shrtdb :: They squandered the holy grail

Apple's vision of computers as "bicycles for the mind" that enable creativity and productivity has been a core part of their identity.
The announcement of Apple Intelligence in 2024 promised transformative AI capabilities like seamless cross-app search and personal context awareness, which was seen as the "holy grail" of trusted compute.
However, the actual implementation of Apple Intelligence features like Writing Tools, Notification Summaries, and Image Playground have fallen short of expectations and feel "half-baked".
The author is particularly disappointed by the poor quality and uncreative outputs of the Image Playground generative AI feature, which produces disturbing and soulless images.
The author argues that generative AI should not be treated as a product in itself, but rather as an implementation detail to enhance more fundamental creative and productivity experiences.
Apple has developed an impressive system called "Private Cloud Compute" that enables highly secure and private AI processing on-device or in a trusted cloud environment, but this foundational technology is being underutilized.
The author laments that Apple has "squandered the holy grail" of trusted compute and personal context awareness that could have truly transformed the user experience.
The open-source community is praised for its ability to creatively leverage limited hardware resources, in contrast to Apple's seemingly unconstrained resources.
The one Apple Intelligence feature the author loves is "Math Notes" for its seamless calculation capabilities within the Notes app.
Overall, the author is frustrated that Apple has failed to fully realize its vision of computers as "bicycles for the mind" with the current Apple Intelligence implementation.

They squandered the holy grail - Xe Iaso