Apple

Apple is shipping through it

At WWDC, the company insists that its AI transformation is well underway — but the evidence feels a little thin

Casey Newton

Casey Newton

— 12 min read
Apple is shipping through it
Apple CEO Tim Cook presents on Monday at WWDC (YouTube)

Here's this week's free edition of Platformer: a look at Apple's high-stakes Worldwide Developers Conference. After a bruising year, the company is seeking to reassure investors that better days are ahead — but the story feels a little thin.

Leaving Substack and Twitter means we have fewer places we can promote our work. Want to kick in a few bucks to support us? If so, consider upgrading your subscription today. We'll email you all our scoops first, like our recent one about Meta's new hate-speech guidelines. Plus you'll be able to discuss each today's edition with us in our chatty Discord server, and we’ll send you a link to read subscriber-only columns in the RSS reader of your choice.

Upgrade

This column touches on AI. My boyfriend works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.

It has now been a year since Apple executives stood on stage and heralded a revolution to their platform that would be powered by artificial intelligence. Or, as the company sought to brand it, Apple Intelligence — a version of AI that was both highly personalized to you and your devices, and more protective of your privacy than its rivals. Apple Intelligence would take advantage of the company's deep knowledge about its users, scouring their emails, texts, and contacts to route requests around the operating system and take actions on your behalf.

It was an appealing vision. But it never shipped. In March, amid mounting questions over when a bunch of features due to ship in 2024 might actually arrive, Apple finally squeaked out an update: they would now arrive "in the coming year," much later than planned, and long after Apple had aired television ads promoting them.

It was more bad news for Apple in a year that has seen plenty of it, from a failed tug-of-war with President Trump over tariffs to being excoriated by a federal judge over its malicious compliance in an antitrust case, who referred the company to prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.

All of which set the stage today for an unusually high-stakes Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple remains one of the world's biggest companies, of course, and its products largely continue to be beloved. But for the first time in a long time, there is a sense that Apple has begun to lose the plot — too slow to recognize the potential of AI, and not capable enough to realize it.

In some ways, Monday's keynote presentation seemed to confirm some of those suspicions. Many of the announcements were almost comically modest: a new naming scheme for the company's operating systems! A Phone app for the desktop! Windows on the iPad that you can resize!

There was also, front and center, a streak of defiance. After CEO Tim Cook welcomed people to WWDC by promoting an upcoming Apple movie about race cars, software engineering chief Craig Federighi began his remarks with the AI features that Apple did ship last year: writing tools, a ChatGPT integration, and 15 other things that I mostly had to look up to remember what they did. (Do you know what the Image Wand is?)

There were also promises of new AI features to come. One update will let you ask ChatGPT about anything you're seeing on your screen. Another will give third-party developers access to on-device large language models. And its Xcode development tool will get code completion assistance from OpenAI, though developers can also bring in their own models using API keys.

That's all fine, though given what we're seeing elsewhere — LLMs working unsupervised for seven hours to refactor code bases, for example — it hardly seems like the state of the art. More disappointingly, I think, the many Apple announcements on Monday failed to cohere around any particular vision for its technology aside from "use it more."

At other times, Apple has sought to inspire with visions of how technology can uniquely advance human progress. But the Apple of "Think Different" and computers as bicycles for the mind was hard to see on Monday. Instead, we saw a long procession of knowledge workers engaged in the tedious meta-work of modern life: rearranging windows on an iPad; polling the group chat about times to meet; setting up a virtual clock.

Contrast that with Google, which used its developer conference this year to show an agent that browses the web on your behalf, an AI filmmaking tool already being used in production, and Gmail writing in your voice. Some of those features are currently vaporware. But there's a clear vision there.

Of course, Apple has its own little productivity boosts to offer. My favorite thing Apple showed off on Monday was an update to Spotlight — the built-in launcher on macOS. While it was initially a novel way to search for files on your Mac, Spotlight has long been replaced on my computers with more full-featured launchers like Alfred and Raycast.

The next version of Spotlight will take a step in Raycast's direction — evolving from a simple launcher to a kind of command center for your computer. In addition to file search, you'll be able to take actions, such as sending messages. You'll also be able to run shortcuts. There's nothing there that would cause me to uninstall Raycast, but this is the kind of stuff I like to see Apple do: make serious but easy-to-use features for people who want to get stuff done a little more efficiently.

On the other end of the spectrum, for me anyway, was "Liquid Glass" — a redesign of Apple's operating systems designed to make everything translucent and borderline unreadable. I haven't seen the design up close and know that reflexive dislike of redesigns is so common as to be cliché. And yet I'm struck by, despite all the minutes spent on stage discussing Liquid Glass, how little of that time was spent explaining what it was meant to do.

We heard endlessly about how pretty it is, how it reflects the light, and how it shifts effortlessly into dark mode. But we heard almost nothing about what the design is meant to do.

At the risk of lapsing into another cliché — quoting Steve Jobs — that seems like an oversight. In 2003, Jobs had this to say to the New York Times, about the design of the iPod: ''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. 'People think it's this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''

Liquid glass looks like the product of a design process led by someone saying "Make it look good." I'm sure it "works" fine. But I'm not sure what it is meant to do that its predecessor did not.

How much does any of this matter? Even on this uncertain footing, Apple remains a monolith. Most people rarely switch device ecosystems, and even Google has yet to figure out an AI feature powerful enough to spur large groups of iPhone owners to trade them in for Pixels.

Apple still has plenty of new widgets it can show off. But the vision behind all that activity feels a little muddy — and the company's rivals, including Google and OpenAI, seem to have a much stronger idea of what they are doing. Apple can still do great things — but for now, it seems fixated on the low-hanging fruit.

Sponsored

NewsGuard Audit:

AI Models Fail on News Topics 20% of the Time

Get the audit to see why the AI models aren’t trusted on news topics. Our public audits do not provide the individual scores of the chatbots.

But, if you work at an AI company, we’ll disclose your fail rate to you.

Download the Report

The Musk-Trump blow-up

Elon Musk relaxed his campaign against President Trump over the weekend, turning the attention of his X feed to an interest he still shares with the administration: whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment. On Sunday he reposted one of Trump's Truth Social posts, seeming to signal some sort of intention to make up.

Trump, for his part, has played down the significance of Musk’s departure. But on Saturday he told NBC News that “there would be ‘serious consequences’ if tech mogul Elon Musk funds Democratic candidates to run against Republicans who vote in favor of the GOP’s sweeping budget bill.” And the administration is concerned about the security implications of installing Musk’s Starlink at the White House.

Elsewhere:

The retreat from content moderation

The Times reports that YouTube quietly relaxed its community guidelines in December so that now up to half of a video can violate the platform’s guidelines and remain on the platform under an exemption for discussions of subjects in the public interest. Regardless of what you make of the changes here, it’s incredibly cowardly of YouTube not to have made any of this public. If you want people to follow your rules, first you have to tell them what they are.

Governing

Industry

Those good posts

For more good posts every day, follow Casey’s Instagram stories.

(Link)

(Link)

(Link)

Talk to us

Send us tips, comments, questions, and Liquid Glass designs: casey@platformer.news. Read our ethics policy here.

Sponsor a Newsletter

Read more