Apple Intelligence lawsuit shows why Apple must keep its eye on the ball

I don’t know if you’re like me, but my social media feeds are filled with nerds talking about tech. When they’re not talking about Severance season 2, they’re mad that Apple’s AI features are delayed.

I wish we’d all just move on from these AI shenanigans, but public companies love to jump on hype trains, so here we are.

That said, Apple is probably wishing it wouldn’t have followed the hype after the last few weeks. First, a bombshell report from John Gruber outlined how Apple has strayed so far from its past light by marketing Apple Intelligence heavily, while not having it ready.

Following that, reports came out that Apple has shuffled its AI leads around to hopefully improve the system and come out of this press cycle with some positive results.

At some point between these two reports, the company also took down its original ad from last fall detailing the advanced AI features.

Now, to put some icing on the cake, the company is facing a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. from a group of people who feel like Apple cheated them into buying new Apple Intelligence-capable hardware since the iPhone 16 series was marketed so heavily as an Apple Intelligence-capable device.

The lawsuit says, “Contrary to Defendant’s [Apple] claims of advanced AI capabilities, the Products offered a significantly limited or entirely absent version of Apple Intelligence, misleading consumers about its actual utility and performance. Worse yet, Defendant promoted its Products based on these overstated AI capabilities, leading consumers to believe they were purchasing a device with features that did not exist or were materially misrepresented.”

All of that said, I don’t expect this lawsuit to go all the way. Apple’s marketing was a little heavy-handed over the past few months, but beyond the one ad featuring Bella Ramsey, most of the others are related to AI features that did roll out after the iPhone 16 release. They’re just not as flashy as the AI-powered Siri shown off at WWDC or in the Ramsey ad.

It sucks things are delayed, but this is par for the course with a lot of software features, and while Apple did market this heavily, I really think anyone buying a phone for AI features kind of swindled themselves.

The real standout is the fact that Apple hedged its new features with marketing before they came out. That’s what feels the most un-Apple of this whole situation. This was the crux of Gruber’s article, and it speaks to the tech giant needing to make sure it’s not only providing cutting-edge features, but it must ensure they work 100 per cent of the time. That’s the “Apple magic,” and the more features that come out that don’t work, the more tarnished Apple’s reputation will become.

Apple has grown so much over the past decade that it’s spinning more plates in the air than ever before with things like Apple TV, visionPro, Apple Intelligence, a plethora of traditional hardware and a renewed push into AAA gaming. It’s all exciting stuff, but if the company can’t find a way to polish everything the way it used to, it may lose some of the iron-clad branding it worked so hard to build.

Again I don’t think the delayed AI features are the main culprit here, but an overall lack of polish. I hear more stories of people getting confused or upsold in the Apple Store than I used to and see a lot more small issues in iOS/macOS. No one thing makes Apple’s products bad, but the more they add up, the more it makes Apple feel like just another tech company.

Source: Axios, Daring Fireball, Bloomberg