At WWDC last year, Apple showed off how Siri would be able to do things like understand your personal context or take actions based on what’s on your screen. But in March, Apple delayed these features, saying in a statement that “it’s going to take us longer than we thought” to deliver them.
That statement vaguely said that “we anticipate” rolling out the features “in the coming year.” However, SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak clarified in an interview this week that Apple was saying 2026.
To me, Apple has been clear that it has a different strategy, and I think that strategy mostly makes sense. I have never heard someone wish for an Apple chatbot. The issue is that everyone can see that Apple seems behind in executing said strategy, both that features didn’t ship on time and that the ones that did ship don’t measure up to similar features from other companies.
Secondly, they seem to be trying to debunk John Gruber’s claim that Apple showed vaporware at the last WWDC. But Apple’s assertion that there was actual, working software doesn’t contradict anything Gruber wrote.
I spoke this week, off the record, to multiple trusted sources in Apple’s software engineering group, and none of them ever saw an internal build of iOS that had this feature before last year’s keynote. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t such a build. But none of my sources ever saw one, and they don’t believe there was one, because they’re in positions where they believe that if there had been such a build, their teams would have had access to it. Most rank and file engineers within Apple do not believe that feature existed in an even vaguely functional state a year ago, and the first any of them ever heard of it was when they watched the keynote with the rest of us on the first day of WWDC last year.
The iPad is the device where this struggle has been out in the open, though I’d argue it affects the iPhone and Mac just as much. On the iPad, though, the divide is pretty stark: A lot of people really never want to do anything but use one app at a time. They’re never pressuring the processor. They’re not connecting peripherals, even Apple-built ones. How do you give the people who want more what they want, without wrecking the experience for the much larger group who like it simple?
Apple’s taking another cut at this, and it seems to me that by following the Mac’s lead, they’re setting the iPad up for success. Nobody, not even power users like me, wants to see the simplicity of the basic iPad experience degraded in any way. I think they’ve done a pretty good job of adding pro features without breaking it for everyone else. We’ll see how it goes over the summer and into the fall.
iPhone users will be able to wirelessly stream videos to the CarPlay screen using AirPlay, according to Apple. For safety reasons, video playback will only be available when the vehicle is parked, to prevent distracted driving. The connected iPhone will be able to detect when the vehicle is in motion and end playback.
When the setting is enabled, CarPlay will be automatically resized to better fit the shape and size of your vehicle's dashboard screen, if possible.
The import/export feature, which Apple demonstrated at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, will be available in the next major releases of iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. It aims to solve one of the biggest shortcomings of passkeys as they have existed to date. Passkeys created on one operating system or credential manager are largely bound to those environments. A passkey created on a Mac, for instance, can sync easily enough with other Apple devices connected to the same iCloud account. Transferring them to a Windows device or even a dedicated credential manager installed on the same Apple device has been impossible.
AutoMix is designed to transition from one song to another as the song that's playing ends, using time stretching and beat matching for a seamless shift. Apple says that it's meant to work "like a DJ."
Cast your mind back five years to macOS 11 Big Sur, when what had been expected to be macOS 10.16 but was announced as 11.0 instead. That had the potential to upset a lot of code and scripts that had become used to checking the minor but not major version number. Apple foresaw those problems, and devised an ingenious scheme that allowed Big Sur to be simultaneously both 10.16 and 11.0. It’s hardly surprising that has been implemented once again for Tahoe.
Researchers revealed on Thursday that two European journalists had their iPhones hacked with spyware made by Paragon. Apple says it has fixed the bug that was used to hack their phones.
The Citizen Lab wrote in its report, shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication, that Apple had told its researchers that the flaw exploited in the attacks had been “mitigated in iOS 18.3.1,” a software update for iPhones released on February 10.
Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, and the Steve Jobs Archive has marked the occasion by uploading an HD version of the speech, publishing notes Jobs emailed to himself, and sharing details about the leadup to the speech.
“I think it’s crazy that 20 years in, we still offer music for free,” Schusser, vp Apple Music and international content, told NMPA CEO David Israelite during their discussion Wednesday evening. “We’re the only service that doesn’t have a free service. As a company, we look at music as art, and we would never want to give away art for free.
“The Murderbot Diaries” are not about existential risk but about existential drama—less “2001” or “Terminator” than “Waiting for Godot” or “No Exit.” It hacked its own governor module—the part of its brain that enforced obedience—without having given much thought to what it would do with its freedom, aside from vegetate in front of the televisual feed in its mind. In the meantime, it takes another security job, where it must continue to wear the mask of unfreedom. In the current lexicon of the A.I.-safety community, it is “sandbagging”: pretending to be aligned with human purposes until it figures out what its own purposes might possibly be.
I just remembered that I haven't watch the WWDC keynote video yet. And I'm feeling fine.
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Thanks for reading.