xp84 5 days ago

The Apple walled garden argues against you here. There are at least 20 million families in America where this holds true:

• Everyone in household uses an iPhone

• Main adult family members use iCloud Mail or at least use Apple Mail to read other mail

• Family members use iCloud contacts and calendars

• USPS Informed Delivery could be used (available to most/all US addresses)

• It can be ascertained what ZIP code you're in, for weather.

I think that's the full list of 'requirements' this thing would require. Just what's standing in their way?

2
lolinder 5 days ago

Not every one of those families would find the same set of features helpful, so you have to make calls about what's worth developing and what isn't. Making those calls is very difficult because it's tricky to gather data about what will be used and appreciated.

const_cast 5 days ago

Well, it's a good thing we've settled on... genmoji. Yeah.

benterix 5 days ago

> it's tricky to gather data about what will be used and appreciated

I'm not sure it's so tricky for Apple, and for sure not for Google.

Rohansi 5 days ago

And whatever they are doing is clearly working well. /s

fmbb 5 days ago

The thing that is standing in their way is probably that nobody is willing to pay for this what it costs to run.

simonw 5 days ago

Doesn't look very expensive to me. An LLM capable of this level of summarization can run in ~12GB of GPU-connected RAM, and only needs that while it's running a prompt.

The cheapest small LLMs (GPT-4.1 Nano, Google Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B) cost less than 1/100th of a cent per prompt because they are cheap to run.

xp84 3 days ago

Yes! And also, Apple loves selling expensive hardware and has zero shyness asking people to pay a few thousand bucks to buy into part of their ecosystem.

They could easily offer an on-prem family 'AI' product that you plop in your house and plug into your router, and does all AI processing for the whole family, and uses a secure VPN to connect to any of your devices outside the LAN.

If such a product delivered JUST what this guy's cool hack provides, and made Siri not a stupid piece of sh*t for my family, I'd buy it for $1999 even if I knew it cost Apple $700 to make.