I Turned Off Apple Intelligence – Sad Update
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This meant that at the time there was frankly no need to run notifications/etc through a summarizer (or even make notifications persist after unlocking the screen).
But then Apple gave up on enforcing the rule, and the push for more "growth & engagement" meant that common decency was also out the window, so now notification spam is normal and even Apple itself engages in it to advertise Apple Music/etc.
The rule about promotional push notifications being opt-in still exists in the App Review Guidelines, it may just take some public shaming to get Apple to enforce it.
(While many apps from big publishers skirt the rule, DoorDash is the most egregious I've noticed: if you opt out of promo notifications, they'll try to trick you into turning them back on every time you place an order, suggesting that you won't receive delivery updates otherwise.)
For the remaining apps that I can’t avoid like Uber, I turn notifications off. There’s a 5 minute window where I’ll have to switch between the Uber app and whatever I’m doing, but I’ll file it under fidgeting.
I think it’s important to call out abuse of notifications for what it is. Notifications are for important events that a user expects. If a service wants to lie to me about what’s important, what else are they lying about?
Amusingly, this is only conditioning me to use fewer apps on a phone, which is making switching to an Android with alternative firmware slowly become easier.
As for the ham-fisted summarization on display in the OP example, I am reminded of the video of a dog that goes up to a shopkeeper and hands him a leaf, in exchange for a biscuit. The dog doesn't understand currency or context: he's simply seen hundreds of people hand the shopkeeper a leaf-like substance and walk off with a cookie.
> These companies are mortified of being left out of the make-believe party they made up themselves. It's incredibly bizarre.
I understand that some of the stuff is not there yet. But dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff? Reminds me of what people were saying of web, web 2.0, etc. My productivity has taken giant leaps since two years, probably because I'm willing to regularly invest some time into understanding & exploring which workflows can be optimised. It might actually not be trivial, and even some AI companies are not able to showcase their tech in realistic problem solving scenarios. But it's there.
Apple is just really really bad at this atm. Their leadership has transformed the company into a mindset of mirco-optimisations, no more taking risks etc.
But that's not Apple. Apple is the company that watches everyone screw up and then comes out with something brilliantly simple that just works. Not only is Apple Intelligence a mess, a lot of it is vaporware [1].
Siri used to be useful enough that I could ask her to send short texts and place calls. But now, when I ask it to message someone I am regularly in touch with, it spouts out a message to someone with a similar-sounding name I haven't spoken to in years.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
New tech tends to start with garage scale startups and targeting the enthusiasts, the experimenters, the hobbyists, the ones willing to put the effort into playing with it, map what is and isn't possible, and file off the rough edges. And when you're making a product like that, you probably have to package and market it entirely differently-- a world of datasheets, programmer's references, and schematics, to give that audience the tools to get the most out of it.
If and when you're lucky, you get to the VisiCalc moment, when someone finds a way to deliver a mainstream value proposition so compelling that people line up waving their Mastercards. There's a 200% chance that value proposition will not be the one you put on the marketing flyer to sell the kit to early-adopters, and it may not even come from the firms who launched the market in the first place.
Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI are all trying to short-circuit that process. You can't just throw a trillion dollars at a product and shove their early-stage products in front of customers and expect to magically win the future.
It's like trying to make desktop computing happen in 1977 by busting into every house in the country, bolting an Imsai 8080 to random appliances unsolicited, and telling them to enjoy their new computing-enabled future.
Nobody was saying that about the web. The web in 1994 had email and instant messaging out of the box, it replaced letter mail and consumer fax overnight.
We're several years into the GenAI wave, what has it changed for Apple users?
(Just as an example of practically useful functionality, while I agree that the technology still falls short of expectations and dreams in many other domains)