WWDC 2024

According to reports from beta testers, the new InSight feature announced at WWDC has appeared in the latest developer beta of iOS 18 and tvOS 18.

InSight pops up details about actors, characters, and songs appearing onscreen in original Apple TV Plus shows. These also show on your iPhone, from where it appears to be easy to add songs to your library. Neat.

John Giannandrea, Apple’s AI chief, speaking at John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2024:

The inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. So it’s a combination of bandwidth in the device, it’s the size of the ANE [Apple Neural Engine], it’s the oomph in the device to actually do these models fast enough to be useful.

You could in theory run these models on a very old device. but it would be so slow it would not be useful.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing boss, also pushed back on the idea that Apple Intelligence is a scheme to sell new iPhones. “Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do recent iPads and Macs, too.”

Apple’s long-included macOS Chess game has a new look in the first macOS Sequoia beta.

Shiny as it is, it’s missing things like the “Grass” board and the style picker for the pieces, 9to5Mac writes. Here’s the current version (using “Fur” pieces on the Grass board, of course) compared to a screenshot posted to Reddit of its coming replacement.

Cook was, unsurprisingly, very on message, but he did acknowledge that AI can have its flaws (which he has said before).

Also, Cook talks about how the introduction of the Magic Mouse was an “incredible moment.”

Here’s how Apple describes the feature, per MacRumors:

A rotating Wi-Fi address helps reduce tracking by changing your Wi-Fi address at various times. Tracking can happen when your address always appears the same to other devices and people using the same network as you.

It’s coming to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia.

Apple has a new Focus mode.

Reduce Interruptions uses the company’s new AI to review notifications and only show those that “might need immediate attention” — like a message telling you to pick your child up.

As someone who is inundated with nuisance notifications and has failed to make Apple’s non-smart Focus Modes work for me, I’m looking forward to this one.

The words “ChatGPT · Check important info for mistakes” popped up under each demo of ChatGPT’s integration with Siri during Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote.

That Apple put something it doesn’t entirely trust on its devices feels like a huge move for the company. Although, it’s clearly keeping its options open — Craig Federighi teased that Google could be a partner, too.

At a post-keynote live session, Apple’s Craig Federighi just explained how the company is thinking about integrating other AI models. ChatGPT is obviously the first big-name partner, but he mentioned eventually wanting to have domain-specific models. He also named another big player you might someday see in iOS:

“We want to enable users ultimately to choose the models they want, maybe Google Gemini in the future. Nothing to announce right now.”

From Apple’s post-WWDC 2024 keynote release (emphasis mine):

visionOS 2 also adds mouse support for additional workflow options, and Vision Pro will now reveal the user’s physical Magic Keyboard — even when they are fully immersed in an Environment or app.

I can’t wait to see my keyboard floating in the clouds like Falkor from The Neverending Story when visionOS 2 comes out this fall.

Siri meets generative AI, genmoji, image generation, and some big upgrades for Apple Photos. If you just want the Cliff’s Notes on Apple’s artificial intelligence plans, we’ve got you covered.

Apple is holding a WWDC session today, where it will feature more information on the deeply integrated next-gen CarPlay it announced in 2022. Here we can catch a glimpse of how different automakers could adopt varied styles for their cars. No automaker other than Aston Martin and Porsche seems to have signed up so far.

They sure look like text messages on the iPhone! But the bigger image, green waveform for the audio message, and the “Text Message • RCS” in the text entry field caught my eye.

RCS support is coming with iOS 18.