What is a Mac? What does an M4 chip say about the next generation of Macs and iPhones, and where do they come from?
Apple’s redesigned iPad Pro launched in May with a new AI-focused M4 chip — marking the first time an M-series chip did not come first to a Mac. I bet M4 chips will be on Macs soon, but I am not going to debate what a computer is. Apple’s MacBooks are all offered with M3 chips, while the Mac Studio and Mac Pro continue to lag behind with M2 chips.
New and enhanced versions of Apple’s built-in apps is likely to be included in the operating system updates for the Mac, iPhone, iPad and beyond. There are rumors that the calculator app will be refreshed and finally released on the iPad, as well as a password manager launching across Apple platforms, and redesigns coming to Apple’s messy Settings and Control Center screens.
Users may finally be allowed to arrange apps according to their preferences. MacRumors reports that you’ll finally be able to leave blank spaces between apps in iOS 18. And Bloomberg has reported that Apple will integrate a theming system into the OS, letting you recolor icons to match each other.
Source: What to expect at Apple’s WWDC 2024
What will WWDC 2024 bring? Apple, Google, Wikipedia, and X-ray: What’s new with Siri? What are we expecting?
Apple had previously ignored Google’s (sometimes cringey) pleas to adopt RCS and let go of the age-old and privacy-lacking SMS fallback. It took some regulatory pressure to get Apple to rethink its stance. As for the green bubbles, they will stick around. But they will be good green bubbles.
Apple is apparently going to brand the AI features as “Apple Intelligence” and build them in throughout its apps, Bloomberg reports. According to Apple Insider, there are other features that might include real-time transcriptions in Notes and Voice Memos. A custom emoji generator is in the cards, and the Photos app will reportedly let you use AI to remove objects and people from images.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference starts on Monday, June 10th with a presentation at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. Here’s what you can expect at Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote.
We need to be skeptical of any claims that Apple makes about its products. More than a decade ago, Schiller stood onstage and proclaimed that Apple had built a better voice assistant, and it hadn’t. The hype for artificial intelligence continues to move faster than the actual technology. No one has demonstrated that the ideas of Humane, Rabbit and others are ready yet.
When Apple first launched Siri in 2011 alongside the iPhone 4S, the company made a series of very compelling ads showing how you might use this newfangled voice assistant thing. In one case, Zooey Deschanel asked her phone about delivering tomato soup, while in the other, John Malkovich requested some life advice. There’s also one with Martin Scorsese shuffling his schedule from the back of a New York City taxi. They showed reminders, weather, alarms, and more. The point of the ads was that a constant companion would assist you in whatever you needed. No apps or taps necessary. Just ask.
The second reason Siri never quite worked is simply that neither Apple nor third-party developers ever figured out how it should work. How can you ask a question and what do you get with the answer? How should developers integrate a personal assistant? Even now, if you want to add a task to your to-do list app, Siri can’t just figure out which app you use. I feel like you have to tell me to water the grass in Todoist, which is a weird sentence that makes no sense, and fails half the time. If you want to do a multistep action, your only option is to muck around in Shortcuts, which is a very powerful tool but falls just short of requiring you to write code. It’s too much for most people.
But next week at WWDC, if the rumors and reports are true, we might be about to meet the real Siri for the first time — or at least something much closer to it. According to Bloomberg, The New York Times, and others, Apple is going to unveil a huge overhaul for the assistant, making Siri more reliable thanks to large language models but without much new functionality. Even that would be a victory. Apple may be almost ready to launch a version of its intelligent assistant called “Siri” that will integrate into your apps, so it can take action on your behalf. Something you can do on your phone could be done for you with the assistance of Apple’s virtual assistant.
It is possible that Artificial Intelligence can give Apple a chance to end the problem. Its researchers published a paper detailing the system called Ferret-UI, which uses Artificial Intelligence to understand small details of an onscreen image. The researchers give some detail on how an overall app might work, stating that the OpenAI GPT-4 does a good job of broadly understanding what an image is. One system might say, “This is the ticketmaster app!” and the other says, “That right there is the buy button.”
