hckrnws

Have to say, I was thoroughly impressed by what Apple showed today with all this Personal AI stuff. And it proves that the real power of consumer AI will be in the hands of the platform owners where you have most of your digital life in already (Apple or Google for messaging, mail, photos, apps; Microsoft for work and/or life).

The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations or asking about someone’s flight is so useful (can’t tell you how many times my brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup!).

I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem.

Nevermind all the thought put into private cloud, integration with ChatGPT, the image generation playground, and Genmoji. I can genuinely see all this being useful for “the rest of us,” to quote Craig. As someone who’s taken a pessimistic view of Apple software innovation the last several years, I’m amazed.

One caveat: the image generation of real people was super uncanny and made me uncomfortable. I would not be happy to receive one of those cold and impersonal, low-effort images as a birthday wish.

> I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem.

It's the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In contrast to Google and Microsoft.

I hadn't considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't.

Nobody wants a GenAI feature that works in Gmail, a different one that works in Messages, etc. -- they want a platform capability that works anywhere they use text.

I'm not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-capable of delivering that, at this point.

"AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`'

Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.

> "I trust Apple..."

I'm actually a little gobsmacked anyone on this forum can type those words without physically convulsing.

The even more terrible part is I'm sure it's common. And so via network externalities the rest of us who do NOT trust any of these companies on the basis that all of them, time and again, have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy in all possible ways, will get locked into this lunacy. I now can't deal with the government without a smartphone controlled by either google or apple. No other choice. Because this utter insanity isn't being loudly called out, spat upon, and generally treated with the withering contempt that these companies have so richly and roundly earned this decision is being made for all society by the most naive among us.

I don't think the GP meant "trust" as in "I think Apple has my best interests at heart."

Rather, I think they meant "trust" as in "Apple is observably predictable and rational in how they work toward their own self-interest, rarely doing things for stupid reasons. And they have chosen to center their business on a long-term revenue strategy involving selling high-margin short-lifetime hardware — a strategy that only continues to work because of an extremely high level of brand-image they've built up; and which would be ruined instantly if they broke any of the fundamental brand promises they make. These two factors together mean that Apple have every reason to be incentivized to only say things if they're going to mean them and follow through on them."

There's also the much simpler kind of "trust" in the sense of "I trust them because they don't put me in situations where I need to trust them. They actively recuse themselves from opportunities to steal my data, designing architectures to not have places where that can happen." (Of course, the ideal version of this kind of trust would be a fully-open-source-hardware-and-software, work-in-the-open, signed-public-supply-chain-ledger kind of company. You don't get that from Apple, nor from any other bigcorp. Apple's software is proprietary... but at least it's in your hand where you can reverse-engineer it! Google's software is off in a cloud somewhere where nobody can audit changes to it.)

For me it's more "I think Apples business interests more closely align with my wishes as a customer" as opposed to any other megacorp.

At the heart of it: I feel like I'm Apple's customer in a way that I never feel like Google's customer (in everything they do it always seems like their real customers are Ad Buyers, even when you are ostensibly paying for services). (And Microsoft is in the middle and all over the map where some divisions treat you like a customer and others don't depending on the prevailing winds and the phase of the moon.)

What leads you to feel this way?

They are anti right to repair & they have their walled garden on their mobile devices. Their vertically integrated model also leads to unusually high prices. This website in particular would also directly feel the pain of Apple killing apps to implement themselves later, the greedy apple store cut and also not allowing use of hardware features that Apples themselves can use. Consumers feel this indirectly (higher prices, less competition).

Also, don't get it twisted, Apple is still collecting all of your data, even if you ask them not to [0].

0 - https://mashable.com/article/apple-data-privacy-collection-l...

There's absolutely several axes in play here. You have very different concerns than I do, and that's valid.

Their vertically integrated model leads to very good customer service. I don't pay extra for Apple Care and I still get treated like an adult if I show up to an Apple Store with some need.

Even when Apple makes a mistake and collects more data than they should, I don't expect that data to influence ads that I see or to be sold to the highest bidder. (As a developer myself, I find that I can be quite lenient on app internal telemetry.) I can also see that ad review is barely a small side hustle to them in their Quaterly Reports and I can also see that most of their ad revenue is from untargeted campaigns. (Microsoft is a bigger ad company than Apple. Google is an ad company deep into its DNA at this point with everything else a side hustle.)

There is a beauty to a well maintained walled garden. Royalty invested a lot of money into walled gardens and Apple maybe doesn't treat you exactly like royalty, but there's a lot of similar respect/dignity there in their treatment of customers, even if they want you to trust them not to touch the flowers or dig below the walls too much. They want you to have a good time. They want their garden to be like a Disney World, safer than the real world.

You may not appreciate those sorts of comforts and that's fine. Plenty of people prefer the beauty and comfort of a walled garden than the free-for-all of a public park (or the squatter's rights of an abandoned amusement park if you don't mind playing unpaid mechanic more often than not). There's a lot of subjective axes to evaluate all of this on.

I don't expect that data to influence ads that I see or to be sold to the highest bidder.

You should temper your expectations: https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-dat...

France’s data protection authority, CNIL, fined Apple €8 million ... for illegally harvesting iPhone owners’ data for targeted ads without proper consent.

If ads are a small percentage of Apple's quarterly reports, that isn't sound reasoning; after all, they make a lot of money in general in a lot of areas.

And if ads are leading to services growth (which they are), you should expect them to do more, scummier ad related things over time.

Fundamentally, ads is an incredibly high margin business with lots of room for growth (particularly when you own the platform and can handicap your competitors) so over time, all tech companies will become ads companies.

Holy shit that is so depressing...

Yeah that's pretty much how I feel as well.

> high-margin short-lifetime hardware

I don't think this applies to their watch or tablet business where the limiting factor on lifetime in the market is security/os updates. Most alternatives in that space have significantly worse support cycles.

This used to be true of their phones as well, but the android market seems to be catching up in ways that tablets/wearables have not (see google's 7 year commitment for pixels).

Not sure if it applies to general purpose. Certainly there are non mac computers that we can throw linux on and use for 10+ years and there are examples of apple laptops getting cut off earlier than I'd like (RIP my beloved 12" macbook), but there are often some pretty serious tradeoffs to machines older than 7 years anyway. Also, I'm not sure if apple's strategy re: support lifecycles on products after the AS migration have shifted. It wouldn't surprise me if the first gen m1 products get 10 years of security updates.

[flagged]

That's some nice casual racism you've got there. Actually it might be overt racism.

it's not that I blindly trust apple; it's more that they're the one FAANG company where I am the actual customer and their incentives align/depend on keeping me happy. Google/MS could care less how I feel; and I am well aware that I am most certainly not their customer.

> it's more that they're the one FAANG company where I am the actual customer and their incentives align/depend on keeping me happier

Do they though? Battery performance that 'lies' to you intentionally, planned obsolescence, locked in ecosystems, overtly undercutting the alternatives, marketing that hypes up rather bland features...I admit I don't see your point.

Apple, if anything, seem about as user hostile as Microsoft is these days.

> Battery performance that 'lies' to you intentionally, planned obsolescence ...

Everything is relative. Apple generally supports their devices with OS updates for longer than most Android phone makers. Their incentives here are well aligned: they get a decent profit from Apple Store no matter how long you use their phone.

I think a lot of the reporting on Apples actions is very click-baity and lack nuance. Take the case when Apple throttled CPU performance of their phones when the battery got old and degraded. It was reported as a case of planned obsolescence, but it was in fact the exact opposite: by limiting the power consumption of the CPU they avoided unexpected phone shutdown due to battery voltage going too low during bursts of high power consumption. A phone that randomly shuts down is borderline use-less. A phone that is slower can at least be used for a while longer. Apple didn't have to do this. They would have spent less R&D money, and had a much lower chance of bad PR backlash, if they just simply did nothing. Yet they did something to keep old phones useful for longer.

> locked in ecosystems

That's a fine balance. Creating a good ecosystem is part of what makes Apple so user friendly. And it's a lot harder to create open ecosystems than having closed ones. Especially when you factor in security and reliability. If Apple diverted resources to making their ecosystems more open I think their ecosystem integration would have been significantly worse, which would have made them lose the thing most users considers Apples primary advantage.

Apple is a mixed bag. They were one of the first to go all-in on USB-C. Sometimes they push aggressively for new open standards that improve user experience. Yet they held on to Lightning for far too long on their phones. But here you get back to the planned obsolescence factor: there's a HUGE amount of perfectly fine Lightning accessories out there that people/companies are using with iPhones. If they killed Lightning too fast I can guarantee you they would have gotten a lot of hate from people who couldn't use their Lightning accessory anymore. With laptops that wasn't a big issue. Adapters are significantly less convenient to use with phone accessories.

Apple is tinker-hostile, but they’re great at getting-things-done for the majority of people. It’s frustrating when you have the knowledge to build custom workflows, but the happy path and the guardrails work great for many.

Microsoft have no consistency and Google wants you to pray at the altar of advertising.

Shouldn't Microsoft be somewhere between Google and Apple ? After all, they do rely on you buying their software in a way Google does not.

Who do you think is Netflix's customer if not you?

> I'm actually a little gobsmacked anyone on this forum can type those words without physically convulsing.

Apple tells a pretty compelling lie here. Rather than execute logic on a server whose behavior can change moment to moment, it executes on a device you "own" with a "knowable" version of its software. And you can absolutely determine no network traffic occurs during the execution of the features from things announced this week and going back a decade.

The part that Apple also uploads your personal information to their servers on separate intervals both powering their internal analytics and providing training data is also known, and for the most part, completely lost on people.

Are you claiming Apple uses personal user data (e.g someone’s photos or texts) as training data for their server-side models? That’s a massive claim and there are some journalists you should definitely shoot a message to on signal if you have proof of that and aren’t just blowing smoke.

Apple's claim (per public statements) is:

- They upload your data to their servers. This is a requirement of iCloud and several non-iCloud systems like Maps.

- Where analytics is concerned, data is anonymized. They give examples of how they do this like by adding noise to the start and end of map routes.

- Where training is concerned, data is limited to purchased data (photos) and opted-in parties (health research).

My point is that Apple's code executing on device can be verified to execute on device. That concept does not require trust. Where servers are involved and Apple does admit their use in some cases, you trust them (as much as you trust Google) their statements are both perfectly true and ageless. Apple transitions seamlessly between two true concepts with wildly different implications.

Apple's marketing and branding is truly impressive when even Hackernews crowd, who'd you assume are very tech savvy, are eating it up all of the propaganda.

“Wow, so many of these people neck deep into tech, privacy, and law disagree with me. It must be because they’re all suckers.”

Despite your snark - you'll never win an argument where trusting a for profit corporation is some sort of win over transparent secure system. Yes Apple might be better of the lesser evils but is this really where us as a privileged class of people who actually understand all this give up and give in? This is sad.

You’ll also never win an argument when assuming that the people you disagree with haven’t thought this through and come up with a different conclusion. The snark is from the implication that we’re either clueless or blind to it. The more likely explanation is that we have different priorities, and that we’re viewing the question from a different angle. That doesn’t make us ignorant or unprincipled, any more than you disagreeing with me makes you naive or unserious.

We have different ideas. That’s all. There’s no need to look down on each other for it.

There’s not really any transparent secure system that competes with Apple.

Yeah, at this point, for me, it’s “use Apple stuff” or “barely use computers in my personal life”. I did the Linux and (later) Android tinkering thing for a good long while, and I’m over it. Losing all the features and automation and integration I get with no time lost, for a bunch of time consuming and janky DIY that still wouldn’t get me all of it, isn’t something I’ll do these days. I’d just avoid computers.

I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD. I lost so much time to screwing around with a million config options. Recompiling with slightly different flags to make things 2% faster. Keeping my system bleeding-edge up to date. All that nonsense was fun but it was a way to avoid getting started on what I was suppose to be doing.

Going back to a Linux desktop would be the end of me. I know it.

Same. Aside from a few self hosted services, I use Apple for my phone and work machines because I just want it to fucking work all the time. My parents understand that if they want IT support from me that they must use a Mac or iPhone - because then I rarely have to help them with anything.

The one exception I made recently was to dump Windows and move to a Fedora immutable build after seeing how capable the Steam Deck (and Linux) was for all the games I play. I’ll get shot of that if it causes me grief though - or just stop playing games on my PC.

I just don’t have the energy to mess about with it all these days and Apple is the 2nd best option in lieu of that.

Tried that route, and while it is quite viable in 2024, I reverted to dual booting. I can turn on my computer to work or to play games, and those two environments are completely separate. Nvidia terrible corporation, but similar with Apple in the #justworks category. Getting much better on linux recently, but you lose stuff like the new hdr feature, and occasionally have to worry about anticheat

Yeah, I’m lucky in that I’m pretty stable now in which games I’m playing and they all run flawlessly via Proton or Lutris. It seems to mostly be the controversial kernel-level anticheats which don’t play ball or where devs don’t enable the Linux support flags for things like EAC which cause a problem. For those, I kinda just have to suck it up and play something else.

I did have a ton of issues with NVidia in the same environment, but after putting a Radeon card in it has been smooth sailing. That’s to be expected I guess.

I doubt I would have tolerated this even a few years ago though and would have ended up like yourself with a dual boot setup.

Define "competes". Sent from my GNU/Linux phone Librem 5.

Uh, friend, this is still just an internet technology enthusiast forum. Popular opinion here is equally as reliable as Reddit. If you are taking hn upvotes as some kind of expert input, you're in for a rough time.

No argument from me. I was replying to someone who couldn't believe the readers here, "who'd you assume are very tech savvy", didn't agree with their opinions.

"Wow, so many of these people disagree with me, it might be because they have a huge dangerous blind spot because of a lack of knowledge and/or experience and/or have trouble seeing things from the outside"

...is a thing I experience on a regular basis (and that I only really gained confidence in once I actually saw the mistakes cause problems, e.g. password managers)

I would give multiple upvotes to this, were it possible.

I do not have either Google or Apple accounts and I do not intend to ever open such accounts (despite owning some Android smartphones and having owned Apple laptops).

Because of this, I am frequently harassed by various companies or agencies, which change their interaction metods into smartphone apps and then deprecate the alternatives.

Moreover, I actually would be willing to install such apps, but only if there would be some means to download them, but most of them insist on providing the app only in the official store, from which I cannot install it, because I have no Google account.

I have been forced to close my accounts in one of the banks that I use, because after using their online banking system in the browser for more than a decade, including from my smartphone, they have decided to have a custom app.

In the beginning that did not matter, but then they have terminated their Web server for online banking and they have refused to provide directly their app, leaving the Google store as the only source of it.

I have been too busy to try to fight this legally, but I cannot believe that their methods do not break any law. I am not an US citizen, I live in the European Union, and when an European bank (a Societe Generale subsidiary) refuses to provide its services to anyone who does not enter in a contractual relationship with a foreign US company, such discrimination cannot be legal.

I sympathize with the plight, as I have also occasionally tried to fight this fight.

However, to quibble with your last analysis, you're almost certainly entering an agreement with the EU registered legal entity of a multinational company, and you almost certainly already had to do that to obtain the hardware, run the OS, use the browser, etc. The degree to which any of those contracts are enforceable is another matter.

Even if Google were treated as a local company, that does not change anything.

I find unbelievable that a bank has the arrogance of conditioning their services on whether their customers accept to do business or not with some third party.

I see no difference between the condition of having a Google account and for instance a condition that I should buy my car from Audi or from any other designated company, instead of from wherever I want. It is none of my bank's business what products or services I choose to buy or use (outside of special circumstances like when receiving bank credits).

Could you provide an alternative model where you get what you want, that is economically viable for vendors and manufacturers to invest in, and that does not require me to teach my parents how to sysadmin their phones to keep them safe?

I trust Apple more than I trust Google to not share my data with a large group of corporate entities who want to sell me things I do not wish to buy.

I believe both - and if required, organizations like Mozilla, Ubuntu, Redhat/Oracle, whoever - to comply with law enforcement requests made of them to hand over any data relating to me that they might hold. I'm OK with that. I think Apple has less of that data than Google, and works actively to have less of it. Google works actively to increase the amount of data they have about me.

I think even if you had a functional device using entirely open software, that any organisation you share that data with or use to communicate with using that device - including cloud service providers, network providers, and so on - would also comply with law enforcement.

"Ah!", you say, "But I get to choose which crypto to use! I know it won't have backdoors!". To which I will reply you are unlikely to have read and truly understood the source code to the crypto software you're using, and that such software is regularly shown to have security issues. It's just not true that open source means that all bugs become shallow, and the "many eyes" you're hoping for to surface these issues are likely employed at, err, Apple, Google, Redhat, Ubuntu, Mozilla...

I look at the landscape and I conclude that true open source environments have a ton of issues, Google/Android have far more (for my taste), and that I am more confident in Apple than I am in either myself (even as an experienced tech expert), or Google, or Microsoft, to keep my data private to me to the greatest extent legally permissible.

Do I think "legally permissible" should be extended? Sure. Do I wish a multi-billionaire would throw 50% of the net worth at making open source compete on the same level? Yeah, cool. Do I think any of that is realistic in the next 5 years? No. So, I make my bets accordingly, eyes wide open, balancing the risks...

Do you have any examples of Apple being untrustworthy to back up your rather extreme reaction?

You should remember that in December 2023 it was revealed that the "Apple Silicon" CPUs have some undocumented testing features, which have unbelievably remained enabled in the Apple devices for many years until being notified by the bug finders, instead of being disabled at the end of production.

Using the undocumented but accessible control registers, all the memory protections of the Apple devices could be bypassed. Using this hardware backdoor, together with some software bugs in the Apple system libraries and applications, for many years, until the end of 2023, it has been possible to remotely take complete control of any iPhone, with access to its storage and control of the camera and microphone, in such a way that it was almost impossible for the owner to discover this (the backdoor bugs have been discovered only as a consequence of analyzing some suspicious Internet traffic of some iPhones that were monitored by external firewalls).

It is hard to explain such a trivial security error as not disabling a testing backdoor after production, for a company that has claimed publicly for so long that they take the security of their customers very seriously and that has provided a lot of security theater features, like a separate undocumented security processor, while failing to observe the most elementary security rules.

It is possible that the backdoor was intentional, either inserted with the knowledge of the management at the request of some TLA, or by a rogue Apple employee who was a mole of such a TLA, but these alternative explanations are even worse for Apple than the explanation based on negligence.

I don't think this demonstrates untrustworthiness.

Sure. Next you'll say that POPCOUNT and the Intel Management Engine are actually perfectly trustworthy too.

Wait, what's wrong with BMI1 instructions?

Allegedly added to the instruction set by request of the NSA, who uses it for things. https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2019/09/08/popcount/

Good thing they did that then, it’s a very useful instruction!

popcount is actually a secret instruction to detect dissidents who use Hacker News. Wake up sheeple

Forgot the "screeching minority" who values privacy quote already?

https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...

> all of them, time and again, have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy in all possible ways

Sorry, but this seems like a very vague claim to me. Can you specifically point out a time where Apple proved itself untrustworthy in a way that impacts personal privacy?

When Apple says they treat my data in a specific way, then yes I do trust them. This promise is pretty central to my usage of them as a company. I'd change my mind if there was evidence to suggest they're lying, or have betrayed that trust, but I haven't seen any, and your post doesn't provide any either.

It depends on what you'd consider "untrustworthy", but some (myself included) feel it's hypocritical for Apple to position itself as a privacy conscious choice, and use its marketing / PR machine to give the impression it only makes money on devices/subscriptions, when they're silently managing an ads-funded cash cow, with billions of dollars that go directly to the bottom line, as pure profit.

Here's a few pointers, to get you up to speed [1-5]. Of course there's nothing wrong with monetizing their own user base and selling ads based on their 1PD (or, in the case of Safari, monetizing the search engine placement). But I find it ironic that they make a ton of money by selling ads based on the exact same practices they demonize others for -- user behavior, contextual, location, profile.

[1] https://searchads.apple.com/

[2] Apple’s expanding ad ambitions: A closer look at its journey toward a comprehensive ad tech stack - https://digiday.com/media-buying/apples-expanding-ad-ambitio...

[3] Apple’s Ad Network Is The Biggest Beneficiary Of Apple’s New Marketing Rules: Report -- https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/10/19/apples-...

[4] Apple Privacy Suits Claim App Changes Were Guise to Boost Ad Revenue - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/app...

[5] Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims - https://proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company

> they're silently managing an ads-funded cash cow, with billions of dollars that go directly to the bottom line, as pure profit

Advertising isn't anti-privacy. Apple's fight was with tracking by third parties without user knowledge or consent. That is independent of, but often used for, advertising purposes.

This is different from say Google determining ads on Youtube based on what you are watching on Youtube.com, and from Amazon or Apple promoting products based on your product searches solely within their respective stores.

> Advertising isn't anti-privacy.

Advertising works much better when there is no privacy.

Tracking-based Ad targeting is blip in the history of advertising and goes against previous decades of "common sense" in advertising that the best ads cast the widest net and catch the eye of people you (and they) don't even know are potential targets.

I hope this current fad dies and people return to that older marketing "common sense". Over-targeting is bad for consumers and bad for advertisers, the only people truly benefiting seem to be Google and Meta.

Your truism doesn’t refute their point.

The fact that Advanced Data Protection on iCloud wasn't forced is sus.

As someone who has to help my father with his personal tech as his mental health deteriorates (several brain tumors), I'm thrilled every time I find something that ISN'T locked down behind pin codes, passwords or other authentication methods that he no longer remembers or can communicate.

His current state really has made me think about my own tech, about what should be locked down and what really should not be - things that we lock down out of habit (or by force) rather than out of necessity.

Given the rate at which the elderly find themselves swindled out of money due to scams, hacks or any other method of invasion, I really don’t think loosening controls makes the most sense.

Might be interesting if companies offered the ability for someone to be a “steward” over another when it came to sensitive choices (like allowing new logins, sending money, etc). Of course that itself is a minefield of issues with family members themselves taking advantage of their elderly members. But maybe power of attorney would have to be granted?

What I hinted at was more granularity in how we treat different types of data, or other accesses, in response to the idea of being forced to turn on "Advanced Data Protection on iCloud".

Rather than putting all of our personal data and accesses under a thick virtual fire blanket, perhaps it is perfectly fine if some of it isn't protected at all, or is protected in ways that could be easily circumvented with just a tiny bit of finagling.

This is now how I'm approaching my own digital foot print, that some not secret things are nowadays wide open, unencrypted and you just need to know where to look to access all of it.

Relatedly, I think a lot of us under-estimate/under-appreciate physical security in our threat models. A desktop tower that never leaves my house and would be a pain for anyone but a dedicated burglar to steal maybe doesn't need the same sort of security/encryption/authentication requirements for physical access in person that a phone or laptop might need. Certainly there are plenty of fears of people targeting me specifically and getting physical access to my house, but there are also more legal protections from some of those. Threat models are all about trade-offs and physical security/physical access restrictions trade-offs can be under-appreciated as places to make choices that can be in your favor.

I understand what you mean but I think maybe your example wasn’t terrific given I think the elderly are actually frequent and vulnerable targets for crims. I’ve actually had scenarios where my parents were unable to log into an account and when I asked why they needed to, it was to give some “support specialist” information they were asking for. Is it a pain in the ass to help your parents install a mobile app sometimes? Yeah I guess. I’m just glad someone didn’t drain their bank account on them.

There is sometimes a point to inconvenience in that it requires time and assessment.

Yeah, the thing about "security" is that there is a lot more chance that it will come to bite you in the ass later down the road than being successful (actually prevent an issue). I have some funny stories about unrecoverable drives because of forgotten encryption keys.

For most people the only security they need is actually access to their money, everything else is mostly irrelevant, nobody really cares about weird habits or whatever.

Not when you understand the tradeoffs being made. If you enable Advanced Data Protection and lose or forget your password, Apple cannot help you recover it. It makes sense that it's opt-in and users make a conscious choice to make that trade-off.

Have you ever done tech support?

Yeah, you’re right. Apple’s approach to privacy is like one of those fairytale genies. On paper, and in many technical aspects, class-leading, but useless because anyone powerful and/or determined enough to hurt you will be able to use the backdoors that they willingly provide.

End to end encryption? Sure, but we’re sending your location and metadata in unencrypted packets.

Don’t want governments to surveil your images? Sure, they can’t see the images - but they’ll send us hashes of illegal images, and we’ll turn your images into hashes, check them against each other, and report you to them if we find enough.

Apple essentially sells unbreakable locked doors while being very careful to keep a few windows open. They are a key PRISM member and have obligations under U.S. law that they will fulfil. Encryption backdoors aren’t needed when the systems that they work within can be designed to provide backdoors.

I fully expect that Apple Intelligence will have similar system defects that won’t be covered properly, and will go forgotten until some dissident gets killed and we wonder why.

For a look at their PR finesse in tricking media, see this, over the CSAM fiasco that has been resolved, in Apple’s favour.

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n...

> Sure, they can’t see the images - but they’ll send us hashes of illegal images, and we’ll turn your images into hashes, check them against each other, and report you to them if we find enough.

> I fully expect that Apple Intelligence will have similar system defects

Being able to scan devices for CSAM at scale is a "defect" to you?

Yes, it is a defect. For many reasons

- it's anti-user: a device spying on you and reporting back to a centralized server is a bad look

- it's a slippery slope: talking about releasing this caused them to get requests from governments to consider including "dissident" information

- it's prone to abuse: within days, the hashing mechanism they were proposing was reverse engineered and false positives were embedded in innocent images

- it assumes guilt across the population: what happened to innocent by default?

and yes, csam is a huge problem. And btw, apple DOES currently scan for it- if you share an album (and thus decrypt it), it is scanned for CSAM.

Yeah but Google and MS have the same problems.. What your talking about is the reality of using a computer connected to the internet since 2003.

But they don't bullshit about it as much and their offerings are much cheaper and it's easier to not have to pay as much (either with data or money).

There is just a general hypocrisy about Apple that is hilarious.

This is true, but your examples aren't directly trying to pretend they are the better alternatives for that. Apple is doing its best to paint itself as some golden company when reality dictates they are no better (if honestly worse in some categories).

Don't expect balanced objective opinions on Apple on HN, that was never ever the case. Some of it are tech enthusiasts, some are maybe employees or investors, some is paid PR.

Nothing wrong there per se, its just good to realize it.

What government needs you to have a smartphone from Apple or Google?

The Australian Government required you to have an app called MyGovID to do you business taxes and other administrative tasks. This app is only Apple or Android, there is no web interface.

That’s crazy. Why no web interface? In Poland for taxes we have a web interface that is mobile and stationary, and for many other things it’s a choice between an app and web and paper.

The tax part is all web, it just mandatory 2 factor authentication to login that requires the app.

Ahl. In our case, we have mobile app 2fa, but also an sms 2fa, and authentication through bank login - it’s quite neat that the government struck deal with a bunch of banks, and they serve as identity providers too.

Not a requirement, but in Poland a ton of administration things can be done from a dedicated iphone/android app - including using your official ID. It is optional though, and you can alway do the same stuff (ID aside) from the web, or using paper and going places in person.

> Because this utter insanity isn't being loudly called out, spat upon, and generally treated with the withering contempt that these companies have so richly and roundly earned this decision is being made for all society by the most naive among us.

Ah yes, blame the simple-minded plebes who foolishly cast their noses up at Windows Phone. If only Ballmer were still in charge, surely he'd have saved us from this horrible future of personal, privacy-respecting AI at the edge...

Have to agree, apple seems to put a really strong emphasis above all else on your shit is your shit and we don't want to see it.

But this is not true. that's the thing.

Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time. ios gives you zero control (all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it)

Apple uses your data. you should be able to say no.

And as for your data, they do other things too, a different way. Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to icloud.

I've seem privacy minded parents say no, but then they get their kid an iphone and all of their stuff goes to icloud.

I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data icloud.

> Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time.

The platform is heavily internet-integrated, and I would expect it to periodically hit Apple servers. There are a lot of people claiming to be security researchers reporting what Little Snitch told them. There are drastically fewer who would introspect packets and look for any gathered telemetry.

I really haven't seen evidence Apple is abusing their position here.

> Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to iCloud.

You need to enable iCloud. You are prompted.

Also, a new device should have next to nothing to upload to iCloud, as its hard disk is still in the factory configuration.

> I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data iCloud

They have desktop backup. Maybe they should allow third party backup Apps on iPhone, although I suspect data would be encrypted and blinded to prevent abuses by third parties, and recovery would be challenging because today recovery is only possible on a known-state filesystem. The recovery aspect is what really has limited it to the handful of approaches implemented directly by Apple.

A key difference is that Apple isn’t then selling the info it has on you to advertisers.

I don’t think any large tech company is morally good, but I trust Apple the most out of the big ones to not do anything nefarious with my info.

None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers. They allow advertisers to target people based on the data, but the data itself is never sold. And it would be dumb to sell it because selling targeted ads is a lot more valuable than selling data.

Just about everyone else other than the tech companies are actually selling your data to various brokers, from the DMV to the cellphone companies.

> None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers.

First-hand account from me that this is not factual at all.

I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.

On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes.

I can go on and on, and yeah, we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels, but to say FAANG doesn’t sell user data is naive at best.

> we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels

So you got aggregated analytics instead of data about individual users.

Meanwhile other companies are selling your name, phone number, address history, people you are affiliated with, detailed location history, etc.

Which one would you say is "selling user data"?

They absolutely are. And they give it to governments upon request.

Their privacy stories are marketing first.

I don't think they sell it like Google or Samsung. For example Apple does not have a location intelligence team dedicated to driving revenue for store brands or targeting users that go there using precise geo location data.

Google and Samsung do.

Give me a source that they are selling your data, not targeted ads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40642672

I _trust_ Google to attempt to do so, and fail sadly along the way…

They went from “Don’t be evil” to a cartoonish “Doctor Evil” character in a decade.

> And they give it to governments upon request.

So in other words, "companies operating within a nation are expected to abide by the laws of that nation"?

Apple structures their systems to limit the data they can turn over by request, and documents what data they do turn over. What else do you believe they should be doing?

Actually under US rule of law you don’t just turn over things upon request.

Much like every other tech company you test the request.

Apple never does.

> Apple never does.

Citation needed?

They are selling data to advertisers? I would like to know more about that.

Google isn't. They are the advertising engine and sell to advertisers for reach, just like Facebook does.

I trust Apple about as far as I can throw them too. They are inherently anti-consumer rights everywhere in their ecosystem. The "Privacy" angle is just PR.

I would say it is PR as much as it is a strategic differentiation. Their business model is too sell products and services directly to consumers. This is different from Microsoft who is selling to businesses who need data protection, but actually want to be able to monitor their employees and Google who wants to leverage your data / behavior to allow advertisers to effectively target you with ads.

None of the big companies expressly sell your information. Not because they are altruistic, but because it is an asset that they want to protect so they can rent to the next person.

Yo Apple is an ad company as well now. They do both.

They all do a little bit of everything. Google sells devices too, but they are not predominantly a physical device company.

At 3 trillion Dollars of market cap they are a capitalistic hellscape and do everything in their power to benefit their own interests, which are not yours.

It’s amazing how many here don’t understand that.

There are several very nuanced comments much farther up this chain who clearly do understand that, and lay out their informed reasoning for why they have chosen to use Apple devices for themselves. It’s amazing how many here seem to have ignored them.

Anyone who disagrees with you about this should buy a Mac and try not enabling iCloud. There's constant nags and as far as I could find, no way to turn them off.

1) Have you tried installing Linux? ;-)

2) I have booted macOS VMs without iCloud. I'm not sure of the nags though. I believe signing out of iCloud will prevent iCloud from contacting Apple.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/104958

1) yes:)

2) that is entirely NOT true. You should install little snitch and see what happens even if you NEVER sign into icloud. note that the phone home contact is not immediate, it happens in the background at random intervals from random applications.

just some random services blocked by little snitch on a mac:

accountsd, adprivacyd, airportd, AMPLibraryAgent, appstoreagent, apsd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, cloudd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service, commerce, configd, familycircled, mapspushd, nsurlsessiond, ocspd, rapportd, remindd, Safari, sntp, softwareupdated, Spotlight, sutdentd, syspolicyd, touristd, transparencyd, trustd, X11.bin

(never signed into an apple id)

Tell me more about how dastardly it is that Safari communicates with Apple servers. Type it from your browser that doesn’t communicate directly with its developers.

Judging from a lot of these comments, most of the folks here are reading/commenting via telnet.

I’ve never used iCloud since it came out. I can’t think of a single nag. Where do you see it on your iPhone or Mac?

There's several of them. The most annoying for me was getting intermittent notifications to sign in to iCloud.

There's also this one: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250727947

I eventually just gave in to stop the nags.

I have an iPad (not iPhone or Mac). If you don't set up Icloud, there's always an annoying bright red circle in settings that tells you to "finish setting up your iPad".

Doesn't have to be bright red, or even there at all.

Last time I had that on a laptop I was going to wipe soon afterward and didn’t want to fully set up, I clicked the “finish setting up” link and canceled out. Voila, red circle gone.

Gone until a few days or a week later, when it comes back.

Yes, that’s the only one I’ve seen. But it’s not much of a nag.

> all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it

Technically you can by turning off wi-fi and disabling cellular data, bluetooth, location services, etc. for the app.

To your point though, wi-fi data should also be a per-app setting, and it is an annoying omission. macOS has outgoing firewalls, but iOS does not (though you could perhaps fake it with a VPN.)

> Apple is very intrusive

> Apple uses your data.

> they do other things too, a different way

What specifically do you mean? Their frankly quite paranoid security and privacy white papers are pretty comprehensive and I don’t think they could afford to lie in those.

> Apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data iCloud

Advanced Data Protection[0] applies e2ee for basically everything, with the exception email, and doesn’t degrade the seamless multi-device experience at all. For most people this is the best privacy option by a long shot, and no other major platform can provide anything close.

They’ve hampered product experience for a long time because of their allergy against modelling their customers on the cloud. The advent of AI seems to have caught them a bit off guard but the integrated ecosystem and focus on on-device processing looks like it may pay off, and Siri won’t feel 5 years behind Google Assistant or Alexa.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/102651

> What specifically do you mean? Their frankly quite paranoid security and privacy white papers are pretty comprehensive and I don’t think they could afford to lie in those.

A couple of years ago Apple was busted when it was discovered that most Apple first-party apps weren't getting picked up by packet sniffer or firewalls on macOS.

Apple tried deflecting for a while before finally offering up the flimsy claim that it "was necessary to make updates easier". Which isn't a really good explanation when you're wondering why TextEdit.app needs a kernel network extension.

What actually happened was Apple removed support for kernel extensions that these firewall apps used.

The user-mode replacement APIs allowed by sandboxed apps had a whitelist for Apple's apps, so you couldn't install some App Store firewall app that would then disable the App Store and screw everything up.

After the outrage, in a point release a few months later, they silently emptied out the whitelist, resolving the issue.

They never issued any kind of statement.

So their "fix", as described here, removed protection from "having the App Store disabled and everything screwed up"?

That makes no sense.

Even if it did, the app the would need protection is the App Store, not every single Apple app. In many cases, the fix for the worst case scenario would be "remove firewall app".

Also, given that TextEdit was not an AppStore app, for but one example, but a base image app.

> They never issued any kind of statement.

Shocking. I've had at least two MBPs affected by different issues that were later subject to recall, but no statement there. radar.apple.com may well be read by someone, but is largely considered a black hole.

The lack of an iOS setting to deny specific apps network access is absurd. It doesn't feel like much of a privacy-focused platform when every day in my network logs I see hundreds of attempted connections from 'offline' iOS apps.

For what it's worth, those platform investments are the difference between Apple being applauded for this, and Microsoft being pilloried for Recall's deficiencies.

> I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI...

Depends on where you are. Apple will bend over backwards when profits are affected, as you can see in China.

Ironically, the only time a large company took a stand at the cost of profits was in 2010 when Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor. Google has changed since then, but that was the high watermark for corporates putting principles over profits. Apple, no.

> Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor

My impression is that they had little chance to survive in a Chinese market, competing with a severely limited product against state-sponsored search products while also being a victim of state-sponsored cyberattacks.

It was the morally correct decision, but I don't know if they were leaving any money on the table doing so. I suspect the Google of today would also decide not to shovel cash into an incinerator.

When enrolling physical security keys to my accounts, only Google's process requested extra, identifiable fields in my key, generating a warning in Firefox, which can anonymize these fields.

Google wants to track even my physical security key across sites to track me.

How can I trust their AI systems with my data?

The attestation on (FIDO certified) security keys is a batch attestation, and meant to correspond to a a batch size of at least 100,000.

So they were effectively asking for the make and model.

There are non-certified authenticators which may have unfortunate behaviors here, such as having attestations containing a hardware serial number. Some browsers maintain a list and will simply block attestations from these authenticators. Some will prompt no matter what.

There is also a bit of an 'Open Web' philosophy at play here - websites often do not have a reason to make security decisions around the make and models of keys. Having an additional prompt in a user conversion path discourages asking for information they don't need, particularly information which could be used to give some users a worse experience and some vendors a strong 'first-mover' market advantage.

In fact, the motivator for asking for this attestation is often for self-service account management. If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone.

Many parties (including Google) seem to have moved to using an AAGUID lookup table to populate this screen in order to avoid the attestation prompt. It also winds up being more reliable, as software authenticators typically do not provide attestations today.

Both devices are Yubikey 5 series, and none of the other services asked for anything similar, or triggered any warnings.

Moreover, none of the service providers auto-named my keys with make/model, etc.

> If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone.

First, Google doesn't differentiate the security keys' name even if you allow for that data to be read, plus you can always rename your keys to anything you want, at any of the service providers I enrolled my keys, so it doesn't make sense.

Moreover, Firefox didn't warn me for any other services which I enrolled my keys, and none of them are small providers by any means.

So, it doesn't add up much.

Google is not trusted because it was an AI company and needed your data. Apple just joined the club.

[flagged]

That might be "trust" in a relative sense

[flagged]

Since Apple is building ChatGPT integration into its devices, it’s clear that Apple’s users’ data is going to be slurped by Microsoft via ClosedAI servers now.

It’s unlikely latency would permit them to proxy every request to fully mask end-user IPs (it’s unclear what “obscured” means), and they would probably include device identifiers and let Microsoft maintain your shadow profile if that could improve ChatGPT output (it may not require literally storing your every request, so denying that is weasel phrasing).

I’ve been browsing with Private Relay since the day it became available. What’s this intolerable latency you’re talking about?

Browsing is not the same as using a personal assistant.

First, it takes much less compute to serve a page than to run an LLM query. LLMs are slow even if you eliminate all network.

Second, your expectations when browsing are not the same as when using a personal assistant.

Right now even when I simply ask Siri to set a timer it takes more than a couple of seconds. Add an actual GPT in the mix and it’s laughable.

In any case, even with a private relay, Apple’s phrasing does not deny sending device identifiers and allowing ClosedAI/Microsoft to build your shadow profile (without storing requests verbatim).

Nope, you’re moving the goalposts. You were talking about the latency of making a network call. I pointed out that Apple’s current proxying architecture has low latency for web browsing, with orders of magnitude larger requests moving through it. We’re not going to bring GPT slowness into the mix because that’s not what we were discussing.

No, I meant the cumulative latency that increases with every hop. You can’t fool physics. Not proxying is just faster and in case of an already super-slow server these seconds matter to any UX designer worth their salt.

Ironically, I feel like Apple might have lost me as a customer today. It won't matter to Apple, obviously, but so much of what they showed today I just felt was actively pushing me out of the ecosystem.

I first bought some devices for myself, then those devices got handed off to family when I upgraded, and now we're at a point where we still use all of the devices we bought to date - but the arbitrary obsolescence hammer came down fairly hard today with the intel cut-off and the iPhone 15+ requirement for the AI features. This isn't new for Apple, they've been aging perfectly usable devices out of support for years. We'll be fine for now, but patch support is only partial for devices on less-than-latest major releases so I likely need to replace a lot of stuff in the next couple of years and it would be way too expensive to do this whole thing again. I'll also really begrudge doing it, as the devices we have suit us just fine.

Some of it I can live without (most of the AI features they showed today), but for the parts that are sending off to the cloud anyway it just feels really hard to pretend it's anything other than trying to force upgrades people would be happy without. OCLP has done a good job for a couple of homework Macs, I might see about Windows licenses for those when they finally stop getting patches.

I'd feel worse for anyone that bought the Intel Mac Pro last year before it got taken off sale (although I'm not sure how many did). That's got to really feel like a kick in the teeth given the price of those things.

From rumours of Apple buying lots of GPUs from Nvidia not that long ago I think management got a nice little scare when OpenAI released GPT-3.5 and then GPT-4. It takes several years to bring a CPU to market. Apple probably realised far too late that they needed specific features in their SOCs to handle the new AI stuff, so it wasn’t included in anything before the A17 Pro. For the M1, M2 and M3 I believe that Apple is willing to sacrifice heat and battery to achieve what they want. The A17 Pro is probably very efficient at running LLMs so it can do so in a phone with a small battery and terrible thermal performance. For their Macs and iPads with M1, M2, M3 they will just run the LLMs on the AMX or the GPU cores and use more power and produce more heat.

Could also be a memory problem. The A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pro comes with 8 GB of memory while everything before that has 6 GB or less. All machines with the M1 or newer come with at least 8 GB of memory.

PS: The people who bought the Intel Mac Pro after the M1 was released knew very well what they were getting into.

It worth noting that the power of the neural engine doubled between the A16 and A17 chips (17 vs 35 TOPS, according to Wikipedia), while the A15 to A16 was a much more modest increase (15.8 to 17 TOPS). So it does seem like they started prioritizing AI/ML performance with the A17 design.

Apple started including the neural engine back with A11 Bionic. In 2017.

And at .6 TOP/second of performance, that Neural Engine is practically useless today. You can go buy a $50 Rockchip board with an NPU 10x faster.

Which introduces a funny aspect, of the whole NPU/TPU thing. There's a constant stairstepping in capability; the newer models improving only obsoletes older ones faster. It's a bit of a design paradox.

Yes. But I was responding to "Apple probably realised far too late". I think they were in fact way ahead of everyone else, it's just that the hardware of 2017 can't keep up with the demands of today.

It was specifically the LLM stuff. Their neural engines were never designed for running LLMs. The question is if the new neural engine in the A17 Pro and M4 actually have the required features to run LLMs or not. That’s at least what I suspect.

> I think they were in fact way ahead of everyone else,

This would be a lot easier to argue if they hadn't gimped their Neural Engine by only allowing it to run CoreML models. Nobody in the industry uses or cares about CoreML, even now. Back then, in 2017, it was still underpowered hardware that would obviously be outshined by a GPU compute shader.

I think Apple would be ahead of everyone else if they did the same thing Nvidia did by combining their Neural Engine and GPU, then tying it together with a composition layer. Instead they have a bunch of disconnected software and hardware libraries; you really can't blame anyone for trying to avoid iOS as an AI client.

I'm genuinely wondering why the NU was added in first place, I can't think of any app that made egregious use of that outside of the Gallery and Photo App. They didn't even allow any access from third parties in a few initial iterations.

On-device voice to text for Siri. Facial recognition in the photos app. Text recognition in photos. Scene recognition and adaptation in the camera app. And FaceID.

Not all those were available from day, except FaceID.

You have no idea what you're talking about. This is painful to read.

While I mostly agree with your point of Apple being rather aggressive with forced upgrading, I don't think the device requirements for these features were based solely on the desire to push out people with older devices, but rather due to the hardware requirements for a lot of the ML/AI features being based on the Apple Silicon, at least for the Mac side of things. As to why they drew the line at the iPhone 15, perhaps it's a similar reason regarding performance requirements. While obviously, I'm not intimately knowledgeable of their basis for the device requirements, I'd wait a few more years to see how the device requirements for these new features cascade. If they continue requiring newer and newer devices, only supporting the trailing generation or so, then I'd agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment.

I'm with you here. As a proud owner of an iPhone 13 Mini, I refuse to switch to anything bigger than that, but I do concede that any moderately useful AI pipeline will require more power than my aging phone is capable to provide.

I'll always slightly regret not getting a Mini, but 2020 was a really bad year for it to launch (when I didn't feel like the extra work needed to see one in person) and 2021 I actually needed a better camera.

In retrospect though, it may be best that I don't know what I missed.

It'll get you when the battery life drops to 4 hours screen time.

Yes, it's not arbitrary at all — they're only offering it on devices with at least 8GB of memory.

The iPhone 15 Pros were the first iPhones with 8GB. All M1+ Macs/iPads have at least 8GB of ram.

LLMs are very memory hungry, so frankly I'm a little surprised they support such low memory requirements (especially knowing that the system is running other tasks, not just ML). Microsoft's Copilot+ program has a 16GB minimum.

It's odd...I've gotten along fine without AI in my iPhone 13, and it will continue to work just as I have come to expect with the new iOS.

The new AI features will be available on the iPad Air I just ordered, and on my M1 MacBook Air, and I'll be able to play with them there until I'm ready to upgrade my phone. I think these new features sound great, but I'm not in any hurry to adopt them wholesale.

> I think these new features sound great, but I'm not in any hurry to adopt them wholesale.

And if you don’t like them you don’t have to use them. I don’t use Siri and it doesn’t bother me that Apple includes it on all their machines.

> I don't use Siri

That's likely true. Unless you were careful to do a lot more than just disabling it, it does use you though, slurping up quite a bit of data.

reference? Proof? How is it slurping data if I have it turned off and don't even use it?

You have to disable the data slurping for each app. The main toggle just governs whether it responds to voice commands. Previous discussion [0].

Separately, the data Siri sends isn't held to the same differential privacy standards as some of Apple's other diagnostics. They just give you a unique ID and yolo it [1]. Unless personalized device behaviors are somehow less identifiable than all the other classes of data subject to deanonymization attacks (demographics, software/hardware version fingerprints, ...), that unique ID is just to be able to pretend to the courts that they tried (give or take Hanlon's razor).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictati...

How?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40647751

I'm not following. What business did they lose if you weren't planning to upgrade? Maybe there is a misunderstanding of what's being gated in the release. I have an iPhone 13, and it was not a surprise to see that AI upgrades would require new hardware. Maybe I'll get a 16 if reviews confirm that it's good.

iOS18 will still be available for older devices right? From the looks of the preview, it’ll go back to phones from 2018 which is fairly standard for Apple. And I’d imagine older iOS versions will continue to receive security updates for several years after they’re dropped from the latest version.

What is it about this release that has lost your support? Specifically gating the Apple Intelligence stuff to the most modern hardware?

I mean, your pushed out to what? Lol your acting like android doesn't obsolete the shit out of their past cycle phones. I don't really get what you wanted them to do here, they're deploying AI in the OS and ecosystem where they can and the features that the hardware supports are being brought in, i don't see where they're implementing features that the hardware supports and are blocking "because"... I don't think anywhere they clarified what part of the cloud tools wont work on older versions. But at the end of the day old hardware is old... its not gonna support everything especially on generational shifts like how much better arm was over intel, or the fact that NPU's don't just manifest inside of old silicon

I'm confused. My understanding is that they didn't drop support for all Intel Macs in Sequoia. My 2018 MBP for example is still supported. The last Intel Mac Pro in your example is also still supported.

My MBP hasn't hasn't been _fully_ supported for many years. The M1-specific features started rolling out in 2021 - ability to run iPad apps being the most obvious one, the ability to get the globe view in maps being the most questionable. IIRC, my MBP did not yet have a M1 Pro/Max version available for sale when they announced the M1-specific features.

The point being, having AI features unavailable doesn't make the Mac unusable any more than it makes an iPhone 15 unusable. Those parts should continue to operate the way they do today (e.g. with today's Siri).

Apple isn’t magic and can’t defy physics. The chips on the older devices aren’t powerful enough to run the new features.

Hardware matters again now in a way it hasn’t for a couple of decades.

Requiring a new device for new features is not the same thing as removing support for older devices.

What? Your phone does everything it did when you bought it and will keep receiving important updates for years to come. How entitled are you to expect to receive every upcoming feature? And where else are you gonna get that? Lol

Not sure this is accurate - a lot of devices have been culled from receiving future updates with these releases. This is not anything new this year, I get that, and I don't really mind not getting the new AI features, but having devices that will stop being supported and which can't have any other software installed because of being locked down is really not a fun situation to be on this side of.

The old Macs can still install Linux/Windows/ChromeOS Flex. iPads/iPhones not so much.

It will be interesting to see if there's an Osborne Effect on iPhone 15 (non-pro) sales now that the model is effectively stuck with brain-dead Siri.

It’s ironic how the one company that is WAY over the top wrt secrecy — not only to the public, but also and especially internally (they’ve even walled the hardware team from the software team while developing the iPhone!) — is at the same time the one company that really nails integration.

The key difference is that Apple (as an organization) appears to have an overarching roadmap (that spans multiple product lines). The secrecy is irrelevant as long as the leadership of each division is aligned (it hurts, but does not prevent success). Google, MS, and others are less organized at the top, so subdivisions of the overall org are left to plan for themselves and between each other, which leads to conflicts. Resolution may be achieved when things get pushed high enough, but only if it surfaces at the top for a leader (if such people exist in their org structure) to declare a resolution and focus for the groups involved.

This reads like a critique of centralized versus decentralized control, but I think it’s more about lack of clear intention.

Apple has a clear intent that allows the subsequent groups to work towards and contribute to it. Google and Microsoft don’t. They have a vague idea, but not something tangible enough for subordinate leaders to meaningfully contribute to.

As the chess players know, ‘a bad plan is better than none at all’. https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/planning.html

Apple is odd in other ways. For example: Calculator on iPad. Once they had a few iPad releases without a calculator, they needed a sufficient _reason_ to release a calculator app for iPad. The product was gated by the narrative.

There was also likely no team on calculator at all (are there bugs that justify a maintenance team?), so it needed a big idea like 'Math Text' to be green-lit or it would simply never come. This is despite missing calculator being an obvious deficiency, and solving it via a port to be a relatively tiny lift.

People will scoff and say "Yeah, but all kinds of companies have internal firewalls, big deal". But no, these were literal walls that would appear over a weekend and suddenly part of the campus was off-limits to those not on the iPhone project.

Wow. Any place to read about that?

I found it in Fred Vogelstein's "Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution" [0]. Decent read, not amazing IMO, but with fun tidbits about the iPhone / Android launches

[0] https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=60B714243482AE3D7B9A83B...

Any book about the development of the iphone or articles in the business press from a few months after product introduction (if any are still online…try Fortune).

I heard they did this for the Amazon Fire Phone, too

Well tbf I’m not sure Google does project ownership… I was shocked how many seemingly important conversations ended with “well, I guess these days that functionality is owned by the community of relevant stakeholders…” (aka: owned by nobody at all). I think they’re only able to do what they’ve done through the sheer concentration of brilliant overpaid engineers, in spite of such “innovation”.

Totally agree on the AI points. Google may have incredible research, but Apple clearly is playing to their strengths here.

Could you please explain ‘lay bare organisational deficiencies’? I ask without skepticism.

Most companies don't have an unified platform they can build this on. And even if they seem to have superficially, the internal organisation is so splintered that it'll never happen.

Like what's going on inside Google, it's getting stupidly political and infighty. If someone tries to build a comprehensive LLM that touches on gmail, youtube, docs, sheets etc, it's going to be an uphill battle.

And even if they did, there'd be five competing efforts, two would be good or at least decent, four would be deployed (not the best one though), and all would be replaced in three years.

None of them would work on-device, all would leak your data into the training set.

And you forgot, if it was Google they would also all have their own internal chat service.

And two of them would be killed within a year and/or renamed/rebranded :)

They did do that. Back in 2013-2015 or so. It was called Google Now, and it was a bit like magic.

It showed you contextual cards based on your upcoming trips/appointments/traveling patterns. E.g. Any tube delays on your way home from work. How early you should leave to catch your flight.

This alongside Google Inbox was among the best and most "futuristic" products.

I was glad to see today Apple implementing something similar to both of these.

But it was a decent new Google product, hence all the past tenses.

Google Then™

Google Now was actually a great idea, it was the only "social" media I actually understood.

No wonder they killed it.

I've always been baffled why those two got canned. They were both really useful.

Canceling Google Inbox was when I started to move off their platform, it was their best product in years and finally got a handle on email chaos, and then they just killed it with no follow up, insane.

Nothing compared to the fighting between whether the Office team or the Platform team at Microsoft owned the AI 'client' work, if we were back in the Windows 7 days.

There'd be constant sabotage.

I assume they mean: expose internal corporate silos/VP-fiefdoms that don't work seamlessly together despite being marketed under the same brand

Google is quite notorious for having this issue from various blog posts and HN comments I've read.

Lots of middle management power groups that would prevent a cohesive top down vision from easily being adopted.

This is the norm, not the exception for big companies.

The more I spend time in mid-large companies, the more I'm amazed that that Apple somehow managed to avoid releasing three different messaging apps that do the same thing.

The same as any enterprise company. It’s all office politics and bureaucracy.

Make no mistake, Google is Enterprise.

Now it makes sense why Elon Musk trims the fat on his companies ruthlessly and regularly

The phenomenon is called “Conway’s Law”: a product reflects the organizational structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

Anyway, while I see all of your points, none of the things I've read in the news make me excited. Recapping meetings or long emails or suggesting how to write are just...not major concerns to me at least.

Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

Microsoft seems to have lost all internal cohesion and the ability to focus the entire company in one direction. It's just a collection of dozens of small fiefdoms only caring about hitting their own narrow KPIs with no overall strategic vision. Just look at the mess of competing interest that Windows 11 and Edge have turned into.

They can’t even get marketing on the same page, such that they counter-productively confuse the hell out of their customers who might be considering giving them more money.

Quick, what’s “copilot”?

Automates the tedious/boring parts of flying between regions in Microsoft Flight Simulator. On higher difficulty levels, can use voice recognition to accept tasks ("Copilot, we are losing fuel, find the nearest airport we can land at", "Copilot, what is the VFR frequency for the airport?", etc.) Sometimes misunderstands tasks and/or will give erroneous information, to increase fidelity to real-world situations.

+ Teams, which includes a feature to build entire apps... inside Teams.

Oh God, when my partner started exploring using Power Apps for Teams to build a platform for running a clinical study, I was intrigued... Then horrified as I tried to help her get it setup. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/teams/create-fi...

Maybe it's just my overly-cynical ass but when the parent comment said Teams+ lets you build apps inside Teams, I physically shuddered.

'We call it Apps for Teams Live 365+!'

The flip side, is that they would not have been able to execute so well with Azure etc if the Windows org had too much of a say about pushing Windows as the OS of choice everywhere. Winning in a brand new space, especially one that might be disruptive to other business units, sometimes necessitates letting the new org do its own thing.

"execute" and "well" in the same sentence when referring to Azure is a bit weird to see.

Only to the ignorant. Tens of billions of dollars a year are spent on the platform. Either all of those customers are misinformed about the capabilities of Azure or you are. I’m going to rely Occam’s Razor here.

Yeah, it's hard to believe that VSCode and Windows are products from the same company. Very different vibes.

Is VS Code the same as Visual Studio? Super confused.

Visual Studio Code, appears to be a code editor with support for C, C#, C++, Fortran, Go, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Rust, and Julia

Visual Studio, appears to be a code editor with support for 36 languages including C, C++, C++/CLI, Visual Basic .NET, C#, F#, JavaScript, TypeScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, and CSS.

Visual Studio Code, appears to be liked by almost every user and the favorite in a bunch of online polls.

Visual Studio, appears to be unusable junk, widely hated in almost every survey, and unable to even display its own error messages correctly in 2022.

Visual Studio Code is supposedly a "related product" according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio#Related_products

How are these related? They seem like Microsoft's internal fiefdoms again.

Definitely different things, I've used them both. Visual Studio is from before they went on their Microsoft <3 Open Source campaign. It has pricey licenses and is pretty much an ad for .net

It's a traditional windows application. .net/WPF I think. Configured via XML

VSCode is free, an electron app, has a plugin store with lots of niche language plugins. Configured via json.

Surely they're using VSCode to exert influence in their Microsofty way, but it feels much less like a prison.

VSCode still feels like a bit much to me (though of a monster than Visual Studio). I'm pretty happy with helix.

Cool. Thanks. Started in with the newest version of VS 2022 recently for C++, and then find out there's apparently something better in a different internal fiefdom that people actually like.

>Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

https://crmtipoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ms-org...

> Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

they are irrelevant on the mobile ecosystem, a place where almost all this features are most relevant and useful

I've heard Microsoft has gotten better, but I think this still rings true. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...

>suggesting how to write

As a(n amateur) fiction writer who pays too much for ProWritingAid each year, I'd love to see if this feature is any good for fiction. I take very, very few of PWA's AI-suggested rewrites, but they often help me see my own new version of a bit of prose.

"Anyone serious about software should be making their own hardware - Alan Kay" - Steve Jobs

Microsoft is trying and I feel they are in a much stronger position than Google. The same advantage that Apple has for personal docs and images Microsoft has across business content. Seamless AI integration across teams and outlook and sharepoint and other office products offer huge platform benefits.

What personal data do you have on Microsoft? It doesn’t even know where my photos are as the folder structure is at the end completely arbitrary - how could it execute “call the person on this photo”, and similar level of integration?

This Apple AI presupposes their strong ecosystem, which no one has anything similar to. Google was in a good position years ago, but they are criminally unfocused nowadays.

I know reading comprehension is difficult based on the overall quality of internet content these days. But I explicitly called out the business data Microsoft has in this domain. So why does Microsoft’s control of personal data factor into this at all? Do you have anything of value to add? Did you even bother to read what you are responding to? But sure. Go off on your anti Microsoft rant completely disconnected from the topic at hand.

For Google in particular, this was honestly something they could've done far earlier. They had the Pixel phones, they had the Tensor stuff, and then Gemini came along.

But for some reason, they decided to just stick to feature tidbits here and there and chose not to roll out quality-of-life UI features to make Gemini use easier on normal apps and not just select Google apps. And then it's also limited by various factors. They were obviously testing the waters and were just as cautious, but imho it was a damn shame. Even summarization and key points would've been nice if I could invoke it on any text field.

But yeah, this is truly the ecosystem benefit in full force here for Apple, and they're making good use of it.

Google couldn't figure out which messaging platform of theirs would succeed; imagine if the team working on hangouts or meet v1 had worked on RCS or context first.

RCS isn't fair, Google wanted the carriers to work on that, but in a disparate ecosystem they also couldn't come to a decision

Android CPUs are not playing in the same ballpark as Apple’s, there is always at least one generation difference between - and the core of these AI features is on-device intelligence, possibly by having managed to fit a good chunk of an LLM to an iphone. It being able to determine when to go online is the crucial part.

Also, apple bought up more ML startups than google or microsoft.

How long until the EU decides that making this a platform capability is a fineable offense?

That's actually exactly what you want. No one company should know what you do on all apps.

At this point, I trust {insert megacorp} more than {insert App Dev LLC} + {insert megacorp}.

Neither is great, but at least the megacorp has a financial incentive to maintain some of my privacy.

I don't quite understand this comment. Are you encouraging us to use your comment as some sort of template and insert our own preferred corporate names?

Sounds like some crazy level of meta where your brilliance is applicable to any pair of mega corps...which I don't buy.

Neither is Apple unless one buys wholly into the Apple ecosystem. I want open ai tools that I can truly use with all my text. But I'm not holding my breath.

"Open tools" and "Integration" is really hard to do.

I'd _love_ to be able to pull down my email from Fastmail, Calendars from iCal, notes from Google Notes etc to a single LLM for me to ask questions from, but it would require all of the different sources to have a proper API to fetch the data from.

Apple already has all it on device and targeted by ML models since multiple iPhone versions ago. Now they just slapped a natural language model on top of it.

>I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly

That's a little premature, let's try not to be so suckered by marketing.

Apple is again going where Google (the world's largest ad company) cannot follow: 100% user privacy.

They really hammered in the fact that every bit is going to be either fully local or publicly auditable to be private.

There's no way Google can follow, they need the data for their ad modeling. Even if they anonymise it, they still want it.

They literally announced their partnership with OpenAI today, and I've seen no sign of this data being "publicly auditable" - can you share this with me?

The OpenAI integration is a side-feature.

All the stuff that works on your private data is Apple models that are either on-device or in Apple's private cloud (and they are making that private cloud auditable).

The OpenAI stuff is firewalled off into a separate "ask ChatGPT to write me this thing" kind of feature.

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

> I've seen no sign of this data being "publicly auditable" - can you share this with me?

They announced it in the same keynote where they announced the partnership with OpenAI (and stated that sharing your data with OpenAI would be opt-in, not opt-out).

WTF are you talking about, the guy literally said that to connect to Apple Intelligence servers the client side verifies a publically registered audit trail for the server. He then followed up saying no data on chatgpt will keep session information regarding who the data came from.

Apples big thing is privacy, i doubt they'd randomly lie about that

This still runs on external hardware which can be spoofed at the demand of authorities. It may be private as in they themselves won’t monetize it but your data certainly won’t be safe

Ahhh cool encryption doesn't exist, MTLS doesn't exist i forgot

I can't speak towards Apple's or $your_government's trustworthiness, but MTLS wouldn't protect against an attack where Apple collaborates with a data requester.

There are people and orgs out there who (justifiably or not) are paranoid enough that they factor this into their threat model.

This is a bit academic right now, but it's also worth mentioning that in the coming years, as quantum computing becomes more and more practical, snapshots of data encrypted using quantum-unsafe cryptography, or with symmetric keys protected by quantum-unsafe crypto (like most Diffie-Hellman schemes) will be decryptable much more easily. Whether a motivated bad actor has access to the quantum infrastructure needed to do this at scale is another question, though.

How about you Google DMA Memory Attacks, VM Escape attacks, Memory scraping and sniffing, Memory Bus Snooping and so on.

As long as the data is processed externally, no software solutions make it safe, unless you yourself are in control of the premises.

[flagged]

"100% user privacy."

That is a huge stretch and a signal as to how good Apple is with their marketing.

If they are still letting apps like GasBuddy to sell your location to insurance companies then they are no where near "100% privacy".

GasBuddy is an optional app, right? Apple is very up front about what apps are going to get access to things like location, with user prompts to allow/deny. Meaning you are opting in to a lack of privacy, which is very expected behavior?

The default Apple apps (maps, messaging, safari) are solid from a privacy perspective, and I don't think you can say the same about the default apps on competitors phones.

I am sorry I used GasBuddy as an example since I agree it is a stretch, but still not one I disagree with.

But let's get back to Apple...if it was functioning at "100% user privacy" would it be able to give access to your data to law enforcement? As an example, I consider MullvadVPN to be 99% user privacy.

Does this answer your question?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple–FBI_encryption_dispute#A...

No.

That was concerning unlocking the phone. I’m talking about the data that they store on iCloud.

I already linked to this article on Advanced Data Protection for iCloud (e2ee for most things) in a different comment, but it feels like a lot of people don’t know about this feature. It literally has zero effect on the user experience (except janky access to iCloud via the web, but shrug). Apple’s competitors don’t have anything close and their business models mean they probably never will.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/102651

The data stored on iCloud is locked with the key from the devices’ Secure Enclave. They’d have to unlock your device to get access to decrypt the iCloud data.

Based on Apple's previous track record, the answer is very likely "no".

You sure?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2024/04/10/new-...

Why should apple be in control of what individual apps do with your location data? You explicitly grant the app access to your data, and agreed to the terms.

The difference between that and this is extremely clear is it not?

If I want a device that’s giving me apps on a locked in platform why shouldn’t they care about what the apps do with my information?

Imagine if we had a smart phone maker that Cared about this so we didn’t have to worry about it all the time?

Gas Buddy, like all 3rd party apps, has their privacy practices detailed on their App Store page. It's true that not all vendors are completely truthful with this information, but Gas Buddy (for one) appears to be pretty up-front: everything in the app is shared with the developers or others except (they say) diagnostic information. Apple set up a privacy-disclosure rule, Gas Buddy seems to be following it, and it's the user's choice whether to install Gas Buddy.

Apple has done its privacy work here; now it's up to the end user to make the final choice.

It's the potential for the model. Everyone else is hoovering the internet to model everything and Apple is sticking with their privacy message and saying 'how can I model your stuff to help you.'

That's tangibly different.

I beg to differ.

Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other cloud?

With an Android phone and Windows laptop (for example) you simply install the Syncthing app on both and you're done.

My point is not "Apple is worse", instead I'm just trying to point out that Apple definitely seems eager to have their users push a lot of what they do through their cloud. I don't see why their AI will be any different, even if their marketing now claims that it will be "offline" or whatever.

Apple is interested in providing products that they can guarantee will work, and meet actual user requirements.

"Sync my files without using Apple's cloud" is not a user requirement. Delivering features using their cloud is a very reasonable way for Apple to provide services.

Now, "Sync my files without compromising my privacy" is a user requirement. And Apple iCloud offers a feature called 'advanced data protection" [1] that end to end encrypts your files, while still supporting photo sharing and syncing. So no, you can't opt out of using their cloud as the intermediary, but you can protect your content from being decrypted by anyone, including Apple, ooff your devices.

It has the downside that it limits your account recovery options if you lose the device where your keys are and screw up on keeping a recovery key, so it isn't turned on by default, but it's there for you to use if you prefer. For many users, the protections of Apple's standard data protection are going to be enough though.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#:~:text=Advanced%20Da....

I'm a user and I require that feature. Transferring photos over a USB cable to a PC has been a feature in all portable electronics with a camera for the past 25+ years, yet Apple is still getting it wrong.

Wires? Oh yeah, I remember when things had wires. Good times.

> Wires? Oh yeah, I remember when things had wires. Good times.

Last I checked the more expensive Macbooks had three USB ports, and the cheap ones have two.

Since Macbooks no longer have ethernet ports, those USB ports are useful for plugging in the dongle when I want to connect the Macbook to an ethernet wire. Good times.

> Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other cloud?

The first hit on Google makes it look trivial with iPhone too?

https://support.apple.com/guide/devices-windows/sync-photos-...

> With an Android phone and Windows laptop (for example) you simply install the Syncthing app on both and you're done.

And with iPhone you just install the "Apple Devices" app: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9np83lwlpz9k

iCloud synchronizes all my stuff between all my devices (windows too) now. They've always been privacy-forward. I could completely see a container that spins up and AI's my stuff in their datacenter, that they don't have visibility into. The impact of them getting it wrong is pretty significant.

> Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other cloud?

Install jottacloud and enable the photos backup feature.

I just plug my iphone into my windows laptop and use the photo import tool built into windows. It works completely fine.

I also sync my photos onto my NAS via sftp, using the Photosync app.

Apple Intelligence stuff is going to be very big. iOS is clearly the right platform to marry great UX AI with. Latching LLMs onto Siri have allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins.

I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I suspect it means we're going to get our own private code interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS.

Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers. I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end and hardware end?

There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.

> allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins.

Are we sure there is a Siri team in Apple? What have they been doing since 2012?

Learning how to write llm function calls.

There is also this thing with Siri and Google Assistant that a lot of the answers are manually entered (the jokes, etc), so the switch to an LLM could be a massive improvement.

I don't get this at all, how does integrating siri with a llm mean you get an interpreter and allowing development?

As much as I hoped for Xcode on the iPad, I still don’t think any of this AI stuff or “private cloud” is related.

Though I don’t know if I would use my iPad for programming even if it was possible, when I have a powerful Macbook Pro with a larger screen.

I do believe much of what they showed was impressive. It actually seems to realize the "personal digital secretary" promise that personal computing devices throughout the decades were sold on.

The most important question to me is how reliable it is. Does it work every time or is there some chance that it horribly misinterprets the content and even embarrasses the user who trusted it.

Yeah, reliability is the crucial bit. Like that example he showed where it checked whether he can make an appointment (by checking driving times), a lot can go wrong there and if the assistant tells you "Yes, you can" but you cannot then I can see lots of people getting angry and not trusting it for anything.

In the context of off-device processing, it's worth keeping in mind that US surveillance laws have recently expanded in their scope and reach:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-g...

For this reason, I really hope we can self-host our "private cloud" for use with apple devices. That would truly, properly allow end to end privacy. I don't trust Apple given the legislation you've just linked to, both claims obviously can't be correct.

Only a diminishingly small percentage of users have the ability to do this properly. I have 40 years of development experience and I don't trust my self to set up and properly run these types of servers.

Fair, but we could conceivably have an ecosystem of providers, like ProtonMail or whoever the user feels comfortable with. If it's just Apple we're headed for honeypot

I’ve been waiting for Apple to arrive. They bring so much polish and taste.

Two features I really want:

“Position the cursor at the beginning of the word ‘usability’”

“Stop auto suggesting that word. I never use it, ever”

Apple auto suggest can be ducking annoying

legitimately good voice recognition would probably be the "killer feature" to get me to switch from android to iOS after all this time. I'm so frustrated with the current state of voice recognition in android keyboards, but ChatGPT's recent update is amazing at voice recognition. I type primarily by voice transcribing and I would be so happy if I could go from 70% voice 30% I need to type to 95% voice 5% I need to type.

One really powerful use case they demoed was that of meeting conflicts.

"Can you meet tonight at 7?" Me "oh yes" Siri "No you can't, your daughter's recital is at 7"

It's these integrations which will make life easier for those who deal with multiple personas all through their day.

But why partner with an outside company ? Even though it's optional on the device etc, people are miffed about the partnership than being excited by all that Apple has to offer.

The image generation is dalle 2.5 level and feels really greasy to me, beyond that I think the overall launch is pretty good! I also congratulate rabbit r1 for their timely release months before WWDC https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-fEoSb

The generated image of two dice (https://x.com/thomasahle/status/1800258720074490245) was dalle 1 level.

Just randomly sprinkled eyes on the sides. I wonder why they chose to showcase that.

What eyer are you talking about? That’s two “hand-sketched” dice, isn’t it?

Did you look at the eyes/pips?

On the side with 5, they are overlapping. On the side with 4, some of them are half missing. On the side with 3, they are arranged in triangle instead of a straight line.

Not to talk about that 2 and 5 should be on opposing sides, same with 3 and 4.

It's basically like early AI being unable to generate hands, or making 6 fingers.

Yeah, the image generation felt really…cheap?…tasteless? but everything else was really impressive.

Personalization really feels like the missing link here. The images it creates are highly contextual, which increases their value dramatically. Nobody on Reddit wants to see the AI generated T. rex with a tutu on a surfboard, but in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning to surf, it’s a killer. The image AI can even use photos to learn who a person is. That opens up a ton of cool ways to communicate with friends

> in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning to surf, it’s a killer.

Maybe, but this class of jokes/riffs is going to get old, fast.

It's what i expected they weren't going to open the pandoras box of realistic photogen on imessage lol, thats why the limit to illustration, cartoon etc, is there to limit the liability of it going wild, they can add more "types" later as they get things more tested, realistically its just prompts hidden behind bubbles, but allows them to slowly roll out options that they've heavily vetted.

I think that basically stretched the limit of what local model can achieve today, which also makes their image API almost useless for any serious generative art developers.

Fwiw I don't think "serious generative art developers" are the target audience at this point, that's probably on the order of .01% of their users

> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context

Given that this will apparently drop... next year at the earliest?... I think it's simply quite a tease, for now.

I literally had to install a keyboard extension to my iPhone just to get Whisper speech to text, which is thousands of times better at dictation than Siri at this point, which seems about 10 years behind the curve

Ooh, which keyboard extension is this?

Auri AI. Note that it's not free, and the way it works is via the clipboard, so it's a bit hacky, but mostly works well.

> the platform owners where you have most of your digital life

Yup! The hardest part of operationalizing GenAI has been, for me, dragging the "ring" of my context under the light cast by "streetlamp" of the model. Just writing this analogy out makes me think I might be putting the cart before the horse.

The UI design part? The integration part? The iteration part?

Apple products tend to feel thoughtful. It might not be a thought you agree with, but it's there.

With other companies I feel like im starving, and all they are serving is their version of grule... Here is your helping be sure to eat all of it.

Whenever I read that expression I have to think about the Porsche commercial from a few years back. I guess it’s not always a bad idea :)

https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/dw...

> but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly.

No-one is hitting anything out of the park, this is just Apple the company realising that they're falling behind and trying to desperately attach themselves to the AI train. Doesn't matter if in so doing they're validating a company run by basically a swindler (I'm talking about the current OpenAI and Sam Altman), the Apple shareholders must be kept happy.

> No-one is hitting anything out of the park

I kind of feel like their walled garden and ecosystem might just have created the perfect environment for an AI integrated directly to the platform to be really useful.

I’m encouraged, but I am already a fan of the ecosystem…

I have no confidence this will work as intended. The last MacOS upgrade had the horrible UX of guessing which emoji you want and being wrong 95% of the time. I don't expect this to be any better. Demos are scripted.

I also expect it to fail miserably on names (places, restaurants, train stations, people), people that are bilingual, non-English, people with strong accents from English not being their first language, etc.

Do you think Apple could develop an AI so powerful that it would allow me to uninstall Siri from my iPhone?

You can turn it off in settings

>The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails

I did not see the announcement. Can Siri also send emails? If so then won't this (like Gemini) be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks?

Edit: Supposedly Gemini does not actually send the emails; maybe Apple is doing the same thing?

It doesn't look like it does. It seems to only write the email for you but not send. At least yet.

It just writes the content, it doesn't actually send anything.

We'll find out later if there's an API to do something like that at all or are external communications always behind some hard limit that requires explicit user interaction.

Some of it will undoubtly be super useful. Things like:

- Proofread button in mail.

- ChatGPT will be available in Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools in macOS

I expect once you'll get used to it, it'll be hard to go without it.

> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations

I can't think of something less exciting than a feature that Gmail has supported for a decade.

Overall there's not a single feature in the article that I find exciting (I don't use Siri at all, so maybe it's just me), but I actually see that as a good thing. The least they add GenAI the better.

The difference is that this is on-device and private. Gmail just feeds your emails to Google's servers and they do the crunching. And in the meanwhile train their systems to be better using your content.

It changes nothing about the impressiveness (or lack thereof) of the feature.

Detecting an appointment from an email doesn't even require AI.

You're also over-indexing on the fact that some processing will be done on device. The rest will go to Apple's servers just the same as Google. And you will never know how much goes or doesn't.

Apple Mail has been able to detect appointments and reservations from email for years, just like Gmail -- and at least in my experience, Apple Mail pulls more useful information out of the mail when it creates the calendar entry. What they showed today is, in theory, something different. (I presume the difference is integrating it into the Siri assistant, not the mail application.)

The "AI" bit (a word they didn't mention during the keynote BTW) is the processing of a natural language user command to something the existing ML model can understand.

Most of the things shown during the keynote, can already be done with older iPhones - on device, but they need to be "talked to" like a computer, not with natural language that's not completely perfect.

> Most of the things shown during the keynote, can already be done with older iPhones - on device, but they need to be "talked to" like a computer, not with natural language that's not completely perfect.

That's only half true. If you get a text saying "Yo let's meet tomorrow at lunch?" it will offer an option to create an event from it, so even now it's possible in non-perfect scenarios.

Now the real question is: does getting the next 5% that wasn't possible justify sending potentially all you data to Apple's servers? I think the answer is a pretty resounding "fuck no".

Overall the announcement is extremely low value proposition (does anyone really use their stupid Bitmoji thing?) but asks for a LOT from the user (a vague "hey some stuff will be sent to our servers").

It is really “the app” that has to die in order for AI to show its potential in user interfaces. If you want to, say, order from a restaurant, your personal agent should order it for you, any attempt for the restaurant to “own” the consumer by putting an app in his face has to end.

I don’t think I am understanding what you mean, but isn’t one of the potential use cases of AI to say: “Siri order me the thing I always get from _restaurant_ and it navigates the app for you in the background? Potentially this can be done without API integration; the AI synthetically operates the app. Maybe it “watches” how you used the app before (which options you choose, which you dismiss, etc) to learn your preferences and execute the order with minimal interaction with the user. This way annoying, bad, UI can be avoided. AI “solves” UI in this way?

Are you saying this type of scenario kills the app, or are you saying the app needs to die, replaced by an API that AIs can interact with, thus homogenizing the user experience, and avoiding the bad parts of Apps?

Preferably the latter but if the agent can use a crappy app for you (maybe using accessibility APIs in some cases) that’s better than the bad experience that “download our app” usually is.

Better yet the system should know about all the commercial options available to you and be a partner in getting food you like, taking advantage of discounts, all of that.

An interesting consequence: I started to think about how I'll be incentivized to take more pictures of useful information, and might even try setting up a Proton Mail proxy so I can use the iOS Email app and give Siri more context

I’m curious if simply running the proton mail bridge on a Mac at home would allow the native mail app feed “semantic” context across devices to iOS.

The native mail app would have my full inbox, so it could (presumably) do whatever local analysis it would do with a normal email account

Google is doing this as well but they are doing it on single app like gmail assuming all info is there and also across websites with agents but not cross apps like apple is doing across mails, messages, maps etc.

100%. Based on what I've seen so far, unified context is king.

Which at the backend means unifying necessary data from different product silos, into organized and usable sources.

Not to mention tied into their underlying SDK API that basically the whole system is based on, and seems they are using those same API's for the internal integrations so they can feel whats missing themselves as well.

I’ll be thoroughly impressed when Siri learns my wife’s name for good. Yes, I trained it, but somehow the lesson was forgotten.

You can set a relationship type in her contact card. I think Siri uses that data.

Ah, you mean my good friend 'heart emoji wife heart emoji'

We will see, in practice Siri has been pretty much useless even if hyped in demos. I keep pretty low expectations

The willingness you seem to have to sacrifice all your privacy for a few gimmicks is astounding

"brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup"

Yeah but what about people going to the wrong airport, or getting scammed by taking fake information uncritically? "Well it worked for me and anyway AI will get better.". Amen.

Even moreso why does brother take the time to bring up Siri if he can't read the flight code? It's the same thing correct?

You do know siri works while driving and other times when you don't want to go fumbling around?

I will believe it when siri isn’t the stupidest decade old idea ever. I’m sorry if I sound anything but snarky, but they have had Star Trek abilities this whole time, nerfed for “safety” and platform product integrity —from my iPhone

I just wanted a folding iPhone

The AI/Cartoony person being sent as a birthday wish was super cringey, like something my boomer father would send me. I'm a fan of genmoji. That looks fun. Less a fan of generated clip art and "images for the sake of having an image here", and way, way less into this "here, I made a cornball image of you from other images of you that I have" feature. It's as lame as Animoji but as creepy as deepfakes.

Aimed at a different demographics. Peepaw and Meemaw are absolutely going to love it.

Yeah, the genmoji feel like a proper Apple feature, but the full images feel cheap and pointless.

LOL you haven't been in group chats with idiot drunk friends apparently shit like that kills, i had a friend who hates iphones, i sent a dozen bing ai images of him as a cartoon doing... things... to the phone... entire chat was dieing for days.

[flagged]

> AKA there would be a way to choose backends.

I think the percentage of iPhone users for who this would matter is very small. It's similar to how many people care about using a different browser than Safari on iOS (or Chrome on Google): in the US at least, those two browsers have ~95% market share.

> I think the percentage of iPhone users for who this would matter is very small.

Oh yeah? Then why don't they permit you to choose an App Store, a browser, a messenger, a blah blah blah...

I don’t follow. If the percentage of people who care about non Apple software is low then it totally makes sense that Apple wouldn’t care about opening their platform for 3rd party software. People didn’t jump ship to Android after all. Apple allow alternate app store in Europe because of regulation, not users revolting

You can set the default browser.

And there are plenty of messaging apps on iOS.

App store, sure, they don't allow sideloading, but that's a different matter (and the number of users, not devs, who care about that is even smaller)

You can only change your browser in the EU, since three months ago, because of their consumer protection laws.

In all other countries, the "browsers" on the App Store are only skins on top of a crippled version of Safari.

I'm in the US. I can set the default browser on my iPhone to Chrome, right in the Safari settings.

> I can set the default browser on my iPhone to Chrome, right in the Safari settings.

You can set your browser to a Chrome UI wrapper around a Safari Webview. You can do this with any [browser] UI wrapper around a Safari Webview, as long as [browser] has received the relevant entitlement from Apple.[0]

Outside of the EU, all browser apps on iOS must run Safari's engine.[1]

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Xcode/preparing-yo...

> Request the default browser entitlement by filling out the Default browser entitlement request form. If your request is accepted you get both the default browser entitlement, and the com.apple.developer.browser.app-installation entitlement. If you have the default browser entitlement, fill out this form to receive the app-installation entitlement for your browser app.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit

> Important: To distribute an app that uses an alternative browser engine, you need to request the relevant entitlements for your developer account. For more information and to request the entitlements, see Using alternative browser engines in the European Union.

I don't comprehend why people feel like being a Safari wrapper is sufficient.

How do people imagine ad blockers get implemented? Why do they assume ad blockers will be supported by Apple, which once ran an ad network and runs an ad network in Apple News, forever?

If publishers wanted to support only ad-block-blocking browsers, that's their prerogative too! I don't either think Apple should get to decide that ads are protected if you appear in Apple News, but ads are not protected if you appear in Mobile Safari.

People opposing choice: it never ceases to surprise me.

I understand the X wrapper on Safari engine, and I don't believe most people care about the underlying engine. Just like Microsoft Edge just being a Chromium browser, most people don't seem to care.

People care about the effects. For example, you can install adblockers on every version of Firefox except for the one on iOS.

I agree with you on this. People that care about adblockers (or something else) care about whether they can do that or not. A minority of people care about the non-default Safari web experience.

Those aren’t anywhere near the same from a technical point of view.

Seems like a silly gripe - why not buy android and have it all?

But...I can't have Safari on Android!

You can set any browser you want as long as it’s a skin on top of safari.

The browser thing is meant for security and privacy, why do you think they allow alternatives to all their other default apps expect for browsers?

But more than that, why are your arbitrary expectations any more important than their arbitrary requirements?

Because it's my device.

To me, everything about how it's been presented so far says the point of how it's set up is that they don't want to use backends. They want everything to happen on device. Even having ChatGPT for expanded queries is an unfortunate necessity driven by the hardware not being powerful enough yet.

How much is run entirely on device so far is unclear, but the sessions later in the day should expand on that.

On device or in an Apple owned DC. It sounds like they have aspirations for their own Apple owned LLM. ChatGPT seems like it's there until they can get something good enough to generally replace it for cases where their in-house solution isn't capable enough yet. They likely continue to invest heavily on big capable LLMs as well as ones that are small enough to run on device (while working on the hardware side to ensure they have the device capabilities to run more powerful models on the device).

The benefit of owning the last mile to the customer is that you can choose when you want to replace default Maps, or not.

So, the company that brought us Siri is going to build something better than ChatGPT... something that will run on-device no less. It's just not quite ready yet. Got it.

Siri was quite impressive when it came out. I just felt it never got significantly better until it became an embarrassment

It never was impressive. It only made cool demos and Apple aficionado worked the reality distortion field like crazy since then. It's actually embarrassing how bad it has always been compared to the Google stuff announced later with less fanfare.

I don't even care much because I don't think "assistants" are good for much of anything, but if I have to use one, Siri is not the one I would like.

Yeah, by having literally a shitton of cash, and having bought multiple ML startups over the years. Plus it’s not like they couldn’t make Siri better, multiple projects had internal problems with Siri and were trying to get it replaced, but none went anywhere, possibly because higher ups planning ahead with this.

I don’t follow your second to last paragraph. It’s called Apple Intelligence. If you want to use something else do so but don’t expect Apple to build its own product and let you use whatever you want for it. Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house product.

I see the goal as a setup to pit LLM providers against each other to pay 10B a year to be the 2nd tap default.

Oh, yeah that is a possibility. I think though long term they are going to have Siri be a search engine that actually works in the way Google once did.

> Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house product.

If that turns out anything like Siri, then surely you would understand why people want a bring-your-own-model framework.

If it's bad enough that you need to bring your own model, (a) Apple is toast, because this is, to some extent, the future; (b) you're hosed, because you can't optimize for battery life as well as Apple can.

Their desires may or may not be rational in this but clearly Apple isn’t going to allow it. They have a history of doing their own thing.

Their desires are expressly illegal, in many countries. We're past the whole antitrust stuff now, we are in a post-FAANG society and Apple doesn't just get away with that stuff for free anymore. I'm not crazy for expecting competition.

This is also coincidentally the reason I got rid of my Apple products. The experience fucking sucks! The only way things get better is if you buy more hardware, which probably makes the average mall-addicted American smile but makes me want to vomit. Everything is upsell, and not just upsell where you can improve the experience. No, you have to buy Apple's solution because every third-party is wrong and can't be trusted. They will gimp anyone that does not compensate them handsomely and rob the only people brave enough to offer their users an improved experience. The devil takes notes during Tim Cook's business meetings. They deserve everything coming to them, and they know it too.

So try it. Watch them go along, "doing their own thing", and then watch them come back limping and bruised after the FTC gives them a worse beating than Microsoft got in the 90s. We know why Apple is mad about this, it doesn't matter. They can go quietly or we can make this a long, protracted process. Microsoft got away lucky when you think about it, still all in one piece.

The funniest thing about current Apple is that they don't just upsell you on more hardware (that would be relatively fine) but they also hardcore upsell you on their "services" that are too often lackluster and fucked up in some bizarre way. To the point where they make using their devices without this service upsell and much less desirable experience.

It makes the whole point of paying more for better hardware completely moot, because if you going to need to rely on cloud "service" stuff, you might as well get cheaper hardware from the other companies who do that much better than Apple ever did.

I like their stuff (well the hardware at least) but I also don't want to buy more stuff from them, it's just not sustainable and they already make too much money anyway.

Can you replace the camera firmware in any of your devices? That’s the same category, I don’t think laws tell you anything about that.

Sure. I’m agnostic in all this but I do think Apple prefers to build their own AI and worry about anti-trust later.

How can you "worry about anti-trust later" when you are under active anticompetitive inquiry from three of your largest markets?

Because they want to build a better product for users rather than one that's been gimped by regulators?

In the same way a person or entity does anything. Just do it.

I don't comprehend how people are not more angry about how utterly shitty the Apple coerced apps are.

What is an example of utterly shitty app from Apple and which alternative is miles better?

Podcasts. Any other podcast app.

What do you mean into hands of platform owners? The point of having an Apple device is that you can run stuff on your device. The user is in control, not any platforms.

I think what they're getting at is that the platform owners have power because they can actually leverage the data that users give them to be useful tools to those users.

I would contrast this with the trend over the last year of just adding a chatbot to every app, or Recall being just a spicy History function. It's AI without doing anything useful.

I take it as 3rd party alternatives will have a much harder time because they have to ask the user to share their data with them. Apple / Google already have that established relationship and 3rd parties will unlikely have the level of integration and simplicity that the platformers can deliver.

Apple owns the platform. The user owns the device that embodies the platform.

Apple owns the software platform. Can I run my non-Apple Intelligence software on the data in "my" iPhone?

Of course. There will be plenty of APIs that 3rd parties can use access the same data Apple Intelligence has access to.

They did mention they’re adding support for other providers.

>Private Cloud Compute

But it runs in their cloud.

Aside from the search and Siri improvements, I'm really not sure about the usefulness of all the generative stuff Apple is suggesting we might use here.

If you spend an hour drawing a picture for someone for their birthday and send it to them, a great deal of the value to them is not in the quality of the picture but in the fact that you went to the effort, and that it's something unique only you could produce for them by giving your time. The work is more satisfying to the creator as well - if you've ever used something you built yourself that you're proud of vs. something you bought you must have felt this. The AI image that Tania generated in a few seconds might be fun the first time, but quickly becomes just spam filling most of a page of conversation, adding nothing.

If you make up a bedtime story for your child, starring them, with the things they're interested in, a great deal of the value to them is not in the quality of the story but... same thing as above. I don't think Apple's idea of reading an AI story off your phone instead is going to have the same impact.

In a world where you can have anything the value of everything is nothing.

I've got a fairly sophisticated and detailed story world I've been building up with my kid, it always starts the same way and there are known characters.

We've been building this up for some time, this tiny universe is the most common thing for me to respond to "will you tell me a story?" (something that is requested sometimes several times a day) since it is so deeply ingrained in both our heads.

Yesterday, while driving to pick up burritos, I dictated a broad set of detailed points, including the complete introductory sequence to the story to gpt-4o and asked it to tell a new adventure based on all of the context.

It did an amazing job at it. I was able to see my kid's reaction in the reflection of the mirrors and it did not take away from what we already had. It actually gave me some new ideas on where I can take it when I'm doing it myself.

If people lean on gen ai with none of their own personal, creative contributions they're not going to get interesting results.

But I know you can go to the effort to create and create and create and then on top of that layer on gen AI--it can knock it out of the park.

In this way, I see gen AI capabilities as simply another tool that can be used best with practice, like a synthesizer after previously only having a piano or organ.

That's a very valid rebuttal to my comment. I think this kind of "force multiplier" use for AI is the most effective one we have right now; I've noticed the same thing with GPT-4 for programming. I know the code well enough to double check the output, but AI can still save time in writing it, or sometimes come up with a strategy that I may not have.

Maybe the fact that you did the dictation together with your child present is also notable. Even though you used the AI, you were still doing an activity together and they see you doing it for them.

In fact, by allowing people to generate photos for birthday wishes, apple is elevating the bottomline not lowering the topline. The person who wants to put in the effort and send a hand-drawn image would often not want to resort to a ready-made machine creation. OTOH, the simple "HBD Mom" sender would now send "Happy Birthday Mom <genmoji>" and an image...

Oh god.. if someone sent me Ai generated slop for my birthday I would be bothered. A simple happy birthday is fine!

What about things like GIPHY reactions? I’m guessing you’re not a fan of those either or using quotes from well known people. There shortcuts have existed as long as people have been writing or drawing. They just get easier and more powerful over time.

I view this as just extending that to custom reactions and making them more flexible expanding their range of uses.

The best articulation of what the industry is currently calling “AI” is “augmented intelligence”—this wording captures that these are tools that can enhance intelligence, not replace it or come up with its own ideas.

Meta comment: This back-and-forth between Nition and bredren is one of the best exchanges I’ve read on HN recently. Thanks to both of you.

Do you think as much creativity and effort would have gone into the story if you had access to AI from the start?

Given current interfaces, yes. AR via smartphone or otherwise remain invasive to interpersonal communication in 2024.

You could say the same thing for sending a Happy Birthday text, versus a hand written letter or card. Nothing is stopping a person from sending the latter today, and yes they are more appreciated, but people also appreciate the text. For example, if you're remote and perhaps don't have that deep of a relationship with them

If a friend of mine sent me some AI generated slop for my birthday I'd be more offended than if they just sent me a text that only contains the letters "hb"

Birthday cards are slop too

The messages inside of them, which are presumably not AI-generated, aren't however.

I guess the question is, is sending an AI Happy Birthday image better than sending a Happy Birthday text?

Nope their identical, but the AI one at least looks cool lol

Your analogy does not apply at all.

The value of a gift isn't solely on how much you worked on it or what you spent on it. It can also be in picking out the right one, if you picked something good.

Context will be more important when the gift itself is easy.

I would argue the same thing applies when you buy a card from Hallmark

I sometimes think the physical world has been going through a similar time, where most of what we own and receive is ephemeral, mass-produced, lacking in real significance. We have a lot more now but it often means a lot less.

having been bombarded with forwards of "good morning" image greetings from loved ones on a daily basis, i can definitely attest to this sentiment.

ai spam, especially the custom emoji/stickers will be interesting in terms of whether they will have any reusability or will be littered like single-use plastic.

LOL that image you painstakingly created is also forgotten not long after being given to most people, just because you know the effort that went in doesn't mean the receiving person does 99.9% of the time.

Same thing for your kid, the kid likes both stories, gives 0 shit that you used GenAI or sat up for 8 hours trying to figure out the rhyme, those things are making YOU feel better not the person receiving it.

I think it would be clear that the picture was drawn for the person - I imagine most people would explicitly say something like "I drew this for you" in the accompanying message. And I don't know what kind of kids you've been hanging around, but my daughter would definitely appreciate a story that I spent some time thinking up rather than "here's something ChatGPT came up with". I guess that assumes you're not going to lie to kids about the AI-generated being yours, but that's another issue entirely.

You go into "HOW" you write a poem for your daughter? are you also explaining and rubbing in how hard you work to get her food on the table? Like wow, the amount of people here that want their "effort" calculated into the "love" cost of something is insane.

I was brought up that the thought matters, if i think to call my mom she appreciates it i don't need to make some excess effort to show her i love her or show her more love.

You read your daughter a book off your phone you got for free, is that somehow worth less than a book you went to barnes and noble and paid full price for?

With my original bedtime story example, I was actually thinking about the kind of story you make up on the spot. Like the topic request comes at bedtime, and maybe the child even has feedback on how the story should go as you're making it up. The alternative of the parent quickly asking ChatGPT on their phone for a story on the selected topic just seems not as fun and meaningful.

I guess in Apple's example it looks like they're writing it as a document on MacOS, so I suppose they are writing it ahead of time.

This is because there actually is a calculation that people do between "effort" and "love" (it's not some 1:1 ratio and you can't calculate it, it's real). At least for the vast, vast majority of people with functional interpersonal skills...

It's the difference between calling your mom and just saying "Hi mom, this is me thinking to call you. bye." vs calling her with a prepared thing to say/ask about that you had to take extra time to think about before calling. Effort went into that. You don't need to tell her "HOW" you came up with what you wanted to talk about, but there is a difference in how your call will be received as a result.

If you really believe that sending a text versus a hand written card will have no difference on how the message is interpreted, you should just know that you are in the minority.

> those things are making YOU feel better not the person receiving it

I don't think this is true at all. Love is proportional to cost; if it costs me nothing, then the love it represents is nothing.

When we receive something from someone, we estimate what it cost them based on what we know of them. Until recently, if someone wrote a poem just for us, our estimation of that would often be pretty high because we know approximately what it costs to write a poem.

In modern times, that cost calculation is thrown off, because we don't know whether they wrote it themselves (high cost) or generated it (low/no cost).

Love is proportional to cost?!?!?!?! Holy shit thats fucking weird, it costs me 0 to love my mom, i love my mom lol, that doesn't change that fact. Broke mother that can't afford to take care of her kid doesn't not love the kid or vise versa.

If your calculating "cost" for if someone is showing nuts, i feel sad for you lol, if my wife buys or makes me something or just says "i love you" they are equivalent, I don't give a shit if she "does something for me that costs her something" she loves me she thought of me.

The thought is what matters, if you put extra worth on people struggling to do something meaning more love... thats... ya

I think I see what tripped you up in my comment. I said

> if it costs me nothing, then the love it represents is nothing.

You could read this as meaning that every action has to be super costly or else the love isn't there. I admit that it's poorly phrased and it's not what I meant.

What I should have said is that if it costs you nothing, then it doesn't in itself indicate love. It costs me nothing to say "I love you" on its own, and you wouldn't believe me if I just walked up to you in the street and said that. But your mom has spent thousands of hours and liters of blood, sweat and tears caring for you, so when she says "I love you," you have all that to back those words up. It's the cost she paid before that imbues the words with value: high cost, deep love.

Hopefully that makes more sense.

He uses cost in a context of time and effort not directly financial

I can't help but be baited into responding to this comment too lol

You are obviously willfully misinterpreting what the OP meant by "cost".

You say "the thought is what matters" - this is 100% true, and "the thought" has a "cost". It "costs" an hour of sitting down and thinking of what to write to express your feelings to someone. That's what he is saying is "proportional" to love.

It "costs" you mental space to love your mom, and that can definitely happen with $0 entering the equation.

And with respect to "extra worth on people struggling to do something meaning more love" - if you spend the time to sit down and write a poem, when that's something that you don't excel at, someone will think: "oh wow you clearly really love me if you spent the time to write a poem, I know this because I know it's not easy for you and so you must care a lot to have done so anyway". If you can't see that... thats... ya

> You say "the thought is what matters" - this is 100% true, and "the thought" has a "cost". It "costs" an hour of sitting down and thinking of what to write to express your feelings to someone. That's what he is saying is "proportional" to love.

So if you sit down and thinking of what to write to express your love to your mom for two hours, then you love your mom twice than the person who only sit down for one hour loves his mom?

It's what "proportional" means. Words have meanings.

I never said that spending two hours means you love someone twice as much as spending one hour, I'm not sure where you're getting that from.

You also may be shocked to learn this, but "proportional" doesn't mean 1:1. It can mean 1:2, 5:1, or x:x^e(2*pi). All of those are proportions. Words do have meanings, and you'll note that - while I didn't even misuse the word proportional - the quotations also indicate I'm using it more loosely than it's textbook definition. You know, like how a normal person might.

I'm getting the vibe from you and the other commentator that, to you, this is about comparing how much two people love their respective mothers. That's not at all what this is even about? You can't compare "how much" two people love a respective person/thing because love isn't quantifiable.

I'm really not sure what you're even taking issue with? The idea that more time and effort from the giver corresponds to the receiver feeling more appreciation? That is not exactly a hot take lmfao

Consider this scenario: Your friend sends you an image of some art they produced. It looks very impressive. You ask them how long it took them to create. They say oh, only a minute or so, I made it with a MidJourney prompt.

Do you feel disappointed in that answer? If yes, then surely you see that appreciation of something can be relative to effort.

Love is somewhat related to cost, but "proportional" is definitely not the word you want.

If love is proportional to cost, then rapists and psychos who kill their SOs are the true lovers since the cost is 20 years of jail time to life sentence. Do you want to live by this standard?

Actually you prove my point; the psycho loves himself so much that he will risk prison to get what he wants (or keep others from having it), but he doesn't love his SO enough to pay the cost of letting her go.

I don't truly agree with your take here, but let's assume you are correct and creating real things in your life only benefits you and no-one else. If you create a painting or story or piece of furniture, others prefer the more professional AI or mass-produced version.

In that scenario certainly there'll be times when using the AI option will make more sense, since you usually don't have hours to spare, and you also want to make the stories that your kid likes the most, which in this scenario are the AI ones.

But even then there's still that benefit to yourself from spending time on creating things, and I'd encourage anyone to have a hobby where they get to make something just because they feel like it. Even if it's just for you. It's nice to have an outlet to express yourself.

What a cynical take!

Their demos looked like how I imagined AI before ChatGPT ever existed. It was a personalized, context aware, deeply integrated way of interacting with your whole system.

I really enjoyed the explanation for how they planned on tackling server-enabled AI tasks while making the best possible effort to keep your requests private. Auditable server software that runs on Apple hardware is probably as good as you can get for tasks like that. Even better would be making it OSS.

There was one demo where you could talk to Siri about your mom and it would understand the context because of stuff that she (your mom) had written in one of her emails to you... that's the kind of stuff that I think we all imagined an AI world would look like. I'm really impressed with the vision they described and I think they honestly jumped to the lead of the pack in an important way that hasn't been well considered up until this point.

It's not just the raw AI capabilities from the models themselves, which I think many of us already get the feeling are going to be commoditized at some point in the future, but rather the hardware and system-wide integrations that make use of those models that matters starting today. Obviously how the experience will be when it's available to the public is a different story, but the vision alone was impressive to me. Basically, Apple again understands the UX.

I wish Apple the best of luck and I'm excited to see how their competitors plan on responding. The announcement today I think was actually subtle compared to what the implications are going to be. It's exciting to think that it may make computing easier for older people.

Until this gets into reviewers' hands, I think it's fair to say that we really have no idea how good any of this is. When it comes to AI being able to do "all kinds of things," it's easy to demo some really cool stuff, but if it falls on its face all the time in the real world, you end up with the current Siri.

Remember this ad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw1iwC7Zh24 12 years ago, they promised a bunch of things that I still wouldn't trust Siri to pull off.

These are all very basic commands that Siri pulls off flawlessly whenever I use it.

Most of the stuff shown are much faster to do yourself if you have your hands free and if you don't you have to pray the gods that Siri doesn't fuck up for whatever reason.

Even something as simple as setting the time, Siri will bork it at least 1 in 10 times. I know that for sure, since I worked at a friend's restaurant 2 summers ago and was heavily using Siri's timer to time french fries blanching (many batches for at least 2 hours every day or every 2 days); this dam thing would regularly use wrong time or not understand at all even though it was always the same dam time and the conditions were always similar.

On the other hand, the Google home at my cousin's place operates at my command without mistakes even though he doesn't even have the luxury of knowing my voice.

People who think Siri is good either are delusional or have special godlike skills. But considering how many hilarious "demos" I have gotten from Apple fans friends; I will say it's the former.

I myself use iPhone/Apple Watch/Macs since forever so it's not like I'm free hating. I just goddam suck like too many Apple stuff recently...

> People who think Siri is good either are delusional or have special godlike skills. But considering how many hilarious "demos" I have gotten from Apple fans friends; I will say it's the former.

Or maybe they just have good experiences? Why do they have to be delusional?

Because they usually are in a tech bubble where Apple is the best there is on everything and they never really tried any alternatives.

So, they think it's good and it's a delusion because it would not be objectively considered good if it was compared side by side with the competition.

I know that for sure because I have spent a lot of time with people like that and I used to be a bit like that. It's much easier to see the world in black and white for most, just like religions are with good/bad and people who really like Apple stuff are very often like that.

I think too many people assumed that because ChatGPT is a conversation interface that that's how AI should be designed, which is like assuming computers would always be command lines instead of GUIs. Apple has done a good job of providing purpose-built GUIs for AI stuff here, and I think it will be interesting to watch that stuff get deeper.

> There was one demo where you could talk to Siri about your mom and it would understand the context because of stuff that she (your mom) had written in one of her emails to you... that's the kind of stuff that I think we all imagined an AI world would look like.

I can't but feel all of this super creepy.

We're really just describing an on-device search tool with a much better interface. It's only creepy if you treat it like a person, which Apple is pretty careful not to do too much.

Yep it's an assistant, they didnt add some weird app where you can talk to virtual granny lol

Yep.

I remember vividly the comment on Windows Recall that said if the same was done by Apple it would be applauded. Here we are.

At the risk of sounding like an Apple apologist, Apple has a pretty good (though not perfect) track record for privacy and security.

Microsoft on the other hand… well, I understand they just pulled the recall feature after it was discovered the data wasn’t even encrypted at rest?!

If anything Recall is MORE privacy respectful than this since everything is stored and processed on your device and you can access (and easily alter) the database, exclude specific applications, websites (for Edge for now), etc.

I'm not saying it's not an awful feature, I will disable it as soon as it is installed.

The fact that it's not encrypted at rest really is the least of my concerns (though it does show the lack of care and planning). For this to be a problem, an attacker already has all the necessary accesses to your computer to either get your encryption key or do devastating damage anyway.

> At the risk of sounding like an Apple apologist, Apple has a pretty good (though not perfect) track record for privacy and security.

"Not perfect" is enough to be concerned. I would also not be surprised that their good reputation is more due to their better ability at hiding their data collection and related scandals rather than due to any care for the user.

I thought that the problem with Recall is that it takes screenshots (potentially of sensitive things like passwords, or private browsing sessions) and stores new data that you never intended to store in the first place.

This Apple AI is not storing anything new, it’s just processing the data that you already stored. As long as they pay close attention to invalidation on the index when things get deleted.

The cloud processing is a little concerning but presumably you will be able to turn it off, and it doesn’t seem much different to using iCloud anyway.

The screenshots are not storing anything new, it's just a visual trail of an already existing activity. It literally just makes it easier to browse the history, that's it. Someone motivated could just recompose activity from logs/histories of the various softwares.

The distinction is made by people who seem hell bent on trashing Microsoft for everything and glorifying everything Apple does.

I strongly disagree. My expectation of what’s on my screen is that it’s ephemeral unless I take a screen shot.

Here’s an example. I always use a random password when creating accounts for (eg) databases, but not every UI supports this, so I have a little shell script that generates one. I then copy and paste it from the terminal. Once I close the terminal window and copy something else, that password is stored only once.

With recall, it’s now stored permanently. Someone who gets access to my screen history is a step closer to getting into my stuff.

Of course there are workarounds. But the expectation I have around how my screen work informs the actions I take on it.

Here’s another example. I recently clicked on a link from HN and ended up on a page containing explicit images. At work. As soon as I realised what I was looking at, I clicked away.

How long until my visual history is to be interrogated, characterised, and used to find me guilty of looking at inappropriate material in the workplace? Such a system is not going to care about my intentions. Even if I’m not disciplined, I’d certainly be embarrassed.

I don't think the above poster was really referring to who does it, but that it's creepy that you're having a conversation about your mom with your phone to begin with

As opposed to what: If you hired an actual human assistant, it wouldn't be?

Having other people read through my stuff and respond for me is creepy regardless.

This is what executive assistants do all day.

Some people view house keepers the same way. “I can’t let someone going through and touch all of my personal belongings. That’s just creepy.”

There’s a wide range of what people find creepy and also what people can and do get used to.

Assistants are generally limited to people who can afford to have one. I think that's a fair assumption. Out of all those people not everyone in that group is going to have one. Which leaves a very very few people that do have one.

Why would this translate to everybody wanting to have one?

What does that have to do with creepiness?

How many people out there are hiring personal assistants?

This something else is it pushes people to even more heavily dive into the ecosystem, if it works how they show you really want it to understand your life, so you'll want all your devices able to help build that net of data to provide your context to all your devices for answering about events and stuff, meaning hey maybe i should get an appletv instead of a chromecast so that siri knows about my shows and stuff too.

I'm just unhappy that this will mostly end up to make the moat larger and the platform lock-in more painful either way. iPhones have been going up in price, serious compute once you're deep in this will be simply extortion, as leaving the apple universe is going to be nigh impossible.

Also no competitor is going to be as good at integrating everything, as none of those have as integrated systems.

i'd be skeptical of the marketing used for the security/privacy angle. won't be surprised if there is subopena-able data out of this in some court case.

i might have missed it but there has not been much talk about guardrails or ethical use with their tools, and what they are doing about it in terms of potential abuse.

You can read the details of their approach for the privacy/security aspects of the cloud compute portion here. https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Question I have is how deeply it is integrated in non-Apple apps. Like Signal (still no Siri support) or Outlook.

It sounds like the app creators need to built in the support using SiriKit and app intentions. If they're using either already a fair bit of integration will be automatic.

Hope I can keep apples fingers from getting "deeply integrated" with my personal data.

[dead]

Gotta say, from a branding point of view, it's completely perfect. Sometimes things as "small" as the letters in a companies name can have a huge impact decades down the road. AI == AI, and that's how Apple is going to play it. That bit at the end where it said "AI for the rest of us" is a great way to capture the moment, and probably suggests where Apple is going to go.

imo, apple will gain expertise to serve a monster level of scale for more casual users that want to generate creative or funny pictures, emojis, do some text work, and enhance quality of life. I don't think Apple will be at the forefront of new AI technology to integrate those into user facing features, but if they are to catch up, they will have to get into the forefront of the same technologies to support their unique scale.

Was a notable WWDC, was curious to see what they would do with the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, and nothing about the M3 Ultra or M4 Ultra, or the M3/M4 Extreme.

I also predicted that they would use their own M2 Ultras and whatnot to support their own compute capacity in the cloud, and interestingly enough it was mentioned. I wonder if we'll get more details on this front.

I think the biggest announcement was the private compute cloud with Apple Silicon. Apple is building up internal expertise to go after Nvidia.

Can you explain what that means for someone who missed part of the video today?

The Apple Intelligence cloud system uses Apple's own M-series chips, not Nvidia.

Because they will be running inference using much smaller models than GPT 4.

At least they are honest about it in the specs that they have published - there's a graph there that clearly shows their server-side model underperforming GPT-4. A refreshing change from the usual "we trained a 7B model and it's almost as good as GPT-4 in tests" hype train.

(see "Apple Foundation Model Human Evaluation" here: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...)

Yea, their models are more targeted. You can't ask Apple Intelligence/Siri about random celebrities or cocktail recipes.

But you CAN ask it to show you all pictures you took of your kids during your vacation to Cabo in 2023 and it'll find them for you.

The model "underperforms", but not in the ways that matter. This is why they partnered with OpenAI, to get the generic stuff included when people need it.

Isn't it also that Nvidia chips are basically unobtainable right now anyway?

Yeah, but Apple wouldn’t care either way. They do things for the principle of it. “We have an ongoing beef with NVIDIA so we’ll build our own ai server farms.”

Apple have a long antagonist relationship with NVIDIA. If anything it is holding Apple back because they don’t want to go cap in hand to NVIDIA and say “please sir, can I have some more”.

We see this play out with the ChatGPT integration. Rather than hosting GPT-4o themselves, OpenAI are. Apple is providing NVIDIA powered AI models through a third party, somewhat undermining the privacy first argument.

Rumours say that Apple has bought a lot of GPUs from Nvidia in the last year or so in order to train their own models.

Not really. They use ChatGPT as a last resort for a question that isn't related to the device or an Apple-related interaction. Ex: "Make a recipe out of the foods in this image" versus "how far away is my mom from the lunch spot she told me about". And in that instance they ask the user explicitly whether they want to use ChatGPT.

I see what they did here and it is smart, but can bring chaos. On one side it is like saying "we own it", but on the other hand it is putting a brand outside of their control. Now I only hope people will not abbreviate it with ApI, because it will pollute search results for API :P

Yeah I feel like we are getting the crumbs for a future hardware announcement, like M4 ultra. They’ll announce it like “we are so happy to share our latest and greatest processor, a processor so powerful, we’ve been using it in our private AI cloud. We are pleased to announce the M4 Ultra”

It was speculated when the M4 was released only for the iPad Pro that it might be out of an internal need on Apple's part for the bulk of the chips being manufactured. This latest set of announcements gives substantial weight to that theory.

Yeah that seems very reasonable/likely. The release of the training toolkit for Apple silicon too points that way: https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-examples/tree/main/transfo...

Yeah real smart move to make your products initials unusable and unsearchable. Apple has done it again

Indeed. I suppose they are hoping people will associate the two letters with their thing rather than the original acronym.

People will just call it Apple AI like ATM machine.

I remain skeptical until I see it in action. On the one hand, Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device. On the other, there was too much ambiguity around this announcement. What is the threshold for running something in the cloud? How is your personal model used across devices - does that mean it briefly moves to the cloud? How does its usage change across guest modes? Even the phrase "OpenAI won’t store requests" feels intentionally opaque.

I was personally holding out for a federated learning approach where multiple Apple devices could be used to process a request but I guess the Occam's razor prevails. I'll wait and see.

> Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device.

Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it wrong". I don't expect an amazing AI assistant out of them, I expect something that sometimes does what the user meant.

> Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it wrong".

And yet this was never said.

Closest was this:

> Just don't hold it that way.

Or maybe this:

> If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

It's merely the instance that gave the name to the phenomena, not the only time it happened.

What phenomena?

When Apple published a webpage about how other phones also got reduced reception when you held them in a particular way, but then basically immediately pulled it. And then a while later they offered a free bumper case to mitigate the whole issue.

None of that suggests any malice. We don’t know what happened internally, other than the arial designer was eventually let go. That engineer could have been pushing the “every phone has the problem” narrative and brushing it off. At some point the pressure from customer feedback could have meant they were overruled and ordered to retest, or test under the specific conditions.

The fact that Apple changed their stance from “here’s a workaround” to “here’s a free bumper” is a sign they reacted to something, and that could have been anything from the conclusion of internal testing to a PR job to keep customers happy.

If they had said there was no design flaw from the start and stuck with that the whole way then I’d understand people’s reaction, but all I see is a company that said “don’t hold it that way” as a workaround then eventually issued free bumpers, thus confirming the issue. That doesn’t suggest they were blaming the user for doing something wrong. The sentiment just wasn’t there.

Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.

Everyone makes fun of Sammy batteries exploding, but forget antennagate, bendgate, software gimping of battery life, butterfly keyboards, touch disease, yellow screens (which I believe were when Apple had to split supply Samsung/LG), exploding Macbook batteries (not enough to cause a fuss tho). Etc.

Other companies can of course be ne'er-do-wells, but people actively defend Apple for the company's missteps.

I rarely see anyone defending Apple, but I do see people constantly applying logic to them specifically that they don’t seem to apply to other companies. Take this:

> Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.

You can’t immediately address any issue. You need time to investigate issues. You might not even start investigating until you hit some sort of threshold or you’ll be chasing your tail in every bit of customer feedback. It takes time to narrow down anything to a bad component, bad batch, software bug or whatever it is.

As for weighing whether the issue is worth addressing at all - this is literally every company. If you did a recall of every bit of hardware at the slightest whiff of an issue you’d go bankrupt very quickly. There are always thresholds.

I wish we would just criticise apple in the same way we do with other companies. There is no need to invent things like “you’re holding it wrong” or intentionally misunderstanding batterygate into “they slowed down phones to sell you a new one”. They already do other crappy things, inventing fake ones isn’t necessary.

> What is the threshold for running something in the cloud?

To be fair, this was just the keynote -- details will be revealed in the sessions.

> has a good track record with privacy

They repeated this so many times they've made it true.

Do you have proof otherwise? Compared to the competition, who openly use everything about you to build a profile.

The iPhone will let you install an app only if you tell Apple about it. It will let you get your location only if you also give that location to Apple. The only way to get true privacy is to give users control, which even Google-flavored Android builds provide more of than iOS.

After so many years, so many people still believe in this user control paradigm.

Giving users control works for the slim percentage of power users. Most users will end up obliterated by scammers and other unsavory characters.

Perhaps there is a way to give control to today's users (that includes my non-technical mother) and still secure them against the myriad of online threats. If anyone knows of a paper or publication that addresses this, I'd love to read it.

If you want privacy, that's the only way to get it. As Apple has demonstrated, giving the platform owner control means eroding your privacy with no recourse and still getting obliterated by scammers.

> The iPhone will let you install an app only if you tell Apple about it

That’s not 100% true, and where it is, there is a good reason, and pretty much every other store does it (being able to revoke malware)

It's 100% true. On Android, you don't have to use a store, and you don't have to tell anybody anything if you don't use a store.

I get the sense there's still a lot of work to be done over the next few months, and we may see some feature slippage. The betas will be where we see their words in action, and I'll be staying far away from the betas, which will be a little painful. I think ambiguity works in their favor right now. It's better to underpromise and overdeliver, instead of vice versa.

They need to provide a mechanism to view the data being uploaded by you

Same they say privacy so many times i got Facebook PTSD.

I mean theres a difference between these companies on their privacy stance historical and current.

> Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device.

I mean they have great PR, but in terms of privacy, they extract more information from you than google does.

Do you have a source for this?

Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you like and dont like at different states of your life built.

What does Apple have that's even close?

Apple is also an ad company,

they generate between $5-10B on ads alone a year now and more importantly that is one their fastest growing revenue segment .

Add the context of declining revenue from iPhone sales. That revenue and its potential will have enormous influence on decision making .

The thesis that Apple doesn’t have ads business so there is no use to collect the data is dead for 5years now

Talking about billions is disingenuous, you should be talking about percentages of revenue. Ten billion _sounds_ like a lot but really isn't.

For Google, over 80% of their revenue comes from ads.

Apple's revenue is around 380 billion, 5-10 billion in ads is in the "other" category if you draw a pie chart of it... They make 30 billion just selling iPads - their worst selling product.

Apple can lose the ad category completely and they won't even notice it. If Google's ads go away because of privacy protections, the company will die.

Talking absolutes is not accurate either. Not all revenue is equal.

There is reason why NVDIA, TSLA or stocks with growth[1] potential gets the P/E multiple that their peers do not or an blue chip traditional company can only dream of. The core of Apple revenue the biggest % chunk of iPhone sales is stagnant at best falling at worst. Services is their fastest growing revenue segment and already is ~$100 B of the $380B. Ads is a key component of that, 5 years back Ads was less < $1B, that is the important part.

Also margins matter, even at Apple where there is enormous margin for hardware, gross margins for services is going to be higher, that is simple economics of any software service cost of extra user or item is marginal. The $100B is worth lot more than equivalent $100B in iPhone, iPad sales where significant chunk will go to vendors.

Executives are compensated on stock performance, stock valuation depends on expected future growth a lot. Apple's own attempts and the billions invested to get into Auto, Healthcare, or Virtual Reality are a testament to that need to find new streams of revenue.

It would be naive to assume a fast growing business unit does not get outsized influence, any middle manager in a conglomerate would know how true this is.

A Disney theme park executive doing even 5x revenue as say the Disney+ one will not get the same influence, budgets,resources or respect or career paths.

[1] Expected Growth, doesn't have to be real,when it does not materialize then market will correct as is happening to an extent with TSLA.

> Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you like and dont like at different states of your life built.

Thats not what I was saying. I was saying that Apple extract more information than google does. I was not saying that Apple process it to make a persona out of you. Thats not the issue here. Apple is saying that they are a "Privacy first" company. To be that, you need to not be extracting data in the first place.

Yes, they make lots of noise about how they do lots of things on device. Thats great and to be encouraged. But Apple are still extracting your friend list, precise location, financial records, various biometrics, browsing and app history. ANd for sure, they need some of that data to provide services.

But whats the data life cycle? are they deleting it on time? who has access to it, what about when a new product wants to use it? how do they stop internal bad actors?

All I want you to do is imagine that Facebook has made iOS, and the iphone, and is now rolling out these features. They are saying the same things as Apple, do you trust them?

Do you believe what they say?

I don't want Apple to fail, I just want people to think critically about a very very large for profit company. Apple is not our friend, and we shouldn't be treating them like they are.

I think what he's getting at is that Apple does collect a lot of very similar data about it's users. Apple Maps still collects data about where you've driven - the difference is that they don't turn around and sell that data like Google loves to do.

I believe (but could be wrong) they also treat that data in a way that prevents it from being accessed by anyone besides the user (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

Can you explain what you mean with "extract more information from you than google" here?

Not saying you're wrong, I'm just curious what sources or info you're using to make that claim.

on iOS Apple record:

o who you message, when you message.

o Your locations (find my devices)

o your voice (siri)

o the location of your items (airtags)

o what you look at (App telemetry)

o What websites you visit (Safari telemetry)

o what you buy (Apple Pay)

o Who your with (location services, again)

o your facial biometrics (apple photos tags people with similar faces, something FAcebook got fined for)

o Who emails you, who you email

With these changes, you'll need to allow apple to process the contents of the messages that you send and receive. If you read their secuirity blog it has a lot of noise about E2E security, then admit that its not practical for things other than backups and messaging.

they then say they will strive to make userdata ephemeral in the apple private cloud.

I'm not saying that they will abuse it, I'm just saying that we should give apple the same level of scrutiny that we give people like Facebook.

Infact, personally I think we should use Facebook as the shitty stick to test data use for everyone.

What do you mean by the “record”? It seems like you think this means Apple somehow has access and stores all that information in their cloud and we just have to hope/trust that they don’t decide they want to poke around in it?

You should look more into their security architecture if you’re curious about stuff like this. The way Secure Enclave, E2EE (including the Advanced Data Protection feature for all iCloud data), etc. The reality is that they use a huge range of privacy enhancing approaches to minimize what data has to leave your device and how it can be used. For example the biometrics you mention are never outside the Secure Enclave in the chip on your phone and nobody except you can access them unless they have your passcode. Things like running facial recognition on your photos library is handled locally on your device with no information going up to the cloud. FindMy is also architected in a fully E2E encrypted way.

You can browse their hundreds of pages of security and privacy documentation via the table of contents here to look up any specific service or functionality you want to know more about: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web

by record, I mean precisely that. Apple stores this data. As the Key bearer it has significant control.

Moreover, because apple has great PR, you don't hear about privacy breeches. Everyone seems to forget they made a super cheap and for a long time undetectable stalking service. Despite the warnings. (AirTag)

Had that been Facebook or Google, it would have been the end of the feature. They have improved the unauthorised tracking flow, but its really quite unreliable with ios, and really bad in android still.

> You should look more into their security architecture if you’re curious about stuff like this.

I have, and its a brilliant manifesto. I especially love the documentation on PCC.

but, its crammed full of implied actions that aren't the case For example: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756

> If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data – including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more – is protected using end-to-end encryption.

Ok good, so its not much different to normal right?

> When you turn on Advanced Data Protection, access to your iCloud data on the web at iCloud.com is disabled

Which leads me to this:

> It seems like you think this means Apple somehow has access and stores all that information in their cloud and we just have to hope/trust that they don’t decide they want to poke around in it?

You're damn right I do. Its the same with Google, and Facebook. We have no real way of verifying that trust. People trust Apple, because they are great at PR. But are they actually good at privacy? We have no real way of finding out, because they also have really reactive lawyers.

and thats my point, we are basically here: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/11gxpcu/our_little_... but with apple.

So, if I've got this correct there's:

1. On-device AI

2. AI using Apple's servers

3. AI using ChatGPT/OpenAI's services (and others in the future)

Number 1 will pass to number 2 if it thinks it requires the extra processing power, but number 3 will only be invoked with explicit user permission.

[Edit: As pointed out below, other providers will be coming eventually.]

I see no real difference between 2 and 3. Once the data has left your device, it has left your device. There is no getting it back and you no longer have any control over it.

> I see no real difference between 2 and 3.

This #2, so-called "Private Cloud Compute", is not the same as iCloud. And certainly not the same as sending queries to OpenAI.

Quoting:

“With Private Cloud Compute, Apple Intelligence can flex and scale its computational capacity and draw on larger, server-based models for more complex requests. These models run on servers powered by Apple silicon, providing a foundation that allows Apple to ensure that data is never retained or exposed.“

“Independent experts can inspect the code that runs on Apple silicon servers to verify privacy, and Private Cloud Compute cryptographically ensures that iPhone, iPad, and Mac do not talk to a server unless its software has been publicly logged for inspection.”

“Apple Intelligence with Private Cloud Compute sets a new standard for privacy in AI, unlocking intelligence users can trust.”

"We make the hardware and we pinky promise that we will protect your data and will open source part of it" means nothing for privacy. Especially when things like warrants come into play.

How would a warrant work in this case? Using Silicon Data Protection[0] the hash of the currently running firmware (of both the AP _and_ the SEP) is locked into hardware registers in the PKA engine used by the SEP. This hash perturbs the key derivation, and the PKA engine can also attest to the running firmware hash(es) by using an EC key only available to it (they call this BAA, Basic Attestation Authority).

iOS won't send any data to a PCC that isn't running a firmware that's been made public in their transparency logs and compute nodes have no way to be debugged in a way that exposes user data[1]

And at the end of the day, this is going to give the warrant holder a handful of requests from a specific user? Why wouldn't they use that same warrant to get onto the target's device directly and get that same data plus a ton more?

0: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec... 1: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Apple controls the hardware and the private keys baked into the hardware. If one of their servers can decrypt the payload, they can intercept, duplicate, and decrypt the payload and its response. I'm sure this'll start a long fight between law enforcement and Apple after the first warrant hits and Apple claims it can't comply.

Warrants to hack devices are a lot less common and generally harder to obtain. That's why police will send Google warrants for "give us info on every device who has been in a radius of x between y and z time".

I'm sure Apple did their very best to protect their users, but I don't think their very best is good enough to warrant this kind of trust. A "secure cloud" solution will also tempt future projects to use the cloud over local processing more, as cloud processing is now readily available. Apple's local processing is a major advantage over the competition but I doubt that'll stay that way if their cloud solution remains this integrated.

Apple actually does not control the private keys baked into the hardware, see the "Root Cryptographic Keys" section of their security whitepaper: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

Your example indicates a situation where law enforcement does not know which device belongs to their suspect, if they even have one. That's a very different scenario from a targeted "tell us the requests belonging to this individual".

Warrants to search a device are extremely common place, otherwise the likes of Grayshift and Cellebrite would not be around.

From a threat modeling perspective compromising PCC is high risk (Apple's not just going to comply and the fight will be very public, see the FBI San Bernardino fight) , high effort (Long protracted court case), low reward (I only see requests that are going to get shipped off to the cloud). If I were law enforcement I'd explore every other avenue available to me before I go down that particular rabbit hole which is exactly what this design is intended to achieve.

If we can't trust independent audits of code and hardware, what can we trust?

I think it boils down to that it doesn't matter what they promise, if you send a videocap of all you ever do on your computer to some company on the internet, you just have to take your chances. Would you put mics and cameras in all of your rooms in your home that send data to Apple (or someone else) to analyze "for your benefit" even if they say and promise they won't do anything bad with the feeds?

At least with gmail and chat clients etc. things are somewhat put in compartments, one of the services might screw up and do something with your emails but your Messenger or WhatsApp chats are not affected by that, or vice versa. But when you bake it into the OS (laptop or phone) you're IMHO taking a much bigger risk, no matter what the intentions are.

There is nothing which Apple Intelligence can do that a hypothetically evil Apple couldn't have done before, given sufficiently treacherous code in their operating systems. Thus if you use an Apple device, you're already trusting Apple to not betray you. These new features don't increase the number of entities one must place their trust in.

Whereas with apps like Gmail and WhatsApp on an iPhone, you must trust Google and Meta in addition to Apple, not in place of Apple. It doesn't distribute who you trust, it multiplies it.

I still think it's a big difference between trusting existing OS'es and apps, which are under scrutiny by hundreds of security researchers and thousands of security nerds all the time, and willingly sending away all your data to a party who promises they will treat it well (I know it doesn't work like this in this case, but just for the sake of argument).

In essence, what you're doing is training an assistant to learn all of your details of your life and habits and the question is if that "assistant" is really secure forever. Taken to the extreme, the assistant becomes a sort of "backup" of yourself. But yeah it's an individual decision with the pro's and con's of this.

If you were already in on iCloud, that one residual distinction is moot.

Open code, inspected and used by a large number of users, hosted on hardware you physically control

I think that's fair, but impractical for most users. I have a number of Home Assistant integrations with locally hosted AI models for smart home features, but I wouldn't expect my grandma to set up a server and a few VMs when she could just give her HomePod a prompt that works with AI and have no worries about the implementation. Do you feel like Apple's "independent" auditing is insufficient?

> Do you feel like Apple's "independent" auditing is insufficient?

Yeah, pretty much

Also, your grandma might not setup a VM, but it sounds like the off-device processing is essentially stateless, or at most might have a very lightweight session. It seems like the kind of thing one person could setup for their family (with the same tamper-proof signatures, plus physical security), or provide a privacy focused appliance for anyone to just plug into a wall, if they wanted to.

Most open source code isn't inspected though.

There have been many cases recently of compromised code being in the wild for quite some time and then only known about by accident.

100% of closed code is not inspected

I have been involved in security audits for 110% closed code, code that's secret even within the company.

Auditing helps the company writing it, the auditors are usually experts in breaking stuff in fun ways, and it's good for business - we could slap "code security audited by XXX" on the sales pitch.

> and it's good for business - we could slap "code security audited by XXX" on the sales pitch.

You're on the precipice of discovering the problem of incentives when it comes to audits.

Audits are good, but they're inferior to source available

By you. Three comments above references "independent audits". Meaning professional cybersecurity firms

From. what I can tell, Apple doesn't actually provide the source code itself, or provides the (cryptographically verified) binaries and VMs to run it. Reverse engineering will still need to take place, it seems.

I will trust independent audits of local code and local hardware. There are still plenty of opportunities for someone to send out malicious patches, but the code running can (and probably will) be analysed by journalists looking for a scoop and security researchers looking for a bug bounty.

I have no idea what code is running on a server I can't access. I can't exactly go SSH into siri.apple.com and match checksums. Knowing Apple's control freak attitude, I very much doubt any researcher permitted to look at their servers is going to be very independent either.

Apple is just as privacy friendly as ChatGPT or Gemini. That's not necessarily a bad thing! AI requires feeding lots of data into the cloud, that's how it works. Trying to sell their service as anything more than that is disingenuous, though.

> I have no idea what code is running on a server I can't access.

That's like... the whole point? You have some kind of hardware-based measured boot thing that can provide a cryptographic attestation that the code it's running is the same as the code that's been reviewed by an independent auditor. If the auditor confirms that the data isn't being stored, just processed and thrown away, that's almost as good as on-device compute for 99.999% of users. (On-device compute can also be backdoored, so you have to trust this even in the case that everything is local.)

The presentation was fairly detail-light so I don't know if this is actually what they're doing, but it's nice to see some effort in this direction.

E: I roughly agree with this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40638740) later down the thread -- what exactly the auditors are verifying is the key important bit.

I do like Apple's attempts to make this stuff better for privacy, but a pinky promise not to leak any information is still just that.

Apple has developed some of the strongest anti tampering compute on existence to prevent people from running code they don't want on hardware they produce. However, that protection is pretty useless when it comes to protection from Apple. They have the means to bypass any layer of protection they've built into their hardware.

It all depends on what kind of auditing Apple will allow. If Apple allows anyone to run this stuff on any Mac, with source or at least symbols available, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. If Apple comes up with NDAs and limited access, I won't trust them at all.

Exactly, Apple has barely any oversight or accountability for their privacy claims. Sad to see so many people taking their word at face value.

Isn’t this basically what Signal does? Legitimately asking; I thought parts of their server implementation were closed source.

I don't think so. Signal regularly stops committing code to the public repos (https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server) when they're working on some kind of big reveal (cryptocurrency integration and such), but the server code is out there for you to run yourself.

Signal has the added benefit that it doesn't need to read what's in the messages you send. It needs some very basic routing information and the rest can be encrypted end to end. With AI stuff, the contents need to be decrypted in the cloud, so the end-to-end protections don't apply.

I meant more regarding their server setup but now that I think about it you are correct, it matters a lot more if the query/message/whatever isn’t encrypted before hitting the cloud.

It's a big mental gymnastics to do the same as Google and Microsoft while claiming moral superiority.

Apple's thrown stones come back to hunt their glass ceiling.

Eh with modern processor features like secure enclaves it's definitely possible to build systems in which the operators CANNOT access the information. (I worked on such a system using SGX for a large car producer, even physical access to the machines/hypervisors/raw memory would not give you access, perhaps the nsa has some keys baked in to extract a session key you may generate inside an enclave, but it would be very surprising if they burned that backdoor on anything as low fruit as this).

SGX has been broken by speculative execution bugs, though. Had something to do with people extracting DRM keys, if I recall correctly, not exactly a nation state attack. Since then, SGX has been removed from modern Intel processors (breaking some Blurays and software products for newer chips in the process).

Secure enclave stuff can be used to build a trust relationship if it's designed well, but Apple is the party hosting the service and the one burning the private keys into the chip.

Yep, it was broken a few times but fixed with microcode patches (afaik). It's still a part of the server processors and in wide use already. I'm not saying it's a golden bullet or otherwise infallable, but it sure beats cat /dev/mem by quite some way.

If you produce the hardware you necessarily have access to the signing key to say update the microcode or the firmware. Intel is in the TCB for SGX, but your cloud operator wouldn’t be. In this case Apple is both the hardware manufacturer and the operator.

Yes, that's all well and good but assumes no mistakes and no National Security letters ordering them to describe it that way and no changes of control or business strategy at some point in the future.

Once the data is out of your possession it's out of your control.

There are VERY few things that can keep your information safe if a TLA wants it. You need to go full Edward Snowden with phones in faraday cages and typing passwords under a sheet -levels of paranoia to be fully safe.

Drow "nation state is after me" from the threat model and you'll be a lot happier.

True, but there's a difference between

- TLA agency deploys scarce zero days or field ops because you're particularly interesting, vs..

- TLA agency has everything about you in a dragnet, and low level cop in small town searches your data for a laugh because they know you, and leaks it back to your social circle or uses it for commercial advantage

> nation state ... threat model

The history of tech is the history of falling costs with mass production. Expensive TLA surveillance tech for nation states can become broadly accessible, e.g. through-wall WiFi radar sensing sold to millions via IEEE 802.11bf WiFi 7 Sensing in NPU/AI PCs [1], or USB implant cables [2] with a few zeros lopped off the TLA price.

Instead of adversary motives, threat models can be based on adversary costs.

As adversary costs fall, threat models need to evolve.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sen...

[2] https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable

> Once the data is out of your possession it's out of your control.

Actually, once your e2e key that encrypts your data is out of your possession, it's out of your control.

Over the past decade it's become commercially feasible to be NSL-proof.

Not everyone has nation states in their threat models. I want privacy from corporations / surveillance capitalism, not the US government. Apple's privacy promises are focused on keeping my data out of the hands of bad actors like Google etc. and that's more than enough for me.

A threat model of Google getting your email revision makes these statements sillier. TLS and existing privacy policies are sufficient.

That's too many words with surprisingly little meaning. I'd suggest to wait for more technical details and to treat this as marketing until then.

You can read more here: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

But in summary 1. The servers run on Apple Silicon hardware which have fancier security features 2. Software is open source 3. iOS verifies that the server is actually running that open source software before talking to it 4. This is insane privacy for AI

The security features are meant to prevent the server operator (Apple) from being able to access data that's being processed in their farm. The idea is that with that + E2E encryption, it should be way closer to on-device processing in terms of privacy and security

Thanks! That's great and sounds like they're really trying to go as far as possible with it.

Here's also a great summary from Matthew Green: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616

You do realise that already happens though? If you read apple's privacy policy they send a lot of what you do to their servers.

Furthermore how private do you think Siri is? Their privacy policy explicitly states they send transcripts of what you say to them. That cannot be disabled.

That's the problem. These AI features may be "free" but is there an option to disable them system wide from rummaging through all your data and building a profile in order to be helpful? If not I won't update. And I mean one tickbox not a separate switch for every app and feature like siri has making it nearly impossible to disable

> Furthermore how private do you think Siri is? Their privacy policy explicitly states they send transcripts of what you say to them. That cannot be disabled.

Ten minutes ago i set up a new Apple device and it not only asked me if I wanted to enable Siri, but whether I wanted to contribute audio clips to improve it. What, exactly, cannot be disabled?

You can trivially find it in the Settings app after setup, too: Privacy & Security -> Analytics & Improvements -> scroll to the Improve Siri & Dictation toggle that explains that it controls whether Apple can store and review audio of interactions with Siri and the dictation function. Plenty of other options to review in the vicinity too, since the first party privacy settings are basically all in the same place.

That is the option for the audio itself. The transcripts of the audio (you do know what transcripts are, right?) are always sent to apple as per their privacy policy.

"When you use Siri, your device will indicate in Siri Settings if the things you say are processed on your device and not sent to Siri servers. Otherwise, your voice inputs are sent to and processed on Siri servers. In all cases, transcripts of your interactions will be sent to Apple to process your requests."

It's pretty clear and not in dispute that your transcripts are always sent to Apple.

That’s because Siri doesn’t run on-device - phones like the iPhone 6 can’t run that level of analysis. They “collect transcripts” insofar as they need to process your request.

Nonetheless, Siri is trivial to disable altogether.

Yeah if you asked the average person on the sheet (e.g. you) if they thought Siri was 100% private, they'd say yes because Apple has mislead them and said it is. That's the point. Apple says everything is private but then secretly collects data via their privacy policies.

Most people are happy for (2) already - iCloud Photos, Device backups, iCloud Messages… email.

Those that won’t use those won’t use this either.

Certainly there's a difference. You are right that the jump is big between 1 and 2, but it is negligent to say that Apple, a company which strives for improved privacy and security, and ChatGPT have the same privacy practices.

No, that's not the point. The point is neither of those companies could have the same values you have for your data and you are then leaving the security of that data in the hands of someone else. Even Apple, who is better than most, values your privacy with a dollar value representing your custom and their reputation. That is not how I value (nor most people value) their data. The latter point applies to any company, regardless of intention because security breaches are a matter of when, not if, and if anyone says otherwise they should not be talking about security.

Apple has demonstrated to be relatively trustworthy about privacy while most AI companies have demonstrated the opposite, so I do see a significant difference.

Google was considered very cool and trustworthy at one point also. "Do no evil" and all that.

Google was cool, once upon a time, but they always used your personal info pretty openly. The CEO a himself famously said, “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Apple has taken a markedly different approach, and has done so for years - E2E encryption, hashing and segmenting routes on maps, Secure Enclave, etc.

While I think it’s perfectly reasonable to “trust no one”, and I fully agree that there may be things we don’t know, I don’t think there it’s reasonable to put Apple on the same (exceedingly low) level as Google.

No they never were, they were "do no evil" but at the exact same time everyone knew they were an advertising company and most people in the field could see where it was heading eventually, or at least i'd hope.

Apples motives are different, selling premium hardware and MORE premium hardware, they wouldn't dare fuck that up, their nestegg is hardware and slowly more services tied to said hardware ecosystem (icloud subs, tv subs etc). Hence the privacy makes sense to pull people into the ecosystem.

Google... everything google does even phones, is for more data gathering for their advertising revenue.

Google's entire buisness model was built on hoovering up and selling access to user data in the form of AdSense. Without that data, their business falls apart.

Apple's business model is to entice people into a walled garden ecosystem where they buy lots of expensive hardware sold on high margins. They don't need user data to make this work, which is why they can more comfortably push features like end-to-end and no-knowledge encryption.

#2 is publicaly auditable, 100% apple controlled and apple hardware servers, tied to your personal session (probably via the ondevice encryption), i'd imagine ephemeral docker containers or something similar for requests that just run for each request or some form of Encrypted AI Lambdas.

The difference is Apple and OpenAI's privacy policies.

I think that is completely fair.

I think also a bunch of people will trust Apple’s server more (but not completely) than other third parties.

Hopefully they have some toggle in settings for this.

Lvl 3 is supposed to support other models and providers in the future too. I hope it will support every server with simple, standard API so I can run self-hosted LLama 3 (or whatever will be released in next 6-12 months).

Or Groq. They can do 1250 tokens/s with Llama 3 8B.

It sounded like 3 is meant for non-personal stuff. Basically like a search engine style feature. When you want to look up things like say sports records and info, or a movie and info about it, etc.

The problem is they don't explicitly define when 1 can pass to 2 and whether we can fully and categorically disable it. As far as I know, 1 can pass to 2 when governments ask for some personal data or when Apple's ad model needs some intimate details for personalization.

The information provided for level two is end to end encrypted and not stored so the risk level is pretty low here.

Ent-to-end encrypted means that the other end (Apple/NSA) has access to it.

Imagine the memory on their server is encrypted with an on-processor key (something like intel SGX) -- reading OS memory, e.g dumping from linux or hardware, you can't read it unless you somehow extract the key (which are different on each chip) from the physical chip. Now, the process running using that encrypted memory generates TLS keys for you to send the data, and operates on it only inside this secure enclave.

There is no way to access it without destroying the chip, and even in this scenario it will be extremely expensive and imo unlikely, certainly impossible at scale. Some scientists may be able to do it once in a lab.

BTW there is an entire industry popping up around exactly this sort of use case, it's called 'confidential computing' and CNCF have some software in the works (confidential containers iirc). I'm pretty excited to see what risc-v is going to bring to the party enclave wise.

Ok, I'm imagining.

Now, is any of that actually true?

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

It does need to process the data. The server has no persistent storage and no remote shell. It is a limited and locked down special-purpose iOS.

Maybe, maybe not. I would like to purchase one of those servers and put it in my rack, so I can monitor all network traffic. Is that an option?

That was my sense as well. I would have appreciated some clarification on where the line between 1 and 2 was, although I am sure a YouTuber will deep dive on it as soon as they have it in their hands

I'm skeptical of the on-device AI. They crave edge compute but I'm doubtful their chips can handle a 7B param model. Maybe ironically with Microsoft's phi 3 mini 4k you can run this stuff on a cpu but today it's no where near good enough.

I don't know how they are going to square the privacy circle when at worst its a RAG based firehose to OpenAI, and at best you can just ask the model to leak your personal info.

Said this in the other thread, but I am really bothered that image generation is a thing but also that it got as much attention as it did.

I am worried about the reliability, if you are relying on it giving important information without checking the source (like a flight) than that could lead to some bad situations.

That being said, the polish and actual usefulness of these features is really interesting. It may not have some of the flashiest things being thrown around but the things shown are actually useful things.

Glad that ChatGPT is optional each time Siri thinks it would be useful.

My only big question is, can I disable any online component and what does that mean if something can't be processed locally?

I also have to wonder, given their talk about the servers running the same chips. Is it just that the models can't run locally or is it possibly context related? I am not seeing anything if it is entire features or just some requests.

I wonder if that implies that over time different hardware will run different levels of requests locally vs the cloud.

Regarding image generation, it seems the Image Playground supports three styles: Animation, Illustration, or Sketch.

Notice what's missing? A photorealistic style.

It seems like a good move on their part. I'm not that wild about the cartoon-ification of everything with more memes and more emojis, but at least it's obviously made-up; this is oriented toward "fun" stuff. A lot of kids will like it. Adults, too.

There's still going to be controversy because people will still generate things in really poor taste, but it lowers the stakes.

I noticed that too, but my conclusion is that they probably hand-picked every image and description in their training data so that the final model doesn’t even know what the poor taste stuff is.

Exactly. And, I'm assuming, it will reject any prompts or words in poor taste.

> I am worried about the reliability, if you are relying on it giving important information without checking the source (like a flight) than that could lead to some bad situations.

I think it shows the context for the information it presents. Like the messages, events and other stuff. So you can quickly check if the answer is correct. So it's more about semantic search, but with a more flexible text describing the result.

> I wonder if that implies that over time different hardware will run different levels of requests locally vs the cloud.

I bet that’s going to be the case. I think they added the servers as a stop-gap out of necessity, but what they see as the ideal situation is the time when they can turn those off because all devices they sell have been able to run everything locally for X amount of time.

I’m betting 100% on this. And I think the new sidecar controlling your phone is an example of where they’re going in reverse.

If you have a M6 MacBook/ipad pro it’ll run your AI queries there if you’re on the same network in two-four years.

> I am worried about the reliability, if you are relying on it giving important information without checking the source (like a flight) than that could lead to some bad situations.

I am worried at the infinite ability of teenagers to hack around the guardrails and generate some probably not safe for school images for the next 2 years while apple figures out how to get them under control.

They hid the workaround for this - it’s going to be available in US english first, and then other locations over the coming year.

This can be never. LLMs fail fast as you move away from high resourced languages.

This seems really cool.

They said the models can scale to "private cloud compute" based on Apple Silicon which will be ensured by your device to run "publicly verifiable software" in order to guarantee no misuse of your data.

I wonder if their server-side code will be open-source? That'd be positively surprising. Curious to see how this evolves.

Anyway, overall looks really really cool. If it works as marketed, then it will be an easy "shut up and take my money". Siri seems to finally be becoming what it was meant to be (I wonder if they're piggy-backing on top of the Shortcuts Actions catalogue to have a wide array of possible actions right away), and the image and emoji generation features that integrate with Apple Photos and other parts of the system look _really_ cool.

It seems like it will require M1+ on Macs/iPads, or an iPhone 15 Pro.

You don't even have to buy a new device since it's backwards compatible with A17 Pro and M1, M2, M3 and M4. It feels like the integration of the services are using existing models and integrating the API used traditionally originally from AppleScript but, extending it to LLM or stable diffusion systems. It seems that they want the M4 as soon as possible though for the gaming and cloud pushes.

For those curious, there is in fact a ChatGPT integration.

The way it works is that when the on-device model decides "this could better be answered by chatgpt" then it will ask you if it should use that. They described it in a way which seems to indicate that it will be pluggable for other models too over time. Notably, ChatGPT 4o will be available for free without creating an OpenAI account.

I don't think that 4o will actually be available for free. It seemed like they were quite careful in choosing their words. My guess is 3.5 is free without an account, and accessing 4o requires linking your OpenAI account.

They only mentioned 4o, but they mentioned it explicitly at the start, well before they mentioned one can also tie in to their openAI account, if you have one, at the end of the presentation.

To me that implies 4o by default, but I guess we'll find out.

I think it's going to be free: https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-partnersh...

Apple must be paying OpenAI a pretty penny to give the best LLM tokens away for free.

It seems no money is exchanging hands!

I'm really curious about this. Framing it as "running a large language model in the cloud" is almost burying the lede for me. Is this saying that in general the client will be able to cryptographically ascertain somehow the code that the server is running? That sounds incredibly interesting and useful outside of this.

It seems like this is an orchestration layer that runs on Apple Silicon, given that ChatGPT integration looks like an API call from that. It's not clear to me what is being computed on the "private cloud compute"?

If I understand correctly there's three things here:

- on-device models, which will power any tasks it's able to, including summarisation and conversation with Siri

- private compute models (still controlled by apple), for when it wants to do something bigger, that requires more compute

- external LLM APIs (only chatgpt for now), for when the above decide that it would be better for the given prompt, but always asks the user for confirmation

The second point makes sense. It gives Apple optionality to cut off the external LLMs at a later date if they want to. I wonder what % of requests will be handled by the private cloud models vs. local. I would imagine TTS and ASR is local for latency reasons. Natural language classifiers would certainly run on-device. I wonder if summarization and rewriting will though - those are more complex and definitely benefit from larger models.

The "Do you want me to use ChatGPT to do that?" aspect of it feels clunky as hell and very un-Apple. It's an old saw, but I have to say Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at that. Honestly confused as to why that's there at all. Could they not come up with a sufficiently cohesive integration? Is that to say the rest ISN'T powered by ChatGPT? What's even the difference? From a user perspective that feels really confusing.

I thought it was the smartest and most pragmatic thing they've announced.

Being best in class for on-device AI is a huge market opportunity. Trying to do it all would be dumb like launching Safari without a google search homepage partnership.

Apple can focus on what they are good at which is on device stuff and blending AI into their whole UX across the platform, without compromising privacy. And then taking advantage of a market leader for anything requiring large external server farms and data being sent across the wire for internet access, like AI search queries.

I think they also announced the possibility to integrate Siri with other AI platforms than ChatGPT so this prompt would be especially useful to make clear to the user which of these AIs Siri wants to use.

From a user perspective it's 100% clear.

If the system doesn't say "I'm gonna phone a friend to get an answer for this", it's going to stay either 100% local or at worst 100% within Apple Intelligence, which is audited to be completely private.

So if you're asking for a recipe for banana bread, going to ChatGPT is fine. Sending more personal information might not be.

I just don't think the average user cares enough to want this extra friction. It's like if every time you ran a google search it gave you lower-quality results and you had to click a "Yes, give me the better content" option every time to get it to then display the proper results. It's just an extra step which people are going to get sick of very fast.

You know what it's really reminiscent of? The EU cookies legislation. Do you like clicking "Yes I accept cookies" every single time you go to a new website? It enhances your privacy, after all.

There is no cookie banner law: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/there-is-no-eu-cookie-banner-law // https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/

In theory there isn't. In practice > 99% of the website I visit have a cookie banner thingy. Including the EU own website (https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en).

Think about it: even a government agency isn't able to produce a simple static web page without having to display that cookie banner. If their definitions of "bad cookies that require a banner" is so wide that even they can't work around it to correctly inform citizens, without collecting any private data, displaying any ad or reselling anything; maybe the definition is wrong.

For all intent and purposes, there is a cookie banner law.

They could not have a cookie banner, but their privacy policy states pretty clearly why they want your consent. It is to "gather analytics data (about user behaviour)". Additionally you don't need to consent to this and can access everything without them "collecting any private data, displaying any ad or reselling anything". The only reason they ask for consent is to gather analytics, which is similar to you being asked for your postal code when paying while shopping.

The cookie banners are a cargo cult.

Someone somewhere figured out that it might be a good idea and others just copied it.

It's interesting you phrase it that way, because that's sort of how DuckDuckGo works with their !g searches. I'm not saying that's good or bad, it's just an observation.

Still involves friction. A more "seamless" way for Apple to do this would've been to license GPT-4's weights from OpenAI and run it on Apple Intelligence servers.

but that restricts it to just openai then.

I want to use perplexity from siri too!

It's a clear delineation between "My data is on my device or within Apple's ecosystem" and "My data is now leaving Apple and going to a 3rd party"

At the core of everything they presented is privacy. Yes the point is that most questions are answered locally or via the Private Compute system.

More specifically "is openai seeing my personal data or questions?" A: "No, unless you say it's okay to talk to OpenAI everything happens either on your iPhone or in Private Compute"

Apple is touting the privacy focus of their AI work, and going out to ChatGPT breaks that. I would be reluctant to use any of their new AI features if it weren't for that prompt breaking the flow and making it clear when they are getting results from ChatGPT.

What? The original Siri asked if the user wanted to continue their search on the web if it couldn't handle it locally. It was one of the last things from the Jobs era.

I agree. Quite odd and not very Apple-ish. I wonder if there’s some good reason for it; it must have been debated internally.

They'll probably add an option to disable that prompt at some point. I'm glad it is the default behavior, though.

This seems really cool.

They said the models can scale to "private cloud compute" based on Apple Silicon which will be ensured by your device to run "publicly verifiable software" in order to guarantee no misuse of your data.

I wonder if their server-side code will be open-source? That'd be positively surprising. Curious to see how this evolves.

Anyway, overall looks really really cool. If it works as marketed, then it will be an easy "shut up and take my money". Siri seems to finally be becoming what it was meant to be (I wonder if they're piggy-backing on top of the Shortcuts Actions catalogue to have a wide array of possible actions right away), and the image and emoji generation features that integrate with Apple Photos and other parts of the system look _really_ cool.

It seems like it will require M1+ on Macs/iPads, or an iPhone 15 Pro.

> I wonder if their server-side code will be open-source

No, but they said it'll be available for audit by independent experts.

I don't understand why people act like this is a new way of working. Hundreds of ISO certifications require independent audit. Functionally this can be done in many ways, like source code access by human reviewers, or static scanning with signed results. What's important is not who looks, be it PwC, Deloitte, or industry peers. It's important whats being looked for, and what standards are being followed.

How do we sign up to be an independent expert? We need about 50,000 eyeballs on this at all times.

How many independent eyeballs are on Gemini's servers or OpenAI's?

They're not making the privacy claim

~It seems like it will require M1+ on Macs/iPads, or an iPhone 15 Pro.

They specifically stated it required iPhone 15 Pro or higher and anything with a m1 or higher.

> Apple Intelligence is free for users, and will be available in beta as part of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia this fall in U.S. English. Some features, software platforms, and additional languages will come over the course of the next year. Apple Intelligence will be available on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later, with Siri and device language set to U.S. English. For more information, visit apple.com/apple-intelligence.

iphone 15 Pro 8 GB RAM (https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_15_pro-12557.php)

iphone 15 6 GB Ram (https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_15-12559.php)

Along with a 2GB RAM difference, they have different processors (A17 vs A16).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17

Per the comparison table on that page, the "Neural Engine" has double the performance in the A17 compared to the A16, which could be the critical differentiator.

That's a good reason not to upgrade my iPhone 13!

English only? That is surprising

The platform talk had a bit more architectural details and it looks like they heavily optimize / compress the Foundation model to run for specific tasks on-device. I'm guessing that sticking to US English allows them to compress the foundation model further?

As long as they don't geolock it to "english speaking" countries, I'm fine with that.

As far as I'm aware, the only time Apple has implemented that kind of restriction is with their DMA compliance. Like, I used the US App Store (with a US credit card) while physically in Europe for many years.

And Apple Fitness and Apple News.

I can follow workout instructions in english, as can my kids. But Apple has decided that Apple One is more shit over here for some reason.

I am quite disappointed that 14 pro is not supported. So much power, but they decided to not support any of the older chips.

The 15 Pro's SoC has an extra 2GB of RAM which could very well be make-or-break for running a local model which tends to be very memory-constrained

it's about 15 having 2x more powerful neural engine

It’s a matter of RAM most likely - models require crazy amounts of ram, and I bet they had to struggle to fit them on 15’s pro 8GB.

Happy as long as there is a switch to toggle it all off somewhere. I find very little of this useful. Maybe someone does, and that’s great!

And my concern isn’t from a privacy perspective, just a “I want less things cluttering my screen” perspective.

So far though it looks like it’s decent at being opt-in in nature. So that’s all good.

My thoughts exactly, as someone who manages 145 iPhones for a health-care org, all of this stuff needs to be completely blockable and granularly manageable in Mobile Device Management or things could go very, very wrong compliance-wise.

Strong agree here. Features are cool, but I value screen real estate and simplicity. Plus, the gpt app works fine for me. I don’t need it built into other things yet.

I feel like this is actually the thing you want when you say "less things cluttering my screen".

Siri can now be that assistant, that summarises or does things, that would instead make you go through various screens or apps. Feels like it rescues clutter, not increases it to me imo

I simply cannot agree, but again, it's a personal thing. I never ever find voice interfaces useful though...

Aside: When the presenter showed the demo of her asking Siri to figure out the airport arrival time and then gloat it "would have taken minutes" to do on her own... I sat there and just felt so so strongly that I don't want to optimize out every possible opportunity to think or work out a problem in my life for the sake of "keeping on top of my inbox".

I understand value of the tools. But I think overall nothing about them feels very worth showing even more menus for me to tick through to make the magic statistical model spit out the tone of words I want... when I could have just sat there and thought about my words and the actual, real, human person I'm talking to, and rephrase my email by hand.

> I don't want to optimize out every possible opportunity to think or work out a problem in my life for the sake of "keeping on top of my inbox"

Completely agree. My first thought on seeing this stuff is that it suggests we, as an industry, have failed to create software that fulfils users’ needs, given we’re effectively talking about using another computer to automate using our computers.

My second thought is that it’s only a matter of time before AI starts pushing profitable interests just like seemingly all other software does. How long before you ask some AI tool how to achieve something and it starts pitching you on CloudService+ for only 4.99 per month?

It's actually taking LESS screen space, because "Siri" is now just a glowing edge on your screen.

And good news! You can clear your homescreen too fully from all icons now =)

I can see people using Rewrite all the time. In the grim darkness of the AI future, your friends speak only in language that is clean, sanitized, HR-approved, and soulless.

At work, yes. However, it won't be long until the language you speak will become a feature of your ML driven consumer language service. There will likely be products that reflect your style/ identity/ whatever. And once you reach a certain socioeconomic level, you'll speak a highly customized bespoke dialect that reflects your station in life, just like today but much, much weirder…

https://mrgan.com/ai-email-from-a-friend/

That perfectly describes how I feel about all of this.

I'm sure that there will be lots of genuinely useful things that come out of this AI explosion, but can't help but be a bit saddened by what we're losing along the way.

Of course I can choose not to use all of these tools and choose to spend time with folks of a similar mindset. But in the working world it is going to be increasingly impossible to avoid entirely.

Young people already seem bothered by how pristine/flawless modern photography looks and seem increasingly obsessed with using film cameras/camcorders to be more authentic or whatever pleasing attribute they find in that media. I think they'll respond with more misspellings and sloppier writing to appear more authentic

As one of these young people, you're way overestimating the popularity of these trends. There are always some "we gotta go back"-centered communities lingering in the background, but digital vs analogue photography isn't even a close match-up. People who want to get more into photography are far more likely to buy a good digital camera than a film camera.

I feel like this is an awful feature for your native language, but fantastically exciting for a second language where you're not quite fluent and need to be able to write coherently.