Intelligence not included

Apple’s WWDC26 keynote last Monday felt… weird.

There are many flavours of weird, some with positive connotations. Quirky, for example. Quirky can be charming. It can be interesting. The flavour of weird I felt as I watched the keynote unfold, was inching more towards gross — sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly. Let me try to explain.

Especially in Cook’s era, and especially since Apple stopped presenting events live before an audience, with live demos of products and product functionalities, we’ve had to watch videos with either pre-recorded demos or with simulated ‘slice of life’ situations where you could see a certain feature or set of features in action. Such videos have always felt particularly artificial to me, always leaving me with the impression that people at Apple — both due to their social status and the Apple Park ‘ivory tower’ creative environment — don’t really have a clue as to how regular people go on about their lives.

During the WWDC keynote, this kind of detachment was (to me) painfully obvious both in the initial segment about children safety, and especially throughout the excruciatingly long segment about Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

Children safety

I’m not an educator. I’m not a parent. I’m not in a position to tell people how they should properly educate their children or protect them from today’s dangers. However, based on observed behaviours, and having a certain knowledge and expertise when it comes to technology, I am of the opinion that children should not be given a smartphone in the first place. Of course, big tech companies such as Apple will present the smartphone as an inevitability to then offer you ‘solutions’ to mitigate the impact of this inevitability and develop ‘healthy digital habits’.

Just because we’ve all become obsessed with our smartphones doesn’t mean the next generations have to develop the same kind of behaviours. The smartphone isn’t an inevitability in a child’s life — its physical presence can be delayed and introduced when it’s necessary and safe to do so. This of course doesn’t mean keeping Internet and the online world a secret until your son or daughter turns 13, or 15, or 18, or whatever age you consider safe. But using a smartphone or tablet as a tool to keep your child entertained and pacified and as a shortcut to a lot of parental work is just as misguided.

But Apple prefers the inevitability scenario because it involves — you know — buying an extra iPhone or iPad for your household.

Apple guy, during the keynote:

On one hand, there’s so many benefits to your child having their own device. You rest easier, since you can stay in touch, know where they are, and provide them with great apps that help them learn and grow.

Note that, as the guy says “great apps that help them learn and grow”, the icons appearing on screen are for the apps Books, Notes, and Freeform. If you really want to put devices in the hands of your young children, you can stay in touch by giving them a dumbphone. And for reading, regular books or a simple ebook reader is enough and even provides fewer distractions. Deep focus is essential from a young age, and you can’t do that by shoving the digital equivalent of an amusement park in children’s faces.

To be clear, I’m not saying that these new ‘trust and safety’ features Apple touted are bad. But the whole discourse rings a bit hollow to me. It all sounds like a sales pitch to parents, as in, Feel free to get an iPhone and leave it in the hands of your children: we have put a lot of safeguards in place, so you don’t have to worry. And I’m sitting here, shaking my head, thinking about all the children I see when out and about, literally left to their own devices while their parents are doing other stuff, arguing among themselves, or doomscrolling on their own smartphones. I’ll reiterate: The first step to children’s safety is not giving a smartphone to a child. They won’t miss out on anything. You don’t need special skills to master the use of a smartphone that is essential you start using such device from a very young age. But it’s much better if a child starts learning another language or how to play an instrument if they’re musically inclined. Both these activities are highly beneficial the sooner you start them. Countless studies demonstrate this.

Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

This is how the segment on Apple Intelligence begins, with Craig Federighi saying:

AI is incredibly powerful technology, with the potential to shape society in profound ways and, with proper care, unlock meaningful benefits for people everywhere. Still, some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve.

Keep these words in mind. He continues:

At Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone. […] We believe that truly helpful AI must be centred around you and your needs. This means integrating AI deep into the products you use every day, grounding it in your personal context and the apps you rely on…

Isn’t this just another flavour of “pursuing AI for the sake of AI”, though? Why not take this opportunity to do something radically different in your approach to ‘AI’, instead of basically saying, Other actors are doing AI in a bad and untrustworthy way, putting it everywhere, not caring about people. We’re still putting AI everywhere in our ecosystem, but TRUST US BROS, we’re going to do it the right way. We know what’s best for you.

This We know what’s best for you attitude — which has always struck me as being a bit patronising — used to work, ultimately and in most cases, when Steve Jobs was still alive. Why? Because Jobs was User Zero. Because despite being a very affluent person, he was still grounded in reality in a way that fewer and fewer ultra-rich people in tech display today. With Jobs, Apple knew what was best for you because he demanded that his people do their damn homework and presented that homework to him, the ultimate user/tester: testing ideas, variants, iterations, until a new feature was perfected, until a user interaction was polished and flowing naturally, until something was implemented in a meaningful way, or scrapped altogether because it wasn’t going anywhere.

So, that We know what’s best for you wasn’t just arrogance on display. It was something Apple was indeed ready to prove. Today’s Apple, though? Eh, not with their recent track record. You can’t show up and tell me We know what’s best for you with a straight face after coming up with something like Liquid Glass, and after demonstrating you have been straying badly from even the most basic and most established UI principles.

These were my thoughts as the segment on Apple Intelligence and Siri was being introduced at the WWDC keynote. And my scepticism was confirmed later, by certain examples and demos they showcased.

Other Apple guy:

Siri is the personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. […] Siri AI uses our new Apple Intelligence capabilities, and you can tap into them in the same ways you access Siri today. […] This includes personal context understanding, app actions, on-screen awareness, image understanding, and access to broad world knowledge. So Siri is now a profoundly more capable assistant that helps you find what you need and gets more done. It’s also more conversational, so you can go back and forth like never before and get detailed, engaging answers. As you have these rich conversations, you can refer back to them with a new dedicated Siri app. And not only that, now Siri offers helpful Visual Intelligence across platforms. Along with integrated tools, so you can write and edit with Siri virtually anywhere you type.

Translation: we have turned the old, ever-unreliable Siri, into a modern ‘AI’ chatbot (which is probably as reliable as any other ‘AI’ chatbot out there).

Other Apple guy now shows a few examples of how Siri is now a more capable assistant. He asks Siri information about an upcoming concert in the city, and how to get tickets. Siri’s answers are not questioned. And while the query is simple enough, and the answers very probably trustworthy, this is simply not the way I’d choose to get information about a local concert. It’s still less cumbersome for me to just type something like “Esperanza Spalding Valencia summer 2026” in my browser (whether on my computer or my phone), and see the information I need appear right there, in the form of results from different sources I can quickly cross reference to confirm that Esperanza Spalding will play in Valencia the next July 7. The whole operation took little time, I didn’t have to talk to my phone, I didn’t have to talk clearly to my phone, I didn’t have to check whether the assistant actually understood my query, nor did I have to take the assistant’s word for it.

The on-screen awareness demo makes for a cool, polished demo, no doubt, and while I realise it’s just an example to show you how Siri is able to make contextual connections and provide an articulated response, I wonder if this is the kind of friction we actually need to remove. If I remember a friend mentioning a change of address, I’ll probably just look for their message in Mail or whatever chat app I typically use when talking to them (e.g. Signal). I can find that information just as quickly and in a way that makes me feel less passive and dependent on a digital assistant for every little thing.

In the next example, Other Apple guy tells Siri to show him photos from a specific occasion, isolate only those where his family members appear, and put those photos in a Shared Photo Album. Convenient? Sure. But also lazy and thoughtless. It really feels like an example taken from the everyday life of a rich, busy guy who can’t even bother looking at photos taken during an excursion with his family, and personally share those that he feels relevant and important to other family members. It feels a bit like having a friend who’s very fond of cats, and just ask Siri, Hey Siri, take all photos of cats in my Camera Roll and put them in the Shared Photo Album I have with Emma. Are these the super-boring activities we desperately need ‘AI’ to do for us?

Then, Other Apple guy show us the new Siri voices, which according to him now sound “incredible and a lot more expressive”, while to me these still sound artificial, but now with an added inflection that makes them also sound strange, like… well, like a machine that’s really trying to mimic how a human talks, and ending up in Uncanny Valley.

Then, better dictation. And this is objectively a good thing, as Apple always seemed to lag behind the competition in this department.

Now, Other Other Apple guy talks about how Siri is now “more conversational [and again, I can’t contain my laughter because I don’t want my computers and devices to be conversational. I don’t want to engage with them this way. I want the reliability of the written word, of the intentional interaction mediated through the UI], so it gives you richer answers and gets more done for you. This goes well beyond quick questions or one-shot tasks. With Siri AI, you can ask for an in-depth plan, go back and forth during a creative brainstorm, get feedback on a document, and so much more”.

If you ask me, ‘quick questions and one-shot tasks’ should be the only way to use ‘AI’ that isn’t ultimately detrimental to our ability to think, organise, create, compose, write. I want technology that helps me sift through 316GB worth of PDF files to locate a specific sentence or word pattern, or that helps me sort a record with 1,730 authors’ names in alphabetical order by surname but also chronologically by birth date. I don’t want technology I can just outsource my thinking to.

Other Other Apple guy proceeds with an example where he asks Siri to display the opening matches for the World Cup, and when he sees Brazil vs Morocco he asks Siri to show him typical dishes from both countries because he wants to organise a watch party, and also wants to include in the menu some creation his daughter mentioned recently, and of course he needs Siri to remind him about it, because he — a young guy probably in his late thirties — can’t even remember that his daughter wanted to make coconut cookies. Then he asks Siri to create a menu based on all the information gathered so far. And finally, he asks Siri to send a prepared message to all the people in his chat who may be interested in this watch party.

On the one hand, if Siri has indeed become this reliable at understanding queries like those demoed so far, it’s indeed impressive. On the other hand, I can’t help but ask myself, once again, whether people at Apple even know how regular people actually use their phones and devices. (Some people will probably be interested in the ‘compose and send the message for me’ part because they’re lazy. And part of me hates that this behaviour is now even more facilitated thanks to ‘AI’ tools).

The first example of Siri on the Mac Other Other Apple guy makes is just baffling to me. He says his son is “super into 3D printing” and that his son’s school has a setup and he (Other Other Apple guy) wants to help them expand into a dedicated space. Now, instead of actually sitting and thinking about how to do that, he just asks Siri: How should I think about building a maker space in a shed?

And yeah, having Siri analyse three different files with estimates from different companies makes for a neat demo trick, but really, in the real world, are you telling me you need a computer to perform some basic comparison like this? I know that if you’re a busy manager at Apple, stuff like this is boring and all you think about is delegating it to someone or something else. But this kind of task is one of dozens of everyday tasks that typically keep our brains nimble. In this Apple-made fantasy (a fantasy that is shared by other AI companies), you just ask everything to the ‘AI’ and accept whatever response you receive — uncritically.

Siri, think of this maker space problem for me. Pick the best contractor of the three, Siri. Write a friendly email to them. What’s next? Which jacket should I wear tomorrow at work, Siri? I know they’re ‘just making examples’ to illustrate a process, but this is all very telling of the way they think people should be helped. It’s very telling of the kind of assistance Apple (and other AI companies) think people need. It’s hard not to sound a bit conspiratorial here, but it’s almost like they want us to be more dumbed down and dependent on this type of technology. Wink, nudge.

Next, after a little wrap-up, the word goes to Other Other Other Apple guy, who talks about Siri’s ‘powerful Visual Intelligence’ across Apple’s platforms. On iPhone, it’s going to be integrated into the Camera app with a brand new ‘Siri mode’. You take a photo of something and Siri can tell you what it is (because asking people or doing an image search on the Web with results you can collate yourself is too outdated and not frictionless enough).

Again, some of the examples are hilarious. Select a portion of a photo of a slice of focaccia, wait for the Siri prompt to appear, then ask if this can be made gluten-free. Wow, so useful! So intuitive! So much better than opening a new browser tab and typing “can focaccia be made gluten free” in the default search engine field. Right? Right!? Oh goodness, all this innovation is killing me!

The following Siri AI examples in Vision OS also kill me. Asking Siri if a certain backpack can work as carry-on for an upcoming flight, with Siri answering yes and reporting the backpack’s measurements that are clearly visible on the backpack’s website, or asking if a pair of boots you own will fit in such backpack when you can clearly assess it yourself — the boots are right there, and you have the backpack’s measurements already!

Next, Other Other Other Apple guy talks about the integrated writing tools, ‘Write with Siri’: “Suppose you’re kicking off a document at work. Just describe what you need in natural language, and Siri can generate a draft from scratch to get the ball rolling”. In this technological vision, we’re all 12-year-olds who are too dumb or too lazy to do the homework ourselves, and so we do the equivalent of the old-school ‘copying stuff from books’ and patch together an essay.

“You can also get feedback on your writing”, Other Other Other Apple guy punctuates triumphantly. No. No, no, no. I don’t want ‘helpful tips and suggestions to improve my work’ from a language model. This is what teachers do. This is what editors do. And in an informal capacity and in a casual scenario, even a family member, or partner, or even that friend whose writing you always loved can tell you whether something you wrote sounds okay or needs a bit more work. A machine should not tell you how to write better. It’s gross.

And Apple Intelligence is going to wriggle its way into so many apps. I won’t keep listing other dumb examples introduced by more Other Apple guys and gals with contrived smiles on their faces. How can you suspend your disbelief when some Apple gal introduces Safari like this — and I quote: Safari was designed to help you move fast and stay focused on what matters.

Are. You. Kidding. Me. It’s a damn Web browser! It’s a tool to search, view, and organise stuff from the Web. But wait, now Apple Intelligence in Safari is going to make it easier to find what I’m looking for because — wait for it — it’s going to organise my browser tabs in topics, analysing Web pages and rearranging everything by relation. I don’t know about you, but in my case, no one, nothing organises my browser tabs except me. As for topics, that’s what Bookmarks are for since this feature was added in browsers decades ago.

Once again, that minimum of friction required to organise your stuff yourself isn’t unnecessary mental payload to get rid of. It’s one of the little things that, together, help you become better at organising yourself and your stuff because you are doing them and learn in the process. Remember when your mother tidied up your room for you, putting away your belongings and storing them according to her criteria, and then you searched for something and you couldn’t find it? Wasn’t it maddening? Sure, you asked your mother where she put that book or that pen you love using, and she would tell you. Just like you can ask Siri where’s that website or document you let Siri arrange and store for you. Is this lack of agency ultimately appealing for you? Because for me it’s just unsettling.

I’ll end my discussion of this segment by making one last passing observation. Looking back at all the atrocious examples the various Apple presenters have made to extol the virtues of Siri AI during the keynote, I’m starting to suspect that most of these examples were actually drafted by Siri itself.

Closing thoughts

The segment on Apple Intelligence took the lion’s share of the WWDC26 keynote. I found it rather patronising and infantilising towards us users and customers. These people think we’re all just a bunch of idiots who are completely dependent on technology for every little stupid thing — or want to become completely dependent. (This is American Big Tech’s dream of course. This is what they would love us to become).

Notice how with Apple Intelligence everything, everything is a mission to reduce, pulverise, annihilate friction. In this worldview, Apple is this close to telling us, Just stop thinking, just touch here and there, and everything will be done for you. You will all sound a bit more like Siri in your emails and messages. Your peculiarities and ways to organise your stuff and your life will be a bit more levelled and similar to one another’s. Even with little creative things like taking a photo, you’ll have the chance to feed them to Siri AI to ‘make them better’ and make them look more like one of those glossy, ultra-processed hero images you see on Apple’s website. Please, do not think for a moment about the creative process of taking the photo, just tap the shutter button and then let ‘AI’ do the ‘heavy lifting’ (in quotes because come on, LOL, what heavy lifting!?)

Remember at the beginning of this piece, when I quoted what Craig Federighi said about Apple Intelligence? Let’s revisit that quote:

AI is incredibly powerful technology, with the potential to shape society in profound ways and, with proper care, unlock meaningful benefits for people everywhere. Still, some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve.

Yes, after watching the WWDC26 keynote I have no doubt whatsoever that Apple, too, is seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve.

Oh, I almost forgot. It appears that at least Apple is actually trying to un-fuck Liquid Glass. So that’s something, I guess. I didn’t expect my personal ‘one more thing’ moment would come at about 6 minutes into the keynote.