“We wanted to establish an entirely different bar,” Federighi says. “So we viewed it as foundational, and as a prerequisite to how we offered personal intelligence, that your personal information remained entirely yours and under your control. And no one, not even Apple, would have any visibility onto that information, even if our data center was processing your request.”
[...]
I ask Federighi if he ever thinks there will be a day when computer processors get so powerful, that a server-based technology like PCC won’t even be needed.
“I couldn’t rule it out,” he says, “…but even in that world, I think that you would expect that at times your device is going to, in servicing your request, reach out at least to knowledge stores that are outside the device.” For example, you’ll want to know if a restaurant’s opening times have changed—information the on-device LLM might not have. “So even in that future, I think there’s going to be a role for contacting external services.”
For the first time ever, Private Cloud Compute extends the industry-leading security and privacy of Apple devices into the cloud, making sure that personal user data sent to PCC isn’t accessible to anyone other than the user — not even to Apple. Built with custom Apple silicon and a hardened operating system designed for privacy, we believe PCC is the most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud AI compute at scale.
Tyrangiel: What’s your confidence that Apple Intelligence will not hallucinate?
Cook: It’s not 100 percent. But I think we have done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we’re using it in. So I am confident it will be very high quality. But I’d say in all honesty that’s short of 100 percent. I would never claim that it’s 100 percent.
If it succeeds, Apple might actually convince its millions of devoted customers that Apple Intelligence will make their lives better and their jobs easier, without all the very scary risks we keep hearing about. That would also mean millions of those customers will have to buy new Apple devices in order to access Apple Intelligence. And why wouldn’t they? It’s not big, scary AI. It’s just fun and friendly Apple Intelligence.
For Apple, that path appears set. It’s going to use AI to be the life hacker that improves emails and saves time and makes little generative delights that take users ever deeper into their Apple devices. It’ll be safe, profitable, inevitable — so inevitable that all friction will be removed. It won’t even be called artificial intelligence. In a sublime act of marketing hubris, Apple has decided to market this new frontier of products as something else: Apple Intelligence. Killer dad joke.
But it’s in Federighi’s final principal — that AI should be personalized around what it knows about you — that Apple’s real advantage is apparent. It’s how the company distinguishes itself from (friendly) rivals like OpenAI or Anthropic, which at the moment offer you only a box to type into, and have limited memory of how you have used their chatbots. Apple can pull from your email, your message, your contacts, and countless other surfaces throughout the operating system, and — in theory — can draw from them to help you more easily navigate the world.
The URSA Cine Immersive camera features a custom stereoscopic 3D lens system with dual 8K sensors, capable of capturing a 180-degree field of view with spatial audio support. It is designed to capture content with a resolution of 8,160 x 7,200 per eye and offers 16 stops of dynamic range to ensure detail and color accuracy in every frame, with the ability to shoot stereoscopic 3D immersive cinema content at 90 frames per second.
As long as your host operating system is macOS 15 or newer and your guest operating system is macOS 15 or newer, VMs will now be able to sign into and use iCloud and other Apple ID-related services just as they would when running directly on the hardware.
Adobe has promised to update its terms of service to make it "abundantly clear" that the company will "never" train generative AI on creators' content after days of customer backlash, with some saying they would cancel Adobe subscriptions over its vague terms.
The most magical Apple ecosystem thing that I use almost every day: copy something on one device, paste that thing on another device. Magic!
(Every time I need to do a 2FA code on my Windows machine, I wish I am on a Mac.)
The new iPhone mirroring + notification thing may well be yet another magical thing in Apple's ecosystem. I can't wait for this fall to try it out.
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Biggest disappointment for me: why isn't Snoopy on my iPhone lock screen?
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Thanks for reading.