
As Apple gears up to open its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote on June 10, all eyes will be on the software-related announcements. The standard expectation this time is that Apple will focus on AI-related announcements for iOS and iPadOS 18 and macOS 15. No new hardware is expected. Of course, with Apple, there’s always the risk of a surprise announcement.
But ‘one more thing’ notwithstanding, the perception is that Apple is on the back foot regarding artificial intelligence (AI) in its products. Rivals like Samsung, Google, and Microsoft have already showcased a stronger, more in-your-face version of AI—to put it rather crudely—in their products. Apple must now catch up.
Apple Products and AI
This is not to say that Apple’s products have lacked AI in all its entirety. One look at Cupertino’s product lineup shows that they have been preparing for the AI wave for a while now. In 2017, the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X were powered by the A11 Bionic chipset. It came with a dedicated ‘Neural Engine’ or neural processing unit designed to simplify processing AI-related tasks. This was before we saw NPUs on most other smartphone SoCs.
Apple took the same route with its Mac lineup in 2020 with the M1 chipset, designed for efficiency, speed, and in-built NPUs. It has been pushing boundaries on this front, as seen with the recent M4 chipset, which it claimed has “Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever.”
Further, it has slowly and steadily added many AI-powered features to iOS and macOS. Whether it is Live Text—similar to Google Lens—the use of AI and ML tools in the iPhone camera to enhance photography or your iPhone figuring out your daily usage patterns, Apple relies on some form of AI to deliver these.
There’s also the Cinematic Mode on the iPhone camera, which is powered by AI to create that false depth-of-field when you record videos in this mode. Plus, Apple improved the much-maligned Autocorrect with a transformer language model to ensure better word prediction using on-device machine learning in iOS 17.
Apple And AI: Rivals Pulling Ahead?
But Apple’s existing implementations notwithstanding, it is seen as behind on the AI wave both on iOS and macOS. None of the stuff is as exciting as what Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) offers, thanks to the disruptions caused by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AI on an Apple device doesn’t appear to jump out at you, at least not yet. Sure, we got Siri back in 2011 with the iPhone 4S, but it hasn’t evolved to be the most loved voice assistant. However, Apple has not been able to capitalise on that lead in its typical dominating fashion.
And we’ve seen how Samsung, Google, OPPO, etc, are making AI a core part of their smartphone experience. Many of their phones will run Google’s Gemini LLM models to power several features. Companies like Samsung are also bringing Galaxy AI to their older phones, with capabilities of auto-summarising PDFs, letting users creatively edit photos with the help of AI, etc. This also effectively means the Samsung device will do many of these tasks natively, thus killing the need for several third-party tasks. The iPhone isn’t quite there yet.
Then there’s Microsoft, which announced a new range of CoPilot+ personal computers (PCs) last month. These PCs promise advanced AI features along with battery efficiency and faster performance. The CoPilot+ PCs boast capabilities such as auto-summarising notes, figuring out replies to notifications, the ability to ‘Recall’ and find anything on the PC no matter how random the search term is, and even help a user during a Minecraft session. The Mac doesn’t come close to this at the moment.
Apple And AI: Expectations From iOS 18, macOS 15
This makes the iPhone and Mac look weaker in comparison. Given Apple’s tight control of both software and hardware, the assumption is that implementing these changes should be easy for the company.
We’ve already seen plenty of reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman about how Apple will improve Siri in iOS 18 and macOS with LLM models, bring AI enhancements to photo editing, create auto-summaries of PDFs, transcribe voice memos, etc.
But everyone is asking whether they will be as impressive as what we’ve already seen from OpenAI and Microsoft. As Gurman has noted, many users relying on tools like ChatGPT for their daily tasks might find nothing incredible here. How will Apple implement GenAI on its devices? Which company’s LLMs will power this approach? We don’t quite know yet.
Apple’s approach of running some of these tasks on-device could limit the experience. Apple’s key marketing message has always been user privacy, and it will certainly prefer on-device to run some tasks to ensure this aspect continues to hold. Gurman also indicated that “on-device features will be supported by iPhone, iPad and Mac chips released in the last year or so.” So, there’s a good chance that your M1 MacBook or older iPhone 13 won’t support many of these features. To be fair, Apple isn’t the only one that has taken this approach. With Microsoft’s CoPilot+ PCs, the features are limited to these devices and won’t come to other Windows devices.
We must wait until June 10 to see how Apple resolves these dilemmas. Given that it is one of the most valued companies in the world, there’s a lot of pressure on Apple to impress users, developers, and investors. And everyone is waiting to see whether it can deliver that AI punch next Monday.