Apple doesn’t innovate from scratch
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Issue #198: the French Bread Law, ancient lawn signs, and reigning in a free-ranging convo
By Harris Sockel
Apple Intelligence dropped on Monday.*
ICYMI, “Apple Intelligence” is marketing-speak for a handful of individual products. You can blurt out something impolite and Apple will recast your email in business-speak. You can create a little cartoon mini-me (a Genmoji of yourself). You can ask Siri how long it would take to drive to the moon, and she will understand that you’re speaking hypothetically.
Reviews are mixed. One blogger thinks it’s a lot of “razzle dazzle” (slick animations) disguising basic features like a Grammarly duplicate. A vlogger known as DailyTekk tested Apple Intelligence in beta and found it was helpful — especially the ability to talk to Siri like it’s your friend, not your weird robot servant.
In June, after Apple unveiled these features WWDC, Chris Messina — inventor of the hashtag — posted on Medium to contextualize them.
Apple doesn’t do a ton of ground-up innovation, he wrote. Instead, they identify technologies that haven’t yet achieved product-market fit — and build compelling product experiences around them. They did this with digital music. Smartphones. Email, text messaging, and personal computing itself. Now, they’re tackling AI, building on ChatGPT’s contextless text box on a blank page to help us begin to see what this new technology looks like when it’s part of a cohesive product.
This is classic Apple. Take something that feels cold, futuristic, and isolating and make it feel warm and welcoming. I’m reminded of this story by former Apple product designer Andrea Pacheco. She recalls how obsessed Apple has always been with building truly delightful product experiences, rather than shipping experimental MVPs. This moment sums it up well:
I’ll never forget this one time when I was at a meeting with a product team from Apple TV, and someone said that we could do a release on the web and mobile platform, but we didn’t have the experience ready for TV. So the PM said “if we can’t launch the best experience across all our platforms now, we’re not launching it at all. If we need to wait another year to deliver the best experience for our customers, we’ll wait.”
If you’ve tried Apple Intelligence, what’s one specific use you’ve found for it? How has it helped you, or not?
*Only if you’re on an iPhone 15 or later! You have to download the latest iOS and then “join the waitlist” in Settings.
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