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I’m still on the 11 Pro, and I feel similarly. I’ve not seen any reason to update to date, though the new AI functionality might just turn out to be it.

I’m unsure I’m willing to lock myself in to the Apple ecosystem to an even greater degree though - they make it devilishly difficult to extricate yourself, and I already find the enforced storefronts built into their apps obnoxious. The Books app went from being a library to a shop - how long until the Photos app is trying to sell me things?

If anything, I may wind up bifurcating my life to an even greater degree - iPhone for general life admin (calendar, phone book, banking etc), Linux for productivity, creativity, gaming.

> how long until the Photos app is trying to sell me things?

Historically, Apple use to have really nice functionality built into Mac iPhotos to design and order photo books and prints. Sadly they dropped this.

That's been outsourced as a 3rd party plugin (iFolio? I think).

Works OK, but I did like the Apple interface better.

That's fair. I'm not interested in allowing Apple to become a single point of failure for my digital life either.

When I think about going deeper into the Apple Ecosystem, I mean stuff like:

Continue to use a 3rd party mail and calendar services, but ensure they're available through the native iOS Mail and Calendar apps.

Increase usage of reminders

Promote iCloud file storage, syncing it with other places to ensure it has a recent view of my holdings.

Increase use of Apple version of subscriptions I might get elsewhere, such as News.

> There are so many things that I feel Siri should be able to do, but it just can’t.

The competitors can and have done these things for a long time now, but all any of these things are (currently) useful for is setting a timer and playing music.

Without a rewind style access to your entire life, there is a real limit on how much useful stuff this technology can actually do.

Perhaps.

An LLM with exclusively global context (no personal context) is already pretty powerful, but certainly not helpful as an assistant.

In theory, perfect personal context would help a lot. Certainly a smart human being who follow me around all day can be very useful, but is expensive and has human limitations.

I don’t think I want exactly that from an AI. I am not thrilled with stuff like the Humane pin. I don’t trust that it will keep all those observations secure. I don’t trust that it will sort through all the noise to identify what’s actually important.

I think a mobile OS is a good balance. It has a LOT of personal context. I already trust it to process that data securely. The context is already well-structured and actively curated. I’m optimistic that adding LLMs to this will be significantly useful.

> Siri’s Generative AI upgrade (which is how I think of this whole Apple Intelligence thing) might be significant enough to change the smart phone as a segment.

Why? Most play with generative AIs for a few days and then abandon them.

The actual gamechanger would be making an AI assistant to be, you know, an actual assistant maybe?

I think LLMs improve Natural Language Understanding enough that we can approach genuine assistance. This is especially true if (1) the AI has access to high quality, well structured context, and (2) there are some constraints on the domain of possible tasks.

I think OS integration can provide both of those things. Mobile app selection is already pretty strong, and the Shortcuts ecosystem is a good example of providing direct access to specific functions implemented by apps. AI should use the shortcuts functions exposed by the apps I’ve already selected, installed and configured as tools.

If I can use shortcuts on demand with just my voice… that’s a huge win for me.