Apple's AI Wearables Expected to Lean Heavily on Visual Intelligence

[TFrank2]

More and more, the Apple pipeline seems to be products of little value, innovation or real world use cases.

Apple Intelligence. The irony.

This!
The UI of Apple’s recent products is bonkers. Visual Intelligence, Photos, Health, Fitness, …. They are all confusing, counter-intuitive and missing basic functionality.

Often, there’s an obvious way to go about things and Apple, by default, gives it a weird twist.

Unless these are really intuitive, durable, priced appropriately, and deliver a seamless experience (privacy concerns not withstanding), I just can’t see how these will be worth the effort. Seems like another distraction in the pipeline

 

[Thunderstrike76]

They’ve gotta bring back the iPod naming scheme back for this AI pin. Intelligence pod is it. Is there a better name recognition out there than iPod?

 

[neuropsychguy]

Using any current AIs to help you work on potentially dangerous repairs is a terrible idea IMO, considering how prone to error and hallucination they are.

You would have been better off just going to the web & youtube to learn tips from some actual human experts, then have another go at your repair. Plus this way you actually understand and learn those new skills better.

Have you used the recent version of Gemini Pro that you pay for? It's really good without nearly as many confabulations ("hallucinations") as previous versions and some other LLMs.

I'm not just blindly trusting what Gemini tells me, just as I don't just blindly trust what I read or watch online. I checked both "actual human experts" and what Gemini walked me through. Gemini explained things more directly and clearly than anyone online did. Further, it provided important safety tips that several electrician guides/videos online neglected to make clear. Gemini linked to YouTube videos and various sites as well to quickly verify what it produced.

My work was also checked by a licensed electrician afterward who came to address a different issue. He approved 100%.

The benefit of using Gemini is that I understand the process much better than if I just followed a video and read some things. It explained each step in troubleshooting. I could quickly ask follow-up questions for clarification about steps and get immediate feedback. It's fine if you don't use it. I find it useful to learn new things and get things done. In this case I was able to fix things and not have an electrician visit on a holiday.

There's always a danger when people misuse technology, but that's true for everything. Survival of the fittest! 😉

 

[Yr Blues]

when ever i use google now, i must scroll down until i find the reddit link to know clicking a link is help from real people.

Careful. A lot of posts can be AI generated now to trick advertisers and investors.

 

[carswell]

As someone who has Apple "Intelligence" turned off and no plans to turn it or Siri on, I find the company's -- heck, the tech world's -- embrace of widespread, largely unregulated surveillance to be an unauthorized (by me) invasion of my privacy. I've never taken a selfie and, as far as I know, there are zero photos of me on the Web or in tech firms' files. This sounds positively dystopian.

 

[Astuces iOS]

yeah no one cares about apple intelligence

 

[mansplains]

No. It’s the thing you activate with the Action Button. If you assign another action to that button, I don’t know how you can access Visual Intelligence. It’s just a very bizarre feature.

It can also be launched by holding the camera control button, if enabled, and equipped for that matter.

 

[klasma]

For me, if I’m walking around a gorgeous city in another country I’d rather not be looking at my phone any more than I have to.

It’s nice for ugly cities though, you don’t have to look at it then.

 

[klasma]

They’ve gotta bring back the iPod naming scheme back for this AI pin. Intelligence pod is it. Is there a better name recognition out there than iPod?

I don’t think it’s meaningful to the younger generation anymore.

 

[citysnaps]

tim cook doesn’t care about users he cares about stockholders.

You're probably not aware what makes Apple stockholders happy.

Hint: It's happy Apple customers (ie users) who purchase 400,000+ iPhones every day of the year (on the average), which generates massive revenue for Apple, which as a result makes Apple one of the most successful consumer tech companies in the world, and causes Apple stock to climb making stockholders very happy.

In summary:

Unhappy Apple customers => poor Apple sales => unhappy Apple stockholders

Happy Apple customers => outstanding Apple sales => very happy Apple stockholders

 

[Unregistered 4U]

oh boy let’s waste more RAM on vaporware from the plagiarism machine.

tim cook doesn’t care about users he cares about stockholders.

He BETTER care about the stockholders as, if the company ends up failing, the users will find themselves with no other Apple products to buy.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

You're probably not aware what makes stockholders happy.

Hint: It's happy Apple customers (ie users) who purchase 400,000+ iPhones every day of the year (on the average), which generates massive revenue for Apple, which as a result makes Apple one of the most successful consumer tech companies in the world, and causes Apple stock to climb making stockholders very happy.

Unhappy Apple customers => poor Apple sales => unhappy Apple stockholders

Happy Apple customers => outstanding Apple sales => very happy Apple stockholders

With the ADDED twist that the number of unhappy Apple customers is growing every year. Apple focuses their marketing on and creates products for the next set of folks in the younger demographics (folks that will be buying Apple stuff for the next 15-20 years). In doing that, they alienate those that USED to be in that demographic, but, due to the passing of time, aged out.

With over 8 billion people in the world, most NOT using Apple products, and hundreds of thousands being born every day, they’ve got a HUGE amount of growth potential in front of them… even as the number of unhappy Apple customers continue to grow!

 

[dontwalkhand]

So an iPhone without any of the useful parts of an iPhone. Got it.

 

[Brother Cavil]

More and more, the Apple pipeline seems to be products of little value, innovation or real world use cases.

Apple Intelligence. The irony.

100% agree. Reading this article, I kept thinking that none of it sounds remotely interesting or useful to me. The lack of real world use cases for all of these AI hardware products is glaring. Everyone is trying to crank them out as fast as possible, but I haven't seen a single use case for any of these kinds of products that make me want one. Maybe Apple will deliver something compelling but I'm very skeptical.

 

[Brother Cavil]

Cook out……please!

And what will that accomplish? The next CEO is literally going to follow the Cook playbook. Cook is one of the highest performing, if not THE highest performing, CEOs of all time. Do you really believe the next CEO is going to come in and make a bunch of changes? No chance. The next CEO will do exactly as Cook has done. We aren't going to suddenly see a bunch of innovative new products and bug-free software when Cook steps down.

The complaining about Cook here is so tiresome and, frankly, embarrassing. A bunch of nobodies complaining about one of the most successful CEOs in business history. It's pretty laughable.

 

[Brother Cavil]

Only if Apple user would demand the firing of Tim Cook then Apple can be great as it was once

Except that it wasn't great. I've been an Apple user since the mid 1980s. What's great about the old Apple? The way macOS crashed multiple times per day? Do you miss the good old Conflict Catcher days?

Nothing will change when Cook steps down. He's not the one writing the (buggy) code. Nothing will change at Apple until/unless Apple stops printing money. As long as the products are popular, the next CEO will do exactly as Cook has done, and why wouldn't they? Cook has turned Apple into one of the most successful companies in the history of the world. The next CEO isn't going to risk all of that. All of the online nobodies hating on Cook will be sorely disappointed by the next CEO, I guarantee that.

 

[paulvee]

ANY wearable AI pin from ANY company - if it records ANYTHING, will be another great excuse for me to avoid ANY people wearing them. I have never shunned "progress," but this is my line in the sand.

 

[Yr Blues]

ANY wearable AI pin from ANY company - if it records ANYTHING, will be another great excuse for me to avoid ANY people wearing them. I have never shunned "progress," but this is my line in the sand.

Panopticon surveillance state where the inmates are all snitches.

 

[CoMoMacUser]

The AI-powered clown nose will be the "and one more thing."

 

[Dj64Mk7]

The only use I’ve found for visual intelligence is accidentally activating it when I hold the camera control button for a moment too long. It’s such a finicky feature, and I’ve not been able to make it a habit in the year and a half I’ve had this phone. If I need to look something up from an image, I’ll either use Google Lens or Gemini. The only part of visual lookup I’ve been able to create a habit around, and now don’t think I could really live without, is copying text out of images I’ve taken.

 

[jole]

Visual Intelligence today seems just a "send this pic to our partners at OpenAI, Google, eBay". And when the partners can be selected by being the highest bidders for traffic, it sounds like awesome money maker for Apple.

A more interesting feature is today "hidden" inside accessibility features: Turning on magnifier glass, and there enabling "Detect", iPhone can continuously recognize what it sees and speak that aloud. This can be transformative to blind person — especially if embedded in glasses that actually whisper in your ear what is in front of you "there is a door 10 feet on front of you; stairs; big brown dog; ...". If you have not tried it, I encourage you to do so.

 

[Lampekap]

-

 

[name99]

‘The camera is always-on, recording what's around the wearer.’

Just no.

Is apple so out of ideas they’re resorting to stealing meta’s product road map?

None of these products are ‘must haves’.

They’re nice to haves at best.

And at their worst they’re dystopian.

It's plausible that this camera is not even a camera as you understand the term.
You think of a camera as something that
1. gathers light
2. to form an image
But you can create a device that performs the first task, while doing something different with that light, a system based on a light sensor but no lens; instead the role of the lens is performed by a "mask", a pattern of holes. (This is not a fresnel lens, though it shares with a fresnel lens the property of requiring less space).

The result generates "patterns" on a sensor that are nothing like an image, but which contain/encode the same data as an image.
What's the point?
1. It can be crazy thin (and cheap, and robust)
2. What do you want to do with the signal? If the only point is to feed it to an AI for situational awareness and to answer questions, then no image is necessary. The AI can train directly on this encoded signal!
3. It can probably be lower power if what you feed to the AI training is a raw sensor signal, with none of the computational pipeline that transforms that signal to a human-recognizable image.

So always-on - reasonable.
Recording what's around the user - possibly only for the last minute or so with constant overwriting.
And quite possibly in a form that's not even human interpretable.

I've no idea what Apple have in mind, but tech like this exists:
https://imagesci.ece.cmu.edu/files/paper/2017/flatcam_tci17.pdf

 

[fatTribble]

In doing that, they alienate those that USED to be in that demographic, but, due to the passing of time, aged out.

To your point, I’m very frustrated Apple hasn’t released a product to shoo kids off my lawn 😡
🤭

 

[bluecoast]

It's plausible that this camera is not even a camera as you understand the term.
You think of a camera as something that
1. gathers light
2. to form an image
But you can create a device that performs the first task, while doing something different with that light, a system based on a light sensor but no lens; instead the role of the lens is performed by a "mask", a pattern of holes. (This is not a fresnel lens, though it shares with a fresnel lens the property of requiring less space).

The result generates "patterns" on a sensor that are nothing like an image, but which contain/encode the same data as an image.
What's the point?
1. It can be crazy thin (and cheap, and robust)
2. What do you want to do with the signal? If the only point is to feed it to an AI for situational awareness and to answer questions, then no image is necessary. The AI can train directly on this encoded signal!
3. It can probably be lower power if what you feed to the AI training is a raw sensor signal, with none of the computational pipeline that transforms that signal to a human-recognizable image.

So always-on - reasonable.
Recording what's around the user - possibly only for the last minute or so with constant overwriting.
And quite possibly in a form that's not even human interpretable.

I've no idea what Apple have in mind, but tech like this exists:
https://imagesci.ece.cmu.edu/files/paper/2017/flatcam_tci17.pdf

OK then fair enough- let's hope. But I'm doubtful. But given Apple's 10 year experience with FaceID maybe this isn't out of the realm of possibility.