When Apple announced their Apple Intelligence stuff in 2024 I was really excited for it. Finally an integrated smart way to improve my english writing. Manuals, texts, a book I'm thinking about writing. It would help me do Spanish, or even improve my Dutch. Magic!

Then the first reviews came and I quickly jumped off of the hypetrain and didn't even upgrade to Sonoma.

Then fast forward to macOS Tahoe being released 2 weeks or so ago. I finally clicked Upgrade and installed Sequoia, 2 days before macOS Tahoe released.

I also installed Apple Intelligence, which as an installation process is as unintuitive as it is useless. I thought it came with the system. So I was looking for the prompts to improve my grammar or whatever the options and menus would look like, but nothing happened.

Then I found out that I had to install a couple of gigabytes of whatever for it to 'just work'.

Fine, being on crappy wifi I spent the next 4 hours downloading Apple Intelligence. Enabling Siri voice and 'type to Siri' as well, Apple said it was necessary or better.

When that finally got installed and activated still nothing useful seemed to happen. Not a good first start, but then I found that Siri voice and Siri in general is not actually Apple Intelligence.

Major red flag here. Why is Siri not Apple Intelligence?

Alas, I don't really need Siri to interfere with my computer usage beyond simple recommendations when I put something into a calendar. So I turned that off after a few days.

Then in my text editor, MarkEdit, I finally noticed the writing tools menu in the context menu and quickly realized that that menu is everywhere where there is text.

Woohoo! Here comes Arnan the aspiring author. Here come the high quality written knowledge base articles and blog posts. Manuals, dashboard texts for the WordPress plugins I make.

Nope, none of that.

The proofread option, as far as I can tell, only suggests adding commas and maybe to replace a word or two. It commonly misses the entire context of my paragraphs and doesn't do much with it at all.

Spell and grammar check is as dumb as ever and didn't seem to change at all, either. So that doesn't integrate with Apple Intelligence? I don't think it does anyway.

Another major red flag, because how can writing tools not integrate with spellcheck... That makes no sense to me.

Whenever I start writing an email reply this stupid 'spell check-like' thingy pops up and it won't go away until I press the escape key. This popup has 2 generic causal stupid suggestions for how to write my email. I've tried it a few times and every time I thought it read as stupid hipstery text, making me look unprofessional.

And all I can think about it is - No dumbo, I'm replying to something serious. Act the part!

In my mind you don't start serious emails with a howdy or without a greeting at all. I'm not some casual Gen-Z'er who treats email like it's chat, either. So what the fuck!? And so, the suggestion popup only gets in the way and I can't find where to turn that off.

I've had it rewrite, proofread and suggest text for me over the past 2 weeks, but every time I dislike what it comes up with.

The whole context menu centered UI is dumb and unintuitive as well. If I select a piece of text and say 'Proofread' it pops up with what it thinks the text should be, but it doesn't tell me what it did to make it better. I can either accept or reject the text without knowing what changes have been made.

I guess that this might work fine if you just do one line. But a paragraph or more? Not so useful. Not something I can learn from either. Pointless really...

AI without context is just stupid it seems. And Apple implementing it in the most useless way makes it even more incompetent.

If this is what Apple can do for me after a year of Apple Intelligence I'm not at all impressed and will uninstall the whole thing sooner rather than later.

Apple Intelligence should probably just be called Actually Incompetent. Just like every other AI out there.