Most iPhone Owners See Little To No Value In Apple Intelligence (9to5mac.com) 57
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: A new survey suggests that Apple Intelligence matters to iPhone buyers, but the majority say that the initial features add little to no value. It remains to be seen whether Genmoji and ChatGPT integration will change that view. Things are even worse for Samsung smartphones, with an even greater majority of owners saying they can't see much point in the AI features offered
A new survey by tech trade-in site SellCell found that AI is an important factor when choosing a new smartphone: "iPhone users showed relatively higher interest in mobile AI than Samsung users as almost half (47.6%) of iPhone users reported AI features as a 'very' or 'somewhat' important deciding factor when buying a new phone vs. 23.7% of Samsung users who said the same." "Smartphone users in general are unsatisfied with the existing AI features as the survey recorded 73% of Apple Intelligence users and 87% of Galaxy AI users stating the new features to be either 'not very valuable' or they 'add little to no value' to their smartphone experience," reports SellCell.
According to the survey, these are the most popular Apple Intelligence features:
- Writing Tools (72%)
- Notification summaries (54%)
- Priority Messages (44.5%)
- Clean Up in Photos (29.1%)
- Smart Reply in Mail and Messages (20.9%)
A new survey by tech trade-in site SellCell found that AI is an important factor when choosing a new smartphone: "iPhone users showed relatively higher interest in mobile AI than Samsung users as almost half (47.6%) of iPhone users reported AI features as a 'very' or 'somewhat' important deciding factor when buying a new phone vs. 23.7% of Samsung users who said the same." "Smartphone users in general are unsatisfied with the existing AI features as the survey recorded 73% of Apple Intelligence users and 87% of Galaxy AI users stating the new features to be either 'not very valuable' or they 'add little to no value' to their smartphone experience," reports SellCell.
According to the survey, these are the most popular Apple Intelligence features:
- Writing Tools (72%)
- Notification summaries (54%)
- Priority Messages (44.5%)
- Clean Up in Photos (29.1%)
- Smart Reply in Mail and Messages (20.9%)
Couldn't you make it funnier? (Score:2)
Don't see the justification for the censor mod points, but mostly disappointed by the lack of Funny comments on the rich target.
It means you need the latest iPhone (Score:3, Informative)
Re: It means you need the latest iPhone (Score:1)
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Then you wont be able to live without it
Really, now?
I have not observed a mass extinction among us, Apple phone non-users.
I won't observe it for the "AI" non-users either.
Re: It means you need the latest iPhone (Score:2)
Re: It means you need the latest iPhone (Score:1)
Right. People wont want it until they get it and start using it. Then you wont be able to live without it in a few years.
You're right. iPhone users still can't live without 3d touch.
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Right. People wont want it until they get it and start using it. Then you wont be able to live without it in a few years.
Which is the typical pattern for a lot of Apple improvements.
Plus, we're criticizing the very idea of an Automobile when all we have are Model T Fords.
Give it a Decade.
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Almost. It's also available on the 15 Pro/Pro Max.
Damn you autocarrot (Score:5, Insightful)
After the disaster that is autocarrot^H^H^H^H^H^Hcorrect I can see why people are skeptical. AI has become the new buzzword but what makes the news are examples of plagiarism, disqualification or other academic penalty for having used in an inappropriate context, bigotry, threats, and hate speech, and lastly flat out being incorrect and providing garbage results that look genuine on the surface of it but are broken.
For the way most of us would interact with AI, it's simply a tool to let a company pay less in salary to actual people who will do the job, but without the company even going through the motions to verify that the results generated are even any good.
I have no doubt that for some researchers working with absolutely massive datasets, AI could help to perform initial analysis in a way that would take people a whole lot longer than if they were doing it the old fashioned way, and with a greater likelihood of that program finding something compared to if dozens of people were working and failed to compare notes to spot such patterns, but that's not a customer-facing use of AI. The people using AI in that context are themselves already AI researchers by and large too.
There's just not a lot of reason to trust the results. They're too often wrong or ill-suited and trusted without a healthy grain of salt people are going to be steered wrong by them. Better to not use them at all if that's the end result.
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I share your pain. Autocarrot has indeed rearranged entire sentences. It does enforce the habit of carefully proofreading your text.
All hail Augmented Idiocy!
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Augmented Idiocy!
neat.
Re: Damn you autocarrot (Score:2)
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What I find funny is that I remember software from Dragon being used on old Macintoshes in the mid-nineties for speech-to-text. It wasn't the most mature software but it generally worked well enough it was at least functional provided that it could recognize one's accent.
Thirty years later most speech-to-text has offloaded the processing to 'the cloud' where theoretically systems should be able to use a massive sample-size to learn, and should be able to apply considerably more computing power to both the
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What I find funny is that I remember software from Dragon being used on old Macintoshes in the mid-nineties for speech-to-text. It wasn't the most mature software but it generally worked well enough it was at least functional provided that it could recognize one's accent.
Thirty years later most speech-to-text has offloaded the processing to 'the cloud' where theoretically systems should be able to use a massive sample-size to learn, and should be able to apply considerably more computing power to both the act of interpreting the audio and to using language rules to better determine what the speaker said, but even with all those tradeoffs with worse data security and consumption of bandwidth it doesn't seem like the results are really any better than they were on that 68030 with 8MB RAM.
AI autocorrect is even more annoying when I'm entering letters manually and I enter a valid word and it still changes it to some other word. This is getting worse lately too.
Oh really?
I bought that same Dragon package that came with a special Mac headset (with a miniDIN connector), etc. I think I used it about twice before it went back on the shelf.
And do you remember having to "train" Dragon, to even get it to (barely) 80% accuracy? I have a completely-neutral Midwestern-US "accent", and I never could make it work even as good as Siri on its worst day!
When's the last time today's speaker-independent Speech Recognition required a "training" phase?
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After the disaster that is autocarrot^H^H^H^H^H^Hcorrect
Did you hear the inventor or autocorrect died? I didn't even know he was I'll.
Alot of AI is a solution searching for a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alot of AI is a solution searching for a proble (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't even call it that much. It's really a buzzword searching for a use case. They don't have a solution to anything yet as far as I'm aware.
I think the key applications are obvious (Score:2)
But from an end user standpoint the key application is a search function people who are just barely literate can use. I hate to admit it but some software at work had an "AI" search feature that spared me from having to learn the frankly ghastly syntax of a case system I needed access to for a single query. I could have dug through the rather terrible docum
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Just today, I spent some time building a new web page to automate some database maintenance operations. The task involved some obscure SQL and some front-end functions that were going to require some research to build. Instead, I instructed GitHub Copilot to write the code for me. Just a one-sentence instruction was typically enough to get a function or SQL statement built. Instructions like "Write a SQL statement to list all currently running queries" or to "generate random text strings." Instead of having
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So if you didn't understand enough SQL to write the query, how do you know what you got from Copilot is correct? How do you write tests for it? How do you modify it? How do you document it?
Current GenAI coding assistants seem intended to replace entry-level developer positions. Which means nobody will be working entry-level developer positions, so nobody will be learning how to be a more senior developer.
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Oh, I know SQL very well. What I don't know, is the specific table and field names names like sys.dm_db_partition_stats or sys.indexes, that contain data on index fragmentation for the database, or that it's necessary to use a CROSS APPLY with sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats in order to get a readable list of indexes and their fragmentation status.
Would *you* know all these names by heart, without spending time Googling? Do you know how to round a number to two decimal places in SQL without researching it? W
Same here (Score:2)
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And I curse a lot, so that always gets me the lame "Sorry, I can't continue this conversation"
LOL, so I better not "upgrade", then.
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Another reason I do NOT like to talk to my computers or computerized gadgets
Where is the value proposition? (Score:5, Interesting)
These surveys are meaningless because they do not capture the sort of data that Apple captures from usage data. How will we know which AI features are useful and which ones are not? When Apple releases the next revision in iOS 19 and we see which features were retained and which ones were axed. It's going to take months and years for people to figure out how they will use these new features to their benefit. Apple knows this better than anyone. This short term survey conducted by an agency with what seems to have an agenda is meaningless. You might as well ask Trump voters which presidential accomplishments of his they admire most. (See, he hasn't been sworn in yet.)
Re:Where is the value proposition? (Score:4, Insightful)
These surveys are meaningless because they do not capture the sort of data that Apple captures from usage data. How will we know which AI features are useful and which ones are not?
You're assuming any of them will be useful. If they were useful, I'd argue that someone would have done them already.
There are two types of AI features: Features that became possible because of AI and features that were conceived because of AI. Features that are something that people have always wanted to do and suddenly became practical because of AI are rather likely to be useful. Unfortunately, nearly all features fall into the second category, which includes every feature where the conversation began with the words "How can we use AI in our product?"
When Apple releases the next revision in iOS 19 and we see which features were retained and which ones were axed. It's going to take months and years for people to figure out how they will use these new features to their benefit. Apple knows this better than anyone. This short term survey conducted by an agency with what seems to have an agenda is meaningless. You might as well ask Trump voters which presidential accomplishments of his they admire most. (See, he hasn't been sworn in yet.)
But he'll tell you how amazing his accomplishments already are. They're the best accomplishments of any president-elect ever. The best. Nobody has ever had better accomplishments than him. :-D
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It manifests itself in knowing your daily routines and automatically broadcasting to the Airplay speaker(s) near you based on your music streaming habits.
I used to have expected travel times to and from work each day showing up on my lock screen, then one day I noticed that it was showing them for the supermarket I went to each weekend. iPhones were "learning" my habits years ago, no Apple Intelligence required.
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It manifests itself in knowing your daily routines and automatically broadcasting to the Airplay speaker(s) near you based on your music streaming habits.
I used to have expected travel times to and from work each day showing up on my lock screen, then one day I noticed that it was showing them for the supermarket I went to each weekend. iPhones were "learning" my habits years ago, no Apple Intelligence required.
You're right; and Apple has mentioned that stuff in Keynotes for years; but it's so well-integrated and understated you usually don't even notice it. You just sense that something that took 3 taps and a scroll now takes 2 taps and no scroll.
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For me, it's the little things , applied incrementally, that I find most valuable. Being able to say "Siri, add romaine hearts to the shopping list" whenever I think of something to add makes the Reminder app far more useful than it was when I had to bring up the app, go to a specific list, and type in each item.
United at Last (Score:1)
Apple, Android, Nokia, BlackBerry, and Rotary-phone users: United at last!
#epicHandshakeMeme
Apple is implementing it the right way (Score:2)
If it works... (Score:3)
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" I like taking pictures of unknown things and asking what they are. "
you can do this with google lens.
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To be honest, I get more value than frustration from Clippy 4.0, but I don't deal well with the frustration. Especially when it suggests making code worse (removing error control due to training on StackOverflow, etc.).
Proposed utility for phone AI (Score:3)
Not everyone can be coached in interviews via an earpiece like politicians, so you too can impress your friends, close sales deals; win over potential partners with the 10 step program of letting the AI in your phone listen into your conversations and tell you what best to say in every situation.
Call center ai (Score:2)
Essentially do this with existing call center workers. Let the AI suggest to the call center worker what to say next, record the call center worker's statement and then the next customer interaction, etc. with the end result of building a decision tree of call center prompts, responses, and resolutions. And the final result of letting AI take more and more of the first level, second level, and third level interactions.
Is it really useful yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of which, their commercials always make their users look bad. Too stupid to properly request someone to stop eating your pudding? Too negligent to read your report before your big briefing? Don't worry, Apple has your back! By the way.... what's a computer?
AI image/video upscaling and smoothing are probably the biggest benefits for a regular user, and they're great, but I don't know how much that's actually worth and if it's that much better than a "non-AI" version. This seems like 3D TV or VR all over again, but with a serious push behind it because it means people willingly give up their data and get used to a growing lack of privacy in the name of making their lives easier.
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Things like ChatGPT are neat and sound like they know what they're talking about until they start talking about something *you* know about, then the mask falls off.
I argue that's a symptom of the quality of information on the internet, in general. Googling will get you to a basic understanding of an unbelievably broad range of topics. But start trying to research a topic or industry that you're an expert in? It becomes clear that >95% of what's out there is absolute drivel. This points towards some potentially valuable use cases in which an LLM is trained on a corporate knowledgebase of known-good information and then used to support customer service agents or ev
AI has little to no direct value to me (Score:2)
The killer app: AI controlled settings (Score:2)
The killer AI app for phones should be Settings.
"Turn on Do Not Disturb."
"Flashlight on!"
"Make iCloud stop nagging me."
"Deny Camera access to all apps"
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Pretty sure the first two have been available for years.
However, the iCloud one is unfortunately terminal.
Image Playground (Score:1)
Only Apple AI feature I've found useful so far is Image Playground. Add a picture, pick from a pre-set, add a prompt and you get an interesting, copyright-free (albeit non-realistic) image. Similar to the image AI stuff inside Adobe CC or Google Sites, but much more polished. Great for creating profile pics. VERY generous with hair, weight, and skin tone.
The message or News summaries were so off had to go turn them off.
The real value in Apple Intelligence (Score:4, Interesting)
... is the fact that Apple had to increase the minimum RAM on all their current hardware without raising the price. Gone are abominations like a MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM that constantly has to swap to the SSD.
The current Mac Mini at minimum spec probably has one of the best value for money in Apple history. They probably fix that with the next upgrade cycle.
And EU citizens even get more RAM for the same price without AI (for now).
Unsurprising (Score:2)
Most of these assistants in phones are used for trivial things like setting an alarm, or a timer, or a reminder or whatever. I doubt the majority of people even need anything more than that. We've seen with Amazon & Siri that they hoped to monetize their service "hey siri order dishwasher tablets" and it turns out nobody was really interested. I doubt slapping some AI into the mix will make a whole lot of difference.
AI - Overhyped (Score:2)
“send your data to Apple” (Score:2)
Did that - for decades.
AI is simply Apple using artificial intelligence tools against you - you’ve been productized.
The next stretch of imagination is Apple using AI products to securitize themselves fresh revenue streams - you pay AAPL to use your data for your purposes.
In otherwords, Apple owns you - your data – preferences — eccentricities that only decades of personal history could elucidate patterns an artificial intelligence could leverage in super-intuition ways no other company or
Maybe (Score:2)
Maybe they've had a similar experience to me, where I've gotten so many completely wrong answers from AI that I now skip the entire paragraph generated by any search engine at the top of any search results. I turn it off most of the time.
I don't know what people are asking AI, but over 30% of my questions have resulted in wrong answers, with about 5% of answers being so wrong that following them would be dangerous, damaging to equipment, wastefully expensive, or otherwise disastrous. The ones that list sou
Voice Isolation (Score:2)
What about Voice Isolation, isn't that an AI feature? It's probably more useful than any of those cited.
No shit?!!??!!?!!! (Score:2)