https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/22/macos-tahoe-26-1-beta-1-mcp-i...
If you have say 16GB of GPU RAM and around 64GB of RAM and a reasonable CPU then you can make decent use of LLMs. I'm not a Apple jockey but I think you normally have something like that available and so you will have a good time, provided you curb your expectations.
I'm not an expert but it seems that the jump from 16 to 32GB of GPU RAM is large in terms of what you can run and the sheer cost of the GPU!
If you have 32GB of local GPU RAM and gobs of RAM you can rub some pretty large models locally or lots of small ones for differing tasks.
I'm not too sure about your privacy/risk model but owning a modern phone is a really bad starter for 10! You have to decide what that means for you and that's your thing and your's alone.
https://paleotronic.com/2025/08/03/connect-ai-to-microm8-app...
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-...
> Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year one of Giannandrea’s deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that if it failed, Federighi’s group couldn’t scapegoat the AI team.
> It didn’t help the relations between the groups when Federighi began amassing his own team of hundreds of machine-learning engineers that goes by the name Intelligent Systems and is run by one of Federighi’s top deputies, Sebastien Marineau-Mes.
This is a pretty good article, and worth reading if you aren't aware that Apple has seemingly mostly abandoned the vision of on-device AI (I wasn't aware of this)
That is a sign of very bad management. Overlapping responsibilities kill motivation as winning the infighting becomes more important than creating a good product. Low morale, and a blaming culture is the result of such "internal competition". Instead, leadership should do their work and align goals, set clear priorities and make sure that everybody rows in the same direction.
> In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off.
Not only Apple, this is happening across the industry. Executives' expectations of what AI can deliver are massively inflated by Amodei et al. essentially promising human-level cognition with every release.
The reality is aside from coding assistants and chatbot interfaces (a la chatgpt) we've yet to see AI truly transform polished ecosystems like smartphones and OS' for a reason.
The notification / email summaries are so unbelievably useless too: it’s hardly more work to skim the notification / email that I do anyway.
There are some good parts to Apple Intelligence though. I find the priority notifications feature works pretty well, and the photo cleanup tool works pretty well for small things like removing your finger from the corner of a photo, though it's not going to work on huge tasks like removing a whole person from a photo.
I want to open WhatsApp and open the message and have it clear the notif. Or atleast click the notif from the normal notif center and have it clear there. It kills me
I use it for removing people who wander into the frame quite often. It probably wont work for someone close up, but its great for removing a tourist who spends ten minutes taking selfies in front of a monument.
Except for that one friend. You know the one I mean.
> "A bunch of people right outside your house!!!"
because it aggregates multiple single person walking by notifications that way...
I mean, I could imagine a person with no common sense almost making the same mistake: "I have a list of 5 notifications of a person standing on the porch, and no notifications about leaving, so there must be a 5 person group still standing outside right now. Whadya mean, 'look at the times'?"
> - They have multiplied, said the biologist.
> - Oh no, an error in measurement, the physicist sighed.
> - If exactly one person enters the building now, it will be empty again, the mathematician concluded.
Anyway, I get wanting to see who's ringing your doorbell in e.g. apartment buildings, and that extending to a house, especially if you have a bigger one. But is there a reason those cameras need to be on all the time?
so ramping it up the rhetoric doesn't really hurt them...
Eg sometimes the writer is outright antagonistic, because they have some obligation to tell you something, but don't actually want you to know.
Those kinds of emails are so uncommon they’re absolutely not worth wasting this level of effort on. And if you’re in a sorry enough situation where that’s not the case, what you really need is the outside context the model doesn’t know. The model doesn’t know your office politics.
Why do I think this? ...in the early 2000's my employer had a company wide license for a document summarizer tool that was rather accurate and easy to use, but nobody ever used it.
So while Apple's AI summaries may have been poorly executed, I can certainly understand the appeal and motivation behind such a feature.
Why use 10 words when you could do 1000. Why use headings or lists, when the whole story could be written in a single paragraph spanning 3 pages.
If it's to succinctly communicate key facts, then you write it quickly.
- Discovered that Bilbo's old ring is, in fact, the One Ring of Power.
- Took it on a journey southward to Mordor.
- Experienced a bunch of hardship along the way, and nearly failed at the end, but with Sméagol's contribution, successfully destroyed the Ring and defeated Sauron forever.
....And if it's to tell a story, then you write The Lord of the Rings.
"When's dinner?" "Well, I was at the store earlier, and... (paragraphs elided) ... and so, 7pm."
Probably a sci-fi story about it, if not, it should be written.
However, when I stopped driving and looked at the picture the description was pretty poor - it wasn't completely wrong but it really wasn't what I was expecting given the description.
What really kills me is “a screenshot of a social media post” come on it’s simple OCR read the damn post to me you stupid robot! Don’t tell me you can’t, OCR was good enough in the 90s!
i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general. the ux/ui used to be a top priority, but the quality control has certainly gone down over the years [1]. the company is now driven by supply chain and business-minded optimizations than what to give to the end user.
at the same time, what one can do using AI has large correlation with what one does with their devices in the first place. a windows recall like feature for ipad os might have been interesting (if not equally controversial), but not that useful because even till this day it remains quite restrictive for most atypical tasks.
[1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/macos-tahoe-upside-down-ui-...
>i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general.
One 100% agree with this, if I compare AI's ability to speed up the baseline for me in terms of programming Golang (hard/tricky tasks clearly still require human input - watch out for I/O ops) with Apple's lack of ability to integrate it in even the simplest of ways.. things are just peculiar on the Apple front. Bit similar to how MS seems to be gradually loosing the ability to produce a version of Windows that people want to run due to organisational infighting.
I’ve seen a lot of things that look like they’re working for a demo, but shortly after starting to use it? Trash. Not every time (and it’s getting a little better), but often enough that personally I’ve found them a net drain on productivity.
And I literally work in this space.
Personally, I find apples hesitation here a breath of fresh air, because I’ve come to absolutely hate Windows - and everybody doing vibe code messes that end up being my problem.
I've now changed to asking where things are in the code base and how they work then making changes myself.
i does not appear to me as hesitation but rather an example of how they were unable to recently deliver on their marketing promises.
calling a suite of incomplete features as "Apple Intelligence" means that they had much higher expectations internally, similar to how they refined as second-movers in other instances. they have a similar situation with XR now.
Jump [1] built a multi-million dollar business exactly on this, a service used by corporations in financial consultancy.
[1] https://jump.ai/
They're definitely not as good as they WERE, but they're still better than anybody else.
The reality is that if they hadn’t announced these tools and joined the make-believe AI bubble, their stock price would have crashed. It’s okay to spend $400 million on a project, as long as you don’t lose $50 billion in market value in an afternoon.
Why not take the easy wins? Like let me change phone settings with Siri or something, but nope.
A lot of AI seems to be mismanaging it into doing things AI (LLMs) suck at... while leaving obvious quick wins on the table.
I reject this spin (which is the Apple PR explanation for their failure). LLMs already do far better than Apple’s 2025 standards of polish. Contrast things built outside Apple. The only thing holding Siri back is Apple’s refusal to build a simple implementation where they expose the APIs to “do phone things” or “do home things” as a tool call to a plain old LLM (or heck, build MCP so LLM can control your device). It would be straightforward for Apple to negotiate with a real AI company to guarantee no training on the data, etc. the same way that business accounts on OpenAI etc. offer. It might cost Apple a bunch of money, but fortunately they have like 1000 bunches of money.
Also kinda crazy that all the "native" voice assistants are still terrible, despite the tech having been around for years by now.
I think Apple execs genuinely underestimated how difficult it would be to get LLMs to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o