Apple Intelligence could be bad news for AI gadgets

So, the rumours were true. Apple has elected to call its own, on-device AI Apple Intelligence. Which is either genius or ridiculous, depending which way you look at it. Last night’s announcements at WWDC were fruitful, even for Apple, with the company revealing the latest generations of each of its operating systems. But all anybody’s talking about is Apple Intelligence.

“Setting a new standard for privacy in AI, Apple Intelligence understands personal context to deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant,” reads Apple’s opening salvo. And indeed, the (mostly) on-device aspect of Apple AI sounds like the company is making big strides when it comes to privacy in AI. And it’s also drawing comparisons with a couple of other, somewhat ill-fated AI devices.

Yep, it’s been a curious few months for ‘AI gadgets‘, with the likes of the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1 not enjoying the most auspicious of starts. Companies like Humane and Rabbit have scrambled to create dedicated hardware to facilitate the software aspect of AI, without a great deal of success. And now, Apple has, it seem, turned the iPhone itself into an AI agent.

But what sets Apple Intelligence apart from the rest is that as well as featuring its own large language model, it also works off of an index of all your personal files, photos, contacts, and messages, and can offer contextual responses. As one X user puts it, “Over 1 billion users now have an AI agent in their pocket with iOS 18.” 

Apple is often accused of ‘Sherlocking’ apps, which essentially means incorporating the functionality of third-party apps into its software, rendering them useless. But now, it appears to have Sherlocked a new category of hardware – AI gadgets.

Time will tell how Apple Intelligence plays out, and whether it will be the game-changer Apple claims it to be. But, perhaps more pertinently, time will tell whether the Humane Pins and Rabbit R1s of the world can survive against the AI gadget that’s already in billions of pockets.