Every year Apple holds their Worldwide Developer’s Conference or WWDC for “short,” or just “dub-dub” for actual short. They really should come up with a better name for these things, as these are the events where the true star of the show takes center stage: the software. If the hardware is the body of a product then the software is its soul. And this is when they announce their intentions for their upcoming software. and nearly every year brings fresh leaks & expectations.

This year the rumor mill has been chugging at maximum speed. Some years it slows down considerably. But this past few months almost every week there’s been 2-3 articles on macrumors.com about how iOS 18 is poised to adopt AI features that can totally transform the iPhone user experience. But if other AI stuff is a grift and a non-starter, what makes Apple so special?

”Apple Intelligence”

In order to build AI functionality into iOS, Apple needs to decide which functions of their LLM can serve the user best right now as it is. That means letting it have limited but predictable control over certain aspects of the system that the user probably has to actively enable.

Some of the rumored functions being considered include:

• smart notification summaries, surfacing the most important notifications and combining the rest into one big update.
• Smart messages recaps
• Making playlists in Apple Music from a text prompt
• Tone adjustments when composing messages
• smart email summaries & auto reply drafts
• auto-summarizing webpages & articles in Safari
• AI assisted photo touch-ups

Of course all of this is still speculative until Monday.

"New Siri"

A major rumor this year has been that Siri is finally getting the overhaul she's so desperately needed.

They are allegedly overhauling Siri to be more like ChatGPT. Less like a list of commands you have to know how to use, and more like an actual "proactive assistant," like they've been calling her for years.

This Siri upgrade would be legitimately different from the other Siri upgrades that have happened over the years. Those improvements only came from adding more rules & more key words to listen for & recognize with pre-programmed intents. This would mean that the new Siri would be able to actually understand what you're asking for, even if you don't use the pre-made programmed-in command phrases.

There's also rumors that this new Siri system might not just be an LLM, but a system that can actually interact with apps on your behalf, to execute on your intentions, regardless of whether the app's makers designed the app with Siri in mind.

AI’s biggest problems are Apple’s biggest strengths.

Right now, a lot of the buzz around AI tech has been skepticism about its real usefulness, in the face of two main concerns.

1. Privacy. AI systems currently in use today are gathering data about how people use them, which privacy advocates have rightly pointed out, foreshadows a potential problem. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, have positioned themselves as prioritizing profit over prudent privacy practices. Regardless of their true operational security. Apple, on the other hand, have built a sturdy reputation for designing privacy into the core of their products.
2. The Environment. Perhaps not enough criticism is pointed at AI’s very high electricity usage. Meanwhile Apple has been spending years on transitioning their entire operational structure to clean renewable energy. (Or at least, so they say.)

These are persistent PR problems that AI has had to deal with, which Apple already has decades of experience navigating.

OpenAI deal

Apple has a lot of experience with hardware software and services. What they do not have, however, is the kind of in-house software engineering talent that can throw together a brand new LLM in just a few years. Hence, Apple said to be striking a deal with OpenAI themselves, to have ChatGPT style functionality built directly into iOS.

No one knows exactly what this deal or this functionality will be like. Some have speculated that the new realtime voice mode that OpenAI showed off at their Spring 2024 update might be what the new Siri will be like. That would be awesome, and I don’t have any concrete reasons to doubt that might happen, but it seems unlikely given Apple’s focus on privacy like i mentioned.

Apple tries to do as much of the AI work directly on their devices as they can. This helps keep your data more private because it doesn’t have to be sent across the Internet. When your data stays on your device, there’s less chance of it getting lost or stolen.

This highlights how unusual the OpenAI deal is for Apple’s especially at this late in the cycle when AI is part of like 9 out of 10 Apple rumors this year. But they are also rumored to be working on a new secure cloud architecture that could help process AI queries without revealing private user data.

And what about visionOS 2?

We haven’t forgotten about the Apple Vision Pro.

VisionOS 2 is slated to be an important update, given that visionOS 1 shipped in an arguably unfinished state. It’s a similar vibe to the iPad before it had multitasking. Remember, the iPhone got multitasking before the iPad did. So there was in fact, a world where you could switch between apps on your iPhone, but you couldn’t do the exact same thing on your iPad.

There’s no minimizing windows in visionOS. You can’t rearrange the app icons in the app list, they’re stuck in a preconfigured arrangement and all your third party apps are just sorted alphabetically. So you have to scroll through the list every time you want to open an app. It’s a UI problem we solved like 20 years ago.

But because this is a whole new dimension of user interface design, one with literally unlimited affordances so you can make literally anything you want, that means we have to figure everything out all over again. That’s what Apple’s visionOS department have been working on. That’s why Apple created a whole separate division within the company, solely dedicated to designing for Vision Pro. Because they know, that just copying what worked before, isn’t going to work as well again here.

I don’t expect it to be a big huge overhauling update, but i do expect it to catch up with their other platforms and become more actually usable. Less silo’d into its own thing and more able to be adapted to the user’s needs.

Stay tuned

I will of course have updates on Monday about everything that strikes me as worth talking about.