Ready or Not, Here Apple AI Comes

It’s a narrative as old as time. Or at least as old as Apple. It goes something like this: the company rarely creates brand new innovations, but instead sits back and waits for a market to mature before coming in with the best version of a product. The iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. The Apple Watch. Even the Mac, to some degree. There are plenty of counter-examples, but it’s also their M.O. for a reason. They use this playbook often. And they play it well.

So where does that leave Apple with AI?

Well, in a similar boat, actually. For a while now, all we’ve been hearing is that Apple is behind on AI. That Microsoft, Google, Meta, and a plethora of startups led by OpenAI were leading the charge here. Amazon, sorta, kind of, but not really. But Apple? Really not really. Wall Street has agreed, boosting the competitors stocks to the moon — nearly quite literally in the case of NVIDIA, which seems on the verge of overtaking Apple as the second-most valuable company in the world. And so Apple has gone on a strange (for them) verbal offensive not completely unlike the opening of Battlestar Galactica teasing the AI-powered Cylons, “and they have a plan”.

That plan is set to be announced in a week and a half now at WWDC. Naturally, as he often does, it appears that Mark Gurman was able to scoop a lot of the would-be announcements. Likely not all of them, but enough where we can probably glean a sense of direction to where this is all headed. And that position is… kind of boring? Sure, there will be a few fun things here and there, but mostly it seems like it will be table-stakes stuff with regard to AI. Stuff which Apple’s competitors have been doing for quite some time now. Stuff which Apple basically needs to do for Wall Street, if no one else.

But what if “kind of boring” is a good place to be with regard to AI, right now?

I’ve already written about how fast the ground is shifting with AI. With the state of the art changing weekly, if not more often some weeks. While the large tech firms are trying to act as stabilizing forces, there’s still just too much seismic activity on which to build foundations you can rely upon. And in this analogy, that’s mainly core products. And because of this continued chaos, we’re still seeing products that range from interesting to amazing, but also range from unstable to fleeting.

All of that is to say, it’s still too early for AI to be the central focus of core products. It’s (mostly) fine if you’re a startup, with all the instability that is naturally assumed there, but if you’re a established player with millions — or billions — of users relying on your services on a daily basis, well… hopefully what you’re building has great seismic retrofitting.

From the reports, and just some good old common sense thinking, it sure feels like Apple is going to take bits and pieces of the most stable forms of early AI — voice transcription, photo retouching, auto-suggestions for texts and emails, etc — and bake those into core products. They’ll likely go a little further afield with things like website summaries and custom emojis, which don’t sound particularly game-changing, but do involve some level of risk. (What will those crazy kids have that poo emoji doing next?) And then there are the must-have elements for a successful AI narrative: augmenting coding within Xcode and upgrading Siri in a way that she’s no longer the laughing stock of the industry, quite literally.

The key, as always with Apple, will be how well they’re able to seamlessly bake the AI into their products. With many other services right now, AI feels tacked-on at best, and unnaturally shoved in a user’s face at worst. To me, one of the key reasons that OpenAI has been a leader in the field beyond some first-mover advantages, is that they’re the best at actually productizing the AI innovations. As we’ve learned time and time again throughout the history of technology, it’s not good enough to have the best technology, you need to make it sing. You need to wrap a compelling product around the technology to get people to actually use it. To get people to actually want to use it.

And so for something like notification summaries, it can’t just be a data dump of items an AI deems to be important across a range of apps, it needs to be an elegant solution to the problem of notification overload. A feature that both truly saves users time and is presented in a way that is desirable to read and use.

Again, this is what Apple does. They look at some early takes on general ideas and figure out a way to make them work for the masses. And I suspect that AI will be no different.

If there is any difference, it’s that there is some actual pressure on Apple here to deliver the AI goods. There was some pressure to deliver on the iPhone back in the day, but the hype around smartphones, while real — I highly recommend BlackBerry, the movie — was nothing compared to what we’re seeing around AI right now. And Apple knows it and feels it in their stock price. They’ll say this doesn’t matter. But it does.

And so it’s perhaps pushing Apple to act a bit faster than they might otherwise. With most of AI still very immature and Apple’s own infrastructure to handle such technology still nascent. That’s why they’ll have to partner on some key elements of their AI narrative at WWDC. But this is also nothing new for Apple. They’ll partner on things until they no longer have to. Remember the ROKR?

Of course, Apple was perhaps also pushed a bit faster than natural on their last big unveil: the Vision Pro. They’ll never admit as much, of course. But I believe it’s struggling to find its bearings in the market right now because it came out of the oven not fully baked. If anything, the high price is helping Apple here, in that it’s limiting the number of people who can complain about the absurd lack of content ready to roll in these early days. So pressure, be it internal or external, isn’t always a great thing for a company that prefers to “ship when it is ready”.

Is AI ready? Is Apple ready for AI? We’ll find out soon enough. But I don’t think Apple is late. If anything, they’re still too early.