GoKawiilThe Ternus announcement got me thinking about the one thing I keep wishing Apple would build and almost certainly never will: a family-scoped AI assistant that actually works across all our devices.
I don’t mean a frontier model or a “reasoning engine”–just a competent, context-aware agent that understands my family as a unit. The shared calendar, the school schedules, the medication reminders, who’s picking up whom and when. The kind of thing that Apple Intelligence was supposed to be, except pointed at the problem that would actually matter most to the people who are already deep in the ecosystem and paying for it.
I am married with two kids. Between us we have more Apple devices than I care to count–and we are exactly the demographic Apple loves to put in keynote photos. And yet iCloud treats us as completely separate customers who happen to share a credit card. Family Sharing is a permissions layer bolted onto individual accounts, and it shows in every single interaction–shared photo libraries (still broken), purchase management (still confusing), screen time (still adversarial rather than collaborative). Twenty-four years of “digital hub” strategy, and this is where we are.
What I Actually Want
Here’s what a competent family agent could do without being creepy–and in most cases, without even needing to leave the device:
Know that my son has a test on Thursday and hasn’t opened the revision material since Monday. A gentle nudge, not a surveillance report.
Track our medication schedule and ping people (or me, if someone misses a window) without turning into a clinical monitoring tool.
Surface things on Apple TV that match what we actually watch, not what the recommendation engine wants us to try.
Coordinate pickup times, grocery lists, meal plans–the sort of mundane family logistics that currently live in a group chat and three different apps.
Make iCloud file sharing work the way a shared family folder should, rather than the absurd permissions mess it currently is.
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