I was just listening to Federico Viticci and John Gruber discussing new iPads on the latest Daring Fireball episode and a sudden thought struck me.
Given that Apple often struggle to do too many things at once, is there a chance that, like with Widgets, that AI comes to iOS at WWDC, but not to iPad.
It’s a possibility, Apple has previous, but wouldn’t that lay them open to suggestions that iPads are behind the times?
I think they’ll have AI everywhere, but…
I think the odds are good that’ll happen if they refresh all the iPads next week but don’t put M4s or chips based on the A18 in them, and these AI features depend on some hardware advance.
I don’t think is true…Apple seems to have gotten much better operationally at juggling multiple products line simultaneously, releasing software features on multiple platforms all at once.
Remember: Apple plans and operates on the order of years and decades. They play the long game when it comes to chip design, cameras, displays, etc. etc. I wouldn’t underestimate them when it comes to AI.
Neither would I, but I’m not expecting much from Apple this year. Yes, they have been using AI to design hardware and probably to help write software, but they were definitely surprised by ChatGPT’s appearance (IMO). So was Microsoft and Google.
Since that happened Apple has cancelled the Apple Car, after investing 10 years and untold $billions on the project, and has moved many of those employees to Apple’s AI team led by John Giannandrea.
In addition Bloomberg is reporting that “Apple is negotiating with both OpenAI and Google to implement AI technology in its next generation of iPhone”.
I’m confident that Apple will rise to the occasion, but probably not this year.
I don’t think Microsoft was surprised. At the moment of launch, they were already one of the biggest investors in OpenAI. They surely new what was happening.
The perception already is that Apple is late with AI (subject to the interpretation of what “AI” actually means and whether most people have a meaningful use for it beyond generative AI at the moment), regardless of whether they may have been working on it in their labs for years.
However, due to that perception, additionally fuelled by the sad state of Siri, they cannot afford a fragmented experience on this one—when it launches, it will launch across the product portfolio (or at least the same generation of chips and OSes). This is more important than how widgets launched a year later on iPadOS or somesuch.
You are correct, and I knew that. 