The iPhone needs a new strategy to salvage Apple Intelligence

Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs, but his gift for supply-chain logistics made him the right CEO when Apple’s largest challenge seemed to be iterating and building the iPhone to sell billions of them around the world. In his own way, Cook was as good a promise keeper as Jobs. Yet, all of a sudden, Captain Cook seems to be in uncharted territory. He’s there because he opened his decision-making to the whims of Wall Street, which was demanding big news on what Apple would do with artificial intelligence (AI). I don’t think Jobs would have allowed himself to be rushed, but Cook did.

Also Read: Apple’s ambition: It wants AI to stand for Apple Intelligence

By prematurely introducing Apple Intelligence, Cook gave his company a deadline it wasn’t sure it could meet, and it hasn’t. Apple has broken promises to customers, with TV spots trumpeting features that are still nowhere near completion, nudging customers to buy smartphones that cost $1,000 plus but don’t work as advertised (there was small print).

Initial ‘Apple Intelligence’ features have been disappointing. First, news organizations complained of misconstrued summaries, which Apple tweaked. Now its problems run deeper: When non-nerd friends message you to ask how to “turn off these pop-ups because it keeps getting my messages wrong," you know Apple has goofed.

Cook is moving to stop this blip from becoming a crisis that would call his leadership into question. His biggest step so far has been to shuffle the executives responsible for the effort. Now in charge is the man who spearheaded the Vision Pro headset, which, while not exactly a hit, is widely regarded to be an impressive feat, unlike its chat agent Siri.

Even so, Apple’s enhanced Siri can’t be expected to land on iPhones until 2026 at the earliest, denying Wall Street the iPhone sales ‘super cycle’ that had supposedly been in the cards thanks to this vague idea that consumers would clamour to upgrade.

Also Read: Apple: It’s late to the AI race but sure and steady

Some of the more conversational features are more likely to arrive in 2027. That tentative due date will seem further and further away if competitors like Amazon.com’s new Alexa are released on time and perform as advertised. Alexa+, with its integrations and clean interface, is the kind of AI application Apple should have built by now. Unfortunately, it hasn’t—so now the company must do everything it can to make sure consumers can use these other services unencumbered.

That’s the way forward, here—a return to the roots of the iPhone as a place for external developers to create ground-breaking applications. To get out of this AI hole and keep the iPhone on the cutting edge of digital technology, the company needs to borrow that famous battle cry from former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer: “Developers! Developers! Developers!"

It’s what Apple has always been good at. As Apple watcher Jon Gruber stressed in a recent blog post, the Mac computer line became the industry choice for creatives because it was the best platform with which to use Adobe’s products. The iPhone, similarly, became the world-changing device it is because of the likes of Uber, Spotify and Google Maps.

Apple’s primary role is—and always has been—to build hardware and an operating system capable of supporting such innovative ideas. But in more recent years, this purpose has been complicated by the company’s desire to exert more control—in the name of privacy, as it has made clear—while also building up its own services business as another valuable income source. This now means that AI on the iPhone is only as good as Apple can currently make it.

As developer Gus Mueller wrote recently: “I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s."

Also Read: Apple’s UK run-in: Privacy may matter less to its customers than it thinks

There might have been a window when Apple felt it could build its own AI and keep everyone else out, but that has closed now. Apple urgently needs to find a way to open up its devices to be properly built upon by others doing it better.

I’m confident it can do this with sufficient guard-rails around privacy, instituting the same kind of watchdog arrangement it put in place to make sure its App Store wasn’t a risk to consumers. I’m certain it can find ways to make heaps of money as that gatekeeper since, despite the tumult, the iPhone is still the most capable mobile device for running artificial intelligence, and its enormous user base is locked in. Failing to adapt to the AI moment, however, could be a mistake with Nokia-sized consequences. ©Bloomberg