For a brief moment earlier this month, I thought an old acquaintance had passed away. I was still groggy one morning when I checked my phone to find a notification delivering the news. “Obituary shared,” the message bluntly said, followed by his name. But when I opened my phone, I learned that he was very much still alive. Apple’s latest software update was to blame: A new feature that uses AI to summarize iPhone notifications had distorted the original text message. It wasn’t my acquaintance who had died, but a relative of his. That’s whose obituary I had received.

These notification summaries are perhaps the most visible part of Apple Intelligence, the company’s long-awaited suite of AI features, which officially began to roll out last month. (It’s compatible with only certain devices.) We are living in push-notification hell, and Apple Intelligence promises to collapse the incessant stream of notifications into pithy recaps. Instead of setting your iPhone aside while you shower and returning to nine texts, four emails, and two calendar alerts, you can now return to a few brief Apple Intelligence summaries.

The trouble is that Apple Intelligence doesn’t seem to be very … intelligent. Ominous summaries of people’s Ring-doorbell alerts have gone viral: “Multiple people at your Front Yard,” the feature notified one user. “Package is 8 stops away, delivered, and will be delivered tomorrow,” an Amazon alert confusingly explained. And sliding into someone’s DMs hits different when Instagram notifications are summarized as “Multiple likes and flirtatious comments.” But Apple Intelligence appears to especially struggle with text messages. Sometimes the text summaries are alarmingly inaccurate, as with the false obituary I received. But even when they are technically right, the AI summaries still feel wrong. “Expresses love and encouragement,” one AI notification I recently received crudely announced, compressing a thoughtfully written paragraph from a loved one. What’s the point of a notification like that? Texting—whether on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal—is a deeply intimate medium, infused with personality and character. By strip-mining messages into bland, lifeless summaries, Apple seems to be misunderstanding what makes texting so special in the first place.

Perhaps it was inevitable that AI summaries would come for push notifications. Summarization is AI’s killer feature and tech companies seem intent on applying it to just about everything. The list of things that AI is summarizing might require a summary of its own: emails and Zoom calls and Facebook comments and YouTube videos and Amazon reviews and podcasts and books and medical records and full seasons of TV shows. In many cases, this summarization is helpful—for instance, in streamlining meeting notes.

But where is the line? Concision, when applied to already concise texts, sucks away what little context there was to begin with. In some cases, the end result is harmful. The technology seems to have something of a death problem. Across multiple cases, the feature appears bewilderingly eager to falsely suggest that people are dead. In one case, a user reported that a text from his mother reading “That hike almost killed me!” had been turned into “Attempted suicide, but recovered.”

But mostly, AI summaries lead to silly outcomes. “Inflatable costumes and animatronic zombies overwhelming; will address questions later,” read the AI summary of a colleague’s message on Halloween. Texts rich with emotional content read like a lazy therapist’s patient files. “Expressing sadness and worry,” one recent summary said. “Upset about something,” declared another. AI is unsurprisingly awful with breakup texts (“No longer in relationship; wants belongings from the apartment”). When it comes to punctuation, the summaries read like they were written by a high schooler who just discovered semicolons and now overzealously inserts; them; literally; everywhere. Even Apple admits that the language used in notification summaries can be clinical.

The technology is at its absolute worst when it tries to summarize group chats. It’s one thing to condense three or four messages from a single friend; it’s another to reduce an extended series of texts from multiple people into a one-sentence notification. “Rude comments exchanged,” read the summary of one user’s family group chat. When my friends and I were planning a dinner earlier this month, my phone collapsed a series of messages coordinating our meal into “Takeout, ramen, at 6:30pm preferred.” Informative, I guess, but the typical back-and-forth of where to eat (one friend had suggested sushi) and timing (the other was aiming for an early night) was erased.

Beyond the content, much of the delight of text messaging comes from the distinctiveness of the individual voices of the people we are talking to. Some ppl txt like dis. others text in all lowercase and no punctuation. There are lol friends and LOL friends. My dad is infamous for sending essay-length messages. When I text a friend who lives across the country asking about her recent date, I am not looking purely for informational content (“Night considered good,” as Apple might summarize); rather, I want to hear the date described in her voice (“Was amaze so fun we had lovely time”). As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle has written, “When we are in human conversation, we often care less about the information an utterance transfers than its tone and emotional intent.” When texts are fed through the AI-summarization machine, each distinct voice is bludgeoned into monotony.

For a company that prides itself on perfection, the failures of Apple’s notification summaries feel distinctly un-Apple. Since ChatGPT’s release, as technology companies have raced to position themselves as players in the AI arms race, the company has remained notably quiet. It’s hard not to wonder if Apple, after falling behind, is now playing catch-up. Still, the notification summaries will likely improve. For now, users have to opt in to the AI-summary feature (it’s still in beta), and Apple has said that it will continue to polish the notifications based on user feedback. The feature is already spreading. Samsung is reportedly working on integrating similar notification summaries for its Galaxy phones.

With the social internet in crisis, text messages—and especially group chats—have filled a crucial void. In a sense, texting is the purest form of a social network, a rare oasis of genuine online connection. Unlike platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where algorithmic feeds warp how we communicate, basic messaging apps offer a more unfiltered way to hang out digitally. But with the introduction of notification summaries that strive to optimize our messages for maximum efficiency, the walls are slowly crumbling. Soon, the algorithmic takeover may be complete.

Google (GOOGL) launched its artificial intelligence-powered Gemini chatbot as an iPhone app this week, offering the service for free in 35 languages worldwide.

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In Computer Village in Lagos, resellers spruce up old devices for those seeking the coveted status symbol – the iPhone.

Can we talk about the cables in our lives? I’ll start: I have a circa-2020 iPhone, which features a Lightning port for charging. My monitor, laptop, and e-reader all have ports for USB-C, the connector that looks like a pill; my car has USB-A, which is the older, rectangular design that is somehow always upside-down. My fancy webcam uses something called micro-HDMI, which is not the same as mini-HDMI or standard HDMI, and to get it to work with my computer, I have to plug its cable into a pair of daisy-chained adapters. I have two sets of wireless earbuds, and they, too, take different cables. If I upgraded to the newest iPhone, which uses USB-C, I’d be somewhat better off, but what about my family, and all of their devices with different ports? Let them eat cable, I suppose.

This chaos was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior. The European Union even passed a law to make that port the charging standard by the end of this year. I do not live in Europe, and you might not either, but the requirement helped push Apple, which has long insisted on its own proprietary plugs, to get on board. As a part of that transition, Apple just put USB-C connectors in its wireless mice and keyboards, which previously used Lightning. (Incredibly, its mice will still charge dead-cockroach-style, flipped on their back.)

People think the shape of the plug is the only thing that matters in a cable. It does matter: If you can’t plug the thing in, it’s useless. But the mere joining of a cable’s end with its matching socket is just the threshold challenge, and one that leads to other woes. In fact, a bunch of cables that look the same—with matching plugs that fit the same-size holes—may all do different things. This is the second circle of our cable hell: My USB-C may not be the same as yours. And the USB-C you bought two years ago may not be the same as the one you got today. And that means it might not do what you now assume it can.

I am unfortunately old enough to remember when the first form of USB was announced and then launched. The problem this was meant to solve was the same one as today’s: “A rat’s nest of cords, cables and wires,” as The New York Times described the situation in 1998. Individual gadgets demanded specific plugs: serial, parallel, PS/2, SCSI, ADB, and others. USB longed to standardize and simplify matters—and it did, for a time.

But then it evolved: USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB4, and then, irrationally, USB4 2.0. Some of these cords and their corresponding ports looked identical, but had different capabilities for transferring data and powering devices. I can only gesture to the depth of absurdity that was soon attained without boring you to tears or lapsing into my own despair. For example, the Thunderbolt standard, commonly used by Apple and now on its fifth iteration, looks just like USB-C. But to use its full capacities, you need to connect it to a Thunderbolt-compatible port, which is identical in appearance to any other that would fit a USB-C connector. Meanwhile, today’s Thunderbolt cable will probably charge your Android phone, but an older one might not effectively power your current laptop, or some future device. As one manufacturer explains, “For charging most devices including laptops, Thunderbolt 3 will provide virtually identical speeds to USB-C. However, Thunderbolt 4 requires PC charging on at least one port, whereas USB-C charging is optional.” Which … what does that even mean? It means that Thunderbolt is a kind of USB-C that is also not USB-C.

[Read: We’ve forgotten how to use computers]

Muddled charging capabilities are not particular to Thunderbolt. If you have ever plugged a perfectly USBish USB cable into a matching USB power brick and found that your device doesn’t charge or takes forever to do so, that’s because the amount of current your brick provides might not be supported by the USB-shaped cable and its corresponding USB-underlying standard, or it might be weaker than your device requires. Such details are usually printed on the brick in writing so tiny, nobody can read it—but even if you could, you would still have to know what it means, like some kind of USB savant.

This situation is worsened by the fact that many manufacturers now ship devices without a charging brick. Some, like Apple, say they do this for ecological reasons. But more cost-conscious manufacturers do so to save money, and also because forgoing a brick allows them to avoid certifications related to AC power plugs, which vary around the world.

[Read: One cord to rule them all]

A lack of standardization is not the problem here. The industry has designed, named, and rolled out a parade of standards that pertain to USB and all its cousins. Some of those standards live inside other standards. For example, USB 3.2 Gen 1 is also known as USB 3.0, even though it's numbered 3.2.  (What? Yes.) And both of these might be applied to cables with USB-A connectors, or USB-B, or USB-Micro B, or—why not?—USB-C. The variations stretch on and on toward the horizon.

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped—and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they’ve owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. Even if Apple puts a USB-C port in every new device, and so does every other manufacturer, that doesn’t mean that they will do everything you will expect cables to do in the future. Inevitably, you will find yourself needing new ones.

Back in 1998, the Times told me, “If you make your move to U.S.B. now, you can be sure that your new devices will have a port to plug into.” I was ready! I’m still ready. But alas, a port to plug into has never been enough.

Despite Apple’s (AAPL) strong fourth fiscal quarter performance, analysts warn that the iPhone maker’s new artificial intelligence features might not boost sales for at least a few more years.

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