Good Enough AI: Why Apple's Case Measures the Wrong Thing

Nate B. Jones (0:00)

You know who Sam Altman is. You might not know who John Ternes is. He became Apple's CEO over on September 1st. He's a hardware engineer. His second-in-command designs chips, and eight days after taking over the top job, he has shipped a $1,999 folding phone. He's shipped a watch that remembers your conversations, an AI that wants to understand your health for you, but understand what you're looking at, because these two are fighting over one thing. It's not the phone. It's where your work lives.

Sam wants you to keep coming back to the agent. No matter what device you own, Chad GPT will be there. Ternus needs the device to stay central to your computing life. The iPhone has to keep mattering. Your history, the projects you've built up, the months you've spent teaching something how you work, because whoever ends up holding that history is the company you're going to keep paying in the long term. And buried in that announcement is the one line I want you to grab out here. Hold on to this. Certain features that rely on server-side models will have daily usage limits. All of those will be available with an additional fee for expanded access. Apple didn't print that price. I'm going to give you everything Apple announced here, right? The phones, the watch, the dates, what it all costs. But keep that missing number in your head, because Apple intends to sell you intelligence and OpenAI is trying to become the place you'd rather buy it from. Let's get the announcements correct first. All the prices I'm giving are US starting prices, and obviously you can modify from there. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max start at $11.99 and $12.99 respectively. Both get A20 Pro, a smaller dynamic island, and what Apple says is a substantial battery improvement. The main camera now has variable aperture, meaning it can physically adjust how much light it lets in. It's a pretty cool little thing. Pre-orders open September 12th, and the phones arrive September 18th. I guess you'll have to get in line at 5 a.m. on the 12th. Then there's iPhone Duo, Apple's first folding phone. It has a 5.4-inch screen outside and a 7.6-inch screen when you open it up, so it looks really big. You can run two apps side by side, open two windows of the same app, or have Siri beside the thing you're working on. It also uses an A20 Pro. It starts more expensive at $19.99, and it arrives October 23 with pre-order starting on the 16th of October. This is the hardware change that Apple made to give AI more room to work with you. On the wrist, Apple announced Watch Series 12, starting at $3.99, and Ultra 4 starting at $4.00. Both arrived the 18th of September with the new S11 chip and a new health sensing system. Apple is claiming they can measure heart rate every 5 seconds now, and there's also a new readiness score that uses activity, sleep and other measurements to help you decide how hard to take on the day. I'm a little bit nervous about that one, frankly. We will come back to where all of this will lead later in the video. The new watches also have a really interesting set of AI announcements that are coming later in this year that we should pay attention to.

Live Rewind can show the last 15 seconds of any conversation as text. Siri Recap can create a really brief summary you can revisit. You do have to opt in, and Apple is saying those features do not create or store audio recordings, and you'll have to decide if that's worth it to you from a privacy perspective.

Both of those features arrive in beta late 2026 and initially in English only outside the EU, and both require a compatible iPhone. That could give Siri useful information from conversations you never typed into a computer, but the functionality is very much going to depend on implementation there. And that's another way for Apple to make that Siri Assistant available while you are heads up doing anything else. The big Siri redesign, speaking of Siri, was introduced at WWDC back in June, and the beta is now rolling out with iOS 27 and WatchOS 27 on the 14th of September, initially in English and on supported devices outside the EU. The promise here is a Siri that can use information from your messages, from emails, from photos, and understand what is on your screen and then take action. So the announcements in Apple's launch video really take that software direction alongside the hardware that Apple is building to make all of this possible.

The rollout dates here, we're going to have to see how the software works on existing Apple devices versus how well it works on the new stuff Apple announced. Health also gets a redesign later in the year. So with AI guidance, you're going to be able to view longer-term health metrics, you're going to have the ability to arrange lab testing through the app, and that deserves a lot more attention than it got, even though it only got a really quick mention in the product recap. It's going to change how people decide to seek health care. Laddering it all back together, those products give Apple more opportunities to become the AI you use all the way through the day.