I hate AI. Speak to me, Apple

The problem with tech trends is you can’t easily tell in the moment which ones are going to have a lasting impact. In retrospect it seems obvious that 3D printers were going to upend multiple industries and 3D TVs just… weren’t. But both, rather inexplicably in the latter case, were hailed as the future by legions of impassioned evangelists.

If we drew up a scale of long-term relevance, with MP3s at one end and NFTs at the other, where would AI sit? Bearing in mind the caveats above, I suspect it would be pretty close to the MP3 end. It’s likely to be extremely relevant in the long term. It’s just that many of the things it changes about our world will be, well, horrifyingly negative.

Personally, in fact, I think AI pretty much sucks.

To be clear, it doesn’t suck in absolutely every application. There are plenty of things AI can do efficiently and usefully, from medical diagnostics to meeting transcriptions. It’s worth noting that in almost all such scenarios, it’s important, at least for now, that a human supervises the output and applies a sanity check for hallucinations.

Many of the things that are essentially powered by AI, indeed, existed before AI was a shareholder buzzword. We (including Apple) used to refer to “machine learning” when talking about developments in areas such as voice recognition. It’s a shame that Siri has lost the plot so badly in that area lately, but the tech in general has been a hugely beneficial tool for convenience and accessibility.

The problem isn’t that AI doesn’t have any benefits. It’s that those benefits have started to become so grossly outweighed by the costs.

AI technology is at its worst when, as is increasingly the case, human critical thinking is not applied. When the technology serves as a replacement rather than an augmentation for human thought, it actually diminishes critical thinking in those who use it, as research has shown. AI makes misinformation more likely to be spread in the first place, then adds insult to injury by rendering us less capable of recognizing the misinformation when it arrives.

AI is also, of course, impacting the job market, particularly among entry-level skilled workers; the effects on the legal sector, for example, will only become apparent in time as senior lawyers retire from the industry and cannot be replaced. And it necessitates the construction of vast data centers that waste energy and space, and create noise, drought, and pollution. In comparison to those factors, it seems impertinent to even mention this, but AI’s infrastructure greed is also responsible for the components crunch affecting the rest of the technology industry.

All this for the sake of a technology that steals art and makes everyone’s LinkedIn posts read the same.

AI’s fundamental badness, at least in current and proposed use cases, feels like something we should all be able to agree about. But like so many things in 2026, and like NFTs in the past, it only ever seems to be discussed in polarised tribal terms. Those of us who write articles like this are referred to as antis, which I suppose is fair, and dismissed as Luddites, which surely is not. And I don’t quite understand why there is such passionate and widespread endorsement of the technology. Hyping AI is helping a few billionaires get even richer, which I get. But why are so many regular people on board with it?

The good news is that not everyone is buying it. (I mean this in the metaphorical sense only, because our AI overlords are doing their best to keep the tech free to consumers for now. Just wait until the sinister phase two of their plan.) It emerged last week that Google’s recent AI-first, or more accurately AI-even-more-first, overhaul of search has faced significant pushback. iPhone installs of DuckDuckGo, a search engine which focuses on privacy rather than AI, have spiked. The rebellion starts today!

Or perhaps the rebellion starts tomorrow. At its WWDC 2026 keynote on Monday, where the company announces the major changes coming to its software platforms in the coming year, Apple is expected to get more AI-obsessed than ever. Some of this will be useful, such as Siri (hopefully) getting the functional overhaul it’s needed for years. But far more, I’m afraid, will be wasteful posturing targeted at shareholders rather than users.

Please, Apple: Consider the rest of us.

Not everyone is obsessed with AI. Not everyone owns shares in OpenAI or uses ChatGPT to secretly reply to their friends’ texts. Not everyone talks about vibe-coding, or boasts on social media about the number of Claude tokens they’ve burned this month. Some of us just want to do fun and useful things on our iPhones without having to worry that we’re contributing to the decline of civilisation. What do you say, Apple?

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

One day to go: WWDC 2026 special!

Felipe Esposito lists his top 5 announcements he wants Apple to make during Monday’s keynote.

iOS 27 is coming soon. There’s a good chance you’ll hate it.

These 4 changes will make macOS 27 massively better.

We hate taking iPhone photos. That might finally change this coming week.

Apple just teased an iOS 27 feature that could change everything.

Apple Intelligence is coming at WWDC, says the Macalope. Just don’t call it AI.

Trending: Top stories

Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops are gunning for the MacBook Pro. Yawn!

MacBook Neo is so popular, Dell is baiting PC shoppers again.

Planning to buy an iPhone 18 Pro this fall? Here’s why you might want to hold off.

Apple just picked a dozen apps you need to download right now.

Podcast of the week

WWDC26 starts tomorrow, so in the latest episode of the Macworld podcast we discuss what we expect to see in iOS 27, the next version of the iPhone operating system.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner

The rumor mill

Image slip-up reveals possible name of macOS 27.

iPhone to get ‘Parallel’ landscape apps in iOS 27, report claims.

iPhone 18 Pro leak points to smallest battery gain since 2020.

Football star reveals existence of unreleased Apple headphones.

Video of the week