> In motorsport, a safety car, or a pace car, is a car that limits the speed of competing cars or motorcycles on a racetrack in the case of a caution period, such as an obstruction on the track or bad weather.
Real people don't need that. Siri has offered a modest set of voice-integrated features for over a decade, and made almost zero impact. Same for Google Assistant, which sucked less but was still useless.
The average smartphone owner cannot be trusted to switch away from privacy-degrading technologies even if the alternative is good. Look at Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify; it's a Keynesian beauty contest, and ChatGPT has more mindshare than Siri.
Yet something like "Call <name of a person>" will still immediately call someone with a completely different name without even letting me cancel, right?
Just today: “give me directions to the ferry terminal”. I’m on an island with one terminal, I shouldn’t have to be specific.
“Here’s a list of three ferry terminals that are on different islands, none of which are the island you’re on.”
“Give directions to the Orcas Island ferry terminal.”
“Here’s directions to the Port of Orcas Island, which is on the side of the island opposite the ferry terminal.”
If I weren’t driving a camper van on narrow roads, I would have taken her up on the “other island” option. “How do you propose we get there, Siri? Maybe start by driving to the g-ddamned ferry terminal?!”
Oh, nice, they added a confirmation screen before you call! I'm not sure when they're planning to roll that feature out to Europe but once they do, maybe Siri will be occasionally slightly useful when I need to call someone while my hands are dirty or while I'm driving.
> Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. [...] it just works.
Yeah, after 30 seconds, assuming it doesn't fail outright. The only thing I use Siri for is to set timers on my watch when cooking. This used to take 2-3 seconds at most and even worked completely offline on the watch itself. That functionality is now effectively broken for me.
I was around in the 90's too, which is why I can confidently say it is that bad. What Apple is doing with AI today is exactly the same formula as some of the worst stuff Microsoft put out back then. I'm not talking about the big things. More like the bundled apps where they see someone else getting traction with something and then they go and bundle their own K-Mart version of it that no one asked for.
Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.
For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!
Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.
The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.
A couple of things I've done with Apple Intelligence on the Mac:
* When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.
* I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.
Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.
> Not sure if I want Siri to know my prescription medication.
Using Shortcuts, a user can use the Cloud model via Private Cloud Compute, the Cloud Pro with "world knowledge, and the on-device model. It occurred to me I probably don't need the Cloud; I switched to the on-device model, which worked fine.
There's no way for Siri or anybody else to know anything about a transaction using Private Cloud Compute:
We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about
the way it handles user data [1]:
A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of
fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to
perform the operations requested by the user. User data stays on the
PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is
returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request,
and no user data is retained in any form after the response is
returned. User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with
administrative access to the production service or hardware.
> I am sorry no amount of assurances from any company is going to make me reveal my medical information to products from any tech company.
Unlike your insurance provider or credit card company, which keep your prescription details, Apple Intelligence deletes the data once you receive a response—a fact Apple could verify if necessary.
It appears I did not need the cloud; my prescription information stayed on my iPhone to create the request, thanks to the Apple Foundation models running locally.
Luckily I live in a country with universal healthcare and our pharmacies don’t transmit prescription medication info to credit cards. They just show some prescription medication was purchased
The Apple Intelligence Shortcuts creation is great as well. I never had a desire to learn their visual programming language so I mostly ignored Shortcuts. Now it's one-shot some really handy utilities for me.
On the Mac, it's FileMaker,[1] which was released in 1985. Claris is a subsidiary of Apple.
[1]: https://www.claris.com/blog/2026/claris-filemaker-2026-is-no...
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