“Apple is laser focused on things that are going to make your day-to-day life better,” says Joswiak. That ultimately involves making use of personal information, whether it's knowing who your close contacts are when you search for a specific photo, recalling places you’ve visited when you use maps, or keeping track of what you’ve downloaded from Safari. To fully make use of AI, Apple would need to organize the personal information of its users in a comprehensive fashion—a scary proposition the company felt it was uniquely qualified to pitch to its customers because of its very public focus on privacy. Protecting that privacy, however, turned out to be a major technical challenge.
“We had to innovate at the data center level, at the system level, at the OS level, at the cryptographic and security protocol level, at the distributed AI inference level … at every level up the stack to do what no one had done before—extend an on-device processing level of security that you have on your phone, to advance processing in the cloud,” says Federighi. “I hope it is the future of how everyone does this kind of process.” His conviction is so strong that he says he hopes other companies mimic the achievement, even if it means Apple losing its competitive advantage. “There are lots of cases where we have very mixed feelings about people copying what we do, but when it comes to our privacy practices, we were happy to set an example and encourage,” Federighi says.
Launched last year and expanded to Asia in January 2024, Apple Music Classical was created to solve the problem of music streaming services not being designed to suit fans of the genre. While pop music fans usually listen to just the original version of a song, fans of classical composers from before the era of recorded music usually prefer to choose between renditions of pieces by contemporary(ish) performers.
As a result, the most listened to classical albums of 2024 include a range of contemporary works and new albums of contemporary performers playing pieces by classical composers.
Simply Piano works by listening to you playing notes and detecting if you’re playing the right or wrong ones. It’s very clever, but the Vision Pro version adds in the ability to overlay a virtual keyboard on your real one, so it can provide visual cues (in the form of glowing notes) when you’re not sure which key to play. It also annotates your fingers, so you can see which fingers are supposed to play which notes.
More than half a decade in the making, Apple’s in-house modem system will debut next spring, according to people familiar with the matter. The technology is slated to be part of the iPhone SE, the company’s entry-level smartphone, which will be updated next year for the first time since 2022.
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For now, the modem won’t be used in Apple’s higher-end products. It’s set to come to a new mid-tier iPhone later next year, code-named D23, that features a far-thinner design than current models. The chip will also start rolling out as early as 2025 in Apple’s lower-end iPads.
In the ruling, three Ninth Circuit judges said the plaintiffs failed to establish that it is "virtually impossible" for them to reduce their storage, or that they will inevitably be forced to pay for iCloud storage. In fact, two named plaintiffs were still on the 5GB tier. The judges added that customers have the option to turn off iCloud at any time.
If every Apple customer has access to a private cloud compute to do on-demand AI processing for free, surely Apple can provide more than 5GB of free storage over at iCloud?
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