How Apple Intelligence Failed.

Over the past two years, Artificial Intelligence has been viewed as the magnum opus of human technology. It has been used for every possible application since then, with tech companies leaping at the chance to be the first one to introduce AI to a feature. While Apple didn’t immediately pursue this trend, they reluctantly followed the flow of popular opinion to introduce their own “version” of AI as Apple Intelligence for their 15 Pro, Pro Max, and 16 series.?

Although you might assume this adaptation of AI to be a home run (sizer for us South Asians), Apple fell short in terms of fulfilling expectations as well as sales. I think the two main areas where Apple dropped the ball was with the final product and of course the marketing.

Apple Intelligence boasted a plethora of features when it was first announced; Image Playground and Genmoji to create images and emoji through AI, Visual Intelligence to edit pictures better by identifying elements, Siri integration with ChatGPT, and Writing tools to write texts and emails in different tones. Amazing right? Well…..let’s think about it. If you considered the applications of these features for more than a minute, you would understand how obsolete these glorified features are.?

While Image Playground admittedly seem somewhat useful with art generation, intelligent editing and AI emojis, users interested in such applications of AI are already familiar with platforms that are much better at this such as Stable Diffusion, Canva, Adobe Express and more. Siri integration with ChatGPT is genuinely useful because the earlier version of Siri had very limited capabilities as a voice assistant. The Writing Tools on the other hand are again, obsolete, because a. ChatGPT already does this, and b. Why reply to an email or text at all if you’re not interested in typing it? And once you generate a formal email to someone, they would just ask the AI to summarize it, replacing human interaction with AI interaction.

Apple is notorious for feigning in their devices while only slightly improving them, but with each progressing year their sales just grow larger. What’s surprising is that in contrast to apple’s usual minor adjustments to their phones and OS, this year they added Apple Intelligence to the iPhone 16 series but sold 12.7% lesser units in pre sales, with sales declining by 16% for the Pro Max and 27% for the Pro compared to the previous year. I believe they underperformed due to their problematic marketing.

Ramping up to the release of iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 series, Apple released a series of ads targeted at potential customers for their comically overpriced new phone as most tech companies do. However, Apple made this strange choice of having these ads revolve around a very rude and inconsiderate person that uses these AI features to avoid their responsibilities.

While this could be assumed as a fun spin on the new features, one cannot help but think that this is how Apple views its customers. So of course these ads have been met with disapproval from the tech community as these ads had been flooded with dislikes and comments poking fun at Apple’s approach leading them to eventually turn them off on all their Apple intelligence ads.

Ultimately, this is a prime example of how faulty marketing has resulted in huge brands like Apple and Jaguar underperforming and having their reputation questioned by the very communities they target.