Cabel Sasser (Hacker News):
Apple Intelligence in 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as “Priority” and moved it to the top of my Inbox. This seems… bad
I’ve been trying to test the new features in Mail to make sure that they work properly with my apps, but Mail is not showing any categories or priority messages on my Mac. Based on this and on reports from other beta testers, I had thought that only iOS got the full Apple Intelligence features in the first beta.
(Maybe this has changed in beta 5, but it’s not available yet for me, and the release notes haven’t been updated yet. Apple’s announcement doesn’t say whether beta 5 is for the 15.0 track or the 15.1 track, and neither is showing an update right now. [Update: It seems that beta 5 is for 15.0.])
I do see the Summarize button, and it seems to work reasonably well, though I don’t really understand the use case for the feature. What kind of e-mails are important enough that I can’t skip them or quickly skim them, yet not important enough that I can trust an AI summary to be accurate and complete? Maybe I would be more likely to use the summary instead of skimming if it didn’t require an extra click.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-19): Cabel Sasser:
In a hilarious follow-up, my dad forwarded me a phishing email just to check with me if it was legitimate. I wrote back and said “Definitely not!”. He wrote back and explained, “I got suspicious.”
This is how Apple Intelligence summarized my dad’s email[…]
Update (2024-09-12): Cabel Sasser:
how does this help. i’m still opening the emails and the messages regardless of the summaries. in fact i’m MORE likely to open them more urgently, interrupting my work quicker, because the summaries can sometimes miss key information and i don’t want my brain to think i “read” them when i didn’t. the emails it prioritizes for me are often just emails about cancelled calendar events, already reflected on my calendar. so what is the… goal? to read my email less? how does this help that goal?
Mark Jardine:
Apple Intelligence summaries are so bad. There have been so many situations when I was shocked or confused by the summary of an email or text and it’s because it was summarized incorrectly or unexpectedly. I know it’s early days, but I’m already losing faith in it all and at some point will end up just turning it off.
Update (2024-09-17): Adam Bell:
Man, I know it’s only a beta but summaries in Apple Intelligence really need more time in the oven.
SO many times will I get summaries that completely get things wrong and flip sentences around.
See also: Joe Kimberlin.
Update (2024-09-25): Ezekiel Elin:
Apple Intelligence keeps flipping the direction of payments from Venmo receipt emails
Update (2024-10-07): Matthew Cassinelli:
This weekend I noticed that Apple Intelligence Summaries made me less engaged in a group chat & unaware of the details.
People were going back and forth about a bbq & a movie, and by the end I didn’t know it wasn’t at our house and which movie they picked, because I read the summaries and skimmed the messages in the moment.
Apple Intelligence Apple Mail Artificial Intelligence EagleFiler Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Phishing SpamSieve
After I got off the beta waitlist, I went to enable Apple Intelligence, and it wouldn’t let me do so without also enabling Siri. I don’t find Siri to be useful on my Macs and tend to restrict it to my iPhone to prevent accidentally triggering the wrong device. It also doesn’t seem to work well with Mac microphones—this time it failed three times to accept the training test phrase but then eventually let me continue, anyway.
Not only that, but it also forced me to enable sharing audio recordings with Apple. See how the Continue button is disabled until I select the (lone!) radio button:
See how it says that you can change the privacy setting later in System Settings? Well, you still can’t do so from the Apple Intelligence & Siri pane. There are a button and a help link that seem to relate to privacy:
but they don’t let me control whether Apple stores my audio, nor explain where to do that. The relevant setting is in System Settings ‣ Privacy & Security ‣ Analytics & Improvements ‣ Improve Siri & Dictation.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-07): See also: Hacker News.
Update (2024-09-12): Jonathan Wight notes another Siri window layout problem:
Update (2024-12-05): Nick Heer:
Spencer Ackerman has been a national security reporter for over twenty years, and was partially responsible for the Guardian’s coverage of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. He has good reason to be skeptical of privacy claims in general, and his experience updating his iPhone made him worried[…]
[…]
Even at the time of its launch, its wording had the potential for confusion — something Apple has not clarified within the Settings app in the intervening years — and it seems to have been enabled by default. While this data may play a role in establishing the “personal context” Apple talks about — both are part of the App Intents framework — I do not believe it is used to train off-device Apple Intelligence models. However, Apple says this data may leave the device[…]
[…]
While I believe Ackerman is incorrect about the setting’s function and how Apple handles its data, I can see how he interpreted it that way. The company is aggressively marketing Apple Intelligence, even though it is entirely unclear which parts of it are available, how it is integrated throughout the company’s operating systems, and which parts are dependent on off-site processing. There are people who really care about these details, and they should be able to get answers to these questions.
Apple Intelligence Dark Patterns Design Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Privacy Siri
Apple (transcript, MacRumors, MacStories, ArsTechnica):
The Company posted quarterly revenue of $85.8 billion, up 5 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.40, up 11 percent year over year.
[…]
“During the quarter, our record business performance generated EPS growth of 11 percent and nearly $29 billion in operating cash flow, allowing us to return over $32 billion to shareholders,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. “We are also very pleased that our installed base of active devices reached a new all-time high in all geographic segments, thanks to very high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
Jason Snell:
And now, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: the charts…
Adam Engst:
Apple’s Services and iPad segments increased significantly compared to last year, with Services up 14% and iPad up 24%. The Mac was also up about 2%, but the iPhone fell 1% and Wearables dropped 2%. Internationally, nearly all geographic segments reported modest increases apart from Greater China, which posted somewhat lower results compared to last year.
Jason Snell:
Another quarter, another record-setting total for Apple’s Services line—$24.2 billion in revenue. And yet, the more I looked at that number, the more I started to ask myself some fundamental questions about Apple’s business, today and in the future.
[…]
Apple’s Services line is powered by less glamorous businesses. The company’s cut of App Store revenue, AppleCare support subscriptions, Google’s payment for being the preferred search engine in Safari, Apple’s cut of Apple Pay transactions, and iCloud services are all a part of the category, and most of them contribute more to Services revenue than Reese Witherspoon and Adam Scott do.
[…]
Without good hardware and software, Apple’s services would be irrelevant. I hope everyone in a position of authority at Apple understands that. Services are a way to help make Apple’s hardware even more profitable than it already was. But services can never, ever take precedence over Apple’s hardware. If Apple ever begins to see its hardware as merely a vessel for selling more subscription services, the game will be over.
There are certainly areas where it seems like that’s how it sees software. And, to me at least, even Apple’s hardware business is just the way to access software (from both Apple and third-party developers). Software is what truly matters.
Nick Heer:
It would be disappointing if Apple sees its hardware products increasingly as vehicles for recurring revenue.
Ryan Jones:
I just want to see Apple Services revenue broken out!
- Google search deal
- App Store games commision
- App Store apps commision
- AppleCare
- Apple Music
- iCloud
- Else
The growth must be games, Music, and iCloud?
Steve Troughton-Smith:
This is the launch year of Apple’s Vision Pro, but from their first six months of financial statements you wouldn’t know it. Much like their first-party software support, it’s just crickets and tumbleweed.
Benjamin Mayo:
Tim Cook says ‘we’ll see what the developers do’ with Apple Intelligence, omitting the fact developers currently have essentially nothing they can do … APIs for summarisation and the like are simply non-existent in the iOS 18 SDK.
Right now, as a developer, you can make your text fields compatible with rich image attachments for Genmoji support, and that’s about it. In-app actions for Siri with app intents are the first real ‘advanced’ integration point, which is a ‘next year’ thingy.
Robert Ilich (Hacker News):
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway slashed its stake in tech giant Apple by nearly 50%, according to Berkshire’s second quarter earnings report released on Saturday.
Berkshire Hathaway disclosed its holdings in Apple were valued at $84.2 billion at the end of the quarter, dropping from 790 million shares to 400 million shares. The sharp selloff is notable for Buffett, who is known for holding onto stocks for long periods of time.
Jason Aten:
That timing thing is pretty important because even though Buffett didn’t specifically say why he’s unloading Apple’s stock, he has indicated in the past that he plans to hold onto the company’s shares “unless something really extraordinary happens.”
Previously:
Update (2024-08-07): John Gruber:
But another way to look at it is that services are just another form of software. Software that runs not on the personal computing devices Apple sells to customers, but which run on servers in the cloud. And, importantly, is sold to users via lucrative recurring subscriptions. Content often isn’t what we think of as software (like say music, movies, and TV shows) but content from the App Store is. But the key is that it’s all stuff that the users of Apple’s devices consume on those devices. Apple’s core business is designing, engineering, producing, and selling those devices. Services are just a huge, and growing, part of what users do and consume on those devices.
To extend Kay’s axiom for today’s world, I suspect Apple’s leadership sees things this way: People who are really serious about device platforms should make their own services. Viewed that way, Apple’s success with services is no more a distraction from their core business than their success with their own chain of retail stores has been. It’s just a necessary evolution.
I see this as more of a “success hides problems” situation. Do you look at the profit number going up? Or at the pattern that the software that touches Apple’s services businesses tends to be less reliable and well designed, often even regressing?
Also, stuff like CloudKit and the App Store are certainly more “core” than original TV content, though Tim Cook seems far more excited about improving the latter.
Previously:
Apple Apple Intelligence Apple Quarterly Results Apple Services Apple Vision Pro Business iOS iPad Mac
Tim Sweeney (MacRumors):
This feature is super creepy surveillance tech and shouldn’t exist. Years ago, a kid stole a Mac laptop out of my car. Years later, I was checking out Find My and it showed a map with the house where the kid who stole my Mac lived. WTF Apple? How is that okay?!
John Gruber:
Thieves deserve privacy too is quite the take.
Rosyna Keller:
Sweeney is seriously angry that Find My, a service for tracking lost or stolen items, can track stolen items…
Tim Sweeney:
To state a thesis explicitly: if a device one person owns ultimately ends up in the possession of another person, then any process of detection and recovery should be mediated by due process of law and not exposed to the owner in vigilante fashion; and no sort of surveillance mesh network in these devices should be activated without a user’s clear and specific consent.
I can respect the consistency of the view that everyone deserves privacy, though in this case it would seem to infringe on the rights of the device’s owner. Involving the law is a high burden, and by the time it’s done the device may no longer be trackable. And how would Apple even know to switch the device from “lost” to “stolen”? His thesis just seems unworkable.
The other interesting thing about Sweeney’s comment is that it inspired a Twitter community note saying:
The location of Apple devices on the Find My
network can’t be accessed by Apple. “The Find My network uses end-to-end encryption so that Apple cannot see the location
of any offline device or reporting device.”
Mysk:
The community note is inaccurate. The claim “Find My is end-to-end encrypted” generally is misleading. Online devices report their location to Apple without end-to-end encryption even with Advanced Data Protection is on. This makes it possible to look up a device’s location through Find My by logging in to icloud[.]com. We intercepted the HTTPS traffic of Find My on icloud[.]com, and it clearly shows that Apple can see the location of every online device.
End-to-end encryption only applies when offline devices report their location through the Find My network, which relies on other nearby devices reporting their own location.
Find My is not even listed on the iCloud page about protecting your information.
I still don’t recommend enabling Find My Mac because then anyone who breaks into your Apple ID account can remotely wipe your Mac. Whereas, if you use FileVault and elect not to store the info with your Apple ID, your data is safe even if the Mac gets stolen. So I think this collection of features is not designed properly. I wish I could find my Mac without putting my data at risk.
Previously:
Find My Find My Mac GPS iOS iOS 17 Mac macOS 14 Sonoma Privacy Twitter
