To hear Cook tell it, appears the timing of Apple's plunge into generative AI wasn't about getting in on the AI hype but making sure Apple's approach focused on real benefits. This goal wasn't lost on commentators and journalists who observed that WWDC's Apple Intelligence segment focused on user outcomes and not just rushing out the technology for the sake of it. Cook mentioned this in his interview when discussing AI features on the Apple Watch, saying:
"We always talk about the benefit to the user and so the benefit to the user is crash detection and fall detection, not the technology behind the feature."
The conventional wisdom going into WWDC was that Apple was the company that was flailing and desperate, trying to catch up to the giants of artificial intelligence and retain some level of relevance. What we saw this week, however, was a company that seems surprisingly confident in its own AI prowess, and one that continues to largely follow its own playbook rather than compromising its ideals.
The hottest company in tech, OpenAI, just gave its crown jewels to Apple for free, and Apple responded by introducing its integration as optional and tagged with numerous warning labels. So, who’s behind and flailing, exactly?
Setting aside feelings on that issue for just a moment, it’s worth looking at the mechanics behind this. Apple also said during its announcement that it’s providing a way for publishers to exclude their sites from being used for training its AI models, via a long established system built originally for search engines: robots.txt.
When you’re trying to do hard things — and improving your health is a hard thing — it helps immensely when you’re given the grace to be imperfect. And you are going to be imperfect. It’s not a matter of if you’ll get sick or life breaks your streaks. It’s a matter of when. When I broke my longest Move streak to date, it was because something traumatic happened in my life. After a day of ugly crying, I woke up the next morning to a broken streak. I knew it was trivial in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, it felt like getting kicked while I was down. It took me two months to get my head back in the game.
Most users who already understand what an Apple ID is probably won’t be confused by the change—the words are sufficiently similar.
Got your hiking boots at the ready? AllTrails has rolled out a suite of new updates to its popular navigation app to help its 60 million users across the globe make better decisions about where to hike, and what they'll need to do it.
I’ve always been a sucker for Nike’s aesthetics (go ahead, roast me) and this is an app I’ve come back to again and again. It has guided runs, training plans, and an incredibly good companion app for the Apple Watch.
This new Yahoo News app, which is available as a free download now, is powered by the underlying code of the well-received yet short-lived app Artifact. And of course, the new app is infused with AI capabilities to surface the news articles that might interest you most.
“Swift 6 eliminates these kinds of bugs by diagnosing them at compile time,” Kremenek said. A new language mode in Swift 6 language mode will enable compile-time data race safety. Because data race safety may require changes to code, the new Swift 6 language mode is opt-in. Apple previously highlighted data race safety in Swift 5.10 in March, advising that the opt-in mode planned for Swift 6 enforces full data isolation by default.
Also planned for Swift 6 is expanded Linux support, covering the Debian and Fedora Linux distributions, and improved support for Windows. Generics also are eyed for improvement in Swift 6, with a new subset planned for targeting constrained environments such as OS kernels and microcontrollers. Apple also is investing in Swift support in Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor and other editors that leverage the Language Server Protocol.
Jon Stewart weighed in on the abrupt end of his Apple TV series The Problem With Jon Stewart this week, further detailing the disagreements he and Apple had on the content he wanted to produce for the platform.
“They didn’t censor me, it wasn’t free speech,” Stewart told Puck journalist Matt Belloni on the latest episode of his podcast The Town. “When you work for a corporate entity, that’s part of the deal, even at Comedy Central. The deal is I get to do what I want until it’s going to hurt their beer sales or whatever it is they want to sell. And that’s the deal we all make.”
The lawsuit filed in state court in San Francisco by two women who have worked at Apple for more than a decade claims the company systematically underpays female workers in its engineering, marketing, and AppleCare divisions.
Apple bases workers' starting pay on their salaries at previous jobs or on their "pay expectations," which results in lower pay rates for women, according to the complaint. The lawsuit also claims that Apple's performance evaluation system, which it uses to set raises and bonuses, is biased against women.
Apple, which offers buy now, pay later financing through its payment service, will bring rival installment plans onto the service later this year, the company said Tuesday in a press release.
How serious is Apple about Apple Intelligence? Is it a Pro-only feature, or is it destined for every Apple devices?
Certainly, going forward, I'd be surprised if any new Macs cannot run Apple Intelligence. But things are still murky on other devices, like the iPhone SE, the Apple Watch, and Apple TV.
I guess we will get a hint soon, when Apple unveils the non-Pro iPhone, and iPad mini.
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Thanks for reading.