Ryan Haines / Android Authority
I jumped on the Apple Intelligence train pretty quickly. I mean, can you blame me? I just wanted to see if Apple had any chance of catching up to Google. It seemed — at least at first — as if Apple was readying its own version of just about everything Gemini could do, too. Apple announced plans for an image generator, photo editing tools, the ability to write and rewrite messages, and more, and it was all coming… eventually.
Well, now it’s been here for about a year, and I’ve been using it nearly the entire time. I’ve tried the whole range of Apple Intelligence features multiple times across several iOS updates, and I’m still underwhelmed. I’ll be sticking with Gemini for the foreseeable future, and here’s why.
Pixel Studio is way better than Apple’s Playground
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
When Google first introduced its Pixel Studio on the Pixel 9 series, I wasn’t entirely sold. Yes, it opened the door to a good bit of creativity, allowing you to describe what you wanted to see while carefully navigating intellectual property, but it was missing something: people.
So, when Apple announced that its Image Playground (now called Playground) would not only include people, but people from your Photos library, I was intrigued. I had hoped it would look a little less creepy than the example Apple shared during its WWDC 2024 keynote, which felt somewhat lifeless and flat, but it didn’t. My first few samples came out with creepy teeth and dead eyes, and although they looked like my friends, I didn’t really want anyone to see the results.
Playground lets you use familiar faces, but it doesn't know what to do with them.
More recently, though, Apple has given its Playground a refresh, adding new animation styles and some help from ChatGPT to further reimagine your familiar faces. The result of all this is… it’s still creepy. I still don’t like the way my iPhone 17 Pro transforms me and my friends into animated characters, and I find that the assistance from ChatGPT rarely works, instead leaving me with a blank box where my image should be.
Google, on the other hand, has actually improved its Pixel Studio. No, it hasn’t added the ability to use likenesses of people you know, but it has added humans in general. It’s a significant improvement when you consider that I was previously asking for generic terms like ‘wizard’ and ‘knight’, and still having Google refuse my requests. And honestly, I don’t really need to make cartoons out of people I know — it’s way more fun having Google recreate my run club in the style of Wallace & Gromit anyway.
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