782: Apple Intelligence Review
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Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, Stephen. How are you today, buddy? I am good. How are you?

I am feeling the intelligence just coursing through my veins. The Apple intelligence. Colorful gradients all over the place. Yeah, when you wear the Apple watch because of Apple intelligence, I think it gets into your bloodstream. Oh, wait a second. The watch doesn't have Apple intelligence. No. Well, maybe it's just my tiger blood. Or a blood oxygen sensor if you live in the United States. Yeah, boy, that's rough.

I keep forgetting about that. I know. It's not in the notes at all, but I actually had a friend of mine upgrade. I think he was on like a Series 6 or something. He was on an older watch. I bought a new one. He doesn't follow the stuff, but he knows I do. And he got it. And he's like, hey, I just got this watch. Where's the blood oxygen sensing? I was like, oh, let me tell you a story. He was disappointed, but that's okay.

You know, it's crazy as a former business lawyer, like when you have something like that, one party has like leverage over another, you want to ultimately make a deal because what's the name of the company that won the patent suit? Massimo. Massimo. Yeah. Because Massimo is not making any money off that patent while we sit here and twiddle our thumbs. Yeah. Right. And so either Massimo is demanding way too much or Apple is being way too cheap.

But the way commerce normally works is once they get the upper hand, he's like, okay, you got me. Let's make a reasonable deal and then we'll pay. And that just never happened. And, you know, kind of inside baseball, the Mossimo CEO just got let go. And you think the board has got to be sitting there saying, how come we didn't make any money on all that stuff?

You would think so. Yeah. So I don't know. But either way, I hope they figure that out soon. My guess is an Apple out of spite will probably come up with some alternative way to do it that passes muster. And Moss and Molden will never get any money out of it. Yeah. Playing chicken with the wrong company maybe. Yeah. Oh, boy. I did a couple contracts with Apple. Those guys don't mess around. They got some stuff going. I'm sure. Yeah.

Yeah. We've got a little bit of housekeeping here at the top of the show. Last week, we spoke about your productivity field guide, and it is now out to the masses. As we record this, it's only been just a little bit of time, but you want to talk about that real quick?

Yeah. First of all, thank you for everybody that got it. I'm already hearing from people with really great questions as they're going through the material and enjoying the new stuff. And like I said last week, this product is very special to me and I love it.

I feel like it's my contribution to the world. So I hope that those that got it are enjoying it. A few of you wrote me to say, Hey, you said last week there's an upgrade discount. I didn't get it. So what I did is I sent out a special email to everybody who bought the last one, but if you had opted out or whatever, for some reason you didn't get the upgrade discount, just email me and I'll, I'll take care of you. And it's just going great. I love it. And thanks everybody for the support and, and,

I'm very proud of the product and glad it's out there. And thanks for putting up with my nonsense. No, it's so good. And I'm glad it's resonating. It certainly did with me. Yeah. I love my, one of my favorites is the, the spouse feedback, right? You know,

many people have written me to say yeah you know i like one of the few people say oh yeah my spouse says that i'm doing a like what's changed you know like people going through the course like oh my spouse asked commented that i'm doing better at things and i'm like yeah that's right you know or or when the spouse goes through it and then suddenly that max barky guy isn't the guy that's costing you all this money he's the guy helping you and her get your lives together i don't know it's it

I, um, I, I, maybe it's my age or whatever, but I'm very, uh, I'm very squishy these days, Steven. And that really makes me feel squishy. Uh, yeah, I got a little housekeeping as well.

Um, over at relay, we launched our redesign, uh, last week and I got a blog post that I wrote that I'll throw in the show notes kind of about the logo change. You'll see the new logo on the, uh, the NPU, the show art this week, kind of a simplified, I think more, uh,

useful look. I think the new logo looks great, but also gives us, um, a little bit easier time working with some things. And, uh, a sign of a true, I think true successful project like this is some of this work has been done for a long time. In fact, we showed off this logo in July in London. And since then I see the old one every day. I'm like, Oh,

it looks so old to me. You know, there's, uh, when Apple announced the first thin iMac in like 2012, Phil Schiller had this joke about like, isn't it funny how like the new thing makes the old thing. It's look older. And, uh, that's how I feel about, about the relay mark and kind of the updated show art. So, uh, the feedback's been great. Thank you all who have said nice things about it. Um, but yeah, very excited that that's out in the world.

Yeah, it looks really good on the show art. I really like it. It's awesome. Looks good on the website, and there's more to come. I got a 10-year plaque from Relay. Did you know that? I did know that, yeah. That showed up in my mail. I love it. Yeah, yeah. We're giving 10-year plaques, and so...

Uh, yeah, we just sent out the class of 2025 because, uh, you started on relay in 2015, which is bananas to me. And Daisy has a 10 year plaque from Disney. So I think I'm going to hang it right next to it. Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It, the world of like ordering, I'm doing air quotes, corporate awards, my word, man, like these websites are so bad or you like customize them and like,

It's been a whole adventure getting these things made. But yeah, I got mine hanging up in my office, right? Kind of by my desk. And I think it was a nice thing to do. Yeah, nice. Yeah. Well, today on More Power Users, I went to the brink this week, gang. I don't know what happened to me, but somehow I found myself picking out a 14-inch MacBook Pro and then...

I took a deep breath and then I stepped back, but I want to talk through the whole process and why it's all Steven and Jason's fault. Um, but, uh, but I had a near miss this week on spending a bunch of money. You did. I think you really had a near miss. I like that. Yeah.

About that. So, yeah. So this week we are doing our Apple intelligence review and you and I debated really quite a bit about when to do this episode. We talked about, do we do it at the end of the year? Like, you know, last month or in December. Yeah.

Not all of it's out yet. We thought, well, do we wait until App Intense and Siri are out? And we kind of decided, no, now's a good time. It's shipping. As we're recording this on January 28th, iOS 18.3 just rolled out yesterday. So it seems like a good time to talk about it, even though there will be more to talk about in the future. So that's kind of been...

Some of the background conversation. Yeah. I mean, even just to expand on that, Apple intelligence is such an important thing. I mean, Tim Cook has said it's the biggest of big deals for them right now. It's dripping into all our shows. I mean, it's just showing up everywhere. And,

But it is very, it's the most evolving thing that Apple's doing. So this isn't going to be the final word on Apple intelligence, but as we stand today, where is it? And I think that is important. In fact, I was looking through notion the other day and, you know, we do our kind of yearly platform check-in at the end of the year. And I think there's going to be like a yearly Apple intelligence check-in at least for a while, because this stuff is moving pretty quickly. And yeah,

Even between 18.2 and 18.3, there's some pretty significant changes. And so, yeah, this is an ongoing thing, but we kind of wanted to put a kind of put a flag in the ground about where it is today. And and it's it's, you know, it's kind of messy. Like you said, it's kind of getting into all of our shows, all of our other contents, because Apple intelligence is really this like family, this umbrella of features that are

kind of all over the place in terms of what they do, how they, how they do their jobs. It is not like a, an app like a, like, Oh, we're talking about the journal app, right? Like Apple intelligence kind of nebulous in some ways, but it is definitely, I totally agree with you from Apple's perspective. It's the most important thing they're doing right now. And they, you know, announced this at WWDC started shipping. It's still not out completely. This is a rolling thing for them. Um,

And it's a big deal. It's a real big deal. So can we start with actually discussion of the question of was Apple intending to do Apple intelligence this year? I know this is total pontification, but I've been thinking about that question. Like part of the reason why for the slow rollout to me tends to make me think that they weren't originally intending to start this ball rolling this year, at least publicly. Yeah.

I tend to agree. It feels like it's been a bit rushed and, you know, the rest of the market was already moving. And Apple, a lot of the time, is willing to let a market exist and kind of figure things out and then it jumps in, right? The classic examples are the iPhone and the iPod.

But this time, I think they felt pressure from the market to do something. And we spoke about this on our WWDC episodes. Everything was future tense at WWDC, right? None of it was in the early betas. It's taken a while to trickle out. So I do think, given a slightly different environment, this may have been a 2025 thing as opposed to a 2024 thing.

So here are some breadcrumbs. Number one is they really had almost nothing ready on day one. When the 18 came out, there was actually no Apple intelligence publicly in it. And we're now recording this mid-January or towards late January, and we still haven't seen the Siri improvements that we'll be talking about later.

And then we're also hearing in the rumor mill that there may even be another new Siri coming down the road, more of an LLM based Siri. And then to me, one of the big pieces of evidence on this is the Ram and the prior iPhones. Like if they had intended to announce this this year, I feel like Apple plans things way in advance. If they had intended, I feel like last year's iPhones would have been had sufficient Ram to run Apple intelligence, you know, the iPhone 15. And, and,

I just kind of feel like they got caught because, you know, the typical Apple thing would be when people say, well, what about this? To say, well, we'll address it when we're ready to address it. But the problem is the stock market is going nuts. And like you look at companies like NVIDIA whose stock has,

I think I read more valuable than like some country G, G, you know, and then, and, and Apple's like in the story about apples, well, they don't have a story. And so, you know, that's what will get Apple to tip their hand early apparently is a fear of stock crash, you know? But they, yeah, I just feel like,

And I think because of that assumption, and I have no confirmation it's true, but I think that is the filter through which I look at this stuff. Like here it is as they shipped it a year early. Like, and I think that is why some of this stuff isn't as good as it could be.

that they just weren't ready yet. And that's okay. Apple has often waited. And a lot of times they come late to the game and they have the best option. But as users, we're kind of getting to see this iterate in public, which is kind of, kind of unique for Apple.

definitely it's definitely unusual and i think all that's right i think the iphone is the smoking gun it's like this thing is a year old and it can't run this stuff like yeah like if they had intended to announce it next year then there would have been two prior iphones yeah you know you'd have you'd have two series of iphones that could run it and i feel like that would have made more sense yeah i think so too um

All of that said, they're also doing this in their own way, right? As you would expect from Apple, these features are built kind of from the ground up with privacy in mind. We got, we got, there's a bunch of stuff in the show notes this week, like a bunch of links to go explore, but they are at the, at the highest level of,

Apple is doing as much of this work as they can on device. That's why the regular iPhone 15 is not capable of running Apple intelligence because of the RAM required to do it. Most of these other solutions out there from open AI, clog, Google Gemini, you know, by the time the show is out, there'll be three more, uh,

Most of that's happening in the cloud, which is why Nvidia stock, to your point, has gone to the moon because they're all running on GPUs for training and execution. Apple's doing as much of this on device as they can. That's I feel like that is baked into Apple's DNA at this point, like on device processing, even if it comes at some weird cost. My sort of go to example here is a few years ago. Well, it's been more than a few years now.

when they added face and object detection and photos, that was done on each of your devices. So your MacBook, your iPad, and your iPhone all were processing object and face detection themselves and not syncing that data around and definitely not doing it on Apple servers, right? And, you know, honestly, that made the feature a little...

around the edges for a while. And eventually they got where the metadata kind of sinks around. But Apple is not wanting to push everything to the cloud by default. But with some of these AI features, even these Apple Silicon machines don't have enough horsepower. And at that point, things get handed off to what Apple is calling private cloud compute, which are Apple Silicon based servers that are

are all publicly logged and open for researchers to go in and inspect them. And there's basically these kind of like stamps of authenticity, if you will, where if a server is not listed publicly or has been tampered with, the devices won't connect to it. And Apple, critically, has no access to the data moving through these servers. And to a user, it's all...

like hidden, like you don't really know, like, is this happening on device? Is it going to private cloud compute? And honestly, having spent, we have both spent hours, like my preparation time for this episode is way out of proportion with some of the others we've done because this stuff is so complicated. It's really hard to tell if or what is being done on private cloud compute at this point. And that's how Apple wants it to be. They want it to be seamless and they want it to be private.

Yeah. They want it to be a little private AI black box that you have an Apple AI black box. Yeah. And you know, you throw a query into it and they do don't worry your pretty little head, whether it's done on your device or in PCC, uh, it's still your data. And, and honestly, that is such an Apple approach to this stuff, right? You know, we're not going to show you, uh,

the man behind the curtain. We're just going to give you the result. And that's totally on brand for them. The other thing that's on brand for them is the privacy element of it, that they're focused on privacy. That's an underlying premise of this whole show. Like everything we're talking about is private that you do with artificial intelligence, which is very much not the case with pretty much every other thing that you can do with artificial intelligence. And it's just a very Apple approach. Yeah.

It is. And I am all for that. Like, I like that Apple's strategy is built around these things. Now, there is a conversation to be had about like, well, how did Apple train its models? Well, they scraped the Internet like everybody else. And I have complicated feelings about that that are outside of the scope of this show. But when it comes to the user experience to someone using these features on their phone or their tablet or their Mac.

they have this protection. And that's a good thing because inherently a lot of this stuff

can't happen on device. And so they are, uh, they're all getting processed in the cloud, which takes lots of energy, lots of water, lots of cooling. And that's a, that's another element of all this conversation. That's a little outside of our scope today, but there are environmental environmental impacts to these technologies. And by bringing things on device, Apple is helping offset that as well, which I, I really value personally. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.

So it's a very much an Apple approach, but getting back to my earlier point, it's also feels to me like it's very much a work in progress. That's kind of an overview. Yeah. But let's, let's go deeper on the privacy thing because I think that we can say it's private, but, but there's, there's more to it, right? The, the PCC stuff is, is entirely private. Even when they send you off to open AI is chat GPT.

That's the most private way you're ever going to be able to use chat GPT. Yeah. Yeah.

And we don't know, I mean, big company, we talked about Apple contracts earlier, but as, as we understand it, although we don't have this as gospel, the deal was that chat GPT and Apple are not exchanging money either direction that, you know, chat GP is getting the benefit of all those iPhone users getting introduced to their technology and Apple's getting the, the use of the chat GPT AI and,

Yeah. But Apple also has conditions. And like, if you want the safest way or the most private way to use chat GPT is don't make a chat GPT account and use it through your, your Apple device. Yeah.

If you do have an account, though, you can log in in settings. We'll talk about that probably like four hours from now when we get to that section of the show. But yeah, and again, I've got the privacy stuff in there in the show notes to read about it. And I think Apple's doing everything it can to protect its users and their data. I mean, even like the foundation model, which is kind of the basis of a lot of the stuff,

like from the get go privacy and user protection are, are designed from, from the start. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm behind, I think both of us are behind all of that. Like I want a private way to use AI. Yeah. As much as, as much as, as it can be, especially when you're talking about some of these tasks where, you know, it's different if I'm asking it to find something on the web or,

But like if I'm having to rewrite something or make an image or adjust an image like, yeah, I want that to be I want that to be private.

I've gone over the line on it personally. I talked last week about how I can use ChatGPT to recognize my handwriting, but that means personal things I write are going through ChatGPT. In a perfect world, I would not be doing that. But I feel like I'll get there. This is a temporary thing. Apple or somebody else will

build these models to such an extent at some point that this will be done on device and it won't be a problem. But, but we're in a little gray area right now. I mean, this whole, this whole industry is like blowing up and people are still figuring out what it means. Oh yeah. I mean the amount of investment and not just from Apple, but across the board, uh,

is just absolutely wild. I mean, you go back five years and everybody was like, well, the future is, you know, virtual reality and it's going to change everything. And we all kind of rolled our eyes and it didn't, but I feel like AI is actually, this is the real deal. This is going to, this is going to cause disruption. It already has. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it will, uh, I think it is,

much more the future than than ar or vr i do think there's an element a bubble element to it right now but yeah like many other technologies that we have seen that the good use cases will stick around and people have ideas of how it could be useful that that won't be or won't be good enough and it'll sort itself sort itself out over time but

It being built into the platforms is, is really interesting. And it's also really interesting that the biggest player to date is open AI, which is not a platform company, right? They're not Apple, Google, or Samsung, right?

They are separate. And Apple and these other companies have partnerships with them or they're arch enemies, in Google's case maybe. But that's also an interesting thing to keep an eye on is that while Apple and Google and other platform vendors are doing things, the biggest player doesn't have a platform. And in the last 40 years of computing, generally platform owners win. And so, you know, who knows how that'll go.

Yeah, but then there's so much space for little players. Like I just featured an app called Cleft in the Labs, and it's a little AI app. I'm sure it's using...

one of the big engines on the background or whisper, probably whisper recognition. But the idea behind the app is you walk out of a meeting and you talk to your phone for five minutes to tell it what happened at the meeting. And it creates a outline of the meeting, active task lists, all the stuff you need. I mean, back in the day that I was going to so many meetings as a lawyer, this would have been so useful to me. Like I,

It just does it. You just put your word salad into the microphone and speak randomly for five minutes and you get a very useful memo, post-meeting memo out of it. It's like this stuff is just happening at such a clip that we're getting used to it. I'm not shocked by the feature because now in this world I know it, but just rewind a few years and this would have been mind-blowing to me.

I do want to talk a little bit about the system requirements for it, because that is a an element when you talk about, hey, this stuff's all happening on my device. You mentioned the phone. So it's iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or any iPhone 16.

That's it. It's not even the standard iPhone 15. It's the Pro or the Pro Max. And we have confirmation that this is a RAM thing. Apple has always been kind of stingy about RAM. And they would say, well, we make the operating so efficient it doesn't need much RAM.

Until it does. Until that doesn't work. Yeah. And once you add AI, then it needs, I, I watched your show. What's that silo show? Yeah. The best line of the whole episode was you were very loyal to me until you weren't. Yeah. I thought that was the best line of the whole series, but the, but the iPhone Ram was very, it was perfectly sufficient until it wasn't. Yeah. You know, someone like came into a meeting. He's like, Hey, I got bad news. You know, we can't, we can't do it.

Not only that, they're saying it's more than four gigs now, right? Yeah. Yeah. So those are the iPhones, any iPad with the a 17 pro or later. So the iPad mini just got to update a few months ago. That was to make it compatible with Apple intelligence. Yeah.

And then any iPad or Mac that's M1 or later can run those things. But it does require, in addition to the RAM, it also requires seven gigabytes of storage because it's downloading these models and these assets to the device. In fact, when you set up Apple intelligence, it takes a few minutes. That's because it's downloading this stuff in the background.

And I just had like a real sense memory of like, remember we were all angry that iPhones were still coming with 16 gigabytes of storage. Now almost half of that is required for Apple intelligence, but it is, that is one of the trade-offs of it running locally is that you got to have the models on the device.

And this is a temporary thing. Going forward, I would be shocked if Apple ever ships a product that can't run Apple intelligence going forward. Across the board. I agree. We're in this sort of weird liminal space right now.

But it sucks if you've got a perfectly working phone that's two or three years old and you want the Apple intelligence features, but you just, because they saved a few bucks when they made the phone, now you can't run it. I don't think, however, it's one of those things where Apple planned this to get you to upgrade. I just don't think they think that way. I really believe that

They got caught a bit with their pants down and the market was saying, what's Apple's story? Should we downgrade their stock? And Tim Cook hit the panic button and said, all right, tell everybody what we're doing. And of course, there's a lot of, I'm going to call it international messiness where the features are supported and what features are supported, what language, whatever.

It's all very complicated. I have several European members in the Mac Sparky Labs, and they will tell you about their dissatisfaction with this situation. Yeah. Yeah. Some of it's the DMA stuff. Some of it, I think, is Apple being upset about the DMA stuff in the EU. I feel like there is blame to go around for everyone. You know what? Agreed. I think that's fair.

Let's start with the writing tools. And I feel like writing tools are kind of the original kind of bread and butter of these systems, right? Like basically any AI system out there can help you proofread or rewrite or summarize. And that's what these models are really good at, right? Because these models work by sucking in a lot of written text and being able to kind of remix it endlessly. Right.

And as we go through this, I will point people to a link. I did a bunch of text generation with Apple intelligence and I put it on a single page on five, 12 pixels. So you can kind of see what we're talking about as we go. But do you want to walk through with some of the, these, these tools? Yeah. I mean, I think tech, like you said, writing tools are like the public facing tools.

a piece of ai that people are most interested in i think there's a lot of parts of ai that are being used in the industry behind the scenes like do training and things that people don't realize but for like normal person suddenly having a really smart grammar checker is like a good starting point for artificial intelligence because they've been trying to make grammar checkers for years and

And it's always been rules-based. And the problem is the English language doesn't lend itself to a rules-based system. But with grammar checking, you can throw a model, a lot of good writing at a model, and it can figure out

what's good and bad based on that. So it's like the perfect example, text files are small, so it can work on a lot of data, crunch a lot of things. And it's like the entry point here. Obviously we're already starting to see things with audio and video, but words are where it was first and best.

So Apple says, we're going to do that for you. And a lot of us have been looking like the underlying gorilla in the room here is Grammarly, which is, I think it's about a hundred bucks a year. I pay for it, but I don't remember how much, but it was a online grammar checker that started, I think, with a degree of AI and has really fully embraced AI at this point. And so can I get

the effect of having a paid service on my device that also gives me privacy. The thing I always worry about, I turn off Grammarly when I'm using day one because I don't really want to send everything

every one of my private journal entries to the Grammarly server. And like, if you had this on device from Apple, then I would be able to use it kind of universally. So what do they do? They bring in probably some of the best stuff you get with Apple intelligence is the proofreading tools. It'll go through and find spelling and grammar mistakes to a much lesser extent structural issues. It really is a basic tool.

very basic grammar checker in fact the last time this came up on the show i complained that i think they need to turn up the dial and i feel like that that still stands yeah i don't know it doesn't need to go as far as grammarly like my buddy uh chris bailey he's writing a new book best-selling author of course that's what he does but he um he went out of he turned off grammarly

As he wrote the book, because he didn't want, because Grammarly's got so aggressive, it wants to rewrite your sentences for you. And he wanted it to be his book, you know? And so he didn't use even Grammarly, you know? And so, and people are all finding their kind of space there, you know?

And Chris is a very conscientious guy, and I think that's exactly the right decision. Honestly, when I read blog posts, I leave Graham really running. And occasionally I'll let it rewrite a sentence for me if I think it's better. But the fear is always that it's going to crush my voice, right? I don't want that. Well, Apple has gone very safe. Like if Chris were sitting here right now, I'd say, Chris, you could probably turn on the Apple stuff because it's just going to find really basic mistakes for you.

And the question is, where are you on that spectrum? If you are, you know, someone like Chris and really don't want anything writing for you, this is actually pretty good. But there's a lot of people that kind of like a little bit more aggressive proofreading and there's no dial you can turn. You know, it is again, the Apple black box and you get what you get.

But I've been using it on my day one injuries and I've been using it. I've been using it actually in drafts. I've been using the Apple intelligence. I knew we were recording the show, but just in general, as a point of intellectual curiosity, it's good enough. You know, I think Grammarly does a better job, but when I prove something through Apple intelligence, it finds the dumb mistakes and then the rest is on me.

Yeah, I think we're on the same page with that. I do find Graham really to be a bit more aggressive than I would like to be in sort of smoothing out my voice. But I'm also aware that you and I are both professional writers, and we may be a bit more sensitive to that than some people.

Yeah.

is really bubbly, at least for my take, and kind of wordy. If I had a complaint about Apple intelligence rewriting tools, it's that they're wordy. Even the concise one isn't really that much shorter than the text I put into it. But it definitely, if you're looking for a tone change, I think it does that, you know, it does what it says it will do.

Yeah. And like, again, the nice thing about the Max Barkey Labs is we have these meetups. I get to talk to listeners using this stuff and we have listeners who are professionals and they are deploying this right now. I mean, I remember when, when I practiced law, sometimes some of the lawyer would do something that would make me pretty frustrated and I would write a letter, print it out, then I'd tear it up and then write another one.

And what people are doing now is they're writing that first angry letter and then they're hitting the professional button.

And this is happening. I mean, people are using this and I think it's great. A point I would like to make here too, and I know we're getting into this later, but if you do the chat GPT integration, you don't have to just go with friendly, professional, concise. You can also say, you know, rewrite it like a pirate or whatever you want and chat GPT will do that for you. So there's a bit of a cheat on the rewrite stuff if you want. Will you please publish a blog post as if it's written by a pirate?

Please? No, I will not. Just so we're clear. Yeah. Arr. Arr. You can also use it to create a summary or a list of points or a table out of selected text. So you select some text, little Apple intelligence kind of logo pops up and you can choose one of these sort of outputs. These I think are sort of the...

to me at least, kind of the least useful things here. But I also don't, I'm also not taking like meeting notes and want key points out of them, right? Like my workflow just doesn't really work

uh, need that. Um, but, uh, again, in line with a lot of other tools, right? Like you can copy and paste a bunch of texts into any number of systems and say, Hey, what, what are the big things I need to know about this document? And, uh, you know, I think the funniest one is the table. Like if you look at my example page, uh, what tables at the bottom is like category, hometown details, Memphis, Tennessee. It's like,

It's not wrong. Would any human being communicate this way? No, but that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's a work in progress. I continue to believe that this is a year early. And like I said, I have no proof of that, but it just, I feel it in my bones. And I do think this stuff is going to get better. Are you replacing grammar at least even? Are you at the point now where you think it could?

I'm not for this. Exactly what you said is that I want Apple intelligence to be

a bit stronger when it comes to actual grammatical things. And I can, you know, with Grammarly, I don't want it to rewrite a bunch of my sentences, but I can basically ignore that stuff. But I would also like some more control. Like Grammarly has a bunch of settings and you can kind of give it parameters about your style of writing or maybe you were writing in a way that is a little distinct from basic grammar.

kind of normal grammar rules like maybe you don't use the Oxford comma well you can tell Grammarly I don't use the Oxford comma quit trying to correct me and there's kind of no dials or levers for Apple intelligence and I don't know if they'll ever do them but for me this hasn't this has not replaced Grammarly but I think it could and I think it will at some point but not quite yet

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, if you take that this is early days for Apple intelligence, I could definitely see a world where I just use it. And the selling point for me is privacy. Like if it's good enough and private, I'm cool. Even if it means it's not going to get everything Grammarly would recommend to me.

I don't use everything Grammarly recommends to me. Boy, does Grammarly love commas. But I could see a world where that happens. And I feel like there's a great book by Ethan Mollick called Co-Intelligence. He's a writer and a teacher and one of the, I think, just the people to listen to if you're interested in AI. Yeah.

And one of the things he always says is always remember what you're looking at now is the very worst version of this ever when it comes to artificial intelligence. And like,

you let Apple grind on the models for another year or two and the proofreading stuff gets a little more aggressive, I feel like there's a good chance that a lot of us will just use that. And honestly, I'm cool with that. I honestly don't, like Chris, I kind of err on the side. I don't really want that much advice about what I should write. I just want to make sure I don't make any dumb mistakes. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Squarespace.

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The other side of the coin when it comes to generation, if you will, with Apple intelligence is, of course, image generation. And like before, I've got an example page. It did us dirty on the example page. We'll get to that. I think I got it worse than you, though. I really do. Your emoji is not great. But the image generation, I think, is when

The public kind of opened its eyes to AI really like two years ago now with like Dolly and some of those tools of like, oh, I can give it a prompt and it gives me an image. And and Apple has done that in a couple of different ways is really kind of three features here.

And I want to start with the best one. And I think it's Genmoji, which I am having a lot of fun with, with my friends. I really am. Yeah. That's what I'm hearing too. Like a lot of people are enjoying that. Yeah. So you on the emoji keyboard, it went from search to describe, which is such a smart UI decision. Like whoever came up with that really good. And you can give it a person, right?

Out of your contacts or it can do like a generic kind of emoji person and it will give you options of a new a new piece of art in the style of Apple's other emoji. You know, all the vendors have their own look for their emoji. Apple has theirs. Google has theirs. I miss the old Google blobs. Do you remember those like the little like gumdrop guys?

Yeah. I thought they were great. They're dead. They're gone. Samsung has their own, lots of different ones. That leads to confusion sometimes, cross-platform, but generally, Emoji kind of looked the same with their own flavor. So this artwork or this model was trained on all of Apple's Emoji artwork styles. And you can describe what you want. So it's like, hey, I want David Sparks as an astronaut riding a rocket that looks like a pineapple. And

it will give you some options and, uh, some of them are good and funny. Some of them are pretty bad. Sometimes it gets stuck. It's like, uh, in fact, if you look at the screenshot, uh, on my page, uh, it basically just gave, gave me like five versions of the same thing of you. And, uh, that's, you know, a little bit frustrating that it kind of can kind of get in a, in a rut, but you can create some really fun stuff. Uh, in fact, there's a,

A group chat that I'm in with Jason and Mike, Jason made a Genmoji that looks like Tim Cook on a surfboard. It makes me laugh every time I see it because when I think about Tim Cook, surfing is pretty low on the list of things I associate with him. But it's just like this funny, fun thing, and it gets used like any other emoji. So you can put it in your messages,

You can apply it as a tap back or sticker and they are a lot of fun. And with 15.3, they're available on the Mac as well. So for me, the Genmoji is the standout image generation feature.

Yeah. I, I went down a little rabbit hole just thinking about Tim, you know, how, you know, how he likes customers that customer satisfaction. He's like customer sat. Do you think he has like a Tim sat? Like, like how's that wave? Oh, that was high. Tim sat. Tim sat. I wonder how that's going to last couple of weeks. Oh, don't forget into that. Uh, image playgrounds, uh,

Yeah. Okay. So no, but let me, let me just follow up with Jinmoji. Okay. That has been my experience too. Like I, I am not a big emoji guy. Like I have a couple go-tos I use just to like communicate, but like you have always been, you've been, you've had high emoji energy, like, you know, as your friend, I like it. Cause it's always fun to see what you're going to send me. And you also love the, what is the thing where they do the little like,

giffies right yeah that's your thing yeah like you communicate with that effectively yeah but the uh but but my i see it like with my kids and their friends that like that's one of the the things i've been hearing from my kids is like oh yeah dad when you know when will my phone do this because like i've got a friend who got a new phone and he keeps sending me these really fun ones i want to send them back you know so like it's happening where like that is kind of the

the insertion of apple intelligence into the world there's a couple points in the show today i want to mention talking to normal iphone users not people listen to mpu and how it's like penetrating and like genmoji is doing that there's a lot of people who are just loving like you and jason making fun emojis that custom and send them back and forth but i agree with you this is the big win of the image generation stuff yeah i think it is too and i think it's because it's

ironically limited in scope because it's going to look like an emoji and that's like a style that's very defined and with all of Apple's image generation stuff they have a lot of fences around offensive topics or things that Apple doesn't want their tools to be used for and for sure you can break some of those rules like yeah if you give it an image of a troublesome historic figure it will make an image out of that person's face like

It will do it. But generally I think the Genmoji works the best because it's living in a universe where like that artwork style is what people expect. And it's kind of fun to see like a dinosaur in a hot air balloon, right? It's a funny thing to see. And, um, it has been, it's been fun to play with. And I think having, uh,

having it kind of in line with the other emoji stuff is really smart. And we had a listener question a while back that was like, well, is this going to mean that

Apple doesn't roll out new emoji every year. And the answer is no. Like the Unicode consortium is still going to be releasing new emoji every year. Apple will still be adopting them because those are all cross-platform. They have to. They have to. Like if, you know, say the hot air balloon dinosaur becomes a standard emoji and Samsung phones have it and regular Android phones have it, Apple's got to do it.

But this is kind of a layer on top, not unlike something like Memoji, right? Memoji, kind of this feature layered on top of regular emoji. This is, I think, this is the same thing. Yeah.

But it's, it's landing with people, but it's all, it's all of a sort. Cause they also have some other platforms for doing this at the biggest one being a separate app called image playgrounds. And this works largely the same way. It's a separate application. It's got animation and illustration styles and you can feed it a prompt sort of like objects and it puts them together for you dynamically and

And that's kind of like the place you can go and play with this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I think it being a standalone app is really smart. They have an iMessage app too, which I had the thought of like, oh yeah, iMessage apps, but a standalone app across all the platforms. You can tag a person, um,

Or you can kind of have a, they have a feature, a whole feature where you can make like a generic person where you can choose, choose gender and skin tone and some other things. And it, it kind of uses them as a stand in instead of like David Sparks or Mike Hurley or whoever. Yeah. And I think the styles animation illustration are smart. Apple by like both of these styles look cartoony. I mean, you can look in the, in the show notes, they do not,

by any stretch of the imagination, look lifelike. And one, I don't know if Apple's technology is even capable of making lifelike images, but also you just totally avoid the, an iPhone was used to make a deep fake of, you know, the president doing something the president didn't do. And I don't think Apple wants anything to do with that. And they have steered really far away from it. And while I do have some reservation about image playgrounds and like

What if, you know, a student is being bullied and someone uses this to, like, make a picture of them in an unflattering light? Like, oh, that's going to happen. It is happening, unfortunately, probably. But they're not making lifelike images, and I'm very, very glad for that. Yeah, agreed. And I think that was just kind of their plan, right, to –

To keep it safe. And they go a step further. Even if you try to put in copyrighted images or products, they don't let you do that either. I tried to make it draw a picture of a friend holding a little Mac Mini, and it wouldn't put the Mac Mini in. That was where it got stuck, you know?

Yeah, I was just trying to put one together to send you, Stephen, from Image Playground. And what it's doing to your face, I'm not going to do that to you, man. Don't look at the teeth or the eyes. I mean, the weirdness of some of these images, even though they're cartoony images,

we've seen in other systems, right? Like very kind of famously, most AI generated images have no idea what to do with text. And so if you ask it, like have a picture of like a teacher in a classroom in front of a whiteboard, the text on the whiteboard is going to look bananas most of the time. Apple's challenges here are the challenges the whole industry faces. So it's not unique to them, but it is, it is interesting that they went down this road. I thought Apple,

Before WBC, there was a possibility they just didn't do any image generation to totally avoid any of the social issues. But I think they found a way to do it that is appally and minimizes, doesn't necessarily get rid of all of it, but minimizes some of those downsides.

Yeah. As, as much as they can and they've got to get, they've got to get in the game. Yeah. And again, I think that this is one, like you're talking about us being people who write a lot, kind of colors our view of the, the word, the proofreading tools. I feel like us just being kind of connected on the internet colors, our view of this, this image generation tools, because there are some really good image generation tools out in the world. And again,

And they're getting just increasingly impressive. And this feels to me like almost like a table stakes entry more than anything else. Yeah, I think that's fair. Image Playgrounds are their own app, but it also kind of shows up in a feature called Image Wand, where if you're drawing something like, say, in the Notes app or on the iPad with an Apple Pencil, you can have it generate an image based on something you sketch or...

even in the context of the notes. Like the Apple note is all about, you know, a camping trip and you ask image one for an image, it will come up with something about camping and throw it in your note for you. This is not one that I've played with a lot. Like this has not come up sort of in my

everyday life, but you know, using it in the run it for the show, it is image playground just kind of exposed a slightly different way. Yeah. Just the way they like incorporate tools and other contexts. Yeah. And it almost feels to me like a placeholder until image playgrounds gets better. Hmm.

And like if you develop the underlying technology of image playgrounds to be something a little more useful professionally or like as a student, then I think the existence of image wand is important that you can, you can apply it from within applications. Yeah, I think that's true. And like pencil kit, like Apple kind of gives basic tools to third parties and,

Maybe this will expand there. That is something Apple can do because they're the platform owner, like we talked about earlier, right? Like you're not going to have Dolly or Adobe Firefly built into the system level at this point the way this is. And so in a way, like Apple kind of has to make this better because in some situations, they're the only option. Yeah. And again, early, just early days. It is early. So what do you think –

Gin Moji is useful for now? Horsing around with your friends. You know, I kind of view Gin Moji kind of in the same way that Photo Booth felt when it was new like 20 years ago. It's like, I can make funny images and send them to my friends on iChat. Like, you know, I haven't used Gin Moji to like

You know, someone texted me that their pet died. I'm not like sending them like a hugging emoji or something, right? Like that's going to be a written or maybe even a phone call. Right. But yeah, but I think for goofing off or just like, you know, expressing yourself in a fun way in a group thread. I don't think it's a serious tool in that way, but yeah.

But I do think it's kind of the most well-rounded of them, interestingly. Yeah. And maybe that's all they really ever mean it to be is like a fun thing to send to people, right? Which is fine. Like not everything has to be like a serious productivity kind of thing, right? Like it can be, it can be fun.

And honestly, this doesn't have to compete with the top of the line image generators either. If that's the, you know, if that's the remit for this thing, it's, it's out there for people. I'll tell you, my kids are having a great time with Genmoji. They love it. And so I have to be careful sometimes because just because that stuff isn't interesting to me, you have to realize that, you know, there's a lot of people out there for whom it is. Oh yeah.

All right, let's switch over to photos because I think there's some really good stuff with photos. And this is a place where the Apple intelligence is actually pretty intelligent. You want to start with the new way that you can create custom memories? Yeah, this is really cool. The memories have been around in photos forever, I feel like, right? Like,

Get the widget or even in the app and it's like, oh, it's pulled together photos from your beach trip and like put some, you know, reggae music under it or something. Now you can generate your own versions of those memories and it's surfaced in the search tool and photos and you give it a prompt. So it's like, yeah, pictures of me and my kids at the beach and it will find them and you can dial it in by date or by person or by topic and

And it will create those for you. And like a regular memory, you can customize the music, have it be a video, just have it be just a bunch of photos. So it's also, again, kind of a search tool. And I have really come to like this. The memory feature for me was always interesting, but it felt limited because it was up to...

what Apple said could be a memory rise. Like Apple photos decided that this could be highlighted in this other thing. Couldn't it? And now you can make your own, you can save them and share them. And I think it's, I think it's pretty awesome. Yeah. Memories is an awesome feature. Like,

We use it all the time. I find it particularly attractive to very young people and very old people. Like when we have family over, like if you get a relative, an older relative, and you sit them in front of an Apple TV with memories, they're good. They're good. Just give them the remote. But now you can say, well, let's make one of Aunt Sue in the 1960s or whatever. And if you've got your metadata set right.

It dynamically generates it. It matches it to the music. It uses good music. It's like,

I think I could make the case this is my favorite Apple intelligence feature. It's just so good. And like right out of the box, it works. Anybody can understand it. This is kind of like Apple intelligence in Apple's best world. You know, it's a black box. You tell it a few things. It spits something out that's enjoyable. You don't have to worry about how it got put together. It just happens. And I'm so into that.

The other one that I think is equally compelling is photo editing. And they call it cleanup. But you go through, and I was shocked in the betas when I first started testing this. Like I was doing some videos on it in the labs, and like the dog was on the floor, and I just stuck up a power strip in front of her with the cord, like a white cord with a big power strip right in the foreground of the image. And I thought, well, I can just like,

you know, use my finger to trace out the whole cord and everything. As soon as I tapped it, it did everything for you. Like something, it's like a long, like snaky cord and it got it perfect. Redrew the carpet underneath it. You couldn't tell it was ever there. And it's like, yeah, this is really good. Now there are services out there and professional applications that are even better at removing objects, but I'm not sure if there's anything easier. You just literally taps a person or a thing and it's gone. Yeah.

When I was in college, I spent a lot of time in the Adobe suite learning how to do this sort of thing. And doing this in Photoshop kind of the old-fashioned way, like when I learned it 20 years ago, it was a lot of work. And it was hard to get it to look good. And I feel so old when I think about that because you, yeah, you just tap it or circle it. And it has done some remarkable things in my photo library as well.

Sometimes it's a little bit weird, but I would say the hit rate's very high. And for most people who didn't spend time in college learning Photoshop, this has made this accessible to them for the first time. It's absolutely, in terms of the magical kind of vibe Apple wants out of this technology, this feels like magic to a lot of people, and it does a good job.

I've got a sister who my big sister, she's in her sixties. She has never been a tech person and stumbled into this feature on her iPad. And now it's like, I'm not sure she should be allowed to use it. Like she's going in and fixing every photo in her whole library. It's like her new hobby, like cleaning up photos. And she loves it so much. She wants to get the new iPhone because she needs that on her phone. Now it's like,

Like this is Apple, you know, again, this is an example of Apple intelligence landing with people who are not using chat GPT, but who really like what Apple's doing. And, um,

And like I said, it's not the best version of it, but it's the easiest. And anybody can do it. You pull out your device, you tap on a thing. I just did it for Daisy, the same thing. She had a good friend who saw, bumped into that movie I was excited about. Was it the Wizard of Oz movie? What's it called? Wicked. Wicked.

Quick idea. Guy, guy bumped into like the director of the film, got his picture with him. Very happy. Right. But just the way the picture was taken, there was a person like 20 feet behind them whose head is right between them. Yeah. And she's like, man, I wish we could fix that. And I like, I just took my phone. I tapped the face. It disappeared, sent it back to him. And now my wife's like, well, wait, how come my phone doesn't do that? You know? And like that, that stuff lands with people. Mm hmm.

It totally does. I mean, and again, giving it to everyone like that's kind of Apple at its best, right? Like Apple at its best is taking high technology and making it where anyone can use it. And yeah, I mean, I think overall the photo memory editing, I think this is I agree with you. It is the best corner.

of Apple intelligence and it's very intuitive and it's kind of built into features. We are like, a lot of people already knew how to like crop a photo or, you know, tweak colors, just another button in that interface and really nothing to learn. And it's great. My, my, my old days of like clone and stamping, you know, in Photoshop are long gone. And once again, you know, as Ethan Mullock says, this is the worst version of this you will ever see. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

It's very good. Very good. Our Christmas card, I think last year or two years ago, my kids on the beach, same deal. So I'm like, dude, far in the background. And I knew it when I took the picture. I was like, again, I know how to do this professionally. So I went Photoshop and cleaned it up. But for most people that would have been a picture they couldn't have used. Right. And I can't say like, I'm really happy with this one. It's really good. Yeah.

I am still worried about my sister, though. Yeah, she needs a better hobby. You got to do something else there. This episode of MPU is brought to you by Indeed. If you're looking to expand your team this year, join the three and a half million employers worldwide who are using Indeed to hire great talent fast.

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Okay. So let's get into the productivity apps because I feel like this is the piece of Apple intelligence that people often miss. Starting with Safari, you can get a web page summary, which is kind of nice, right? It's got to be on the iPhone, but you just tap a button and it creates an outline for the page and off to the races you go. How often do you use that?

Not a ton, but again, I'm a professional writer. I want to read. I'm a fast reader. And so this kind of doesn't really scratch an itch for me. But I think for a lot of folks, I think it would. And I think it's really interesting that it's built into reader mode. It's such a smart move. I think it's the perfect place for it. And it does do a pretty good job. Like in...

Uh, our testing of this, like I use this across a bunch of web pages, like news blogs, like all, you know, forum posts. And I think their summarization engine is honestly pretty solid and, you know, just a tap away. So again, not one for me, but one, I think that is pretty well done. Yeah. You don't think you'll use it every day, but like even just recently I was trying to share something from with a friend from a long form piece and I wanted to get the quote right.

And it was really easy to do that with this summary feature. You know, you just put it in the mode, hit the button, jump to the section. You're good. And I feel like it's like a tool that you've got in your belt now that you didn't have before.

Um, uh, honestly, I'd like to see them do more with Apple intelligence and Safari. I think there's a lot more options with the browser if, if you, but you know, they've got to start somewhere and I suspect this isn't where they're going to end, but it's, it's good to see it there. This feature just like, it just begs the question is like, what about Apple search engine? Right. Because, uh, Google has built summaries in, uh,

Like the two things, I mean, the two things are just hand in hand. Like, I don't know if Apple's ever going to do a search engine, but there's a lot of pieces that they have now, you know? Yeah. But I mean, honestly, I feel like search engines are on the way out. I mean, I saw recently Google for the first month has less than a 90% market share of

A lot of people who do play with artificial intelligence are increasingly using that as their method of search and research. So I just don't know if search engines are going to matter in a few years.

As these AIs get better, I think you're just going to go to the AI and ask a question and then it's going to find the answer for you. It's like, you know, we talked about disruption earlier. That's scary for me because I have a website. Like if the AI gets the answer from an article I wrote, nobody ever knows that what came from me. That's the core problem, I think. Yeah. But the, but I also think that that's inevitable because it's such a better way to get information. Yeah.

What do you think of Apple Mail? I think this one seems to be a little bit polarizing. Yeah, I think it is. It's sort of a collection of features that,

You have the summarization stuff. So in the inbox view, messages can be summarized. You can also, in an email, hit the summarize button. But it also has inbox categories, which if you use something like Gmail, is not new. Like a lot of apps have had inbox categories for a long time. And this comes currently just to the phone, but I'm sure it'll be on the iPad and Mac relatively soon.

I think from what I have heard from people, it's kind of hit or miss like what the category, what categories, you know, what messages go where and the priority messages feature where like things get pinned to the top. Like a friend of mine sent me a screenshot. It was just straight up spam. And like Apple was like, boom, priority message. It's like, no. Oh, you know, in the South we would say, Oh, sweetheart, you know, like, Oh honey, like that's, that's not what you wanted to do. Um,

And I don't like inbox categorizations. Like I have most of this stuff off in mail. But again, for a lot of people who use Apple Mail and not Gmail, like this is maybe the first time they're using these features on their phone. And I think a lot of people do find value in it who don't scrub their inbox clean religiously like I do.

Yeah, I'm very curious about it because I would like to have it done privately. Historically, I've paid SaneBox for this. Same. So I have turned off SaneBox for the last several months and tried to use it. I mean, the complication is that it's only an iPhone. I really need to see it on all the platforms to really kind of judge its usefulness.

But as a triage tool, I find it pretty useful. Like if I let my mail go for a few days, I can go into the lower categorize and find email and delete groups of it pretty quickly. And I think that's kind of nice. I think it needs work. It's not SaneBox. It's not as good as SaneBox, that's for sure. But it is private and it's on your device. And it's the worst version of it ever.

Yeah. So like, we just got to see what happens. I could see a world where I could kind of cook it together myself between Apple mail rules and these, uh, these inbox categorizations for stuff that doesn't fall under a rule. Um, with my, my max Sparky account, I've been pretty aggressive about making server rules with fast mail.

So that all gets skipped. You know, that stuff doesn't go into the inbox. So it doesn't get subject to these inbox categorizations. But I do think there's an answer for email that allows you to not pay for a service and have a pretty good email categorization done. So I'm actually more pro on it than a lot of people. Yeah.

The email summaries I think are okay, but not great. I just, I feel like all the summaries they do, and we can talk about this later with the message. I just think I kind of take them with a grain of salt at this point. Yeah. But I really want to get the improved mail app over on iPad and Mac to really kind of fully grok how useful it is to me. Yeah.

which may happen any day. The rumor is that the next 0.4 beta is going to bring those, the improved mail app to the iPad and Mac. So maybe by the time we publish show it's in beta, who knows? So you mentioned messages, kind of similar features to mail to a degree, but,

Yeah. Summarized messages and the messages list. Now you're pinned messages. There's no preview of those, which I had never thought about until this feature came out. Like if you look at messages, you're pinned ones. You just see the person's face or like the, you know, the, the icon for the group thread, if it's a group thread, but there's no preview of what's in there.

unless it's unread, and then you just see a little bit of it. Feels like maybe that UI could be refreshed at some point to show those things, but you get those summaries, and then you also have smart replies. And out of all the writing tools, the smart replies and messages feel like the weakest part of the chain for me. They never sound like something I would say, or even maybe a human would say. They're very stilted and...

very kind of formal in a weird way. Like if someone says, oh, this funny thing happened, it will say, you know, ha ha comma, that's so funny exclamation point. It's like, I've never, I've never answered a text message that way. You have my entire message history, you know, whatever, you know, a hundred gigabytes or whatever on my desk, like use that and like come up with replies that sound like me and it would be

it would be more useful. That I want them to continue to improve because I think it is really useful if it, you know, the basics have been there for a long time. Like, do you want pizza or do you want barbecue? And you know, the quick type bar says pizza or barbecue is like, boom pizza, you know, but past that is where I think this falls down a little bit. It makes, I've been thinking about this. It makes it sound like all your friends are back on the sauce, right?

It's a little bit, right? Yeah. That's what it sounds like when they, the way they write, you know, and it's like, it seems to me like using AI, wouldn't you, it's on device, it's private. Why don't you just scan the way I reply to messages? Yep. And use that as a basis for your model. I feel like they're not doing that and they should. And if they made that switch, it might be useful, but I kind of find, like you said, it just,

Like I have, I've been enjoying it since it came out. Cause like I can tell which friends are using it. Yep. Yeah. I can spot it. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's, he's using AI. Yeah, definitely. So sometimes I reply to somebody and like in parentheses, I'm like Apple intelligence, you know, it was like a,

That's a, uh, yeah, that I think, I think can improve. Um, and I think in particular the UI for that on the Mac kind of stinks. Like it just gives you like this floating bubble. And for me, the messages window is at the bottom of the screen. It's like, it kind of has no room to go. Some UI cleanup I think would be good, but, um, but overall, yeah, I'm not, I'm not really using, I'm not really using the smart replies at all. Yeah. Call transcriptions.

Much better than the last time we tested, right? Yeah, we looked at this in the beta and it totally just fell down. Like it just quit recording at some point and the transcription just stopped. It does seem much better now. I was on a phone call with somebody recently and I was like, hey, I'm going to try this. And you get the transcription dumped out in Apple Notes.

And, you know, it's not perfect and has a lot of issues other transcriptions have or like it doesn't know certain words or names, that sort of thing. But for a rough searching tool, it's it's pretty OK. And you get the audio attached to the note. Like I like all the packaging they did and bring this into Apple Notes is honestly really smart. Like when they announced call transcriptions before they explained how it worked, I was like, where's this going to go? Like, is it going to go in files or like voice memos maybe? But now.

Straight into Apple Notes, and I think that's the right place for it. Yeah, agreed. And I think that it got better. I mean, that's what we want. They're constantly improving this stuff. But in terms of the productivity stuff, where are you actually deploying it? Are you using any of this stuff? I mean, sometimes in Safari, sometimes the summaries. But I have basically all automatic summarization turned off.

And we'll talk about this more when we get to notifications. But I kind of feel like I'm reading everything twice and it felt like more work, not less for me personally. I know some people really like it and it feels like it speeds things up. But for me, I feel like I'm kind of always like, oh, I read this thing in this group chat and then I still read the messages or I read the preview in mail and maybe it said the exact opposite thing. The email actually said because it summarized it incorrectly. So, yeah, I'm not doing a lot of it, to be honest with you.

I feel like the mail stuff I'm trying to use more aggressively, largely because of a test platform. But mail is always, frankly, a challenge for me. I would love AI to get better at mail.

But message of stuff, yeah, that's fine. But I don't use the replies. And I only use the call transcriptions and tests. I don't have a life where transcribing calls is something I would normally do. Yeah. But I feel like all of these platforms, Safari mail messages, are

I feel like they could stand to get more Apple intelligence support. And I hope the roadmap on these has more features that we just haven't seen yet, because I just feel like, like one of the things with the mail is I don't want artificial intelligence replying for me, but like in a perfect world, if a male comes in that, that needs a simple reply, um,

And the artificial intelligence knows enough of my business to know how to make that reply to at least draft it for me to review and edit. I think that would be cool. You know, there are certain types of email I get repeatedly. And like, even this, like the sorting stuff could be so much smarter. Yeah.

And I know that they've got some features in this, but what if you just followed what I did with every email? Yeah. And you turn that into your own internal rule system and do what AI does, take a body of data and learn from it. And I feel like all this stuff, it would be so cool. And with it being on device, it could be so much smarter. I mean, that's the promise of Apple intelligence to me. Because I'm not going to give...

Um, like even SaneBox only reads my subject line, but Apple mail could read the body of my email. So it would have so much more data to work from to make a strong model. Yeah. And, um, it just, you know, we got to get there. And I think too, like there's a lot of productivity apps Apple has that have no Apple intelligence yet. Like thinking about some of the things that can do with like, Hey, take this body of texts and give me key points out of it. Like,

Why can't I select that list and Apple Intelligence move them and make them all a separate reminder and a list and reminders? I think there's a lot of inner app communication that Apple Intelligence could do. Now, some of that will come with...

Potentially with new Siri and app intents. Again, we'll cover all that as it comes out over the coming months. But I'm more interested in some of that sort of thing. I think reminders is a key thing. And I think that I think there's more they could do.

In Safari, again, if they kind of turn up the volume a little bit on search, could I ask Siri to search the web and it be useful as opposed to right now, Siri searches the web and it doesn't know what to do. It's like the fallback. There's angles here and routes they could take, and that's really going to be interesting to watch. Yeah.

Uh, we've been dancing around notifications. Let's talk about that a little more because that is a hot topic. Um, so in various platforms of Apple intelligence, it does a summarization and sometimes that's been causing problems because it gets it wrong. Yeah.

particularly an issue when reporting things like news or sports, sports events, you know, that stuff, if it gets the, if it gets the story wrong in the summary, that sucks. Not only does it suck as making Apple look bad, it also makes the, the app developer pretty upset. Like if you're the New York times or whatever, and it, it summarizes your headline to say the opposite of what the story says. Yeah. That's not good. Yeah.

Yeah. The BBC, uh, that happened exact thing happened to the BBC and they complained. So with, with iOS 18.3, which is out this week, it disables notification summaries for news and entertainment apps. Like you cannot turn it on and apps. You do have it turned on. Now the summaries they've had this little icon next to them that frankly, no one, no, no one knew what it meant. Uh,

Uh, now summarize notifications are in italics, which on upgrade, Mike and Jason were talking about this when it was out in beta. They're like, that's literally the least they could do. It's like command. I, Oh, it's italics. It's AI. And they have more management options from the lock screen now and more clearly labeled as, as beta. But yeah, the, the notification summary is like the promises. Oh, I, uh,

My phone is keeping an eye on everything coming in and can sort of like collate them. And so like it can, hey, 10 things came in your family text thread. I'm gonna give you one notification that kind of sums it up or a bunch of news. But it does sometimes fall down. I think another funny example is,

if you have like a ring or some other security system and nine people have walked by your front door in an hour, the notification would say nine people are at your front door, which is a very different thing, David, that nine people walked by over an hour, nine people all at once in my front door. Like the mob has come for me, right? It's a different thing. And so there's, there's ground rules.

to make up here. But in talking with people, a lot of people do like it and they do like that they can just glance at something. And what I keep hearing from listeners and readers and just friends who are using this feature is it's a barometer if I need to look at something right now. It's like, does the family text notification, does it summarize something to say, what are we doing for dinner next Friday?

Or dad's in the hospital. And those are two very different importance levels in my life. And I can make a decision. And like, do I look at this right now? Or can I deal with this, you know, a little bit later? And I get that. And I think that is valuable to a degree. But it does come with this sort of baggage of sometimes it gets it wrong. Sometimes it gets it exactly inside out from what the truth is. And that's kind of complicated, I think.

Yeah. So you've kept it turned off then? I have it off. I had it on in the betas and for a while. And like the summaries in mail, I found my, I just found myself like, I feel like I feel like I'm reading everything twice. And I had examples where it did summarize something wildly incorrectly. Now, none of them were as high stakes as a breaking news, a breaking national news story being wrong or, uh,

Um, did you see early on someone like their significant other had sent them a bunch of texts and basically they were breaking up with them over text, which is terrible. But so they got broken up with in the Apple intelligence summary. Like that sucks. Um, yeah. So yeah, I just, I feel like it's an extra load and because I, I know that it can make mistakes, um,

Kind of found myself kind of second guessing it all the time. And I had him back on for about a week in preparation for this episode. And that feeling remained. And so I'm not using them. And I will revisit. I'm sure Apple is going to continue to improve this. But for now, it has felt like a bit more overhead than I wanted.

For me, I feel like I'm keeping them on partly out of curiosity. Yeah, you are more curious about this than I am. And I think your willingness to be slightly annoyed by a feature like this is higher than mine. And so you are willing to take it from the team. Yeah, I definitely am. But at the same time,

The idea of a news app throwing a notification at me is not something that I would ever do. Nope. I've never had news notifications on. Do not. So I don't really, I don't, you know, the horror stories of them getting the story wrong. I would, I don't want the news app interrupting me. Like I have a period of time that I allocate to current events. And one of my goals is not to give it a second more than that. And I definitely don't want it to have the ability to interrupt me. So, so the worst part of this stuff, I'm not seeing.

And I do find it curious to see what it does with an email message or a message from a friend. And sometimes I do find it useful. And sometimes I read it and I'm like, this is definitely wrong, you know? And then I find it kind of humorous to see how it got it wrong sometimes.

And I do have faith that this stuff is going to get better. I mean, the stuff Apple is doing across the board here is table stakes AI and they're going to get it right. You know, they need time to get it done. I keep going back to my original point. I think they're a little half baked with AI in 2025 and it's going to be a lot better with the next couple updates, the operating system over the next few years, but they're going to get all this stuff right and it'll be fine. And they're, they're putting their, their,

They're, you know, they're flagging the ground where Apple would probably need to do that. My concern is that they're going to stop there. I hope that they're willing to go out a little bit further on the ledge with this stuff. Yeah, it's, uh, I understand that balance being tricky for them. And in a lot of ways where these features and go wrong, kind of run counterintuitive to how Apple thinks about itself and, and,

And I have the sense that there is struggle with an Apple around some of these things. Like I know for a fact, there are people Apple who did not want to get into the game of image generation and they did it. There are people who thought it wasn't ready for this year, but they did it. And you know, the internal politics that are interesting to people like us, but people who were just using this stuff, right? Like your, like your sister and the, and her unending image editing, like,

If it can make people's work more efficient or enables them to do something they couldn't do before, then that's great. We just have to kind of manage the trade-offs and people got to decide for themselves what works and what doesn't. Yeah. I think it's, it's excellent. And in that way, I mean, I guess I shouldn't say excellent because there's a lot of stuff that needs improvement, but I think that they're scratching the itch that they're trying to scratch and,

We haven't mentioned visual intelligence, which is kind of the surprise feature that they announced when the phones got released. But you point your phone at something and it identifies things for you. What's your experience been with that? Yeah, it's been interesting. This is iPhone 16 only, so you got camera control. You kind of mash on that. I've played with things like Google Lens. Google Lens was doing some of this stuff a long time ago. It can do a series of things like...

You can point it at a flyer and it can like add information on that to your calendar or

uh it uh it can do basic visual search you know it's like oh what is this logo uh what kind of what kind of dog is that uh their example will always be funny to me when they announce this it was like someone was walking a dog and someone came by like took a picture of the dog with yeah visual does like why don't you just ask the person walking the dog what kind of dog it is like yeah you take a picture of my dog without asking i might punch you in the face i know it's like what are you doing right weird example um

It can also do stuff with text. I, you know, it has not made a huge impact on my day to day, but at the same time, like it's, it's kind of out of all these features, the one I forget about the most easily. Like I just have never gotten into that sort of like, even like Google image search. We like, I have a picture find where it's from or find images like it. Like I just never kind of come across that sort of thing. Yeah.

And so I don't have a lot of firsthand experience, honestly. Okay, so I am in the midst of testing. I haven't decided yet because I pay for an app. It's 20 bucks a year that identifies plants really reliably. I'm a little bit of a gardener. I like working in the yard. And I live in a drought.

So I'm always interested when I see somebody successfully raising an interesting plant in Southern California, I take pictures of them and I'm like, Oh, that may be something I want to plant someday. And so, uh,

it's been working pretty good. I want to do more work on testing because I wouldn't mind dropping that subscription and just doing it through Apple Intelligence. And it's so far pretty good. So I've been taking a lot of pictures of plants with it and it's identifying them. But I want to go, like I need to go to Disneyland or a garden somewhere where there's something exotic and see how it does with those. But that's the kind of stuff that has use for me. So good. I'm glad it's there. Yeah.

Yeah, I could see it in a travel context, especially if they can do, you know, I mean, the Holy Grail of this stuff is like point at a thing in a different language and tell me what it is in my language. Like if they can get there with it, like that is some, there's some interesting use cases there. That is so doable. I feel like that is like almost. And their company's doing it, right? Or at least attempting to. So it feels like there, again, it feels like there's areas that Apple could move into. Yeah.

We haven't mentioned a lot about ChatGPT, but I feel like this is a huge part of the puzzle that a lot of people are not even looking into.

I think for a lot of people, they just want to use the built-in stuff and not worry about it. ChatGPT sounds a little intimidating or it sounds a little too public. Like, do you want to give them all your data? And like I said at the top of the show, the most private way to do it is don't make a ChatGPT account and push everything through iPhone, through the Apple operating systems, because that's the deal they got with ChatGPT to anonymize your data as best as possible.

I made a labs video on hooking it up and using it that I'm going to share with the listeners. So it's just in the show notes. You can go watch it, but it's something I did in the Max Barkey labs. It's just a six minute video, but it kind of walks you through and gives you a couple examples. But I think there's something people should check out because a lot of the stuff we were talking about, like with the proofreading tools, that stuff gets better.

If you, if you also introduce chat GPT into the equation, cause it gives you a whole much bigger, much more powerful LLM behind you. It does require you to send the data up, but it's anonymized to a large extent unless you choose not to make it. So, and I think this is like the bit, if you're listening to the show and you feel like you, you've used Apple intelligence, you have a good feel for it, but you haven't tried that bit. Watch this video and,

and give it a shot because I think there's a lot of folks that could benefit from it. Yeah. And to Apple's credit, they make it very clear when you're going to do something that's going to be sent off to ChatGPT. And if you don't mind that, you can also turn off the notifications where it just kind of does it in the background. And yeah, ChatGPT is used for some of the writing tools, the visual intelligence stuff, some of it's powered by ChatGPT. And then Siri can...

get stuff from ChatGPT. And generally, I think Apple's done a good job of clarifying kind of where their stuff ends and ChatGPT begins.

I have an account. I pay for chat GPT. And so I signed into my account. So it knows that it's me. But if you want to be anonymized, you totally can do that. And I think to Apple's credit, I would imagine if OpenAI had not agreed to the privacy things that Apple wanted, they wouldn't have turned it on. And I don't know anything. This is not me being cheeky. But Apple has said that they want to extend this to other companies.

Other partners like maybe Gemini or Claude or others that has not happened yet. And I wonder if some of that is some of Apple's privacy points. And so I think credit to Apple for getting honestly getting that right. I think the balance they've struck is pretty good.

Yeah, although I'd have to bet a nickel with Claude that that's not a problem. But maybe with Gemini, I could see it being a problem. Maybe. Yeah, but that is a piece of this. And one of the angles for the future, like so much of this to me is future-facing stuff.

is that a real good angle for Apple with Apple intelligence would be the arbiter of these big LLMs and where it routes the traffic. Like, you ask your iPhone a question, and it decides which engine is the best at answering the question and how best to use it and integrate it with whatever they can do with your private data. You know, like, ideally, they could build kind of a firewall where...

your data would stay on device and only in Apple intelligence, but it could still use the resources of these outside engines to give you more power over your data. Yeah. And like that, I'm sure that's on a whiteboard somewhere, but you know, getting it into reality is going to be a lot of work. I think so. I mean, this is early days for all of these companies, really even open AI, like the kind of the leader currently is,

They haven't been around that long. Like this is not necessarily established kind of web technologies that have been around for decades. And so there is a lot of give and take. And I would imagine that those negotiations, like I'm sure Apple wants to have more than just chat GPT, but it's going to take some time. And, you know, I kind of thought they'd have something by now, but I, I, I would bet a WWDC, you know, in six months, they've got some other logos up on the screen somewhere. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And, but I also think that the future of this stuff is long-term and we aren't going to get, this isn't really going to play out for like over five years. I think it's going to take a long time to kind of fully develop what this is all capable of.

And part of it is just waiting for the public to be comfortable with it. Part of it is for Apple to get its act together. But I think, you know, we're going to have really good private stuff on Apple intelligence. It's not going to be as good as the best cutting edge stuff out there. But this idea of punching a little hole in Apple intelligence to let you go out in the world like chat GPT if you want.

kind of solves that problem. Like I'm, I'm actually rosy about it, even though I'm kind of glum on what we currently have. You know, I'm not, I'm not using a lot of it day to day, but I think what Apple's doing here is a solid first step. Yeah. I think some of it is a bit like this. I think in particular, my personal opinion is notification summaries don't, don't really work all that well for most people, but people like them.

And, you know, some things like the writing tools, like, again, we're professional writers and not necessarily for us. But when I talk to, you know, friends about this and I have done more of that in the last couple of weeks in preparation for this episode than I normally do.

People have mixed feelings on Apple intelligence. Some people think it's really good and interesting. Some people like no chat GPT or bust. And, you know, Apple has, I think, a particular where they've tied it to the Siri brand. They have somewhat of an uphill battle in places to to push this forward. But when Apple has its mindset on something, I don't I don't often bet against them. And like you have said many times, this is the worst version of all of this.

So it's going to be an exciting future, I think. Even if some of these features are never for you as an individual listener or for me as an individual person, on the whole, this will continue to get better and more interesting, both through Apple's efforts, through partnerships, like you said. And it's going to be wild to watch. It is really wild.

I hope they keep their focus on it long enough to give it what it needs. You know, that's, that's another thing. Another point I wanted to make about this is you and I are, are on the bleeding edge of this stuff. I know I definitely am because of, you know, the stuff I do with the labs and just in general, I want to, I want to see what's coming. I don't think everybody is. I think for a lot of people, they're treating Apple as their AI curator and they're like, I'll use as much AI as Apple deems fit to put into the operating system.

And I've talked to a lot of people who feel this way, not just my kind of Luddite family members, but people kind of who are plugged into this stuff. But they still, frankly, don't want to go out into the world of AI too much. And I think that's something that Apple probably appreciates. And that's why they aren't going super fast.

It's a lot of stuff, man. It's a lot of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And this is an evolving story, but we'll be covering it on Mac Power Users. It comes up often with guests and shows, but we're going to jump back into the thick of it once in a while, too, as it evolves. Even just like this beta in a few days is going to hopefully give us some answers about whether or not this new series is going to be up to snuff or not.

Anyway, we're the MacPower users. Find us over at relay.fm slash mpu. You can check it out there. Thanks to our sponsors, Squarespace and Indeed. Now, if you'd like to get the ad-free extended version of the show, go over there and sign up for more power users. You can do that at the same site, relay.fm slash mpu. We'd love to have you as a supporter. Today, I'm going to be talking about the MacBook Pro temptation of Sparky, and that's going to be fun. But we always have something fun to talk about in the extended show. Either way, we'll see you next time.