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Comment by QuadmasterXLII | Hacker News Reader

i was under the impression that the 2024 apple intelligence rollout was something of a victory: Apple realized that the majority of people don't actually want this stuff forced on them at the os level, and the ai maximalists all used apple anyways via clawbot (including purchasing an additional apple device, the mini!) because of apples non-ai-specific commitment to phone computer interop.

Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows

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I say this every time: the average person never wants to hear the letters A and I. Not because it has a negative connotation, but because they don’t care how their phone gets them an answer to “when is my dentist appointment” they just want it to do it.

At least for consumer software, AI is synonymous with annoying nagware forcing itself in your way.

I think you're trying to say, the term 'AI' is _associated_ with chatbots being added in places (websites mostly) where they are more of a nuisance than added value.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is AI consumer software and is a hit, albeit mostly free tier users.

And that's the thing, 90% of people's interactions with "AI" is negatives in places it didn't belong, Klarna had to roll back "AI" customer service, useless chatbots everywhere "because AI", copilot this and that and so on.

And yes, ChatGPT is a hit but who will subsidize the hardware for freeloaders, Google's (cheap to run) AI is good enough now that I don't need to move over to ChatGPT for simple answers, thus the Google moat will probably remain intact denying OpenAI the search revenue stream all whilst OpenAI proposals/trials to add ADs were met with annoyance.

AI where useful is becoming a commodity, Apple did the correct thing in waiting and using the commodity parts and we're otherwise also quickly heading to the bubble's pop, HN even censoring articles on the topic sure seems to be an indicator that those in power are afraid.

Don’t forget Google search and Copilot giving you wrong answers. The first time someone gets graded poorly or called out at work for obviously not checking what they sent tends to reframe their perspective.

I think this is the jaded HN way of seeing AI in products. It's not reality.

I work on a popular consumer product (from well before AI existed) which is incorporating more and more AI features. When we release AI features they receive far more attention and usage than traditional features.

Users who interact with AI features are much "stickier" (more likely to still be users months from now). Free users who interact with AI features are much more likely to convert to paid users. AI features get more press, more online comments, more usage, more conversions. If this wasn't true we wouldn't be spending so much money on it.

I keep hearing that "the average person hates AI", but their revealed preference is different. Any time they need to make anything that takes effort a lot of people immediately turn to ChatGPT.

People don't like to consume AI-made things but they sure like to use it.

Deep, deep down, the average person wants to be controlled and told what to do, just so long as they don't have to acknowledge it to themselves. Clinging to the garment of a Daddy or a Mommy or a god or priest or a Great Leader is the usual way to do this.

Buying brands that advertising has told us will make the anxiety go away, or equivalently believing ideologies that propaganda has told us the same, is another.

Note that I count myself among this number - I'm not holding myself out as a superior free-thinker, I think it's likely that I'm just as unaware of my personal flavour of self-deception as anyone else.

Clinging to chatbots is just a new version of the same thing.

That sounds like an untestable hypothesis, aka conspiracy theory.

Or, more charitably, they don't want to be controlled but rather want guidance and wisdom in a difficult and confusing world.

Exactly. Even though Siri is completely lost today, my friend asks it a number of random things, all she wants is an answer. Currently it redirects to the web, it’s enough for her. I told her “next year it’ll work!” And boom. We’re in the EU. Sad.

Yep, by using the terms intelligence, and occasionally Apple Intelligence and not AI[1], they get to talk about these features in a way that don't trigger an automatic mental gag reflex. The fact they cottoned on to this 2 years ago is actually pretty impressive.

[1] https://x.com/ArtemR/status/2056961743142957143

Is it impressive though?

I wrote this in another thread recently: AI is a technology, not a product. Consumers don't care about technologies, they care about products.

This is pretty elementary stuff. SV has a propensity for conflating technology and products, I'll give you that, but Apple's product management has always been relatively good about this kind of thing.

AI's not a technology, though. LLMs are a technology. AI is a marketing term.

"Mental gag reflex" is exactly right. I'm running two different instances of Claude Opus 4.8 on xhigh right now, and I'm absolutely fine with it because that's what _I_ want to do.

AI features on my toothbrush, toaster, refrigerator, doorbell, washing machine, word processing software, TV, whatever, without my actually asking for them first are THINGS I DO NOT WANT, and adding those features to those devices will cause me either to have go to great lengths not to use them, or - much more likely - just not to buy them at all if I can.

But also because it has a negative connotation. Not with everyone, but with a lot of people. If someone says "That looks like AI", do you think they are intending to make a compliment?

Yeah that comment is making it seem like people don't care if they are using AI only the results, but they not only do care they actively hate AI and tech companies associated with it too.

There is a reason why there is a massive backlash against data center buildouts across the US.

While I agree with your assessment, these data centers cause substantial noise and water pollution-- even if people didn't have a problem with AI the data centers would be a problem for people.

Exactly this. I want a system that can understand basic instructions like this, in context, with all the necessary unspoken assumptions implicit in natural language and the problem domain, and get it right _every single time without fail_. A bit like AppleScript, but in natural language and smarter.

Most definitely _not_ a cleverer system that sometimes hallucinates or goes off on tangents, or sends my personal information to parties unknown.

Their most recent iPhone which had no major AI advertisements associated with it GAINED market share over competition[1]

They have no ground to make up on AI, and changing their operating system to center on AI would piss off every iPhone user I know outside of tech, and probably half of them within tech.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/13/apple-q1-market-share-g...

Whether or not consumers wanted it, Apple failed to deliver. And that wasn't because they were listening or anything - they just couldn't deliver.

Apple doesn't leak much but there has been coverage of this:

https://spyglass.org/apple-ai-fail/ (April 2025)

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-... (paywalled)

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/06/07/one-fateful-meeti... (2 days ago)

They couldn't deliver because they are not a startup and thus have something to lose in a way that OpenAI/Anthropic don't. If Siri starts telling people to self-destruct themselves it would be a major PR disaster, whereas Apple Intelligence being late is not. Arguably the technology they needed (strong guardrails) didn't really exist at the time and the extra couple of years is what made the difference.

Are you saying that Google is a startup?

Google doesn't care about reputation the way Apple does. People are used to Google shipping broken features and shutting down products when they don't immediately sell. Apple is a premium brand and it's expected to be more stable, and to deliver solutions that actually work.

Yeah, that's exactly why Apple is paying money to Google now to fix the shitshow that is Siri

Well they're paying Google for access to their model, which I think makes sense. I've been saying for a while that models are commodities, the integration or harness is what really matters. There's a lot of good models available, many open weight these days!

What took Anthropic to the top wasn't their models, which are good. It's Claude Code, everything around the model that delivers value for their customers. Gone are the days of slapping a model behind a chatbox and hoping for the best. We need, like, actual software, that does actual things. Siri could be that... maybe. Apple has a lot going for them in regards to how much of their consumer base's software experience they control.

I think you're quite right in a sense, but let's say it had been Samsung making these promises. Do you think the system not working properly or producing weird and unacceptable results would have prevented them releasing it anyway?

Well, the results[1] are[2] actually[3] in. Samsung of course did do that and the results are what you'd expect.

So in a sense Apple 'could' have released what they had, after all Samsung and others have, but almost certainly not at the level of quality Apple expects. In which case arguably not releasing until it is capable of reaching that quality bar is the right call. The wrong call was announcing it in the first place when it wasn't ready.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1b4zc1j/new_ai_tex... [2] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/awful-galaxy-s24-feature-... [3] https://www.androidauthority.com/im-tired-pretending-galaxy-...

Avie Tevanian told the parable of not needing to outrun the bear if you can outrun your friend. These companies aren’t competing to be perfect, they’re competing for our money.

If Apple had to be the best at AI, it would be out of business already. But it just has to make things people want and the customers will use them to run local or remote LLMs.

> copilot button in ms paint

things there don't seem to be going well

Genuinely, the day they start shoving "AI features" into my iPhone is the day I switch to a fairphone or something I can actually own. I don't care if they include optional features, but I am so tired of seeing chatbots and text manglers shoved into every fucking app. I can write my own emails, thanks google.

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