Apple logo over an Apple store

It’s announcement time at Apple’s WWDC. And apart from trying to rebrand AI as “Apple Intelligence” I haven’t seen many people get very excited about it. MKBHD has an overview if you want to get into the details. I just use macOS without iCloud because everything works and my Mac Studio is super-fast.

Ryan Broderick has a word for Apple fanboys, who seem to think that everything they touch is gold. Seems like their Vision Pro hasn’t brought VR mainstream, and after the more innovative Steve Jobs era, it seems like they’re more happy to be a luxury brand that plays it relatively safe.

If you press Apple fanboys about their weird revisionist history, they usually pivot to the argument that while iOS’s marketshare has essentially remained flat for a decade, their competitors copy what they do and that trickles down into popular culture from there. Which I’m not even sure is true either. Android had mobile payments three years before Apple, had a smartwatch a year before, a smart speaker a year before, and launched a tablet around the same time as the iPad. We could go on and on here.

And, I should say, I don’t actually think Apple sees themselves as the great innovator their Gen X blogger diehards do. In the 2010s, they shifted comfortably from a visionary tastemaker, at least aesthetically, into something closer to an airport lounge or a country club for consumer technology. They’ll eventually have a version of the new thing you’ve heard about, once they can rebrand it as something uniquely theirs. It’s not VR, it’s “spatial computing,” it’s not AI, it’s “Apple Intelligence”. But they’re not going to shake the boat. They make efficiently-bundled software that’s easy to use (excluding iPadOS) and works well across their nice-looking and easy-to-use devices (excluding the iPad). Which is why Apple Intelligence is not going to be the revolution the AI industry has been hoping for. The same way the Vision Pro wasn’t. The iPhone effect, if it was ever real in the first place, is certainly not real now.

Source: Garbage Day