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Kuo: Apple Knows Apple Intelligence is 'Underwhelming' and Won't Drive iPhone Upgrades

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The Apple Intelligence features that Apple introduced with iOS 18 are not pushing people to upgrade their iPhones, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reiterated today. Apple's recent Siri failures are also going to have an impact on 2025 iPhone shipments, which the market is beginning to realize.

Sad-Siri-Feature.jpg

As early as last July, Kuo said expectations that Apple Intelligence could drive iPhone upgrades were likely "too optimistic," and in January, he was even more explicit and said that the appeal of Apple Intelligence had "significantly declined" because of the delay between when Apple showed off Apple Intelligence features in June and when they launched starting in October.

Kuo is maintaining his cautious view in light of Apple's Siri debacle, which has seen the company delay heavily advertised Apple Intelligence Siri features that it initially said would come in iOS 18.

According to Kuo, Apple is already aware of Apple Intelligence's "underwhelming performance," and has provided suppliers with conservative iPhone shipment forecasts as a result.
Lately, the market consensus has shifted to a more cautious stance on iPhone shipments and Apple Intelligence (Siri), which supports my earlier predictions. Moreover, it's clear that when Apple shared conservative shipment forecasts with its key suppliers early this year, they had already factored in Apple Intelligence's underwhelming performance.
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The negative public sentiment that Apple is facing due to the Apple Intelligence Siri delay could further impact sales of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 17 models in the coming months. Apple last week said that Siri personal context and App Intents are being pushed back until the "coming year," and it doesn't seem like the company expected such a critical reaction from the tech community and its customers.

Longtime Apple reporter John Gruber, for example, recently published an in-depth report calling out Apple's Siri shortcomings, and his commentary has resonated with many who have the same feelings about Apple's longtime struggle with Siri improvements.

Many others have also spoken up on the very public demonstrations of Apple Intelligence Siri features that Apple provided over the course of the last year and the subsequent delay that has shaken public confidence in the company's ability to deliver AI features that can compete with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others.

Article Link: Kuo: Apple Knows Apple Intelligence is 'Underwhelming' and Won't Drive iPhone Upgrades
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/13/kuo-apple-intelligence-underwhelming/
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Good. Sick of AI cannibalizing everything even though it's largely been foisted upon us with, for the moment, limited use cases for the median consumer. Particularly when it looked like last year's iPad OS update got entirely bulldozed to make way for AI features (that we ended up not even getting).
 
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Forget about the business for a minute and go back to the product. Take an honest and very critical look at the product.

This is what Apple did when Steve returned. Most fluent in business and company management would NOT have looked favorably on what Apple was doing when Steve was given the reigns again.

Apple looked at the product and followed through on what the vision and their standards for said product were and executed. As a result, Apple flourished.
 
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While disappointing that Apple Intelligence isn't ready for primetime, I agree that their assessment was too optimistic. What they should have done was roll out over 2 years, keeping the Beta tag on the features for as long as it was necessary (Google does it all the time). Though overall as others have mentioned in the past regarding AI, I think apple was pressured into providing some kind of AI features and got too ambitious.

Perhaps they should have tried to buy a smaller AI company and start from there? Even connecting to ChatGPT (noting its external source) and continue to develop their own solution. it could have been marketed correctly... ChatGPT is not guaranteed to be private etc (fine print stuff).

just my $0.02 worth.
 
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I could literally make a list of every article where this guy has said that the iPhones will “under perform expectations”.
I remember when he said the XR would underperform because it only had a 750P LCD, and it ended up being their best selling phone of that year. It was so successful, Apple just decided to make it the regular iPhone.

So… I highly doubt this will have a major impact. After all, Apple Intelligence or not, people still need phones when they’re old ones break and will still upgrade.
Now is this embarrassing for them? Of course. But is it being blown out of proportion? Absolutely.
both Google and Microsoft had to delay the initial launch of both of their AI features due to controversy, security, language issues.
Even Amazon‘s recently announced “Alexa+” has this at the bottom of the page…
“Alexa+ will start rolling out in the U.S. in the next few weeks during an early access period, and subsequently in waves over the coming months.”
Given that this is about as vague as apples original announcement, I would not be shocked to see “the coming months” become December 31.
 
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btrach144 said:
Apple finally has something to stress iPad hardware but misses.

Apple lied to investors to sell iPhones and keep their stock price high.
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I'm agree, but I have to say, don't give a **** about investors... They lied to their customers and therefore now is decreasing it's credibility. That is even worse than lie to investors. Less credibility is usually related to less sales, and investors know about that.
And this, is all Tim's fault. He decided to grant this marketing nonsense lying.
 
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They'd get more upgrades if they would give a face to Siri on the iPhone and allow users to punch and slap it -- via tap and swipe gestures that Apple is so fond of -- and make that exclusive to the newest iPhones. Granted, I am making the bold assumption that their designers and coders still have a high school level of competence. It's much cheaper and attainable than actually fixing Siri.
 
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MrGimper said:
Is there a single Apple Intelligence feature that isn’t just a gimmick?

Genuine question.
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Apparently those auto-reply options in Messages...Which I'm surprised it took Apple this long to implement since they've been in Teams, Google Messages for years.

That is the legit on feature I can say is good.

Image Playground and Writing tools are too limited and poor.
 
I can't even think of one Apple Intelligence feature I regularly use on my 16 Pro. I quickly disabled the notification summary feature because it was SO bad at summarizing texts and alerts from news organizations. The writing tools seem gimmicky to me, and the Image Playground app was fun for about 10 minutes when I made cartoonish versions of myself, my wife, and my two boys. But that was about it.

I'm just "meh" on the whole thing.
 
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Most of us knew this last year already. No amount of paying Bella Ramsey for ads will fix this.

Apple is 2-3 years behind ChatGPT and Gemini, never mind leading edge stuff like DeepSeek. There is no way they're closing that gap so quickly. Data is the fuel for AI. Apple has none to feed it either.
 
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FSMBP said:
Apparently those auto-reply options in Messages.
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I hated those -- was the reason I turned it off on my Mac Mini
It was just never something I wanted to say or how I wanted to say things

Communication being devalued to "guessed things I might want to say" is something I honestly find disrespectful to anyone I'm communicating with.
 
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MrGimper said:
Is there a single Apple Intelligence feature that isn’t just a gimmick?

Genuine question.
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Genuine answer:

I can search 20,000+ photos on my iPhone for various criteria I'm interested in. A simple example: red car + blue bus + policeman + bridge

When Apple gets their distributed AI online server network up and running it will no doubt be far more sophisticated.
 
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