The Rise and Fall of Apple’s Personalization Features: Implications for Email, Reports, and Text Messages to the Consumer Electronics
In a series of prerecorded demos, Apple lays out a vision for users to interact with these new features, emphasizing the usefulness and personalization of the features. Apple says it can use AI to provide a highly personalized experience for you, the iPhone user, because its system is able to collate all sorts of information the AI has learned about how you use your device.
Industry experts theorize that Apple would put the line at a lackluster tool by limiting its intelligence features to the most expensive hardware. (At the time of writing Apple hadn’t responded to inquiries from WIRED.) But whether this limitation is a technical requirement or a product differentiation strategy, it might be Apple’s best shot at convincing customers to upgrade to newer iPhones this fall.
Apple’s AI can help with writing emails, reports, and personal text messages. Messages can have images generated that are informed by the context of the conversation that you are having. If you and your friends are talking about throwing a party on a rooftop, you can generate an image of what that party will look like. It can even generate AI images of the people you’re talking to. If you send a text with your mom on the receiving end, theArtificial Intelligence will give you a picture of her face, using any photos you have identified as showing her face. Your mom will hate this if she is anything like mine.
Apple Intelligence also has advanced writing tools that can generate full emails or messages, or review what you’ve written to change the tone of a work email to help you avoid saying something you might later regret.
Apple is limiting these new AI features to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, which run on Apple’s A17 Pro chip; the iPads Pro and Air, which run on Apple’s M1 chip or later versions; and various Mac computers that run on the M1 chip or later.
Dan Ives, a long-time Apple analyst, believes that the growth path of the company should change with the introduction of an artificial intelligence powered iPhone with a focus on personalization features.
The new features are being added at the same time as Apple’s sales have fallen. When Apple reported earnings for the January-March period, it showed a year-over-year decline in the number of units of the flagship device as well as the biggest drop since the summer of 2020, when some factories had to close. Its revenue last quarter decreased four percent from a year ago on account of the iPhone sales dip. Apple’s gross margin last quarter was still healthy, but that was due largely to its growing services business.
Apple’s phone hardware has enabled plenty of new features and functions over the past several years, but some of these tools have become commoditized or are layered in abstraction. Its custom-designed iPhone and iPad chips are bleeding edge and help sell top-of-the-line phones to the nerdiest or wealthiest consumers, but “CoreML on Apple silicon” isn’t as big of a selling point for consumers seeking midrange phones. And while new iPhones have iteratively better camera systems each year, high-end phones from rivals like Samsung and Google also have advanced photo and video systems. The convenience features are the same.