The recently presented ChatGPT apps are what Apple Intelligence (and Siri) should've been. Some chat/voice interface, that can access data from installed apps and trigger actions.
It should've been a home run for Apple. ChatGPT starts with zero existing apps, Apple has one of the biggest app ecosystem, and with (Siri) Shortcuts they already have most of the necessary interfaces available for years.
They have your context. OpenAI doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you bought or when you last called your wife, it can’t know your heart rate or your work schedule.
Apple can turn it around.
Great AI is a good model with lots of context. Your model can be the best, but if you need the user to provide the context it’ll never be a great experience.
After working with Claude code for a while now, I’ve become much more aware of how to convey context to a machine, and just how poor some humans are at doing it in conversation.
Your AI product is toast if you need people to make it work.
Yes, Apple still has the advantage over OpenAI. But OpenAI can also release some iOS and Android integration layer, that allows to connect with installed apps on the device.
If Apple doesn't get their act together with the next iOS release, it could be too late.
OpenAI can't, they're completely dependent on Apple and Google permitting such a thing. Unless you have a particular way in mind they could currently achieve this?
They can integrate into third party apps, if the publishers want to. A lot of them are going to do it.
It's already possible to connect Gmail, and many other services, this can extend even more. The connection of those services could be done by the iOS/Android apps.
I doubt this will be super successful because so many of the apps that people would want to integrate it are those made by Apple, Google, Meta and others whose goal is to be a direct competitor. I might be wrong though, we'll see.
I still find Apple Maps to be awful. It consistently gives poor directions. For example the exit you need to take from the closest major road to reach my neighborhood splits once you are on it. If you continue straight you reach a stop light where you can then take a left and then continue 1/8th of a mile to the turn for my neighborhood. Apple Maps will instead have you go to the right when the exit splits and then have you continue another 1/2 mile before taking a u-turn and heading back the 5/8ths of a mile to turn into my neighborhood. Google Maps does the right thing. I now warn visitors to use Google Maps or to ignore these directions from Apple Maps.
I also live near a large city and a couple of smaller cities with busy downtown areas. In each of them the main streets are virtually impossible to perform a u-turn on because of the large amount of traffic. Apple Maps will insist on giving directions which involve taking u-turns on these streets. Google Maps will instead route you the easier way around the block instead of insisting on an impossible u-turn which in the end is slower because of the difficulty in actually performing the maneuver.
Also I find the directions from Apple Maps when taking an exit which further splits into multiple exits to be highly confusing. The spoken directions from Google Maps is much better in these circumstances.
Every new release I try Apple Maps again just to see if it has gotten better in these circumstances and every release I am disappointed.
Well it's useable sure but also not very good/useful.
From a directions/routing standpoint it's pretty decent and I'm OK with how the route planning works.
But they miss many POIs and the data they have is often stale, and their version of street view, while smoother, is not up to snuff at all.
I think it's really annoying and a major reason I have stopped using it even though I was an advocate at first. Apple can't be bothered to invest as much as Google did to have a proper open map system, with a good web version where people/business can post/add data easily.
At this point the privacy stick is tiring because we don't get anything from it and they will comply/sell the data the minute they can profit from it anyway (as they have shown).
So, you just end up paying more for a product that is clearly worse and won't become much better because of Apple's ideology and how stingy they are.
They generate a lot of cash but are unable to invest it in proper competitive software.
There are many bad things to be said about Google, but at least they manage to serve pretty good software that is open to everyone...
A 'plot'? That must be some kind of weird online conspiracy theory. Apple Maps worked poorly on initial release for reasons that are entirely unmysterious (the lack of comprehensive and accurate geographical data). Forstall was of course fired as an eventual result of this, but the idea that the whole PR disaster was engineered as part of a scheme to oust him is just daft.
It should've been a home run for Apple. ChatGPT starts with zero existing apps, Apple has one of the biggest app ecosystem, and with (Siri) Shortcuts they already have most of the necessary interfaces available for years.