I think this is the correct approach on a phone. I don't want AI front-and-center. I want it in the background quietly making everything better. To me, that's a much more useful form of AI.
That's because people don't trust AI that much... and most people don't differentiate between a really cool feature and AI so it's more confusing marketing than anything.
They did talk about ML in their image processing software for their cameras, though. And I don’t think they mentioned AI when talking about their babelfish AirPods, but it’s clearly there, as well.
This is a non-story. This was a hardware event. Apple is releasing many new AI features as part of iOS 26 which will launch along side the new iPhones. AI is software. And yet, a number of the features are clearly powered by AI models such as camera enhancements, health monitoring and live translation. Also GPU performance continues to increase in the A19, with CPU remaining presumably fairly flat since no numbers were given, so that’s a win for on-device inference.
If you've read the Steve Jibs biography, you’d know his obsession with creating the future products.
I feel like he’d be obsessively working to combine AI, robotics and battery technology into the classic sci fi android.
Instead, modern Apple seems to be innovating essentially nothing unless you count the VR thing and the rumors of an Apple car, which sounds to me much like the Apple Newton.
I'd disagree: his obsession was with watching everyone fail to create the products of the future, learning from their mistakes, and only then committing to a product strategy (e.g: iPod, iPhone, iPad).
I feel like they don’t want to get burned the way they did with the AVR/metaverse thing. Those headsets are worthless. Probably a lot of ptsd going on with people thinking how Jobs would have had their ass over it. I suspect they’re being very cautious with “AI”.
Late to a reply but the tech went nowhere. I’m not a financial expert but I don’t think they could have come close to breaking even on that product. I know no one that has it and there hasn’t been an article here talking about it in years (guessing here but I don’t recall seeing one).
Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs:
* Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access.
* Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate.
* iPhones already have specialized hardware for AI acceleration.
I want to be able to tell my phone to a) summarize my finances across all the apps I have b) give me a list of new articles of a certain topic from my magazine/news apps c) combine internet search with on-device files to generate personal reports.
All this is possible, but Apple doesn't care to do this. The path not taken is invisible, and no one will criticize them for squandering this opportunity. That's a more subtle drawback with only having two phone operating systems.
I think on-device AI will show up more front and center but in a few more years.
A big issue to solve is battery life. Right now there's already a lot that goes on at night while the user sleeps with their phone plugged in. This helps to preserve battery life because you can run intensive tasks while hooked up to a power source.
If apps are doing a lot of AI stuff in the course of regular interaction, that could drain the battery fairly quickly.
Amazingly, I think the memory footprint of the phones will also need to get quite a bit larger to really support the big uses cases and workflows. (I do feel somewhat crazy that it is already possible to purchase an iPhone with 1TB of storage and 8GB of RAM).
> Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed
Nevermind that—iOS just needs to reliably be able to play the song I’m telling it to without complaining “sorry, something went wrong with the connection…”
Apple is generally anti market hype. It is a smart PR move to avoid mentioning AI after the Apple Intelligence fiasco, their researchers leaving, and the bubble sentiment at the moment.
It's not a smart move to avoid integrating the most important capability advance in computing in the past decade - LLMs. They do support small cases, like summarizing text. But there's scope to do more.
This is all possible, but an absolutely terrible idea from a security point of view, while prompt injection attacks are still a thing, and there's little evidence they will stop being a thing soon.
This is what I like about Apple. They just use technology judiciously without making a big deal about it, and talk up the product instead. As it should be.
they just casually mentioned they have always been on the forefront of AI.... however that might have been a poor choice of words. If they would have just swapped it with "Machine Learning" and then referring to the ML chip and on device learning & analysis. A Win.
just using "AI" as term... they are so on the forefront that they sent your data to ChatGPT, otherwise you would be too ahead of the pack...
Maybe some day Apple will realize they need to fire the San Francisco consultant they turned Siri into - offended at any request and absolutely useless to provide you a meaningful answer.
Let me know when Siri can do even the most basic things using natural language. It can't even properly answer things like "hey siri, is apple juice already on my shopping list" or answer most questions that require a web search. Summarize it for crying out loud, I asked you because I'm not right next to my screen to click search results.
THAT would make me take an upgrade. Until then, I'm just keeping this phone until it goes out of support.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] threadSo was last year’s, technically, but that didn’t stop apple from making it all about AI.
I feel like he’d be obsessively working to combine AI, robotics and battery technology into the classic sci fi android.
Instead, modern Apple seems to be innovating essentially nothing unless you count the VR thing and the rumors of an Apple car, which sounds to me much like the Apple Newton.
* Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access.
* Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate.
* iPhones already have specialized hardware for AI acceleration.
I want to be able to tell my phone to a) summarize my finances across all the apps I have b) give me a list of new articles of a certain topic from my magazine/news apps c) combine internet search with on-device files to generate personal reports.
All this is possible, but Apple doesn't care to do this. The path not taken is invisible, and no one will criticize them for squandering this opportunity. That's a more subtle drawback with only having two phone operating systems.
A big issue to solve is battery life. Right now there's already a lot that goes on at night while the user sleeps with their phone plugged in. This helps to preserve battery life because you can run intensive tasks while hooked up to a power source.
If apps are doing a lot of AI stuff in the course of regular interaction, that could drain the battery fairly quickly.
Amazingly, I think the memory footprint of the phones will also need to get quite a bit larger to really support the big uses cases and workflows. (I do feel somewhat crazy that it is already possible to purchase an iPhone with 1TB of storage and 8GB of RAM).
Nevermind that—iOS just needs to reliably be able to play the song I’m telling it to without complaining “sorry, something went wrong with the connection…”
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/ferret-ui-2
just using "AI" as term... they are so on the forefront that they sent your data to ChatGPT, otherwise you would be too ahead of the pack...
THAT would make me take an upgrade. Until then, I'm just keeping this phone until it goes out of support.