Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event
50 comments
·September 9, 2025pradn
darth_avocado
> iPhones already have specialized hardware for AI acceleration.
This really is the problem. Why do I spend hundreds of dollars more for specialized hardware that’s better than last years specialized hardware if all the AI features are going to be an API call to chatGPT? I am pretty sure I don’t need all of that hardware to watch YouTube videos or scroll Instagram/web, which is what 95% of the users do.
_mu
I think on-device AI will show up more front and center but in a few more years.
A big issue to solve is battery life. Right now there's already a lot that goes on at night while the user sleeps with their phone plugged in. This helps to preserve battery life because you can run intensive tasks while hooked up to a power source.
If apps are doing a lot of AI stuff in the course of regular interaction, that could drain the battery fairly quickly.
Amazingly, I think the memory footprint of the phones will also need to get quite a bit larger to really support the big uses cases and workflows. (I do feel somewhat crazy that it is already possible to purchase an iPhone with 1TB of storage and 8GB of RAM).
some_random
I agree completely, it's really unfortunate how AI on apple devices has been going. The message summarization is borderline useless and widely mocked, meanwhile their giant billboard ads for it are largely stupid and uncompelling. Let me choose to give it access to my data if I want to do really useful stuff with on device processing. They've been leaning into the privacy thing, do the stuff that would be creepy if it left my device, generate push notification reminders for stuff I forgot to put in the calendar, or track my location and tell me I'm going to the wrong airport. Suggest birthday gifts for my friends and family, idk.
Edit: And add strong controls to limit what it can and cannot access, especially for the creepy stuff.
astrange
> In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate.
Apps already have such an accessibility tree; it's used for VoiceOver and you can use it to write UI unit tests. (If you haven't tested your own app with VoiceOver, you should.)
futureshock
This is a non-story. This was a hardware event. Apple is releasing many new AI features as part of iOS 26 which will launch along side the new iPhones. AI is software. And yet, a number of the features are clearly powered by AI models such as camera enhancements, health monitoring and live translation. Also GPU performance continues to increase in the A19, with CPU remaining presumably fairly flat since no numbers were given, so that’s a win for on-device inference.
russellbeattie
If Apple had an insanely great AI feature that truly differentiated itself from their competition, we all know they'd take a lot of time focusing on how their hardware enabled or enhanced that functionality.
The expectation is that Apple will eventually launch a revolutionary new product, service or feature based around AI. This is the company that envisioned the Knowledge Navigator in the 80s after all. The story is simply that it hasn't happened yet. That doesn't make it a non-story, simply an obvious one.
taylodl
I think this is the correct approach on a phone. I don't want AI front-and-center. I want it in the background quietly making everything better. To me, that's a much more useful form of AI.
scyzoryk_xyz
And I want it turned the fuck off, quietly not doing anything with my personal shit.
I want to reach for my tools when I want to use them.
tartoran
Yeah, the annonying movies IPhone does from my photo library is something I'd love to opt out of. I get that some people love this feature but I don't. And as you say, I could ask the phone to do that for me on request.
foogazi
I love this feature on both Photos and Google Photos
loloquwowndueo
Disable “show featured content” in Photos.
nerdjon
I think it is just generally the correct approach. It was not that long ago that ML (outside of research) was often talked about but it being ML was not the focus. The focus was on the actual benefits and what it did.
Of course this is going to be spun and turned into a negative, but I basically want ML to be invisible again. The benefits being clear, but the underlying tech no longer mattering.
akomtu
Indeed, a good AI Snitch runs in background on your phone. The era of intelligent spyware.
Razengan
Actually if Siri ever worked when I really need it, they could finally catch up with their promises made in 2011.
nathan_douglas
I have a similar philosophy about home automation. Every few years I geek out and set up a bunch of crap and spend a bunch of money and waste a lot of time, and then it tends to fall apart fairly quickly and I repent of everything...
...except for the motion-activated lighting in our foyer and laundry room. $15, 15 minutes to install, no additional charges, no external services, no security issues, and just works year after year with 100% reliability.
goodells
"Any sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting."
kergonath
They did talk about ML in their image processing software for their cameras, though. And I don’t think they mentioned AI when talking about their babelfish AirPods, but it’s clearly there, as well.
Jtsummers
They talk about "Apple Intelligence models" running on the phone. They dropped that name for their AI stuff in a few other spots, too.
esafak
This is what I like about Apple. They just use technology judiciously without making a big deal about it, and talk up the product instead. As it should be.
xutopia
That's because people don't trust AI that much... and most people don't differentiate between a really cool feature and AI so it's more confusing marketing than anything.
xnx
> That's because people don't trust AI that much
ChatGPT being the number one app is a weird way for people to express they don't trust AI: https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone
altairprime
[delayed]
hu3
And with Gemini being the 2nd.
mdotk
I think it's more because they're way behind on AI and they literally have nothing to actually tell us.
kergonath
They’re not way behind on AI, they’re way behind on LLMs. Several features they presented depend heavily on AI.
runako
As an Apple user, what are they behind on? What features are other makers shipping that Apple is missing?
(Genuinely curious, perhaps there are third-party apps I can use to bridge the gap.)
vbezhenar
You need to spend a week to disable all AI features in Pixel. You need to spend just a day to disable all AI features in iPhone.
acdha
How are they behind, in terms of things normal people actually use? Apps like ChatGPT work just fine, and I have literally never heard an Android user I know personally talk about something they can do which isn’t available on iOS.
frizlab
That’s not true. There were multiple AI features presented, just very well-known ones like the babel fish AirPods Pro. Nothing fancy, but it’s still AI and it’s useful.
micromacrofoot
in some ways (hardware) they're ahead, their dominance in mobile chip power lets them do a lot more machine learning on-device
also hard to find a better laptop for running an LLM locally too
andrewstuart
If you've read the Steve Jibs biography, you’d know his obsession with creating the future products.
I feel like he’d be obsessively working to combine AI, robotics and battery technology into the classic sci fi android.
Instead, modern Apple seems to be innovating essentially nothing unless you count the VR thing and the rumors of an Apple car, which sounds to me much like the Apple Newton.
chasd00
I feel like they don’t want to get burned the way they did with the AVR/metaverse thing. Those headsets are worthless. Probably a lot of ptsd going on with people thinking how Jobs would have had their ass over it. I suspect they’re being very cautious with “AI”.
grey-area
Good.
null
pryelluw
You’re absolutely correct!
Yeul
I have a Samsung A55 but I shudder to think that soon the AI crap will trickle down to midrange devices. Samsung is "all in" on AI.
Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs:
* Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access.
* Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate.
* iPhones already have specialized hardware for AI acceleration.
I want to be able to tell my phone to a) summarize my finances across all the apps I have b) give me a list of new articles of a certain topic from my magazine/news apps c) combine internet search with on-device files to generate personal reports.
All this is possible, but Apple doesn't care to do this. The path not taken is invisible, and no one will criticize them for squandering this opportunity. That's a more subtle drawback with only having two phone operating systems.