This is Technology Bytes, episode 99 for January 26th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this week I’m back on the Apple intelligence bandwagon as it were, um, not so much on the bandwagon as wanting to talk about where it fits in my life, what I’ve seen, what the news is saying, what the general technology public is saying, almost in a sense of grading where Apple is at this point with their introduction of Apple intelligence.
The big thing as is often the case in the news, because this is just the way news works is it’s 90% negative, 10% positive.
So they don’t focus on anything, not just Apple, but anyone.
They don’t focus on what is done correctly or done.
Right.
They focus on the mistakes, the errors.
And it’s interesting that this week at work in that effort to try to improve our processes at work, I realized that’s what I do.
I focus on the errors and that’s kind of what I have to do to get it to be better.
So I hope Apple is doing the same thing that even though the press may be negative and the news may be negative, that internally they’re far more hard on themselves than the press would be, because I think that’s the only way to correct it and to make Apple intelligence what it needs to be and to make it better.
So the one thing in the process of improving is you have to know what to fix.
And in the news, they’re talking mostly about the summaries that Apple uses, summarizing news stories, summarizing texts, those kinds of things, actually quite enjoy it.
And the summaries of my text and the summary of Teams notifications at work and the summary of email, I actually find it to be quite useful.
Doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it gives me a glimpse without having to read in a lot of detail the information that’s coming to me from my phone.
But the problem with the news summarizations, and I don’t know if I have much news notifying me on my phone anyway, but from what I understand, they’re summarizing the article titles and not really summarizing the articles themselves.
And that just leads to big problems because when I’m reading news and I look at the article title, it’s already wrong.
The, if you think the title of an article is a summary of what you’re about to read, it is not.
And that’s just maybe my personal opinion, but that’s the way that news works today is that they grab you with the headline and then tell you a story that may not necessarily support the headline that you just read.
But so that being said, I just don’t know that there’s a way to summarize a news story based on headlines.
I think you have to summarize the story based on the content of the story.
And I don’t think they’re doing that.
So there are fixes that obviously have to be made.
And the other thing is those fixes take time.
So one of the thoughts that I had was since Apple is maybe a little late to the party that they did that on purpose, not that they weren’t working on artificial intelligence stuff, but that they were taking their time so that the bullets that they take from being bad would be minimized.
And it appears that that might not be the case that they may be behind because they just are behind and in the rush to get something into the public’s hands.
They’re making far more mistakes than people are used to seeing from a company like Apple.
So the question is, is the public willing to give them time to fix the mistakes that they’re making to make Apple intelligence better and whether the public’s willing or not, Apple’s a huge company.
They have products that people like to buy.
So I think that they probably have the time.
But the other thing that’s interesting is as much as they advertise Apple intelligence, as much as it’s in everybody’s faces, the general public, I just think they don’t know my wife has, she’s not interested whatsoever, but she was also not interested in any artificial intelligence.
I think my kids use chat GPT or something like that.
I don’t use it at all.
And I really haven’t used any artificial intelligence until Apple released something.
And what I use is pretty good.
I’ve covered that in previous podcasts and some of it is just, you know, toys, I guess.
So it’s interesting where Apple will go from here, but grading Apple intelligence, I don’t know, I’m not going to give it a letter.
I just don’t think they’re doing very well.
So let me talk about my personal use after that rant or rave or whatever I just did, but I’ve, I’ve talked about it in previous podcasts.
I don’t use it a whole lot.
And the one thing that I would like to see, and it’s something that they announced at WWDC, even though they said it would be maybe far off, is that personal assistant, something that is looking at my calendar, something that’s looking at my email, something that’s looking at my contacts that stays on my phone and lets me interact with that world when my phone knows so much about me.
And that does not exist in Apple’s world yet.
They’ve promised it, but there is no light yet for them even using that.
I don’t know why they didn’t just start there and say, we’ll get something out at that point.
Because I think lots of people would use it if that was available, but because of their limited offering, my problem is I forget, I forget that Apple intelligence is there.
I, it doesn’t solve anything for me necessarily.
And when I use it, it’s more because, oh, they have this functionality, whatever it is.
And so I try it, but it’s more try it, not use it as in make it useful for making me more efficient at what I do or effective at what I do.
So really I need Siri to get smarter.
I need them to tie into everything that they know about me on the phone and use that as an intelligence point to do work for me.
Well, that’s all I have for today.
If you have any comments or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at Merrickfamily.com.
And as always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
