Cheesy Name, Big Difference

Apple's WWDC this year was massive. It felt like the biggest in ages, and a lot of that credit goes to AI.

Outside of anything AI, the biggest announcement was the ability to put icons anywhere on your home screen. Believe it or not, that announcement got the biggest cheer during the event – even from Loy. They also added customizable shortcuts, hidden app folders, text formatting, RCS messaging, window snapping on the MacOS, and, finally, a calculator app for iPadOS after a decade and a half. The event had a bit of a "catch-up" vibe and I am sure Android and PC users get the trend here.

This pretty much sums up how the event would have been if AI wasn’t in the mix, which is why we're going to focus on the AI part.

Now, AI, which of course Apple managed to rebrand as "Apple Intelligence" (a bit cheesy, but hey, it works) brought the best features and my colleague David couldn't agree more.

My favourite implementation of Apple Intelligence was in upgrading Siri. Using LLMs, Siri can now understand context better, allowing it to follow conversations, reference photos and videos, and even be aware of what's on your screen. It finally embodies its Assistant title.

Other favourites were the Maths notes feature on the new calculator app, the Notes and Call app summaries, Genmojis, the Highlight feature on Safari and even a "clean-up tool" similar to Pixel's Magic Eraser. Mind you, all of this is about to get even better with Apple integrating GPT-4o from OpenAI into Apple Intelligence.

Here's the kicker though: all these AI features are only supported on the highest-end versions of Apple's Silicon (the iPhone 15 pro and any iPad or Mac generation with an M1 chip or latter). Here, we have Apple being Apple again.

But hey, even with the AI stuff stealing the show, there were still other great announcements. What were your favourite non-AI features?

H-ai-ppy weekend!

– Emmanuel

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