Apple is about the enter the world of AI–and nothing will ever be the same

WWDC24 is almost here and everyone expects it to be all about AI. As the eyes of the tech world turn back to Apple, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s got to establish that it’s been working on AI features for years, show off new features, catch up with AI features from competitors, and maybe even take the opportunity to show where it’s raising the bar.

But this isn’t just Apple’s chance to show it’s doing AI right. It’s also an opportunity to redefine the conversation about AI to make it more substantive and results-oriented–and, of course, to make Apple look better while doing it.

Adult in the room

Let’s face it–for all its promise, the last few years of AI have also been kind of a disaster. Racism, bias, more bias caused by anti-bias training, recommendations to eat rocks or add glue to pizza–there is a constant drumbeat of stories about all the ways where AI fails spectacularly.

This is, to put it bluntly, the fault of a tech industry that’s gotten way over its skis. In a rush to one-up one another, companies roll out features that seem like brilliant science fiction but fall apart into embarrassing and substandard functionality so immediately that the failures are often literally contained in the introduction of the product itself.

But behind that wave of unreliable garbage, some amazing features emerge from using AI models. Apple has the chance to depict itself as the adult in the room, a company committed to using AI for features that make its customers’ lives better–not competing to do the best unreproducible magic trick on stage.

In doing so, it risks being seen as dowdy and behind. But if Apple can see beyond the latest tech-industry hype cycle–and it’s generally good at doing that–it can bet on iPhone users being more interested in real features than impractical nonsense.

Wrong way around

Historically, Apple has been a company with a very strong philosophy about new technologies: they should be applied to solving the problems of real people. Most tech companies have historically had this backward: they take delivery of some whizzy new technology fresh off a manufacturer’s conveyor belt and shove it into a product. The result tends to be products that are solutions desperately searching for problems.

The current AI hype gives off the whiff of that particular stink. This is an opportunity for Apple to focus on using AI technology to solve real problems and trump those solutions while, yeah, bragging that they used AI to solve them.

The truth is that Apple has been doing this for ages. It has used the phrase “machine learning,” recently discarded because AI is the catchphrase of the day, to analyze and process images in the Photos app for nearly a decade. AI features permeate Apple’s products already, and the company’s been shipping AI-enhanced Apple-designed processors–the Neural Engine, y’know–for years now. Given how long it takes to design and manufacture microprocessors, that means Apple has been planning for this moment for ages now.

But now it needs to deliver.

Careful to a fault

The sign of Apple being “behind” in AI is that it entirely missed the boat on the AI chatbot and content generation craze. According to reliable reports, the company was taken aback by the rise of those tools and has rushed to catch up.

That’s not the warning sign I’d point to, though. It’s more like a symptom of a larger problem within Apple, which is that the company can be incredibly conservative when it comes to certain kinds of technologies, including AI features. You may have noticed that Apple has a bit of a control freak streak: it really wants to have complete control over the user experience. The more you give an AI feature free rein, the more unpredictable it can be.

This has led some corners of Apple to resist many AI technologies because they’re just not controllable. And I think that’s a good impulse, generally! Tech sites freak out when literally anything Apple ships has a problem, even if it’s a handful of defective iPhones that make weird noises or have green casts on their displays. By being conservative, Apple has saved itself lots of negative headlines about an “AI-gate” here or there.

But… that careful approach also probably explains why Siri is generally considered to be lackluster at best and embarrassing at worst. More than five years ago, Apple hired away Google’s AI chief and put him in charge of Apple’s AI efforts. And yet here we are, five years later, and everyone’s clamoring for Apple to explain itself next week.

I have to think that some of the reason Apple is in this spot is that it’s been reluctant to flip the switch on some AI features. By all accounts, there was a reckoning a year ago, and we’re about to see the result.

Features matter

I think Apple probably needed this kick in the pants from the rest of the tech world. The company operates at its best when it’s pressured by competition. It takes great pride in operating around the cutting edge–but with better approaches than its competitors.

That’s what Apple’s announcements should be. Instead of chasing ridiculous demos, it should remember that it’s building solutions to real problems. The features it builds matter because its customers don’t actually care about Apple checking the “has AI” box or keeping up with a tech industry leaderboard. They do care that they can remove something annoying from the background of a photo, get a clear summary of their notifications while in Focus mode, or ask Siri for something and get a clear and accurate answer without getting frustrated.

As you watch the WWDC keynote and read reactions to the announcements here and around the web, keep this question in mind: Will this make iPhone, Mac, or iPad users happy? Or is it just happening to appease investors, journalists, and other tech-industry insiders? The more times Apple does the former, the better its announcements will be in the long run.

Apple Inc