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Question #198: French Bread Law, Old Lawn Signs, and Governance in the Realm of Freedom
Harris·Sockel ( Harris Sockel)
Apple Intelligence dropped on Monday.*
Icymi, “Apple Intelligence” is marketing language aimed at a few individual products. You can eliminate some impolite things, and Apple will resell your email by speaking business. You can create a mini-me cartoon (your own Genmoji). You can ask Siri how long it takes to drive to the moon, and she will understand you are speaking hypothetically.
Reviews are mixed. One blogger thinks it’s a lot of “Razzle Dazzle” (slick animations) that cover up basic features like grammatical repetition. A vlogger named DailyTekk tested Apple Intelligence in Beta and found it very helpful—especially the ability to talk to Siri like your friend, rather than your quirky robot servant.
In June, after the WWDC, Apple launched these features with the inventor of the hashtag, Chris Messina, releasing medium context.
He wrote that Apple hasn’t done a lot of foundational innovation. Instead, they identified technologies that were market-fit but not yet realized and built engaging product experiences around them. They did it with digital music. Smartphones. Email, text messaging, and personal computing itself. Now, they are working on AI, which is built on a blank page of Chatgpt with a contextless text box to help us start to understand what this new technology looks like as part of a cohesive product.
This is classic Apple. Take something that feels cold, futuristic, and isolated, and make it feel warm and inviting. I’m reminded of this story from former Apple product designer Andrea Pacheco. She recalled that Apple has always been about creating truly delightful product experiences rather than shipping experimental MVPs. This moment sums it up well:
I will never forget this time when I met with the Apple TV product team, and someone said we could launch on web and mobile platforms, but we weren’t ready for the TV experience. So the prime minister said : “If we can’t launch the best experience on all platforms right now, then we won’t launch it at all. If we need to wait another year to provide the best experience for customers, we will wait.”
If you’ve tried Apple Intelligence, what’s one specific use you discovered? How did it help you?
*Only if you are using iPhone 15 or later! You must download the latest iOS and then “join the waitlist” in settings.
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