On Apple’s Intelligent Journey to AI And Much More

These are my hot takes about Apple Intelligence and the intelligent move to embrace AI for the rest of us. AI, or Apple Intelligence. Are you getting it? Let’s dive in.

• Thanks to Apple, AI, generative AI, to be more specific, is about to get more personal.
• Apparently, All my devices can run everything they announced. That’s cool. I’m glad I just bought an M4 iPad Pro.
• At some point in the Apple Intelligence segment of the keynote, I thought they would drop the name “Siri”. They didn’t.
• I finally decided to move away from 1Password and save money along the way. However, it will take some time to move all those passwords.
• I wish Apple Intelligence was here right now, but as a French-Canadian native speaker, I’ll need to wait a little bit (maybe months).
• Bye bye ChatGPT app. I barely knew you as soon as Apple Intelligence ships.
• Apple had to focus on privacy first; environmental questions will eventually get addressed, too, but not in a keynote. I trust Apple with this. Are Apple Silicon ships less power-hungry than Nvidia chips? What is the performance per watt comparison with Nvidia chips?
• Speaking of energy consumption, is Apple’s decision to go hybrid and run things on-device most of the time and in the cloud when needed better than an always-cloud runtime architecture? Time will tell, but instinctively, I guess yes.
• I love the new Siri UI with this multicolour glow around the screen edge!

• I think I’m done with Grammarly when Apple Intelligence comes out.
• Private Cloud Compute is based on Apple Silicon and runs a custom version of iOS. I want to see the server’s external design! It’s still impressive how Apple has come a long way with its silicon. I wonder what chip they will use for that cloud.
• There is so much to digest from user interaction demos involving Apple Intelligence, like in Freeform and Notes.
• Thanks to machine learning, Text recognition coupled with custom font on the fly, called Smart Script, is really cool. I’m curious to see how my handwriting will translate.
• Double-tapping the slide-to-unlock handle of the iPhone screen to invoke the type-to-Siri from the lock screen is quite nice, too.
• The message around being personal with AI is new and marks Apple’s unique approach to generative AI. I like this a lot.
• A big “finally” for watchOS 11 to introduce the day break feature in activities.
• Thanks to Apple Intelligence again, Siri will finally get multilingual phone call transcription!
• Apple Intelligence will come in a future beta release this summer, not right now. Too bad.
• The Control Center customization experience seems great; I like what I see.
• Image Playground looks like a specialized picker that will be available system-wide. That’s nice, and I can’t wait to play with it.
• I should have kept my M1 MacBook Air so that I could have played with macOS Sequoia.
• I’m not sure I’ll take advantage of the free icon placement on the home screen or the icon tinting. It looks awful.
• Everything about Apple Intelligence is free. For now. How long before Apple offers Intelligence+ as a subscription?
• Users can ask questions about how to use a specific feature on their device, which happens locally on the device. That’s super handy and might actually kill the Tips app.
• Genmoji is so cool. Who said we cannot have playful experiences on our smartphones?
• I’ll take anything that makes Siri more intelligent, with or without Apple intelligence.
• Apparently, there are no changes to iPadOS’s Stage Manager. Ouch—iPadOS being iPadOS. But the new tab bars user interface element is a welcomed addition. The Journal app isn’t getting the iPad treatment yet, which is a shame if you ask me. I don’t know if it is written in Swift with SwiftUI, but the idea “write once, run everywhere” seems not to apply here.
• Many features will take time to roll out, probably until early 2025.
• iPhone Mirroring is not only cool and clever but will prove useful! How often have I left my iPhone downstairs while working in my home office? Quite often. That’s the pure Apple ecosystem.
• I expect a new round of iPhone and iPad upgrades from users willing to participate in this developing Apple Intelligence experience.
• The iPhone home screen customization option now includes large icons that suppress the application’s name, just like the icon sitting in the dock.
• From a security perspective, I wonder how the corporate IT world will react to Apple Intelligence, Private Cloud Compute and privacy protection.
• Safari borrows a few tricks from the Arc Browser, such as picture-in-picture automatically popping up when you switch tabs. Will I switch back to Safari? Probably not. Please note that I still mostly use Safari on the Mac for the job.
• While I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, I expect this year’s iPhone 16 Pro models will be better at handling Apple Intelligence workloads.

Today, I feel that Apple’s ecosystem is at a turning point that will prove monumental a few years from now. AI is about to blend the boundaries of apps and the web and enables metaphors and a computing paradigm. As Apple said, it’s only the beginning.