Rui CarmoI’ve been sitting on this draft for a few days now, partly because I thought it would turn down the bitterness, and partly because I kept asking myself whether I should even write it. But I think it is worth getting out of my system, so here goes.
In case you’re not in the Mac community, Sky is an app that brings AI automation to the Mac that Federico Viticci wrote about at length last week, and that not only looks and feels exactly like what I would expect Apple Intelligence to be like, it also completely blows out of the water all the desktop automation tools that have sprung out of the MCP hype.
I have several questions, some of which I have already sort of asked back in March, but which I think are worth reformulating.
The people who created Sky are the same people who created Workflow and worked on Shortcuts, so here’s my first question:
Why wasn’t Apple able to harness their expertise in the first place?
I mean, people have free will and all, and can choose to work wherever they want, but this makes my earlier rant about their having neglected automation feel like the first clue to a corporate culture murder scene.
Not having made it possible for them to thrive feels like vanilla corporate politics, but having brilliant people leave Apple and ship something that is, even in preview, much better than anything that Apple Intelligence promised (including the made up bits they paraded as marketing material) is just gross mismanagement (now you know why I held back on this draft).
Which leads me to my second question:
Why has Apple failed this badly?
Was it just a consequence of their innately siloed nature? The internal decline of John Giannandrea’s team (and the rumored hand-over of Siri to Craig Federighi’s team) might have played a role, but macOS has been largely stagnant from a UX perspective for ages (and as far as I know it isn’t even being addressed in the upcoming Solarium redesign), so I have to assume the Sky team saw this huge blind spot in terms of improving the desktop experience and just jumped on it.
Was it about control? Privacy?
I can see Apple balking at doing something like Sky (if they ever even considered it) because it not only has to share bits of your screen with an LLM, but also because it would have to open up the Mac to third-party automation in a way that it has never done before, and that would be a huge departure from their current approach.
Which, again, is pretty much non-existent, so… No, that doesn’t make sense.
But the privacy angle is interesting, because Apple was in a perfect position to do something exactly like Sky and ensure that it was done in a way that respected user privacy. Even though local models are still not quite there yet (remember that RAM requirements are still very high as far as running truly useful models are concerned), they do have the confidential computing tech to run inference in a privacy-preserving way–which might be the only bit of Apple Intelligence that actually works at this point.
But Sky, despite having cloud inference, is designed to enhance your local Mac experience, and it does so in a way that looks extremely polished, and, above all, feels like the way people always wanted to use computers. Star Trek echoes aside, it has the ability to understand what you want to do, and automates your Mac to achieve that.
Federico’s post also goes into part of the how it does this, and I get the impression that even though Sky can leverage the remnants of Mac automation, for gathering context it is completely bypassing the standard automation APIs and inferring UI structure and content.
Everything I read about it makes me think that Apple has dropped the ball so badly that Sky is like a perfect storm of what they could have done, but didn’t.
And now, not only is it a third-party app that is doing what Apple should have done, but it is also doing it in a better way that anything they ever shipped.
And if Sky takes off (let’s face it, the Mac desktop market isn’t really mainstream these days and there is too much AI hype, but just entertain the notion for a bit), that will have the added bonus of highlighting that Apple are completely out of touch with what people want from their computers.
Which leads me to my final question:
What will it take for Apple to get its act together?
I honestly don’t know. I mean, I have been asking this question for years now, and I have no idea what it will take for Apple to take any sort of integration or automation seriously. I currently have zero expectations towards next week’s WWDC, and not only because of the Mac. We were fooled once, and I don’t think we will be fooled again.
Unless they actually ship something, which seems highly unlikely unless it slots into their yearly release cycle (which they are rumored to be rebranding as “OS 26” because, well, why not ship the org chart and their corporate calendar?).
A case in point (and stop me if you’ve heard this before): Spotlight has been a complete mess for years, and Apple has done nothing to effectively fix it on any of its platforms–and it would be a perfect place to start integrating AI in a way that would actually make sense and be useful to users.
Not to mention that it would be a key component of any sort of retrieval-augmented generation approach, etc.
So yes, Sky is the limit. Or, at least, one very concrete yardstick by which we can measure how much Apple has failed to deliver on the promise of AI.