The question has been hanging over Apple, the Midas King of the tech world, for some time. When will the company finally position itself in the battle of the giants for supremacy in artificial intelligence? Now, at the start of Apple’s developer conference WWDC, the company has given its answer, in a very typical way.
“Artificial intelligence, Apple style” – this sentence from Apple CEO Tim Cook sums it up. As so often, Apple has not really invented anything completely new. But the designers and engineers have made devices and software that already existed usable for the masses. Now for artificial intelligence. Or, as Apple’s software boss Craig Federighi summed up the strategy: “AI for everyone.”
The AI functions, such as automatically generated replies to emails, are integrated directly into the respective apps and can be triggered very easily. The AI, which of course is not simply called AI, but rather Apple Intelligence, is like a layer above the apps and can – or so it promises – also recognize connections. The presentation was about the daughter’s appearance, which overlapped with an appointment in the calendar, and the AI also checked the traffic situation at the same time.
Because this is all very private data that you don’t want to hand over to any provider on any cloud, Apple has taken two measures. The system tries to calculate as many tasks as possible on the devices themselves. Only when their computing capacity is insufficient does the cloud have to step in.
The head of the new partner Open AI does not get an appearance
For this purpose, Apple has developed a special cloud whose servers run on special Apple chips and in which none of the content is to be stored. The AI calculations only work on newer Apple devices that have the necessary chips. For the iPhone, these are only the top models of the latest 15 series; iPads and Macs must have a chip from the M series. So if you want to be part of the AI revolution, you may have to upgrade.
Apple did not develop all of the new AI capabilities itself. Towards the end of the presentation, software boss Federighi names the new partner Open AI. Its boss Sam Altman, however, does not appear in the, as always, strictly styled video composition. Chat-GPT with its latest language model 4o is the basis for the writing capabilities, for example.
You can also use Chat-GPT directly from Apple devices for free, but you still have to pay for the paid services. Apple announced that it would integrate more models in the future, but no further information was given. It will still be some time before Siri’s new capabilities and AI options can be used worldwide. A pre-release version is due to be released for the USA in the fall, while non-English-speaking countries will have to wait until 2025 – Apple did not provide any more precise information.
Arch-rival Samsung is already aggressively promoting smartphones with AI features
Apple was under pressure when it came to AI. In the public perception, the company based in Cupertino, California, had fallen far behind in recent years when it came to generative language models such as Chat-GPT. More or less unnoticed by the general public, Apple had already done a lot to catch up with the competition from Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
However, the big breakthrough, a game changer that one would expect from a company with the aspirations of Apple, has been a long time coming. For example, the Siri assistant function now seems inflexible and outdated to many users. Arch-rival Samsung, on the other hand, is already aggressively promoting smartphones equipped with AI functions – even if their usefulness in everyday life is still limited.
Nonetheless, Elon Musk immediately threatened to ban Apple devices in his companies if the iPhone manufacturer integrated AI systems from Open AI at the operating system level. After all, the Tesla and Space-X boss is pushing forward his own AI system xAI.
At Apple’s developer conference, the focus is traditionally on software, but occasionally new hardware has been announced, most recently Apple’s Vision Pro computer glasses. This time there was no famous one more thingonly the announcement that the Vision Pro will soon be available outside of North America, in Germany it will be available on July 12th.
In general, the presentation of the upcoming versions of Apple’s operating systems for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac computers showed that the company’s strategy remains to weave all of these devices into an ever denser network. For example, an iPhone that is in another room in the house can be completely controlled from a Mac. Or the screen of a Mac can be wirelessly projected onto the Vision Pro glasses, all the way to a huge curved virtual screen.