WWDC 2024: 5 Biggest Announcements By Apple
This was the Apple Intelligence show. Tim Cook had been building up to WWDC 2024 for Apple to show its hand in the realm of generative AI, and what a hand it showed
While Apple Intelligence took the spotlight at WWDC 2024, for the end user, it's all about features that will meaningfully make their life more efficient and simpler. At its core, WWDC is about the evolution of Apple's iconic software platforms. Let's take a look at five of the biggest announcements by Apple.
This was the Apple Intelligence show. Tim Cook had been building up to WWDC 2024 for Apple to show its hand in the realm of generative AI, and what a hand it showed. It is uniquely Apple, with a hyper-focus on privacy, speed, simplicity, and pervasiveness across Apple's galaxy of software platforms and apps, extending even to third-party apps. Apple's take is on making its devices easier to use rather than talking about the technical aspects of its large language models. The only technicalities it has focused on are to assuage privacy concerns and show the world how privacy can be maintained in a post-genAI world. It is also positioning its platforms as neutral ground for third-party LLMs, announcing a partnership with OpenAI for ChatGPT 4, which works privately without requiring users to log in to OpenAI. Apple is also signalling that it may add support for Google's Gemini models, which is impressive.
The biggest change to the iPhone home screen in over a decade, clearly inspired by what Android has allowed users to do for years. A couple of years ago, at WWDC 2020, Apple added support for widgets. Now, with iOS 18, one can move around icons, change their shape and colours, enabling users to completely transform the look and feel of their iPhone. While doing so, Apple also announced updates to the Control Centre, making it more intuitive to use.
iPhone mirroring on macOS is a huge deal. This will allow users to keep their iPhone aside and access its full interface with a mouse and keyboard on the Mac. While some Android phones can achieve this with a link to Windows, and Samsung has been pushing a similar feature, the tango between macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 seems more intuitive and seamless. This will likely further strengthen the stickiness of Apple's ginormous moat of an ecosystem, where its gadgets play so well with each other, creating a sort of lock-in against competitor products.
As part of Apple Intelligence, with the use of Apple's own LLMs, the beleaguered Siri becomes significantly more intelligent across a gamut of devices, enabling it to understand context and source and process information on-device. Siri had fallen behind after being a pioneer of virtual assistants when unveiled one day before the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 with the iPhone 4s. Over the years, it fell behind the Google Assistant, Alexa, and Microsoft's now-defunct Cortana, but with GenAI, new life has been infused into it.
Enhanced handwriting recognition called Smart Script will work with the Apple Pencil on iPads in the Notes app and Freeform. It will not only understand your handwriting and fix all spelling and grammatical errors like when you type on the keyboard, but it will also enhance your handwriting. This also extends to the new mathematical logic capabilities which are part of the new Calculator app for the iPad.
Apart from this, there are a number of updates, like AI audio enhancement on tvOS for movies, clearer calls on AirPods Pro 2, and a bevy of updates to core apps like Mail and Photos, which segregate emails and enable searching within videos and photos. Apple also announced new seasons of hit shows like Silo and Severance, as well as many new movies and features for its platform.
Sahil Mohan Gupta is a Contributing Editor for BW Businessworld. He writes on auto and tech developments.
