Apple Becomes the AI Kingmaker

WWDC 2024 sets the stage for a massive rewrite of the industry.

Jun 11, 2024

Morning y’all!

The big news out this week is Apple’s foray into artificial intelligence more properly and you can get a lot of that info here on their official website. Their official newsroom has more broken down bits too on technology releases.

With nearly 1.4 billion units out there being used, this could be a massive shift in generative AI adoption as it’s instantly “on” in a billion devices. I saw this a while back and even wrote about it 2 months ago to the date: Every device will become an AI device.

And here we are. Add the ChatGPT integration and you’ve got a serious contender for AI dominance. Can we declare a winner yet?

There are a number of Siri upgrades (I still can’t fall in love with her) that aren’t particularly interesting to me and the integration with Mail, Messages, and Notes with things like “auto-complete” seem old hat at this point (but I imagine some folks will absolutely love it).

I am interested in the AI-centric upgrades for images and photos though. All-in-all I’m a bit meh about this announcement but perhaps that’s because so many of the “new” features aren’t particularly “new” anymore. This is Apple’s core strategy though being fashionably late to the game and ultimately killing independent apps that were really popular — we call this “sherlocking” in software engineering parlance.

And more customizations and personalization options are never bad — making one’s device feel like home is especially fun to do.

Finally, the introduction to a better and more comprehensive password manager might ultimately remove my need (and monthly subscription) for 1Password. That would be a fundamental shift in how I interact with my computer every single day but one that I think I’d welcome.

As always, Marques does a fun job of an overview of the WWDC 2024 Recap:

One thing that he showcases very quickly is the upgraded control of the iPad via an iPhone! I’ve been wanting this forever and I’m glad it’s coming. Thank you Apple gods! I appreciate you so much.

Enjoy walking through the updates from Apple and get ready for some big changes coming soon. Have a great rest of your day!