Steve Jobs is rolling in the grave.
Dud On Arrival
Apple Intelligence, the iPhone-maker’s feature-packed stab at AI integration into its devices, appears to be a total dud with buyers, according to a new survey conducted by online smartphone marketplace SellCell.
In a poll of over 1,000 iPhone owners with models built with AI hardware — the iPhone 16 series, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max — only 41.6 percent said they’d bothered to even try the new Apple Intelligence features.
And among that minority, an overwhelming 73 percent of them reported that the AI tools were either “not very valuable” or that they “add little to no value” to their smartphone experience. Only 11.1 percent — of the ones who actually tried the features — considered them to be “very valuable.”
For comparison, the negative consensus was even more damning among Samsung Galaxy AI users, with 87 percent responding that they were unimpressed, and just 5.9 percent finding the features to be particularly worthwhile.
Apps to Oranges
Regarding the disappointing iPhone response, there’s a caveat. As 9to5Mac notes, the survey was conducted just before the launch of iOS 18.2, which added notable features like Image Playground, Genmoji, and ChatGPT integration. Still, if these are meant to be Apple Intelligence’s saving graces, that does not speak well to Apple’s long-term prospects with the tech.
An AI image generator from Apple sounds like it should be a major hit, but so far, Image Playground has an incredibly negative 2.7 star rating on the App Store. Most of the reviews are one star.
Genmoji sounds incredibly gimmicky: a generative AI tool that allows you to create custom emojis with text prompts is a fun idea, sure, but one with fleeting novelty. “The Genmoji, thus far, have been a huge disappointment,” one 9to5Mac reader sounded off in the comments, adding that the AI-generated emojis have a “definite ‘AI look’ to them when compared to standard emoji, but worse is that what AI creates doesn’t look at all like what I’m telling it to create.”
And while perhaps the most useful feature of the bunch, ChatGPT integration obviously relies on the unique popularity of someone else’s product; if it’s a success, it’s just Apple tapping into another company’s software ecosystem.
Small Audience
Both Apple and Samsung’s apparent failure to woo customers with their current AI offerings could point to a failure on their part to ship a convincing product. But more fundamentally, it could also indicate the shortcomings of AI technology in general, which has limited applications it can be used for reliably.
Even then, faults abound: Apple’s AI news notifications recently landed in hot water for incorrectly summarizing a BBC News report by making it sound like that suspected healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione had shot himself.
Perhaps several years deep into a breathless AI hype cycle, the scales are finally beginning to fall from consumers’ eyes. Indeed, it’s striking that such a big push is being made for a tiny minority of AI evangelists — 11 percent, in Apple’s case — who are the only ones who appear to be really enthusiastic about this stuff.
More on Apple: Microsoft’s AI “Recall” Feature Caught Screenshotting Your Social Security Number
Source link
lol
