> Remember when Apple blamed EU tech rules — and more specifically the Digital Markets Act — to justify the fact that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be available in the European Union? Maybe that was just an attempt to turn EU users against their regulators as Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April 2025 along with local language support.
If they were NEVER bringing it to the EU, maybe I'd understand the cynicism. But that it's part of a phased roll-out where it just takes more time to come to the EU does not make it MORE likely that the cynics were correct. It's impossible to know for sure without some kind of Apple memo/emails, but I don't understand pointing to the new release date as proof of some ulterior motive.
Also, many many Apple products and services have been released in the US first. The iPhone, the iPad, the vision pro (still not available in most European countries), the 3D maps, the ECG on the watch etc etc. AppleCare+ was not available here for years, nor are some of the other services (someone mentioned Fitness+).
Releasing later in the EU is just standard operating procedure for Apple. Sure the law makes this more difficult but clearly not impossible. This doesn't just go for AI but for all products. They all need different certifications etc than in the US.
The big difference between this and other stuff is that AI is so hyped everyone wants it right now. That's why it seems to stand out.
There does seem to be a narrative against the EU legislation from the AI companies though. I'm not sure if Apple can be counted as one.
I would bet that a major driving reason for delayed release in the EU is not regulations, but simply linguistics. Localization is a huge effort, even more so around the types of AI features they seem to want to deliver.
As a native Danish speaker - a relatively small language spoken by about 6 million people - Apple had by far the most cohesive and thorough localization story of any tech corporation. Google and Microsoft come really close, but I’ve never seen a single instance of awkward word choice, ambiguous grammar, sloppy punctuation, or imprecise phrasing in an Apple product.
Anybody can do that in Spanish, German, or French, or any of the other major languages.
My pet belief is that this is a big reason why Scandinavia, like the US, is dominated by iPhones, in contrast to the rest of Europe, where Android leads.
This is a good point now that you mention it. I’ve found the Dutch translations and spoken voices on iOS to be outstanding. A few more people than Denmark, but in the scale of Apple, 6 vs 14 million is a rounding error.
I think the relative wealth of northwest Europe also plays a role in the adoption of Apple hardware. Or at least it certainly helps.
> I think the relative wealth of northwest Europe also plays a role in the adoption of Apple hardware. Or at least it certainly helps.
Definitely. IPhone here in Spain means tourist or expat :) It's just that most people buy budget phones here. A category in which apple doesn't even compete. The SE is decidedly mid-range (upper mid range in pricing terms even, it's a lot more expensive than in the US)
Also I think people here care less about spelling. There isn't that cultural attention to detail that the northern countries have.
Compare an average street in Denmark or Holland with Spain, where fibre cables hang in a huge spider from facades, streets have potholes, paint is falling off everywhere. People here don't really care about that stuff (and I would agree)
I mean, sure, there may be cultural differences, but let's not ignore how Spain as a country has been fucked by successive rounds of people in power making self-centered decisions, not to mention the relatively recent liberation from literal fascists.
I think Spain would fix its potholes the moment it could afford to make that a priority.
Yeah the obvious hole in my pet theory is that there are lots of small languages in Europe, but purchasing power may explain it. I have no idea about the quality of Apple’s localization for Slovenian, Lithuanian, or Albanian, just to name a few.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence.
Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users.
That being said I think that it's the kind of thing that many will want to have once they see a power user playing with it and achieving many things with their voice or few gestures.
> Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users.
I think that’s part of the reason Apple calls their stuff ‘intelligence’, not AI.
Users do not want better cameras, they want better pictures, and a large part of what gives that to them is smart software.
for example https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/depth-pro (“Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second”), if it works across huge ranges of pictures, will enable features that users like, but users may not call that AI.
Yes, any company not having an AI offer appears as a loser.
Ex: When you see travel pictures with tourists on it… You know it’s a iPhone. Android users have pristine pictures of the Coliseum without anyone in it.
Am I the only one who want to have photos that represent my experience, regardless of the amount of tourists ir traffic or road/building work done at the scene?
The photo of one of my family in law whatsapp group which we also framed in our corridor is a photo of me with my partner and her sister in a scenic historical street with a dog peeing at a light pole on the right corner. Another almost identical picture was taken without the dog but we just decided the "imperfect" one was better.
If I wanted a picture of a momument without tourists, I could just buy the damn postcard or download it somewhere.
Definitely not. Relatedly, the best advice I ever got about taking pictures of not-people is to put people in them. There are countless pictures, many of them better than I will ever get, of almost every mountain/building/whatever in the world. Put yourself, friends, and family in the shot, or it will be forgettable.
We just went through my late mother's albums of pictures a few months ago, and ultimately we ended up discarding a rather large number of them because they were just random pictures of landscapes.
The target audience is influencers that make the Apple look and feel of photos the default. They want pretty pictures and perfect scenes and then you have a bunch of teenagers going for the $1000+ iPhone instead of a Pixel for half the price with better AI but a different post processing pipeline
Gemini's been a thing for android and Samsung has something too. I've heard nilch about "success stories". I've even heard it loses some accuracy on voice commands compared to Google Assist.
These are features to excite shareholders, not users.
Personally I picked my next phone based on which had the most useful AI this year.
I've been waiting my whole life for, basically, the computer from Star Trek, and I think it's on the way.
Gemini was really disappointing. It could do some incredible things but it was more like the first hints of what will be possible. For example, I could ask it to show me the biggest files in my Google Drive. And as far as I could tell, it had access to Google Drive APIs, and _could decide how to use them_. That's extremely powerful, that means it could think of what to do to accomplish any goal you have and determine how to do it. If the API can do anything the UI can do, then the AI can do anything you can do, and you don't have to point and click and type like it's 2024, and we're suddenly in the 24th century.
But, it was too early. Many of my requests were met with "I'm sorry I can't access x y z" when it could and did at other times. The unreliability is what got to me.
So I went with an iPhone (my first ever, I'm not American) because I think in the short term, iOS is going to have the experience which is closer to this intelligence. Because it can drive behavior in other apps and will increasingly do so as features roll out.
Don't be fooled though Apple Intelligence is currently very, very limited.
Side note: I don't care about the text and image gen capabilities at all. Though the notification summaries are pretty handy and occasionally hilarious.
Apple’s intelligence has the benefit of a much deeper integration (if they can live up to their wwdc), which will pretty much bring the sci-fi assistent to life. Just say “when will my plane depart” and when siri replies ask it to “send that info to X” is absolutely possible with current LLM tech exposed to a standardized API against which it can execute commands. Give it some personalized context and that’s absolutely reachable tech.
I don’t know, if apple can pull it off, that will bring a huge change to human-device interactions.
People aren't excited because most of it already exists with native apps like chatGPT itself or even Copilot (Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard for example, can generate memes, images, guess emoji etc)
Integrarion through Siri is not transformational because few actually use Siri - Siri in Europe is dumb as a bucket, even when it correctly understands what you're asking.
I just installed 18.2 and now that Siri can fallback to ChatGPT (with search results) you can have Siri can actually answer things, all while still setting timers and turning on lights.
The integration seems well thought out, I think people will find it useful.
> I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence.
So what? Users don't know what they want, or need. People claim phones haven't "noticeably improved" in 5 years and then spend $600 more on a new phone instead of buying an old one.
The conspiracy theory is that it was to turn users against their government. The argument that it was delayed so they could work out compliance with regulations is entirely plausible.
Part of that line of thought was that it just came on the heels of meta announcing they would no longer bring AI products to the EU at all. So I can imagine the thinking behind this.
But for Apple it's pretty normal to release later in the EU. They almost always do this with new products and services.
The exact quote was: “Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.”
What didn’t seem plausible is that Android manufacturers didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing out comparable features, and Apple never elaborated on where exactly they see the difficulties. The whole wording reads more like deflecting blame to the DMA for the delay, rather than taking it on themselves by saying “sorry, we’re already late to the game as it is, we’ll need more time to work through this, and it’s all beta this year anyway”. It certainly seemed like a welcome excuse for why they’ll only release a US version this year.
Personally I don’t really care about those features, but Apple’s communication in recent years has gained a bit of a passive-aggressive side towards the EU.
> What didn’t seem plausible is that Android manufacturers didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing out comparable features, and Apple never elaborated on where exactly they see the difficulties
The issue is the security of the Apple Intelligence model. It was kinda vague whether they had to open up that API to 3rd parties - which would completely taint the work they did to keep it secure and private despite being a cloud AI system.
Android manufacturers don't care, nobody will bat an eye if a Samsung Cloud AI system leaks user data or it's used for training models. If Apple does it, the Internet will have another gleeful hissy-fit and forget it wasn't Apple who leaked the data, it was the 3rd party Cloud AI someone plugged in to their phone instead of Apple Intelligence.
For context, they issued that statement on a Friday and on the following Monday the regulators officially charged with them with violating the DMA over steering and App Store fees.
It seems reasonable in that light to have pumped the brakes on new iOS features when the DMA also targets bundling apps and services and iOS is labeled a gatekeeper.
Some of the bigger models require certification due to EU laws and are delayed as a result, but I can't see Apple Intelligence falling in this category.
Apple burned through collosal amount of developer/core fanbase good will with this little mauver. More than a year of hostile actions against developers, consumer choice and then anti EU PR stunts etc. Many of their services like News and Fitness+ are still not available in all EU countries even.
Utter guesswork on my part, but this just feels like the software probably isn’t ready to ship, so it’s a case of using the excuse of legislation to buy as much time as humanly possible to improve it before a wider rollout. Source: LLM development in general — massively promising but perhaps not the Swiss Army knife every PM assumed it would be.
Most people aren’t upgrading from the 15 to a 16, so they’re probably getting more than just a button. You could argue that the only update for the 15 over the 14 was also just a button.
Digital stupidity is rife, spreading like a common cold, leaving children everywhere immunocompromised, adults ethically stunted, and technologists waving their conceits like handkerchiefs at a soccer game.
Don't eat rotten fruit. Go read a fuckdamn math text instead, with a nice cup of tea or coffee and a view of the local vegetation in the background. Then take a walk and count your fingers and toes.
This lede makes no sense:
> Remember when Apple blamed EU tech rules — and more specifically the Digital Markets Act — to justify the fact that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be available in the European Union? Maybe that was just an attempt to turn EU users against their regulators as Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April 2025 along with local language support.
If they were NEVER bringing it to the EU, maybe I'd understand the cynicism. But that it's part of a phased roll-out where it just takes more time to come to the EU does not make it MORE likely that the cynics were correct. It's impossible to know for sure without some kind of Apple memo/emails, but I don't understand pointing to the new release date as proof of some ulterior motive.
Also, many many Apple products and services have been released in the US first. The iPhone, the iPad, the vision pro (still not available in most European countries), the 3D maps, the ECG on the watch etc etc. AppleCare+ was not available here for years, nor are some of the other services (someone mentioned Fitness+).
Releasing later in the EU is just standard operating procedure for Apple. Sure the law makes this more difficult but clearly not impossible. This doesn't just go for AI but for all products. They all need different certifications etc than in the US.
The big difference between this and other stuff is that AI is so hyped everyone wants it right now. That's why it seems to stand out.
There does seem to be a narrative against the EU legislation from the AI companies though. I'm not sure if Apple can be counted as one.
I would bet that a major driving reason for delayed release in the EU is not regulations, but simply linguistics. Localization is a huge effort, even more so around the types of AI features they seem to want to deliver.
As a native Danish speaker - a relatively small language spoken by about 6 million people - Apple had by far the most cohesive and thorough localization story of any tech corporation. Google and Microsoft come really close, but I’ve never seen a single instance of awkward word choice, ambiguous grammar, sloppy punctuation, or imprecise phrasing in an Apple product.
Anybody can do that in Spanish, German, or French, or any of the other major languages.
My pet belief is that this is a big reason why Scandinavia, like the US, is dominated by iPhones, in contrast to the rest of Europe, where Android leads.
This is a good point now that you mention it. I’ve found the Dutch translations and spoken voices on iOS to be outstanding. A few more people than Denmark, but in the scale of Apple, 6 vs 14 million is a rounding error.
I think the relative wealth of northwest Europe also plays a role in the adoption of Apple hardware. Or at least it certainly helps.
> I think the relative wealth of northwest Europe also plays a role in the adoption of Apple hardware. Or at least it certainly helps.
Definitely. IPhone here in Spain means tourist or expat :) It's just that most people buy budget phones here. A category in which apple doesn't even compete. The SE is decidedly mid-range (upper mid range in pricing terms even, it's a lot more expensive than in the US)
Also I think people here care less about spelling. There isn't that cultural attention to detail that the northern countries have.
Compare an average street in Denmark or Holland with Spain, where fibre cables hang in a huge spider from facades, streets have potholes, paint is falling off everywhere. People here don't really care about that stuff (and I would agree)
I mean, sure, there may be cultural differences, but let's not ignore how Spain as a country has been fucked by successive rounds of people in power making self-centered decisions, not to mention the relatively recent liberation from literal fascists.
I think Spain would fix its potholes the moment it could afford to make that a priority.
Yeah the obvious hole in my pet theory is that there are lots of small languages in Europe, but purchasing power may explain it. I have no idea about the quality of Apple’s localization for Slovenian, Lithuanian, or Albanian, just to name a few.
I still can't figure out why Fitness+ on Apple One isn't available?
Does Apple think that people in Europe don't understand enough english to do a fitness workout?
At least give us the option, please?
It is available with Apple One in France, but only for the most expensive tier.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence.
Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users.
That being said I think that it's the kind of thing that many will want to have once they see a power user playing with it and achieving many things with their voice or few gestures.
> I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence.
Because the vast majority of the user base hasn't really heard of Apple Intelligence and definitely doesn't understand what it is.
It's been out in tangible form for a few hours, and 99% of the people haven't had a chance to update yet.
> Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users.
I think that’s part of the reason Apple calls their stuff ‘intelligence’, not AI.
Users do not want better cameras, they want better pictures, and a large part of what gives that to them is smart software.
for example https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/depth-pro (“Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second”), if it works across huge ranges of pictures, will enable features that users like, but users may not call that AI.
The market looks excited, the stock is almost 40% up since a few weeks before the announcement in May
Yes, any company not having an AI offer appears as a loser.
Ex: When you see travel pictures with tourists on it… You know it’s a iPhone. Android users have pristine pictures of the Coliseum without anyone in it.
Crowded photos are the green bubbles of iMessage.
Am I the only one who want to have photos that represent my experience, regardless of the amount of tourists ir traffic or road/building work done at the scene?
The photo of one of my family in law whatsapp group which we also framed in our corridor is a photo of me with my partner and her sister in a scenic historical street with a dog peeing at a light pole on the right corner. Another almost identical picture was taken without the dog but we just decided the "imperfect" one was better.
If I wanted a picture of a momument without tourists, I could just buy the damn postcard or download it somewhere.
> Am I the only one
Definitely not. Relatedly, the best advice I ever got about taking pictures of not-people is to put people in them. There are countless pictures, many of them better than I will ever get, of almost every mountain/building/whatever in the world. Put yourself, friends, and family in the shot, or it will be forgettable.
We just went through my late mother's albums of pictures a few months ago, and ultimately we ended up discarding a rather large number of them because they were just random pictures of landscapes.
The target audience is influencers that make the Apple look and feel of photos the default. They want pretty pictures and perfect scenes and then you have a bunch of teenagers going for the $1000+ iPhone instead of a Pixel for half the price with better AI but a different post processing pipeline
People aren't excited because it's just been released stateside. Wait for the customer success stories to appear before determining desire.
Gemini's been a thing for android and Samsung has something too. I've heard nilch about "success stories". I've even heard it loses some accuracy on voice commands compared to Google Assist.
These are features to excite shareholders, not users.
Personally I picked my next phone based on which had the most useful AI this year.
I've been waiting my whole life for, basically, the computer from Star Trek, and I think it's on the way.
Gemini was really disappointing. It could do some incredible things but it was more like the first hints of what will be possible. For example, I could ask it to show me the biggest files in my Google Drive. And as far as I could tell, it had access to Google Drive APIs, and _could decide how to use them_. That's extremely powerful, that means it could think of what to do to accomplish any goal you have and determine how to do it. If the API can do anything the UI can do, then the AI can do anything you can do, and you don't have to point and click and type like it's 2024, and we're suddenly in the 24th century.
But, it was too early. Many of my requests were met with "I'm sorry I can't access x y z" when it could and did at other times. The unreliability is what got to me.
So I went with an iPhone (my first ever, I'm not American) because I think in the short term, iOS is going to have the experience which is closer to this intelligence. Because it can drive behavior in other apps and will increasingly do so as features roll out.
Don't be fooled though Apple Intelligence is currently very, very limited.
Side note: I don't care about the text and image gen capabilities at all. Though the notification summaries are pretty handy and occasionally hilarious.
.... I might write a piece for http://unlikekinds.com about this.
Apple’s intelligence has the benefit of a much deeper integration (if they can live up to their wwdc), which will pretty much bring the sci-fi assistent to life. Just say “when will my plane depart” and when siri replies ask it to “send that info to X” is absolutely possible with current LLM tech exposed to a standardized API against which it can execute commands. Give it some personalized context and that’s absolutely reachable tech.
I don’t know, if apple can pull it off, that will bring a huge change to human-device interactions.
Ah we were typing at the same time but strong agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41974935
People aren't excited because most of it already exists with native apps like chatGPT itself or even Copilot (Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard for example, can generate memes, images, guess emoji etc)
Integrarion through Siri is not transformational because few actually use Siri - Siri in Europe is dumb as a bucket, even when it correctly understands what you're asking.
I just installed 18.2 and now that Siri can fallback to ChatGPT (with search results) you can have Siri can actually answer things, all while still setting timers and turning on lights.
The integration seems well thought out, I think people will find it useful.
Assuming it works well enough to be useful.
> I don't think I've ever heard anyone but few power users here and on some other boards to be excited by Apple Intelligence.
So what? Users don't know what they want, or need. People claim phones haven't "noticeably improved" in 5 years and then spend $600 more on a new phone instead of buying an old one.
‘Informed users’ has always been a joke.
It wasn't a conspiracy theory, it's the official reason Apple told the press: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-says-regulatory-concerns-m...
The conspiracy theory is that it was to turn users against their government. The argument that it was delayed so they could work out compliance with regulations is entirely plausible.
Part of that line of thought was that it just came on the heels of meta announcing they would no longer bring AI products to the EU at all. So I can imagine the thinking behind this.
But for Apple it's pretty normal to release later in the EU. They almost always do this with new products and services.
The exact quote was: “Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.”
What didn’t seem plausible is that Android manufacturers didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing out comparable features, and Apple never elaborated on where exactly they see the difficulties. The whole wording reads more like deflecting blame to the DMA for the delay, rather than taking it on themselves by saying “sorry, we’re already late to the game as it is, we’ll need more time to work through this, and it’s all beta this year anyway”. It certainly seemed like a welcome excuse for why they’ll only release a US version this year.
Personally I don’t really care about those features, but Apple’s communication in recent years has gained a bit of a passive-aggressive side towards the EU.
> What didn’t seem plausible is that Android manufacturers didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing out comparable features, and Apple never elaborated on where exactly they see the difficulties
The issue is the security of the Apple Intelligence model. It was kinda vague whether they had to open up that API to 3rd parties - which would completely taint the work they did to keep it secure and private despite being a cloud AI system.
Android manufacturers don't care, nobody will bat an eye if a Samsung Cloud AI system leaks user data or it's used for training models. If Apple does it, the Internet will have another gleeful hissy-fit and forget it wasn't Apple who leaked the data, it was the 3rd party Cloud AI someone plugged in to their phone instead of Apple Intelligence.
For context, they issued that statement on a Friday and on the following Monday the regulators officially charged with them with violating the DMA over steering and App Store fees.
It seems reasonable in that light to have pumped the brakes on new iOS features when the DMA also targets bundling apps and services and iOS is labeled a gatekeeper.
Some of the bigger models require certification due to EU laws and are delayed as a result, but I can't see Apple Intelligence falling in this category.
Apple burned through collosal amount of developer/core fanbase good will with this little mauver. More than a year of hostile actions against developers, consumer choice and then anti EU PR stunts etc. Many of their services like News and Fitness+ are still not available in all EU countries even.
Utter guesswork on my part, but this just feels like the software probably isn’t ready to ship, so it’s a case of using the excuse of legislation to buy as much time as humanly possible to improve it before a wider rollout. Source: LLM development in general — massively promising but perhaps not the Swiss Army knife every PM assumed it would be.
Related:
Apple Intelligence is available today on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971835
See also:
EU Digital Markets Act: Litigation Against Apple
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41970854
That news is so 2023.
At that point it’ll be in the middle of the upgrade cycle - why get a 16 when 17 is around the corner?
The idea that Apple Intelligence is the big feature for the 16 flies out of the window and the only update this year is a button
Most people aren’t upgrading from the 15 to a 16, so they’re probably getting more than just a button. You could argue that the only update for the 15 over the 14 was also just a button.
I bought the 16 for the 5x zoom and the extra battery life. It has been a fine phone so far.
I have a 15 pro and Apple Intelligence works on it just fine.
Digital stupidity is rife, spreading like a common cold, leaving children everywhere immunocompromised, adults ethically stunted, and technologists waving their conceits like handkerchiefs at a soccer game.
Don't eat rotten fruit. Go read a fuckdamn math text instead, with a nice cup of tea or coffee and a view of the local vegetation in the background. Then take a walk and count your fingers and toes.