Apple announced his next era. Your iPhone, Mac or iPad experience will be guided and infused with artificial intelligence. Apple calls it Apple Intelligence, of course. It will appear later this year. That’s right: we’re dealing with another “artificial intelligence.”
You may have heard a lot about how it makes Siri smarter, transcribes your emails and essays, creates never-before-seen emojis, and turns abrasive sketches into uninteresting AI graphics.
It really is AND vision of the future. And while it’s not groundbreaking, with its typical Apple sheen, it may be one of the friendliest, intuitive, and useful implementations of generative AI ever seen.
However, for most of us, the pressing factor is that we are not invited, and the iPhone is the most affected of Apple’s devices.
To apply Apple Intelligence, you need iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max. A regular iPhone 15 won’t cut it, which means a cell phone older than a year is, at least in this specific sense, obsolete. Mac users simply need an Apple Silicon computer, meaning one released in 2020 or newer.
Exclusion zone
A more cynical take is that these exclusion time frames are tied to the average upgrade cycle for phones and laptops. A person can be considered normal if he updates his phone every year. Buying a up-to-date laptop every year means you’re probably a fool, a theft magnet, or just plain clumsy.
The reality is much more complicated. The calculations required for at least some parts of Apple Intelligence are significantly different than the calculations performed for the average task on an iPhone or Mac.
And all of this has been previously unclear to the average generative AI or chatbot geek because of the way we have all been introduced to this form. When you apply ChatGPT, Midjourney, or even Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature, your computer does almost no real work.
This is done on remote cloud servers that perform the necessary calculations and then send the final result to your phone or laptop. In this sense, generative artificial intelligence has so far resembled more of a digital assistant such as Siri or Alexa. Sometimes he can do great things. However, on the device it is used on, not much of this happens.
Apple Intelligence will try to change this, at least partially.
Apple’s celebrated privacy game
Why? “You shouldn’t have to hand over every detail of your life to be stored and analyzed in someone else’s AI cloud,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, when Apple announced the up-to-date features.
“The cornerstone of a personal intelligence system is on-device processing. We’ve integrated it deeply with your iPhone, iPad, Mac and all your apps, so it’s aware of your personal information without collecting your personal information.