Look, the Macalope is sure WWDC will go off fine. He’s not really worried about it. It’s gonna be great.
But let’s just say that, in general, the horny isn’t sure the tech companies are reading this moment right.
At last week’s I/O event, for example, Google somehow managed to say “AI” infinity times. How?! That should be impossible! But somehow they did it. Possibly through the power of AI? Unclear.
Talking about AI at I/O does make sense. It is a developers’ conference, after all (just like WWDC), and AI is a great boon to development. But both of these conferences are also used to announce new features for consumers, not just development tools. Google, for example, announced it was making its search field larger to accommodate longer queries designed for AI. Which is to say queries that are designed to keep you on their search page instead of sending you to those tedious websites. Why would you go to a website–many of which are poorly designed, smelly and possibly immoral–when you can have Google just tell you what it thinks it maybe read on that web site (accuracy not guaranteed, void where prohibited)?
Funny story, as the Macalope was typing this column he saw this post on Bluesky which claims Google’s AI overview says, and he quotes:
…next year is not 2027. Next year is 2028, and 2027 is the year after next.
Buh? The Macalope tested it and it still says that. (Hilariously, it is getting this answer from a Reddit post about a previous Google AI year error. It’s AI errors all the way down.)
Who would not want to use these valuable tools?
More importantly, why would you go to some rando’s website and see an ad impression that Google is making no money from when you can see more ads on Google.com?
It just makes sense.
For Google.
Google, the search company, is now becoming Google, the “I summarized the web for you without paying a single dime to any of these sites, please do not go to the web.” company.
Yes, AI provides a great boon to developers and Apple should absolutely discuss that at WWDC. But maybe it shouldn’t lean into it as hard as Google did. Why? Because, as the Macalope explained last week, most people don’t like and don’t want AI. And, no surprise, it hasn’t gotten any better in the last seven days.
“In desperate times, graduates find hope in humiliating tech CEOs”
Hey, the kids are alright.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is one of the CEOs who found himself on the receiving end of such a boo-valanche. To his credit, when met with the booing he… hang on, let the Macalope put on the ol’ readin’ glasses to see what it says here… uh, it says he stubbornly doubled down.
Huh. Well, that’s one way to go.
“When someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat. You just get on,” Schmidt told the room of angry graduates. Even if it’s owned by one of the guys destroying the Earth and is headed straight to an off-world labor camp run by killer robots.
In fairness to Schmidt, he was also terrible at reading reality when he ran Google. Here he is back in 2011:
One Android-toting audience member said he was frustrated to see iOS apps beating Android versions to market. But in part because of Ice Cream Sandwich, “my prediction is that six months from now you’ll say the opposite,” Schmidt said.
It is now 15 years since that prediction and it still has not happened.
(Disclosure: the Macalope was not in any way trying to be fair to Schmidt.)
Of course, Apple is going to talk about AI at WWDC and it’s probably going to do it a lot. It did just register a genai subdomain and it is widely expected to show off some of the enhanced Siri it promised two years ago. Although, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that feature is expected to ship as a beta when it does in iOS 27.
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Foundry
It would not be the first time a new Siri has been released as a beta. That’s exactly how Siri was first released and it stayed in beta for… wait, did it ever actually get out of beta? Maybe that’s been the problem the whole time. (It did finally come out of beta two years after it launched.)
Here’s the Macalope’s word of warning to Apple, though: in a time when disdain for AI is on the rise and even developers are complaining that AI is rotting their brains, you might want to be careful with your messaging. For starters, don’t turn on the firehose of “AI” references that Google unleashed on I/O attendees and watchers. Also, it seems like it would be a good time to re-emphasize the creative aspects of your platforms, the aspects that people love, that make us human (or part human as the case may be), the aspects that AI seems bent on taking over.
Just maybe do it in a better way than 2024’s “Crush” ad.
