Watch what you say: Apple opens the door to a nightmare world of always-listening tech
86 points by lim
86 points by lim
I can't help but feel like Apple is truly losing its way. macOS 26 has been an absolute mess for me for close to a year, with a ton of new bugs and UI jank. The base model of their new flip phone costs $2800 here which is an absolutely outrageous price for a phone. The next AirPods Pro are rumored to have a camera. And this new watch has speakers which are always listening. Their ad for it is bonkers too, where a guy misses what a waitress said and, while the waitress is still there, uses his watch to look at a transcript.
And I can't even imagine transcripts will work okay as they're clearly struggling with speech to text; I rarely ever use Siri because the past few times I've tried to ask it to call someone, it immediately calls someone else with a completely different name.
I'm writing this on a 2021 MacBook Pro. I've been extremely happy with the hardware but macOS has taken a nosedive in terms of quality over the time I've owned it. It's so janky, and their laptops are now so expensive (if you want any remotely reasonable amount of storage), that I'm probably going to eventually replace it with some laptop running Linux. GNOME has gotten better over the years while macOS has gotten worse. And PC hardware maybe hasn't quite caught up, but the gap has certainly closed a bit since 2021.
The base model of their new flip phone costs $2800 here which is an absolutely outrageous price for a phone
It is, but it’s comparable to other manufacturers' folding phones. Those things are really complex mechanically, not to mention having multiple screens, which makes them expensive.
Plus, complaints about Apple's high prices have been constant since at least the mid-80s, so that’s hardly evidence of decline! (And let me tell you, Apple's prices are generally much more reasonable than they were in the 90s. The most expensive Mac I owned, the IIfx, cost about $7000 in 1990 US$!)
High prices have always been a complaint, but for as long as I've paid attention it's mostly been in line with what you need to spend for similar quality/performance among other premium manufacturers. Used to be that if you have $300 $3000 to spend on a laptop, you could spend it on either a MacBook Pro or a Dell XPS and get a similarly specced machine. And the base model of their best iPhone has always been "expensive but within reason".
$2800 for a phone is so incredibly far past the line of "within reason".
It's always been (always being this millennia) that they would cost more than you could find if you just compared main specs and less than competition if you also valued the rest including finish.
I have no idea how it compares to foldable in finish (the few videos I've seen suggest Duo is more polished), but it's not like this is the only phone they offer or the main one they want you to buy. It's niche.
The price is huge for what I'd want from phone, but not as nuts if this was my only computing devices which phone is for many.
According to Mark Gurman, Apple runs on Anthropic these days. Siri team was sent to AI coding bootcap when they did not eagerly adopt vibecoding like other teams. Might have something to do with the software quality, or not.
god that's sad, if true. For all of their faults, these corporations (apple, google, microsoft) have contained a vast amount of institutional knowledge about building hugely complex software systems. It's one thing when individual engineers start using LLMs, but forcing teams to use LLMs even if they don't want to feels like intentionally damaging their software culture, something that I imagine took many years (decades?) to build.
Apple software quality decline significantly predates AI. There is no need to implicate AI in everything.
if you like the macos key shortcuts... toshy is a godsend on linux. https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy
works quite well ootb. some edge cases that need to be smoothed out but it helped me not lose my mind trying to hit command all the time.
i've been a linux main user for a solid year now and it's really refreshing coming from macos. you can look into how anything works and change it if you want to... you have the ultimate control.
Oh I'm very comfortable on Linux, my desktops have always been Linux and my laptop was a Dell running Linux until I got this Mac in 2021. I had Asahi Linux installed on this Mac for most of its life, the only reasons I didn't daily drive it is due to bad battery life in sleep and annoying trackpad drivers with non-existent palm rejection. Eventually had to uninstall it because 1TB just isn't enough these days for serious development work across two OSes.
WOW. I am the exact use-case for this product and you told me about it. Former(ish) Mac guy, Linux/NixOS main dev machine now; and this even has NixOS support as of a couple months ago?? NICE. Thanks!
Yeah this finally makes me wanna chuck Linux on my M1 MBP, esp since my work M3 has to stay macOS.
UI jank
I wish that they would focus on the basics again. I currently use an iPhone Air, which has their, until this week, latest SoC. It constantly suffers from render stutters (observed the same on a 17 Pro) and this is not just in some render-heavy app. It even happens in their settings app. How come we have a phone with a desktop-class CPU/GPU, but it cannot even render a settings app smoothly.
Like you say, the hardware itself is stellar. It's just the software that gets worse and worse. Even on iOS 27 the stutters persist (and Liquid Glass still has really obnoxious UI/UX everywhere).
I also have a GrapheneOS phone. If tap-to-pay (with my own bank, not Curve, etc. credit-card based tap-to-pay does not work in all stores here) worked and maybe Play Integrity, fully switching would be a no-brainer.
are rumored to have a camera
A lot of privacy was theater anyway. "Ask app not to track" primarily blocks access to the IDFA, apps will still track you and just correlate data between apps and websites server-side. iMessage may be end-to-end encrypted, but most people use iCloud backup on their phones with Advanced Data Protection disabled. So all chats end up only encrypted at-rest on their servers (which is some footnote in one of their security documents). Even if you enabled ADP, probably most people you communicate with haven't, so they still have your chats accessible by law enforcement/through the US CLOUD act, etc.
The irrational and petty side of me wants me to coincide this with apple heavily adopting AI (as shown by the leaked CLAUDE.md).
macOS 26 has been an absolute mess for me for close to a year… nosedive in terms of quality … so janky
Apple realized that while making it. Which may be why even a full year ago, macOS 27 was described as focusing on stability and performance:
“Reports indicate that Apple’s engineering teams are now combing through the operating systems, trimming bloated legacy code, debugging existing issues, and identifying every opportunity to meaningfully enhance performance and overall polish. This refocusing appears to be a direct response to mounting criticism that Apple’s recent feature-heavy releases — including the dramatic Liquid Glass redesign — have eroded the perceived quality of the software.”
Everyday use even feels less ‘off’ than macOS 26 did. Not just from getting used to it, but subtle important ways the UI drama was both dialed back and refined.
We'll see once I install it after 27 comes out. I hope you're right. I'm disappointed though that they haven't fixed the egregious bugs in a point release, they've left it so buggy for a whole year
I feel exactly the same way, 26 had so many terrible bugs and it’s like they just threw their hands in the air. The only grace I’m willing to give is that (a) they have a very large and complex process and that changing the process for one particularly bad release could make matters worse and (b) new CEO makes this even more difficult.
But for the first time in 20 years I’m starting to think about alternatives and if 27 isn’t a massive improvement then. I don’t know. The last OS I used for more than a decade was Linux and I bailed. Maybe time for a new career.
Beyond all the privacy problems, this also just seems like a shitty, antisocial feature. What is the actual benefit of having this vs. just asking the person to repeat what they said? You don't even save yourself or them any time because they have to wait for you to interact with your watch.
Unless of course this is used in situations different than the one with the waitress that they showed, where you can't reasonably ask the person to repeat it because they weren't talking to you in the first place. Then it just becomes a fully creepy feature.
Having no empathy for people whose everyday life is hard because they have a common disability such as poor hearing or ADHD, just not bothering to consider what it must be like to miss more that one actually catches, seems more like it should be defined as 'shitty and antisocial' to me.
"We need invasive always-listening devices on our wrists because ADHD people are too dysfunctional to ask a waiter to repeat themselves" is frankly ableist.
You do know that people with hearing impairments already wear “invasive always-listening devices”?
Hearing aids historically didn't transcribe and store everything that is said around the wearer.
We also didn’t have cameras but somehow society figured out how to use cameras in phones in a respectful way (except for Japan, but that is also solved with the mandatory shutter sound).
Our phone's cameras don't record 24/7 I don't think that's a great analogy. I would agree if this feature needed to be activated by the wearer first, that way the wearer can ask for permission or others can see them activate it.
Edit: spelling.
C'mon, this gotcha is clearly not a good-faith response as the comparison discards the subject of the thread. You can do better! Think about what the obvious response would be before posting, and if it makes you look silly, don't post it.
I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you are talking about. And to be clear, I think that this feature is great and I know I will be using it since I often have issues with understanding speech in loud environments.
@manfred already spelt it out for you; the key difference between the watch and hearing aids is the reason this topic is even on this site. If you deliberately ignore that and pick out a subphrase in isolation so you can find an interpretation that lets you be right, you're just trolling.
For me it's not about what a waiter just said to me, a summary of a meeting is already immensely helpful and at the moment I can only create text summaries for meeting where I can bring my macbook that has a local-only (no cloud) transcription AI model running (parakeet) and uses a local Qwen 3.6 model to summarize the contents of the meeting for me. When a meeting lasts an hour, it's hard for me to remember what people said I have to do at the start compared to things brought up at the end. A transcript with summary helps me a ton.
I don't know how you read muvlon's comment as unconsiderate and ableist to us to be honest.
They might not have had considered some aspects of us persons with disabilities, but I agree with them that you don't have to reach far if there is some part of the conversation you didn't understand. Yes, it gets akward when you ask for the 3th+ time to repeat the exact same thing because your brain just don't want to process it, but I find it awkard because of the judgment of the person. Part of our disabilities are just that, people and society not accomodating for us.
I'm sorry to say but a distopian band-aid that wasn't even designed for and with us just ain't it. We already have hearing helpers thingies tailored just right for our specific hearing loss pattern, and in case it's not your ears but your brain who love jumbling words, like me? You can already ask, explicitely, consent to record people if deemed important. That's the shitty and antisocial part. The lack of consern for our humanity.
I have an Apple Watch (a few years old). I'm genuinely worried that it will become socially unacceptable for me to wear it in public - like those Meta glasses - thanks to this feature in the latest models.
FWIW, that's my immediate reaction. I'm already uncomfortable and muted whenever I'm in earshot of a smart speaker, I'm really not looking forward to the same feeling around wearers of smart watches. File that together with Air tags and Meta glasses under "cool on paper, horrible for society".
So the thesis here is that this feature is extremely privacy respecting and fine, but
Apple is opening the door to a world where other companies, device makers, and app developers try to recreate or rival Apple's technology and do a far shoddier job, all the while creating a worse surveillance monster and introducing new security and privacy risks along the way.
What is the point of this sentence? What’s the ask? Should they also get rid of iCloud Drive because, while they support end to end encryption, Dropbox and Microsoft make the same feature but read all your data? Should they get rid of iMessage because Telegram is insecure?
Apple introducing a feature like this serves to normalize the idea that this kind of feature is okay at all—that it’s potentially a reasonable thing for Apple or others to offer. Worse, Apple’s reputation for caring about users’ privacy—whether deserved or not—will help to quell some of the fears people have about this particular implementation, which will blunt the criticism later when Google or OpenAI come out with something similar.
I would also argue that always-on recording and iCloud Drive have extremely different balances of “how useful is this to the person using it?” to “how potentially harmful is this to everyone else in society?”.
Since when did Google or OpenAI need Apple to normalize behavior and consumer expectations so they could release a feature that violated your privacy?
This all just seems like a weird response to a privacy respecting feature. Reward the behavior you want to see when you get it.
Reward the behavior you want to see when you get it.
I mean… I don’t want to see this. I think that the feature is inherently creepy and antisocial, and even if Apple were able to do it in a perfectly private way (whatever that might mean), I still wouldn’t want them to.
“creepy and antisocial” is a non-sequitur. I’m speaking to “creating a worse surveillance monster and introducing new security and privacy risks along the way”
So the thesis here is that this feature is extremely privacy respecting and fine, but
Ummm, really, says who? It sounds more like it's fundamentally in opposition to privacy as generally understood, makes a few cursory nods to limiting the blast radius, but is still likely outright illegal in some jurisdictions.
What’s the ask?
Don't normalize anti-social systems with the justification that some optional guardrails outweigh the fundamental faults. That could work.
So the thesis here is that this feature is extremely privacy respecting and fine,
No, it is that it is privacy respecting for some people (Apple customers, that are willing to fully trust Apple). But it processes data of everyone near those people and it is extremely privacy-invasive for everyone who considers Apple an untrustworthy third party.
But this is not new behavior from Apple. Apple's measure to prevent stalking via air tags also only help Apple customers. To Apple, non-customers are not people whose rights are worth considering.
I really hate how futile it feels to be privacy conscious now that the companies have managed to get everyone around you to record you instead. It's really distressing. I hate entering homes and seeing an Alexa. I hate being in a group where someone wears the Meta spyglasses. I hate being in newer cars not knowing how much is being recorded and sold off to advertisers. Now I will have to tell my mom to turn off her watch whenever I am in a room with her. It's just getting ridiculous and I will come off as completely paranoid.
Realistically that genie has left the box long ago. Every phone can record, every watch can record since ages. The only stop gap is that it's not as convenient so far.
But even then you have to assume every meeting is recorded (which for a bigger company is probably up to 8h of your day), and that can also be for local meetings, thanks to (actually really helpful) tools like talky making it really easy to do so.
There's a very big difference between a device that records everything always "just in case" and a device that does it only on request.
It would be so straightforward to avoid all controversy and market it as requiring consent.
But they decided that since it's not an audio recording, then it's not covered by the law, and they can get away with it.
Apple's favorite use of Siri from their last event seemed to be queries of the flavor "What was that restaurant so and so recommended to me?". I think this Apple Watch feature makes a lot of sense in that context. Siri as a kind of search engine for your life becomes a lot more powerful if it also has access to real life conversations. I have to admit, I think I would find this extremely useful. I have questions I'd ask right now. At the same time, I share some of the privacy concerns others are raising here.
All of this reminds me of Ted Chiang's story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling". It relates a theoretical always-listening technology to the technology of writing, and explores the effects of making permanent moments that used to be squishy. I'd definitely recommend the read.
The article literally starts by stating that Apple will likely take the necessary privacy precautions (honestly, instant high-quality on-device transcription would be ideal, but we're not quite there yet) and then raises some FUD about what this "enables" or "opens the door to" in terms of hypothetical less-careful competitors that do not even exist yet.
Maybe it's a pet peeve at this point but I cannot stand this type of clickbait doomframing. "Maybe things mostly look OK right now but IMAGINE HOW AWFUL THEY COULD BE IN THE HYPOTHETICAL POST-APOCALYPSE BASED ON EXTENDING THIS IDEA TO ITS WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME!" is no longer a framing that I care to, nor wish to, subscribe to.
And neither should you. At least be aware of the pattern-match, because it's literally all over the place, from AI doomerism to political doomerism to...
I don't think this is FUD at all. Siri Rewind sends condensed transcripts to Apple's servers (which we have to trust because they call it Private Cloud Compute and they made some white papers), which make a summary.
It is opt-in, but only for the Watch wearer, not for the people whose words end up getting transcribed and summarized. I never gave permission to send my words to an Apple server (even without explicit speaker attribution, it may be possible to infer who the speakers were, based on location, etc.) or to store a summary of my words on someones phone. The person whose Watch does this, may not even be part of the conversation.
By introducing this, Apple pushes the boundary of 24/7 consensual eavesdropping similar how Meta glasses are. And yes, Samsung and others will rush to introduce this feature as well, probably with even worse privacy guarantees.
We should condemn Apple, 'the privacy company' for this.
It's also sad, because it overshadows some of the excellent hardware improvements they made, like much-improved sensors on the watches.
(No, I'm not some rabid anti-Apple person, using Macs since 2007 and iPhones since 2009.)
It is opt-in, but only for the Watch wearer, not for the people whose words end up getting transcribed and summarized
Cool, how do I opt out of other people (gasp!) hearing my words and (double gasp!) remembering them in their meat brains?
When you speak in public, you kinda accept the fact that your words may be heard.
Nope, that’s not "public". That’s between you and the wearer.
And, believe it or not, "recording" is not the same as someone telling "he told me that…".
In most country, there a strong laws were any conversation recording cannot be used in court if the participant has not been warned that it was recorded. In fact, in most countries, it is illegal to record someone without their consent (that’s why most helpdesk tells you "this conversation will be recorded).
So, no, it is not because Apple launch a product that suddenly 150 years of laws are to be forgotten.
Nope, that’s not "public". That’s between you and the wearer.
I used "public" in broad sense here, not in a legalistic sense. When you speak with audience A, you accept the fact that your words may be heard by anyone in A.
In fact, in most countries, it is illegal to record someone without their consent (that’s why most helpdesk tells you "this conversation will be recorded).
As it turns out, this is generally not true. In most countries and in the majority of states, it is legal to record a conversation you are a party to. What's more, most of the times it is legal to record a public conversation in general (the limiting factor is reasonable expectation of privacy, not whether you are being directly spoken to). Also, companies do this because they need to comply with the strictest possible law, and because they are companies (EU's GDPR applies different restrictions to companies vs. "purely personal or household activity").
In most country, there a strong laws were any conversation recording cannot be used in court if the participant has not been warned that it was recorded
We weren't speaking about laws of admissibility of evidence, did we?
In most countries and in the majority of states, it is legal to record a conversation you are a party to.
This is technically true, but misleading. California, Illinois, Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and several others are all-party consent states; that's over 25% of the US population, including the single most populous state - and the one in which Apple is based!
I understand the desire when you disagree so much, but would you mind being less inflammatory?
To respond to the content and not the tone of your comment, I don't think your opinion is universally held by governments. Even if participants may perfectly remember what is said, recording (telephone) conversations is not always allowed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws).
You can argue against an expectation of privacy in public spaces, but it doesn't seem so cut-and-dry to me. And IANAL, but I expect that privately-owned land is subject to different rules (e.g. restaurants can have no photography signs even they aren't allowed to prevent you from remembering what the restaurant looked like).
Edit: but to ignore the legal aspect, how would you feel if you learned that every word you said to someone was being written down? If I asked my friends "Would you be as comfortable talking to me and would we have the same conversations if I told you that everything you said to me was recorded?" the answers would be "no" and "no" (and so would my own). If you're not bothered by it, that's one thing, but at least in my culture it would be considered rude.
I understand the desire when you disagree so much, but would you mind being less inflammatory?
Point taken. I'll try.
I don't think your opinion is universally held by governments. Even if participants may perfectly remember what is said, recording (telephone) conversations is not always allowed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws).
Yes, true wrt "not always". I wrote about this in my response directly above.
I expect that privately-owned land is subject to different rules (e.g. restaurants can have no photography signs even they aren't allowed to prevent you from remembering what the restaurant looked like).
As far as I'm aware, that's an entirely different thing. A restaurant may have any signs it wishes, but that's "house rules", not law (i.e. noncompliance can result in you being kicked out, but never in you being sent to jail).
That's sort of how capitalism works, though. Companies won't see any profits if their products don't have the features consumers want, and the less R&D they need (to include "extra" features like privacy), the more money they make.
I think you’re describing the mechanics of a free market.
Capitalism, defined at Wikipedia as
… an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit.
I know the two terms are often used interchangeably, but I do think the distinction has some value.
Barely a free market even.
The govt picks the winners, the oligopoly jacks up prices of everything to uncompetitive levels, while shifting the Overton window of what people expect, want and accept to include Stasi-level horrors, or worse.
Tempting to call that a free market because it's not state-owned, but.... Meh.