Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the company’s operating systems.
If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below.
Emma Roth at The Verge
Most of the stuff Apple announced aren’t particularly interesting – a lot of catch-up stuff that has become emblematic of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft when it comes to their operating systems. The one thing that did stand out is Apple’s approach to offloading machine learning requests to the cloud when they are too difficult to handle on device. They’ve developed a new way of doing this, using servers with Apple’s own M chips, which is pretty cool and harkens back the days of the Xserve.
In short, these server are using the same kind of techniques to encrypt and secure data on iPhones, but now to encrypt and secure the data coming in for offloaded machine learning requests.
The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing.
Apple’s security research blog
Apple also provided some insight into where its training data is coming from, and it claims it’s only using licensed data and “publicly available data collected by our web-crawler”. The words “licensed” and “publicly available” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I’m not entirely sure what definitions of those terms Apple is using. There are enough people out there who feel every piece of data – whether under copyright, available under an open source license, or whatever – is fair, legal game for ML training, so who knows what Apple is using based on these statements alone.
From Apple’s presentations yesterday, as well as any later statements, it’s also not clear when machine learning requests get offloaded in the first place. Apple states they try to run as much as possible on-device, and will offload when needed, but the conditions under which such offloading happens are nebulous and unclear, making it hard for users to know what’s going to happen when they use Apple’s new machine learning features.
The most significant improvement is window tiling/snapping on macOS. I think if I ever find myself at a Mac, I’ll finally get expected behavior when I try to move applications around. Twenty years from now, that might be the feature improvement we remember the most from yesterday’s show.
Also there’s a calculator for iPad which is a huge deal considering how useful those devices are in the educational space. It looks a bit like the calculator in Gnome.
If you are on the mac, I would recommend the awesome Rectangle application for window management.
Not only it has standard shortcuts like “move left”, or “move right”, it has huge amounts of functions, and is highly customizable. Bonus points for being free and open source:
https://rectangleapp.com/
+1 for Rectangle.
I hated how macOS doesn’t properly maximize windows. Rectangle finally fixed that for me (plus the tiling features).
What I found interesting is although Apple will bundle the latest version of ChatGPT for free as a chat agent Apple’s use of AI is primarily focussed on specific end user features that people might actually use. This is a very Apple style approach. Watch a space develop, think long and hard about how ordinary people might actually use this new thing, then try to offer some solutions that are so easy and fun to use that users might actually use them. Then they build on that, looking at how their initial offering is received, and iterate over and over again.
The other thing that struck me was the advantage Apple has by both controlling the entire stack (Private Cloud Compute is very Apple) and by having a portfolio of very interconnected devices for all situations.
Interesting times ahead.
PS loved the new calculator! Reminded of this great story by Andy Hertzfeld
https://www.folklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html
Strossen,
I don’t know, I often get the impression apple fans are just looking for reasons to praise and idolize apple, even when they are copying others. “Apple Intelligence”, built on the AI technology of others but now praiseworthy because apple’s attached to it. Meh evangelicalism is not for me.
This the best analysis I have come across of the significance of Apple Intelligence and how to think about the impact of AI on the wider tech world. Really worth a read.
“Apple Intelligence is Right On Time”
https://stratechery.com/2024/apple-intelligence-is-right-on-time/
The biggest thing I took away from the entire presentation was how absolutely distracting the Apple presenters were with their hands. It’s like they all watched that power video about not putting their hands below their waist while talking and they all awkwardly tried to not talk/talk with their hands. I was more of a game of.. where will the next presenters hands awkwardly be..