(i had to watch delayed due to a pre-existing commitment that takes higher priority than tim apple)
it wasn't the most exciting and then it fell off a cliff in a much greater way than i was expecting
whether AI generated imagery is generated on device or in the cloud, it still looks like complete dogshit
and the only question now is how much sludge they'll allow for turning off, because it's fucking everywhere
oh, are you writing text anywhere that isn't obsidian 1? your right click menu is now filled with a button to rewrite with sludge.
("show you really care by rewriting your email to someone as a poem!" if you actually cared, you'd do the fucking work.)
oh are you drawing in anything making use of the standard apple pencil UI? here's some sludge as a permanent fixture of that.
i'm assuming anything that calls the system photo picker will have an option to provide sludge instead.
ask a question to siri that would previously have resulted in "here are some results from the web for you"? now it'll prompt to get sludge from fucking chatgpt
how much of this can be turned off? who knows until developers actually get access to it in betas, because why would someone want to get rid of this wonderful sludge??
and there are now so few other places left to run.
so many of the other dominos have already fallen, apple was just wobbling.
every google, apple, and especially microsoft keynote from this point forward will dedicate so much time to how they've improved the sludge delivery experience that their users love
it may someday, eventually, be the year of linux on the desktop but i don't see the year of degoogled android on the phone.
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it being an electron app does have some advantages, sometimes
I think part of what's hitting me harder about this one is that part of the marketing message for particularly Macs has been "these are computers for people who care about the things that they make, and want to use one of the nicest possible canvases for whatever medium they work in". That's part of why the Crush ad missed the mark so widely for so many creative professionals, in a way I don't think would have necessarily happened if it was Samsung or HTC or whoever doing it
I write, I code, I make texture edits and other silly tweaks in Unity, I don't have to grade HDR video but it's nice knowing that if push came to shove I could.
And. Well. All of this kind of makes the "care about the things they create" part a lie now, doesn't it? Like, I was expecting some subtle hints of sludge here and there, but no, they've gone all in. It might be a nice version of sludge - they might have dressed it up in a top hat - but it doesn't fundamentally change what it is.
Ditto Apple's years long marketing push on privacy. Privacy to me means never ever being prompted to "pwetty pwease let us send this photo to chatgpt π₯Ί". I suppose at least they ask rather than just doing it, unlike other companies, but I don't even want the option to misclick on it
And of course, we can't forget how much of Apple's iPhone presentation last year was focused on Apple's climate change targets. Regardless of what you think about the Mother Nature skit, that's all out the window now.
Congrats to the shareholders and other people that complained about Apple being behind, while at the same time showing how Google was fucking up with displaying AI summaries from Onion articles, for showing all that marketing was indeed just marketing. Just words.
Hope it's worth what it might do long term.