Another year, another WWDC disappointment.
The tech media is having déjà vu.
Just like in 2024, journalists left Apple's developer conference underwhelmed, fixated on flashy UI updates while missing the deeper story. This time, the media obsesses over "Liquid Glass" design changes and the lack of wow factors in their AI announcement.
Many of my designer collections criticized Apple for prioritizing "vibes" over functionality, one of them wrote:
iOS 26 is visually stunning. And functionally worse than ever... failed in real-world use.
I feel for Steve Jobs.
If he were still alive, the only redesign by this point, will be the iPhone UI team’s org chart.
Then, of course, the markets soon react to it. One analyst described:
the WWDC keynote is"a dud," especially when compared with other recent software developers conferences, such as Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google I/O.— Investors.com
Apparently, the majority of analysts have the same takeaway.
Apple's stock dropped 2.5% after the conference, down 20% year-to-date. Investors seem convinced Apple is falling behind in the AI race.
Against everyone's disappointment, I am going to explain why:
Apple is one of the few tech giants getting AI right.
TL;DR
Apple and Salesforce’s latest studies proved that even the most advanced models fail basic logic puzzles and can't follow simple instructions. For the time being, AI is just sophisticated pattern matching, no thinking, no reasoning.
AI can only do tasks accurately up to a certain complexity. The performance drops to zero if you go beyond this point.
Running AI directly on devices is much less costly for developers (no token fee) and eliminates privacy risks. Where AI can reliably perform small tasks, leveraging what AI does best: pattern recognition and content generation.
Apple built an uncopyable competitive advantage by accepting AI's real limitations, while most others remain trapped by their cloud infrastructure and per-token billing models.
Shall we?
Agentic AI = A Trillion Dollar Marketing Exercise
The tech world and media are obsessed with agentic AI.
In theory, these are supposed to be systems that can think, plan, and act all by themselves, without anyone telling them what to do…
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