Whenever a new story comes out detailing yet another setback with Apple’s AI initiatives and roadmaps, without fail, someone shows up and asks: “What exactly is Apple behind on?,” or “Catch up? Catch up to what?”.
And while this sort of comment tends to come from people who seem to spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to make sure that everyone knows they don’t care about something, this specific hill they’re choosing to die on is getting increasingly steep. Here’s why.
I will give them this: for the better part of the last two to three years, there was a chasm between the possibilities offered by novel AI techniques and applications, and their practical appeal to everyday users.
That’s no longer the case. Although there’s still plenty of overblown hype around chatbot platforms and, more recently, products like ChatGPT Agent or Claude Artifacts, we increasingly see clear, practical examples of useful AI features being applied directly to places where regular users already spend their time.
Here are just two of them:
COPILOT function in Excel
While this is an experimental feature that Microsoft started rolling out in its Beta Channel, it is still impressive, and it easily conveys a clear productivity gain previously reserved for more advanced users through add-ons, notebooks, and APIs.
With the COPILOT function in Excel, it is now possible to include a prompt right in the formula, and let Copilot do the rest:
To be clear, this is still in the Beta Channel, so feel free to be skeptical until you get to try it for yourself. I certainly am. But even if you don’t deal with spreadsheets, if you can’t see this as something that would be incredibly useful to millions of Numbers users (and how incredibly out of Apple’s reach this looks), I don’t know what to tell you.
Magic Cue
During the recent Made by Google ’90s TV infomercial event, the company showcased a new Android feature that looks like a more advanced and proactive version of exactly what Apple promised two WWDCs ago, and seems further away from delivering now than it did back then.
Here’s Google’s demo:
If you can’t get past the awkwardness of the video, our sister site 9to5Google has a great overview of Magic Cue. Here’s a tidbit:
“If a friend asks you in Google Messages about the address for tonight’s event, Magic Cue will appear at the bottom of the conversation as a Smart Reply-like suggestion with a rainbow outline. A single tap will insert the address from a Gmail confirmation email or Calendar event.“
Top comment by Nate
I get what you're saying, but so much of the AI train has been over hyped. AI has value, but just a month ago, I planned a roadtrip with Google's AI. I wanted it to plan a trip cross country I was taking, chart charging stations, and suggest places to stop. Google maps had all the info needed to chart this course given the parameters.
It was so badly off that I would've ran out of charge multiple times. I had to manually rebuild the trip and it would have increased charging stations by 10-15 stops at a cost of roughly $300 more than expected. The problem was that it accounted for distance between cities as the crow flies aka a straight line and not a road.
This is Google's AI tool. So it can figure out a joint event between two known people, but not map directions and charging stations given clear parameters such as keeping the battery above 10%.
I'm not saying Apple isn't behind, but if you're betting your company's future on a spreadsheet formula derived from an AI or as a trip planner or any number of other uses, you may find yourself in deep trouble.
AI at this point is a useful tool, but it still depends heavily on humans to supervise. It might be useful to recommend places to go and sights to see based on calendar events from multiple venues on a specific range of dates. It is not reliable to get you there safely and account for the needs of restroom breaks, refueling breaks, and rest breaks.
The feature, which will run locally on the device due to a local model, will be exclusive to the Pixel 10 line, which comes out tomorrow. So here’s your easy gripe to hang on to: it’s not out yet.
But if you’ve been following Google’s advances with Gemini, you probably know that this sort of feature tends to be on the list of things Google has actually been delivering on.
Apple, meanwhile, is still not sure about how to get started.
What other AI-powered features have you been seeing or using that you wish Apple offered as a native feature? Let us know in the comments.
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