While the tech landscape moves quickly, if there’s a brand that seems to make innovation carrying notes of elegance and subtle power, it’s APPLE. And, despite the fact that new hardware was nowhere to be found, I recently got a lot of technology mush beamed straight onto my cerebrum at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024 at the green APPLE Park. Big tech conferences are always great fun because companies big enough to afford them want people to feel some of their magic, the belief that stuff was made in the best way possible by the nicest people. When I write about APPLE, it’s not product reviews so much as finding out how the sausage got made.
Unlike those past iterations, WWDC 2024 lacked devices that any attendees could see or touch. But APPLE’s first step toward the eventual launch of ‘APPLE Intelligence’ signalled its commitment to transforming the way people use technology. The key is that APPLE makes things personal. This is the big difference between APPLE, Microsoft, and Google. Instead of focussing on new ways that people can use technology, APPLE Intelligence is about how APPLE can integrate AI into how people use technology day in and day out without compromising user privacy or jeopardising the ease of use APPLE is known for.
But then we see such a thing as macOS Sequoia launched alongside the (wonderfully idiosyncratic) Calculator app in iPadOS 18, and immediately we begin to understand both the reach – Sequoia’s – and the depth – the Calculator’s – of APPLE’s development between the grand and the minute, the major and the trivial. This is what APPLE is about. This is what we reasonably expect from its brand. Most fundamentally, it’s about creating and supporting an ecosystem.
The changes APPLE has made to Siri, all part of what it calls the broader APPLE Intelligence, reflect this move towards making the virtual assistant not just smarter, but also more aware and contextual. The new Siri is good at handling changes to your command mid-way through. APPLE is placing greater focus on coming up with a genuinely smart companion that can communicate like us.
At a time when privacy is increasingly important, the way that APPLE thoughtfully and meticulously integrates private settings is exceptional. They have apps such as Passwords (no longer the 11th-grade joke), and fine-grained controls like giving apps the ability to share your contacts, but not your photos. APPLE also has its own privacy cloud compute framework and anonymises the data that is sent to the servers for processing.
Going deeper into the texture of APPLE Intelligence reveals a deliberate approach to AI, not seen elsewhere in the corporate world. One indication of all this strategy is APPLE’s insistence on not calling its AI anything other than the full phrase, as though its branding strategy would get jeopardised if it resorted to a fashionable acronym. Another indication is the specificity of the features it does have deployed, along with the way they depend on detailed, low-level, on-device processing to deliver on what they promise, in a way that wouldn’t be feasible or desirable if user privacy wasn’t everything to the organisation behind them.
macOS Sequoia should serve remind us of the grand intention behind APPLE’s ecosystem, which already goes a long way to make its hardware and software as pleasing to use as possible. With features such as iPhone mirroring, APPLE isn’t just showing off its technological competence but great insight into people’s desire for more coherence and uniformity throughout our devices.
And at the heart of all that, APPLE remains an icon of innovation, wedded to the way technology and lifestyle mix together. From the beginning, when APPLE shook up the status quo with products and services that were not just new but set new benchmarks for what technology could be, the focus on design, function and respecting the privacy of customers has always been at the heart of its service to humanity. Yes, APPLE strives to create products that augment users’ lives and bring them joy, which is why its focus will always be on WWDC.
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