Apple Keynote 2025 talks design, photography, hardware - but not AI…
Does it mean anything that Apple barely mentioned AI in their latest keynote? Hari muses…
It’s that time of year. Leaves are falling, temperatures dropping, and Apple have a new iPhone out.
I thought I knew what was coming in last week’s keynote from Apple.
I expected it to be all about AI. Apple Intelligence this. Image generation that. Like Google was with Gemini only a few months ago...
But, AI is no longer the star of the show. She’s been shunted out of the spotlight by Shinier Design and Better Cameras, the previous divas reclaiming the stage from the young upstart.
But while AI isn't entirely offstage, the Guardian comment that "Cook and others made scant mentions of the iPhone’s generative AI features."
After several years where you could barely move for AI-that or AI-this, it feels odd to see the tech sidelined. Instead Apple deliver hardware improvements, size reductions, and cameras that can record both ways at once.
It makes me think about Learning Technologies. The first time I visited the exhibition in 2024, AI was everywhere. This year, the focus was a little less singular - partnership rather than replacement. What will the 2026 exhibition bring?
Some reports say AI use is down 14% year on year in some of the big corporates. Another striking line from the same article is:
“Up to this point, enterprise AI has been incredibly unprofitable, with a whopping 95 percent of US companies that took up AI reporting that the software has failed to generate any sort of new revenue.”
Could we be seeing the beginnings of an AI bubble burst?
I'll admit I'm not AI's biggest fan. I'm not anti-AI - there are certain tools I use myself for meeting notes and admin. But I wouldn't mind going back to taking my own meeting notes if it means we do less outsourcing of creation and creativity from our brains...
Using generative AI to create articles, images, art - it's an easy way out. Yes there's a short term gain, but studies of students who used Gen-AI to write essays show a long term cognitive loss.
I’ve also noticed more of my students bringing AI into the classroom.
In two recent Storytelling and Data classes I posed the following question for the final exercise:
Using the data provided, do you consider Friends or Game of Thrones to be the more culturally impactful television show in the USA?
I provide various statistics - when each show broadcast, viewing figures, awards won - and a big table of baby name popularity rankings. (I do this for the USA rather than any other country because the top 1000 baby names are available to search online for the US, whereas in the UK we only get the top 100 so there’s more data to play with).
I do tell students that if they want to look beyond the data provided the internet is right there… but I might have to stop doing that, as two groups immediately went to ChatGPT or Copilot and simply copy/pasted my question in.
And while certainly a time saver, that’s not the point of the exercise.
The point is to look the data, play with it, compare it. The point is to search for evidence based data and make your case why this is more culturally impactful than that.
And there is no right answer - it’s entirely subjective.
But I’ve been teaching this class for 4 years and this week is the first time this has happened.
So, I don’t think AI is done yet.
Realistically it’s only just been widely adopted outside of the digital and tech industries. And most people are still enthusiastic about their new toy and not seeing any real downsides just yet.
But Apple is a design giant.
When they decide to talk about physical design rather than AI opportunities, maybe we should remember it's human creativity and design excellence that make the real difference.
Maybe we should listen to what’s not being said. Because they really didn’t talk about AI at all.
