The first time I wore an AVP, I was astonished by how intuitive it was to use — within a minute or two, I was opening and closing and resizing windows, dialing down my surroundings and turning up a Joshua Tree landscape. A college student I met on InSpaze, a spatial chatroom where AVP users hang out, told me that the first time he let his older brother, who has Down syndrome, use his AVP, his brother independently played video games on it for two hours. But this native intuitiveness can fall away the further a disabled person might stray from the typical, mainstream user. I don’t doubt that Castor is able to fluidly use her AVP entirely with audible feedback, but she’s also a lifelong screen-reader user with a B.S. in computer science, not to mention a full-time engineer at Apple. Users with less expertise can struggle to figure it out. It’s also worth noting that within the chronically underemployed and impoverished disabled population, these users represent a rarefied subset who can drop a few thousand dollars — often with professional interest — on this class of first-gen tech toy.
Still, my brief experience with the AVP allowed me to imagine a future version where, for instance, the price comes down, Apple opens up the front-facing cameras to developers, and what is already a powerful low-vision device could become the ultimate tool for blind and low-vision people. When I play the complicated tabletop games my son adores, and press a game’s card to my nose to read it, I often find myself wishing I could tap on the blocks of indecipherable text the way I can with a paragraph of text on my iPhone and hear it read aloud. It’s easy to imagine a non-distant future where I could wear a fourth-gen AVP, leveraging whatever comes after GPT4o, and tap one of the game cards with my finger, and hear a readout of the text printed there, along with a description of whatever illustration is on the card, too. If I preferred to use my residual vision, I might casually use two fingers to zoom in on the card (or my son’s face) the way you’d enlarge a photo on your iPhone.
Apple says the ChatGPT partnership will only be used with explicit consent for isolated tasks like email composition and other writing tools. But security professionals will be watching closely to see how this, and other concerns, will play out.
“Apple is saying a lot of the right things,” said Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance. “But it remains to be seen how it’s implemented.”
As a creator and website owner, I guess that these things will never sit right with me. Why should we accept that certain data sets require a licensing fee but anything that is found “on the open web” can be mindlessly scraped, parsed, and regurgitated by an AI? [...] It’s disappointing to see Apple muddy an otherwise compelling set of features (some of which I really want to try) with practices that are no better than the rest of the industry.
Apple simply hijacking the abbreviation AI for itself, and replacing the generic “artificial intelligence” with the branded “Apple Intelligence,” is not a substantial gesture. But as a branding maneuver to distinguish itself in the noisy marketplace of AI dreams and promises, pulling the term Apple Intelligence out of thin air and pretending it represents a considered point of view is not a bad move. It simultaneously suggests Apple is above the sometimes-dubious AI fray, and yet somehow owns the entire space. It may not really be all that intelligent, but it’s a remarkable mix of caution and chutzpah that may turn out to be a solid example of Apple Cunning.
Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deal terms are private. Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments, these people said.
Apple Vision Pro launches in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K. on Friday, July 12, and you will be able to try out the spatial computer at your local Apple Store in those countries starting on the same day next month.
With the specific LockedCameraCapture framework, the third-party camera app will be able to be opened into camera mode while an iPhone is locked, mimicking the functionality that's available with the standard Camera app.
Designing a proper dark mode app icon is important for you and your users, because if it’s too bright amongst the rest, it will stand out (in a bad way). A likely result is your app being removed from home screens.
Apple's Korean unit was also ordered to pay a fine of 210 million won for allegedly collecting location data without consent, violating the clause on disclosing its policy on location data and others, the commission said.
Japan's parliament enacted Wednesday a law to promote competition in smartphone app stores by restricting tech giants Apple Inc. and Google LLC from limiting third-party companies from selling and operating apps on their platforms.
The law will prohibit the providers of Apple's iOS and Google's Android smartphone operating systems, app stores and payment platforms from preventing the sale of apps and services that directly compete with the native platforms' own.
Including audiobooks in the premium tier is nothing more than a Spotify scam, say music publishers, intended to cheat consumers and music labels alike.
I have been so busy with so many things that I haven't watched any of videos from WWDC sessions yet.
I have a three-day weekend coming up soon, and I'll need to fix that omission.
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Thanks for reading.