Apple WWDC24
My observations about upcoming Apple stuff based on the WWDC keynote. Lots of minor, yet long-awaited improvements and visual tweaks—satellite messages are my favorite. Very questionable redesign of the Photos app; I feel that most people will hate it, at least the first iteration of it. So nothing to really write home about in iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, or tvOS.
macOS is a bit more exciting. They showed off iPhone Mirroring—seems like a great feature. I wonder how much I’ll actually use it. They didn’t talk much about security. I really fear they’re just going to add tons of new limitations and superficial dialog boxes that nag for various permissions all the time.
However, the star of the show was Apple Intelligence. Clever naming — “ai.” Some of it seems trivial these days for those of us who use ChatGPTs of the world. I guess it’s still good that those little life improvements go out to the masses. I really like their Private Compute—seems like a well-explained concept and a good shot at providing privacy and capabilities. They talked a lot about other very magic-like features that OS-wide LLM implementation can bring. But I’m very skeptical about what they presented. First, I just don’t think that Apple institutionally can do things like that well. They’ve missed the LLM wave for the past year and a half now. Many people were “expecting” them to show cool things at WWDC a year ago—instead, they were totally silent about it. This year they show some simple things (I expect those to be OK), and they show some very futuristic things. I expect those to fail. They might not even be delivered at all. They say those will come out later—well, that already smells like 2025 at best, and I personally wouldn’t even bet on 2026. My personal experience with Apple Vision Pro was so bad that I don’t believe Apple with their pre-announcements anymore. And if you notice, they didn’t really demo any of those cool features running on some advanced betas. All of this is pure vaporware for now. I know that Apple has a strong reputation for delivering features they announce, but I just don’t trust them with this now. Well, if I’m wrong and they release all that and it works as presented—that’ll be awesome.
Tags: apple
