Apple’s AI products are all doomed. Wanna guess why?

It’s time for another edition of Old Man Macalope explains how things used to be better.

No, don’t get up.

In the early 2000s, there were three big rumors about Apple: the tablet, the set-top box and the phone. We have speculated about them endlessly. Mainly because, since we didn’t have a smartphone to look at, we had so little to do. But the fact is that we were excited about them.

Getting excited about Apple rumors isn’t exactly a no-brainer these days, and the reason lies in two simple letters: AI. Let’s look at some rumors circulating at the moment.

The first is the rumor that Apple is working on a series of home products. As Macalope noted, this is an area he wants the company to get into because it’s a real blend of reliability and privacy, things that Apple in general– not always, but most of the time – is pretty good. The product people are most excited about is a doorbell camera that uses Face ID. Compare that to Ring, which recently had to backtrack (again) on its cozy relationship with law enforcement, and you can see the benefit of Apple’s entry into this market.

It’s a place where Apple can solve people’s real-world problems and make things work better with more privacy.

And then there’s… whatever: Apple is working on AI smart glasses, an AI pendant, and AirPods. These are all AI wearable devices that will rely on the supposedly smarter Siri, which appears to be taking longer than expected.

You know, Apple, we’ve gone to great lengths to ridicule Google Glass into the tech dustbin, so it seems a little rude to expect us to turn around and get excited about these things. “Glass holes”? It was quality work. Come on.

Foundry

It turns out that there are many sighs about AI about the future. The New York Times notes that people are not that interested in the AI ​​boom.

Silicon Valley executives are promising that artificial intelligence will radically change everyone’s lives for the better, in just a few minutes.

The new Tork timetables, February 21, 2026

Hey, hey, Elon Musk patented saying an AI feature was only months away and years away. Every other leader who says that needs to give him a quarter. He doesn’t need it, of course, it’s just the principle of the thing.

In a YouGov survey last year, more than a third of respondents said they were concerned about AI ending human life on Earth.

Okay, so yes, AI has a bit of a PR problem. Just a public relations problem at the global level of extermination. This is… you can overcome… this.

Even those with a more optimistic attitude overwhelmingly said in another survey that they would not pay more to install AI on their devices.

Pay extra to get it out of our devices on the table?

Why don’t people see the point?

…80% of companies said AI had no impact on their productivity or employment.

Apart from that, the Macalope means.

(He will, however, drop the standard caveat: AI do have utility in various applications, it’s just that Silicon Valley executives try to shoehorn it into everything, whether it’s justified or not, and instead of giving it to employees to increase their productivity, they cut staff based on supposed productivity gains that don’t materialize.)

The real tragedy of all this is that by not being 100% excited about AI, we are hurting the feelings of Nvidia’s billionaire CEO.

“Frankly, it’s extremely hurtful,” Mr. [Jensen] Huang said…

It is said that he can barely muster the enthusiasm to buy more black jackets made from increasingly bizarre types of leather.

“Ant leather? Handmade from 10 million ants? I didn’t know that was a thing. Sigh. Okay. I’ll take twenty.”

Despite Huang’s expense, when AI is regularly used as an excuse to make layoffs, who can blame people for not being very enthusiastic about the technology?

All this before even asking the question: will it work? So far, Apple has struggled to deliver on its AI promises. And maybe that’s a good thing? Because other companies seem content to release AI products that simply don’t work properly, often with catastrophic, even hilarious results:

And all this before asking the question: what impact does this have on the environment?

Apple once knew how to avoid technological trends and focus on creating products that people actually wanted. Maybe these devices aren’t exactly what the rumors make them out to be, handheld devices with a chatbot that will annoy you and everyone else in the waiting room at your doctor’s office. Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised. In the meantime, Macalopes will eagerly await the more concrete products that Apple could offer.