Whoever wrote this just doesn't understand who apple's main customers really are. Yes, devs may be a high impact customer base but most of apple's customers are people like my mom who struggles with the difference between Gmail the app, Gmail the web page and Gmail in apple mail and is reasonably worried about scams and viruses because she knows she isn't really tech savvy enough to spot them. If she is going to run AI on her apple products it can't be 'well it probably won't delete your data.'. It needs to be something she can be sure is safe and is limited to the access she gives it.

That's a really tough problem. I'm not even sure yet google can pull it off.

Can someone enlighten me what people actually use this for? The article mentions „managing your calendar, responding to emails, file your taxes“

The bottleneck for emails and my calendar is not the speed at which I can type/click some buttons, but rather figuring out what I want to write or clarifying priorities when managing my calendar.

As mentioned here already, Lately Apple is about taking existing ideas and introducing them as new features. (At least in Tim Cook’s era, only exception is Apple silicon)

Especially in the “AI game”. Just yesterday Xcode got fuller agent support for coding way later than most IDEs.

I’d expect some sort of Shortcuts integration in the near future. There’s already Apple Foundation Models available to some extent with Shortcuts. I’m pretty sure they’ll improve it and use shortcuts for agentic workflows.

Having said all that, Maybe it’s my age. I think currently things are over-hyped

- Language models running in huge centers are still not sustainable. So even if you pay a few cents, it’s still running over capital fumes.

- it’s still a mixed bag. I guess it might be useful in terms of profession because like managing people to produce the desired result, you need skills to properly get desired results from AI. In that sense, fully automated agent filing my tax still feels concerning to me if later I won’t have coverage if something was off.

- on-device, this is where Apple shines hardware wise and I personally find it as more intriguing.

While it's debatable if Apple would release something outright as encompassing and complete as OpenClaw, they should have helped developers and builders to build something similar themselves.

This could have come in any form, a platform as the author points out for instance.

I have a couple of ideas, how about a permissions kit? Something where before or during you sign off on permissions. Or how about locked down execution sandboxes specifically for agentic loops? Also - why is there not yet (or ever?) a model trained on their development code/forums/manuals/data?

Before OpenClaw, I could see the writing on the wall. The ai ecosystem is not congruent to Apple's walled garden. In many ways because they have turned their backs on those 'misfits' their early ad-copy praised.

This 'misfit' mentality is what I like so much about the OpenClaw community. It was visible from it's very beginning with the devil-may-care disregard for privacy and security.

Expensive and overhyped?

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Steve Jobs

OpenClaw is a very fun project, but it would be considered a dumpster fire if any mainstream company tried to sell it. Every grassroots project gets evaluated on a completely different scale than commercial products. Trying to compare an experimental community project to a hypothetical commercial offering doesn't work.

> They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid it.

I sincerely doubt that. If Apple charged $500 for a feature it would have to be completely bulletproof. Every little failure and bad output would be harshly criticized against the $500 price tag. Apple's high prices are already a point of criticism, so adding $500 would be highly debated everywhere.

You just put words in Apple's mouth. This is exactly what they should do but safer . This is entirely possible because only apple has control on their ecosystem.

If they optimize their entire hardware line (iPhone, Watch, Mac Mini, Macbook) AI enhanced with local/remote LLM model, they will win big. Imagine someone running a business can manage their entire business with iPhone/Mac/iCloud without buying any other saas services (inventory, payments, customer service).

This article is talking about the AI race as if it’s over when it’s only started. And really, an opinion of the entire market based on a few reddit posts?

Author spoke of compounding moats, yet Apple’s market share, highly performant custom silicon, and capital reserves just flew over his head. HN can have better articles to discuss AI with than this myopic hot take.

In terms of useful AI agents, Siri/Apple Intelligence has been behind for so long that no one expects it to be any good.

I used to think this was because they didn’t take AI seriously but my assumption now is that Apple is concerned about security over everything else.

My bet is that Google gets to an actually useful AI assistant before Apple because we know they see it as their chance to pull ahead of Apple in the consumer market, they have the models to do it, and they aren’t overly concerned about user privacy or security.