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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

What are these servers actually used for?

The Siri+LLM features of Apple Intelligence aren’t launched yet, and the other features like notification summaries run on-device.

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I'm a complete Apple ecosystem user-- I have a Mac, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, Apple earbuds, and an Apple TV, and I also pay reasonably close attention to their announcements and developments-- and I couldn't tell you a single Apple Intelligence feature. Nor do I ever use Siri except for setting kitchen timers.

Just a total failure of execution.

> Nor do I ever use Siri except for setting kitchen timers.

If it even works, it fails with "something went wrong" for me 3 out of 5 times

The gorgeous rainbow border is one of the Apple Intelligence features, unavailable to plain Siri :/

What do people even expect from these intelligence services? Apple is always said to have failed, yet I've seen nothing in Windows that I'd actually want to use WRT to intelligence services.

Siri being better at free form requests for actions and doing internet/knowledge searches is about all I can think of. But also, I use Kagi for that, and unless Siri has a pluggable backend for search I'm not sure being forced to use only Apple's search, if it ever exists, is a great design.

The next Siri is Siri by Gemini, running on Google servers with Apple Privacy requirements. (aiui)

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/30/apple-explains-how-gemi...

They are supposed to run Apple Intelligence for devices too old to do it themselves.

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

I don’t believe that’s true. Private Cloud Compute is restricted to newer phones that already support on device Apple Intelligence. It’s just that the on device model is basically limited to simple stuff. Safari page summarization and the text rewriting features are run in the cloud. You can tell because those features go away without a network connection, and don’t cause the phone to warm.

Well... you can write Apple Shortcuts that send AI requests to their cloud.

I was wondering the same thing. I turned notification summaries off as they were less than useful, and I don't think I've stumbled across any other Apple Intelligence features apart from the laughable Image Playground or whatever it's called.

I cringe whenever I see the Image Playground icon on my MacBook.

It somehow looks worse than most scammy image generation apps you see on half-page search ads on the App Store. I have no idea how Apple willingly released it like that.

It was updated on my iPhone to a bland, forgettable abstract icon that’s still fairly mediocre but no longer an ongoing embarrassment for their corporate brand standards.

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