Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs:

* Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access.

* Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate.

* iPhones already have specialized hardware for AI acceleration.

I want to be able to tell my phone to a) summarize my finances across all the apps I have b) give me a list of new articles of a certain topic from my magazine/news apps c) combine internet search with on-device files to generate personal reports.

All this is possible, but Apple doesn't care to do this. The path not taken is invisible, and no one will criticize them for squandering this opportunity. That's a more subtle drawback with only having two phone operating systems.

I agree completely, it's really unfortunate how AI on apple devices has been going. The message summarization is borderline useless and widely mocked, meanwhile their giant billboard ads for it are largely stupid and uncompelling. Let me choose to give it access to my data if I want to do really useful stuff with on device processing. They've been leaning into the privacy thing, do the stuff that would be creepy if it left my device, generate push notification reminders for stuff I forgot to put in the calendar, or track my location and tell me I'm going to the wrong airport. Suggest birthday gifts for my friends and family, idk.

Edit: And add strong controls to limit what it can and cannot access, especially for the creepy stuff.