Apple’s AI and Vision Pro Products Don’t Meet Its Standards

For decades, Apple’s defining characteristics as a hardware and software maker have been simplicity and quality. “It just works,” as Steve Jobs repeatedly told users.

Sure, Apple products have had flaws and lacked some capabilities offered by competing products. But the company would rarely ever be drawn to acknowledge them. When it did (begrudgingly) admit a problem, as it did with the Maps debacle of 2012 and the iPhone “you’re holding it wrong” saga in 2010, it became international news. Apple made a mistake! Can you believe it?

Today, Apple is having to become a different type of company. Its two most important products are being developed very much in the full view of the public, and I would say before they have met the previous Apple standard. “It just works” is now “we’re working on it.”

It’s happening because Apple is under two sources of intensifying pressure. Progress made by its competitors in the artificial intelligence space has exposed that Apple has been slow to develop AI tools in its products. At the same time, Wall Street is wondering where Apple’s future growth is going to come from now that the iPhone seems to have reached its sales peak. (The company reports its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings later on Thursday.)

The first experiment is Apple Intelligence, the company’s haphazardly pulled together answer to efforts from OpenAI, Microsoft and Google in applying AI to their consumer-facing tools and devices. Partially released to the public this week (more features will come out next year), Apple Intelligence is light on functionality and considered to be more than two years behind the competition. One of its main applications — summarizing notifications — is inconsistent. (Sometimes comically so; one recent example shared on Threads: “Jeff Bezos criticizes the [Washington] Post’s lack of presidential endorsement in an op-ed” … huh?)

Each example of AI shortfalls will cause Apple employees to wince — particularly those in Cupertino whom, I suspect, know Apple Intelligence marks a shift in standards at the company, a software release that the Apple of yesteryear would not have put out in such an incomplete form.