Apple Intelligence. What's Another Year?

in the world of AI, it's an eternity...

In the wake of last year’s Apple WWDC we shared our thoughts on the then-newly minted “Apple Intelligence” concept:

I was not impressed with Apple Intelligence, to say the least:

I believe Apple’s hand was forced. Microsoft was accelerating away from them in terms of market cap growth, the car project had failed, Vision Pro etc. Then, when they looked at what they could assemble into an “Apple Intelligence” package, they knew they were coming up short. In essence, it’s simply a repackaging of everything the company has been doing all along, delivering great products which their customers mostly love and with a high level of integration between different devices, apps and tools. Sure, Apple Intelligence brings a sprinkling of new capabilities, but, from my perspective, they are mostly trivial. Perhaps the Siri upgrades will be significant, I guess they probably will, but they are long overdue anyway.

As time went by, the promised integration of ChatGPT into Siri arrived on my MacBook and I tried it out. It was pretty much useless, not being the version that has real time internet access. I’ve never used it since, albeit I believe that it now does seem to have upgraded to real time access. As for the emoticon creation tool, I did a funny picture of my son and again, never used it since.

Now, after WWDC 2025, I’m reminded of a Eurovision winning song from 1980 by fellow Irishman Johnny Logan called “What’s another year?”. You can watch the video here. The song starts off as follows:

I've been waiting such a long time
Looking out for you
But you're not here
What's another year?

I've been waking such a long time
Reaching out for you
But you aren't near
What's another year?

These lyrics pretty much summarise how I feel about Apple Intelligence after WWDC 2025. What’s going on? Let’s dig in….