Apple Intelligence: Fud, Dud or Both

John Gruber is not mincing his words.

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. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.

You have to read the whole thing. Gruber is a long-time follower of Apple, close to its high priests and kings. He has a historical understanding of Apple like no other. When he criticizes Apple, you know the situation is much worse. Gruber truly eviscerated Apple over its Apple Intelligence debacle.

As someone who was highly enthusiastic about Apple Intelligence, I have to admit the final results have been disappointing. Apart from transcription and proofreading, most of the Apple Intelligence features have fallen short of expectations, to put it mildly. I’ve been writing about this for a while. Last fall, I pointed out the glaring shortcomings of Apple Intelligence.

As I wrote before: “The ‘AI’ transition is a shift in how we interact with information, much like how the browser and later the mobile device changed our relationship with it and what we could do with it.” This shift in our interaction with information, driven by AI, is reminiscent of earlier technological leaps. Just as web browsers revolutionized our access to online content and mobile devices made that access ubiquitous, AI is poised to transform how we process and utilize information in our daily lives.

“I’m on my knees, praying to the tech gods that Apple can pull off something miraculous with its upcoming ‘Apple Intelligence.’ We desperately need a better experience than what we have now,” I wrote then, pointing out that “if Apple fumbles the ball on this one, it could potentially fall behind in what is a crucial generational shift in our relationship with computers.”

It’s clear Apple must radically rethink its reason for being. Gruber is right when he says, “Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino.” He puts it best when he writes, “The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.” Gruber has done a good job of explaining why.

I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what the stock market expects from it.

They lack the moral authority of Steve Jobs to defy the markets, streamline their product lineup, and focus the company. Instead, they do what a complex business often does: they do more. Could they have done a better job with iPadOS? Should Vision Pro receive more attention?

The answer to all those is yes. Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough – because what others have on the market is worse. They know how to build great hardware; it’s the software where they falter. In the case of Apple Intelligence, they have been caught short because others’ AI products, even when flawed, are significantly better than Apple’s own offerings.

Apple’s AI event was more of a show-and-tell to appease Wall Street investors. Make no mistake — stockholders, not just customers, are a primary focus of the company. Back in 2020, I explained how Apple was part of nearly all our portfolios without us realizing it. Now that stake has grown even larger. Apple’s management can’t afford to make mistakes.

And perhaps that is why they had to come up with an AI strategy. So, instead of trying to do better and sticking to the Apple way, they rushed out an incomplete product. As Steve Jobs said:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.

Updated: A few Wall Street contacts reached out to challenge my hypothesis. They argued that if Apple were focused solely on pleasing investors, the company would likely concentrate on maximizing profits from its primary revenue source — the iPhone — rather than experimenting with new products.

My counterargument is that releasing Apple Intelligence early helps maintain the iPhone’s cutting-edge appeal and perceived value. The extensive advertising campaign only reinforces this strategy. For a company like Apple, maintaining its reputation as an innovator is crucial. Consider the Vision Pro: Its timing appears to be a response to Meta’s push into augmented and virtual reality, rather than representing organic product development.

We are in the “spectacle of technology” era, and Apple isn’t immune to this trend. Am I worried about the classic Apple? Not at all — its hardware and semiconductor teams know how to build exceptional products. However, what used to be a “complete experience” now feels incomplete.

March 12, 2025. San Francisco.

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