- This poses a problem for Apple because their iPhones are so good that users don't need to buy replacements.
- But the new AI features Apple showed off at WWDC will only work on Apple's latest phones and devices.
- So the big question: are the new AI features enough to justify buying a new iPhone?
What if your iPhone could scan and understand your emails, texts, and calendars so you could ask it what time to pick up your mom at the airport? and Are you supposed to go to lunch afterwards without checking all that stuff out for yourself?
That's the scenario Apple laid out on Monday as it sought to explain how it will integrate AI into its ecosystem.
That seems… pretty good to me.
But let's reframe the question: Would you pay $800, or even more, for an Apple device with such features?
Because that's a key question for Apple, which said that all the new AI features it announced at its developer conference will only be available on its top-of-the-line devices, which means the iPhone 15 series introduced last fall, the latest and most powerful iPads and Macs, and any new devices it introduces later this year.
If the answer is yes, AI would be extremely important to Apple because it would solve a very big problem: people aren't buying iPhones like they used to.
The problem is no secret, and was made perfectly clear by Apple releasing iPhone sales figures that showed slowing growth, or, as it revealed last quarter, an actual decline.
It's also evident from third-party reports that iPhone owners are sticking with their existing phones for much longer than before.
In some ways, this is a huge problem for Apple: Their phones are so good that there's no reason to buy next year's model, or the one after that, or the one after that. (I can attest to this myself: I'm using an iPhone 13 that I bought in 2021, and have yet to find a reason to trade it in for a new one.)
But this is a very real problem for Apple, since the company is in the business of selling expensive, high-margin hardware.
As we've discussed here before, Apple has tried to address this issue by focusing on growing its “services” business, which can grow independent of device sales, but Apple really, really needs you (and me) to buy new iPhones on a regular basis to keep the whole business running smoothly.
If you're a very cynical person or journalist, Apple is really needs The company's vaunted AI is powered by the latest and greatest chips and other hardware, which some might say is merely a convenient sales pitch for a company that can no longer convince people to buy a new phone by saying it's thinner or has a better camera.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that this is at least a little true (for starters, we know that the technology to power something like ChatGPT requires massive amounts of power, so to run it on a pocket computer you might as well need a state-of-the-art pocket computer).
Now, back to the main question: Are the features Apple CEO Tim Cook showed off on Monday great enough to warrant buying a new phone, iPad or Mac?
Because we saw hints of some pretty cool features, like the airport-with-your-mother scenario that Apple says it can solve. But a lot of the features weren't all that impressive, like the ability to create custom emojis in text messages. (Does Apple really believe in emojis as something that makes a difference?)
One reason these didn't wow me is because they might literally be no big deal, just like the poop emoji was no big deal in 2017. Or maybe the most impressive uses of AI on the iPhone won't come until developers figure out new cool ways to use it on the iPhone, which is the whole rationale for showing these off at developer conferences.
But I have a third, tone-based theory for why Apple's AI unveiling didn't wow me: Apple is walking a delicate balance: it wants the AI to seem awesome, but not scary.
Because this amazing/scary dichotomy is one we’ve become quite familiar with over the last few years of AI. Chatbots like ChatGPT can have compelling “conversations,” but can we trust what they say? Image and video creation technologies like Midjourney and Sora can create stunningly beautiful scenes from scratch, but will they replace entire industries? And so on.
And in Apple's demo on Monday, the company played both sides of the coin, telling users that its AI can instantly improve your writing, while also making fleeting allusions to other companies' less-than-stellar AI, like AI companies that store their users' data in “someone's AI cloud.”
And that tension is most visible in the product names themselves: Apple calls its AI “Apple Intelligence” rather than “Artificial Intelligence,” an implicit assertion that other AIs are not something you need to spend your time worrying about.
In fact, it was pretty clear: “This is AI for the people,” Apple executive Craig Federighi declared at the end of the presentation.
In Apple's framework, it's a helpful but not creepy AI that's immediately useful but Too Disruptive. And, importantly, cool enough to justify a very expensive new purchase.
Will you buy it?
