“Have you heard about AI? Everyone is talking about it. It’s something called Apple Intelligence! Siri is super smart now! It’s cool how much Siri knows about me and how it can use my phone my phone for me, without having to touch anything!”

The above quote is an example of what we COULD HAVE BEEN SAYING if Apple had delivered on its promises when launching the new iPhone 16 lineup. If they had delivered, Apple Intelligence would be a meaningful conversation piece about AI, maybe even the primary way some people engaged with AI. In our reality, the conversation around Apple Intelligence is much different…

Apple Intelligence is a joke online and unheard of in person. While I love the writing tools and ChatGPT integration, most people are unaware of any of this. Those tools are largely hidden and out of the public eye. In fact, the Apple Intelligence that is getting the most buzz is Genmoji, a basic image generator that makes custom emojis in Apple’s signature art style. Emojis of “parrot popsicles” are not the AI revolution that we were promised.

John Gruber (of Daring Fireball) is an old-school tech blogger with deep connections at Apple. He hosts live interviews with Apple executives at WWDC and can occasionally even get an exclusive breaking news statement directly from Apple themselves. That is what happened last Friday, March 7, when Apple came to him with a special announcement.

Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy told John Grubber the following statement: “We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

John and Apple have a documented friendly relationship, but even HE has come to his wit’s end regarding Apple Intelligence. In his most recent article, Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino, John makes it known that enough is enough when he says,  “… the “more personalized Siri” features, it turns out, were bullshit.”

Apple is starting to lose the cache of credibility that it has so steadily and deservedly grown over the past decades. People have been able to watch official ads for months and see features that the iPhone 16 series wasn’t even CLOSE to being able to do. If making an ad showing a feature that isn’t real (or even close to being real) isn’t false advertising, what is?

In my opinion, Apple should be brought up on charges of false advertising by the US government, and a class-action lawsuit should give those who purchased an iPhone 16 some kind of (likely small) compensation for the principle of the matter. While basic Apple Intelligence features (Image Playground, writing tools, Genmoji) have been released in the months following the iPhone 16 launch, the big one, Contextual Siri, has not. They internally HAD TO HAVE KNOWN how far from ready this feature was and they still shot, edited, and aired these advertisements anyways. This wasn’t a mistake; I believe they intentionally deceived their customers into purchasing an iPhone 16. Apple knows that it worked, too! In a call with investors, Tim Cook bragged about how Apple Intelligence has been driving iPhone sales. I can attest to this myself. In a contemporaneously posted article, I talked about how Apple intelligence was part of the reason I updated my iPad when I did. Give people the features they paid for or pay them back.

The ship is sinking. No amount of cowboy frogs can save them now.