Apple’s Glowtime event brought with it a flood of new products and features centered around Apple Intelligence, which the company has been touting for months. For the lowdown on everything you need to know, check out our iPhone 16 Pro hub. And for our first impressions, read our hands-on review of the iPhone 16 Pro.
But amid all the new and upcoming features, the actual release felt familiar. I noticed over and over that every new feature already had a counterpart at Google, at OpenAI, at Meta, at all three, and more. I have more than a passing knowledge of what’s out there, but still, Apple’s onslaught of features gave me the feeling that someone was drawing a comparison rather than breaking new innovative ground, which was what Apple typically did in the 2000s. What really gave me that feeling was watching Apple announce its HomePod smart speaker and its subsequent iterations.
Siri blew everyone away when it came out, adding real power to the iPhone and setting a standard that no one could match for a while. But when Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa came along, Siri suddenly wasn’t that special anymore — but still, no one was willing to use either of them with their smartphone the way they did with Siri. Then came Amazon Echo and Google Home (later Nest after an acquisition). Both companies poured resources into not only making attractive, relatively inexpensive smart speakers and displays, but also making sure their voice assistants were up to the task, often with better natural language processing, superior context retention, and deeper third-party integrations than anything Siri could bring to the table.
The first Echo came out in 2014, and the first Google Home arrived two years later. Both quickly iterated on the voice assistant and hardware that links users to Alexa and the Google Assistant. The first HomePod didn’t come out until 2018, and it suffered from much of the performance stiffness that led to complaints about Siri. The HomePod, while technically impressive in terms of sound quality, couldn’t compete with the likes of the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Both rivals had already cemented their place in homes, offering affordable smart speakers with extensive voice assistant capabilities that connected to a broader ecosystem of smart home devices. Apple’s HomePod was more expensive, limited, and, frankly, late to the game. Even the later HomePod Mini could only try to match what had already been available for a while from Amazon and Google.
Apple's tough AI competition
Apple Intelligence hasn’t suffered as severe a launch delay as Apple’s voice assistant and smart speaker, but looking at the list of AI features, you could repeat the words “Google/OpenAI/many more already did this” almost all the time. Advanced natural language understanding, photo editing tools, and improved smartphone controls have already been announced or released by Google and others. They reflect a company still trying to close the gap left open by its AI rivals. Even the news of Apple’s partnership seems familiar. Incorporating OpenAI’s models to power ChatGPT features is a nice idea, but one that Microsoft and others have already pursued. Even Google, with its own set of AI models, looked to ChatGPT’s capabilities to develop features for its Gemini AI assistant.
There were only two ideas — one frivolous, one arguably important — from Apple that struck me as unique or at least noticeably different from what we’ve seen before. Custom Genmoji emojis are a cute idea that doesn’t seem to be all that easy to set up on Google-powered devices. More importantly, Apple emphasized how much AI processing will happen on-device and how it will leverage its Private Cloud Compute system to foster data privacy and security. That could be a big selling point for potential customers, even if it does limit some of what AI can do compared to a cloud-first approach. But even on-device processing as a selling point for a smartphone was already something Google did when it introduced the Pixel 9.
Apple had a lot to say, and Apple Intelligence may bring some unique features to the table, but the company’s late entry and iterative approach to AI suggest it’s still playing catch-up. Much like the HomePod’s struggle to gain traction in a market dominated by previous entrants, Apple’s AI tools, while sporting the refined design and privacy focus that many admire, seem designed more to match what others are already doing than go beyond it. Apple used to be laying the groundwork for the next big tech fad, but it’s going to take more than fun custom emojis to regain that footing — just ask the ten people who still own a HomePod.