decent. (upbeat music) So I remember being there
at WWDC in the summer when they announced Apple Intelligence and thinking, “Oh okay, great. I would like to review this thing when it all finally comes out.” So a couple months go by,
September rolls around, the iPhone 16 launches, and it’s built from the ground
up for Apple Intelligence. And so it has iOS 18, but it doesn’t have any
Apple Intelligence features at launch at all, like
literally none of it. It’s all still pending
with software updates. Oh okay, but at least, you know, there’s some betas coming
up in the pipeline. So a few weeks later, iOS 18.1 comes out, and then it’s got some of the features. It’s got Writing Tools,
notification summaries, so it’s starting to have
some stuff that I can test, but it is missing a lot
of the bigger stuff. And also, notification summaries kind of turned out to be
not that great all the time. A few more weeks go by, and
then iOS 18.2 drops in beta and they added Genmoji
and Image Playground. It also added that ability to kick out more complex
queries to ChatGPT. So I mean, okay, it’s
progress and I’m glad it works and people can generate
cartoon images on their phone, but, like, is that really the
core of Apple Intelligence? Have we really seen that yet? I’m still thinking, no,
I’m gonna keep waiting. I’m not reviewing Apple Intelligence yet. So a few more weeks
later, we get iOS 18.3. At this point, we’re months away from the original iPhone launching built for Apple Intelligence, but this time, they flipped the switch on visual intelligence, which I think is the first
genuinely really useful, interesting thing using the camera feed to answer questions about your environment or add an event to your
calendar from a poster, things like that, but it also did disable
notification summaries for news and entertainment apps because of all the mistakes it was making. But there is still no improved Siri. This new Siri was supposed to have all this great stuff
like onscreen awareness and being more conversational and having more in-app controls, but none of that is launched, and at this point, I just
don’t know when it’s coming. So I eventually just did a review of all of the Apple Intelligence features that are out so far ’cause I don’t know when
the rest are coming, and I thought that would be helpful, but at the same time, it’s frustrating because they promised so much, and yet. (gentle music) So this is where it gets kind of weird. Not to get too existential,
but this job that I do, that we do, these tech
YouTubers and tech journalists, things like that, you can
kind of boil it all down to just going around and just
doing endless tech demos. Like, we just go from
tech demo to tech demo, and it’s other people’s
jobs professionally to give us cool tech demos, and then we can point a camera
at it or write an article. And then our job is to,
one, decide if the thing that they’re demoing
is a good idea or not. But then, two, to try to understand how real that tech demo actually was. That’s really what it is. It’s just cool tech demos left and right. So, like, a new product might
come out and get announced and they show it to us and
they’re like, “Check this out.” And part one again is, okay, are these new features in this
thing actually a good idea? Would people want that? And then part two is to
try to listen to the words coming out of their mouth
and look at what’s happening and understand, is this
tech demo real or staged or completely fake or
somewhere in between? So then Apple, you know, I would say is typically,
they do a pretty good job, like in the spectrum of
how crazy things can get, like they’re pretty
realistic about things, like the new iPhone comes out on stage and then they shepherd
everyone to this hands-on area. And then we get to point a
camera at and demo our own hands a lot of the new features
that they just announced. So in general, pretty good,
but it’s not always perfect. Fun fact, I don’t know how
many of you remember AirPower, but that was one of those things where I remember that event. They showed it off on stage, whatever, and then we go out to the hands-on area, and there was this single
AirPower out there, just one wireless charging pad among all the chaos, but it didn’t work. So you could put your phone on it and pretend it charges, but it didn’t. And maybe that should have
been a red flag right there, because, of course, as we
know, AirPower never came out. I think Tesla’s robots are another pretty
recent, like, famous one. We all remember that
show that they put on. They had those humanoid robots
walking around their event, interacting with people. Tesla would never confirm or tell people exactly what
was going on behind the scenes to make that all possible, but
there were plenty of theories about them being remote-operated
or human-controlled. Anyway, Apple Intelligence
is one of those things where they have had this
slow continuous rollout where the most interesting and possibly most important things are at the end of the rollout,
but there’s no timetable. They’re just kind of coming at some point. And Apple’s never demoed them for us. It’s really interesting. John Gruber pointed this out
in his piece a little while ago that this could be an even
more glowing bright red flag. Apple has never shown these
features working to anyone. And, I mean, you’d think if
they could demo it to a reporter or YouTuber or something
that they totally would, they’d love to show it’s almost done, just, “Here’s how cool
it is,” but they haven’t. And the fact that they haven’t even gotten to the cool tech demo part yet kind of makes it feel like
this is a lot farther away than we think it is. Now, all of this is true at the same time that Apple is literally running
commercials and billboards and plastering Apple Intelligence
all over their website and every announcement, they
talk about it all the time to the point that you’d assume
it’s like the most important new feature of their devices. They even had to delete a commercial that they made and published. They had to take it back because it was literally just
advertising a new feature of this big Siri update
that doesn’t exist yet. It’s like looking into your phone and using context to tell you something. That straight up didn’t work. – Siri, what’s the name of
the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel? – [Siri] You met Zac
Wingate at Cafe Grenel. – Hey.
– Zac. – Oh, I didn’t think
that you’d remember me. – Yeah, of course. Since I saw you, I’m like, it’s Zac. Nobody walks like Zac.
(Zac laughs) ♪ I am genius ♪ – You know, I think it would be cool if Siri actually could
look into your phone, into your apps and calendar and actually tell you things
about it, but it can’t. And we’ve never seen a demo of this outside of this commercial
or Apple’s official videos. So yeah, this disconnect between how successful Apple
would like us to believe that they are with AI and how poorly and delayed
things are actually going, that is the crisis on
Apple’s hands right now. It’s fascinating to watch. And, you know, it’s totally
fine to delay products, like, that happens all the
time, it’s actually very normal. But just with AI, with
how immediate it feels, with it being this paradigm
shift of technology and all of their
competitors shipping things, it feels like things
are moving very quickly. So that’s how you end up with apparently internal
meetings and reorganization and people inside of Apple
calling it embarrassing. To people paying close attention to Apple, I think Apple Intelligence
has, from the beginning, kind of always felt more like a nice thing to please investors more than an actually useful
revolutionary set of products that regular people are gonna love. But now that it’s so delayed and the disconnect is so obvious, it’s never been more apparent. (upbeat music) Remember Nokia? They were huge, and then they kind of just
completely missed the jump to smartphones, and now, we
don’t think about Nokia anymore. I’m sure you remember BlackBerry. they were also once thought
of as way too big to fail, and then virtual keyboards came along and BlackBerry just
continued making phones with physical keyboards, and then everybody just moved along, and now, we don’t talk
about BlackBerry anymore. There’s countless examples
of huge tech companies. We thought they were way too big to fail, but then they failed to adapt in some way to the changing tides of technology, something happens, and
then they’re just gone and we don’t know what happened to ’em. And so there’s no way to
tell the future on this one. Maybe everything’s fine. Maybe Apple ships the
new Siri in two months and it does everything
they said and it’s great and we just forget any
delay ever even happened. But there’s three things
that have been on my mind that kind of make that feel unlikely. So number one is just that AI is just not at the core of
Apple’s business right now. And if you’re just looking at it from a business perspective, they make a ton of money selling hardware, selling the services and the things attached to that hardware, and they will continue to
make tons of money iterating and doing all that like they usually do. Financially, they’ll probably be fine. Like, it’s kinda hard
to draw a straight line from Apple Intelligence is successful to Apple making way more money, especially when they’re such a privacy-focused company as well, like a lot of these features don’t go hand in hand with that. But then, two, their usual advantages don’t really work here as
much as they usually do. So like, the second mover advantage thing that I talked about earlier, like that’s typically a
hardware technologies thing. And so AI being software, with software, Apple’s usually able to just rely on their massive, enthusiastic army of developers to support things and give it a kickstart and get it off the ground
to get people using it. And with this, it’s kind of the opposite. I don’t think they’re interested in this. Like, just think if I’m Uber,
if I’m developer for Uber and this new Siri is supposed to be able to reach into my app
and perform an action, like calling a car, so the user just goes, “Hey Siri, call me an
Uber to the airport,” and then it does it without
ever opening my app? I don’t actually like that very much. That gives me less control. I don’t get to do as much
with that experience, even though it would be
really cool for the end user. But then number three,
just the lack of demos is like really, it’s
actually very hard to ignore just from someone who’s seen so many. Remember the Bixby speaker? Like all those years
ago at a Samsung event, they announced, the Galaxy
Speaker is what it was called. It looked like this little
mini barbecue grill. And in person, we all go to this event, and then we go down to the hands-on area and they had a bunch of them
on display and they were lit up and nobody could actually
touch them or use them. And then I think we maybe
saw them one more time at a display at CES, but then
we just never saw them again. Samsung canceled it. They
never shipped the thing. I don’t think Apple wants
to pull a Bixby speaker or an AirPower with this thing. Like, Apple Intelligence
has gotten so much PR and it’s clearly so important to them that it just feels like it’s
gotta get there eventually. It’s gotta be frustrating for
them to not have the ability to show it off or ship anything yet, but it would be pretty
cool if Siri was good. But we’ll very much just
still have to wait and see. There’s still Apple. They’re still just gonna
keep shipping new computers, tablets, software,
phones, the whole thing, and they will continue to
iterate on other stuff, but this is just something
to be keeping our eye on for the future, especially
as this whole AI thing continues to ramp up and as they continue to
put billboards out there. Share this video with someone
who needs the explanation. Thanks for watching. Catch
you guys to the next one. Peace.