Apple Just Won AI (and It’s Not Even Close) (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Videos, Artificial Intelligence,

Apple may have just won consumer AI by being last, and here is the twist that makes it interesting: it did it without having the smartest model. ChatGPT is more powerful. Claude is better at complex reasoning. Apple even leaned on the tech behind Google's Gemini to help train its own models, and after promising a revolutionary Siri back in 2024 and then failing to ship most of it, Apple had every reason to be the company nobody trusted with AI. But while everyone was writing them off, they quietly rebuilt the Siri that had been broken for 15 years, and after spending time with the beta, I think that changes the whole equation.

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Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Every so often Apple ships a feature before it's ready to admit the feature exists. That's what's happening in the macOS 27 beta right now: there's a redesigned, floating Siri interface sitting inside the software, fully built enough to poke at, but switched off so nobody trips over it. If you're the kind of person who reads release notes for fun, you can flip it on yourself with one Terminal command.

Here's the pitch. You select some text, a little icon pops up at the top-left of your selection, and hovering over it opens a compact popover full of things to do with those words. Rewrite. Proofread. "How does this sound?" Summarize into key points. "Edit with Siri." It's Writing Tools and Siri's smarts collapsed into one small, contextual menu that follows your cursor instead of making you dig through a menu bar. The idea is genuinely good. The execution, at least today, is a work in progress.

Click to continue reading Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On

Apple’s Mac Pro Was Supposed to Bury the Mac Studio. It Blinked Instead.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Rumors,

Here is the version of the Mac Pro you never got to buy: a tower with a chip so big it would have carried twice the processing cores and twice the graphics cores of the beefiest Ultra chip Apple sells. A machine built to make the Mac Studio look like a warm-up act. Apple designed it, plotted its launch, and then quietly walked away.

That is the picture painted by a new report from Bloomberg's Power On, and it lands with a little extra sting because Apple killed off the Mac Pro entirely back in March. So this is not a story about what is coming. It is a story about the monster desktop that got as far as the drawing board and then lost an argument to a smaller, cheaper box sitting right next to it.

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The iPad mini Is Finally Getting the One Upgrade That Actually Matters

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Handhelds, Rumors,

The iPad mini has always been the tablet you actually hold. Not the one you prop on a stand to type an email, but the one you read on in bed, thumb through on the train, or hand to a kid in the back seat. And for two years it has been coasting on the same screen it has had since forever. That is about to change.

Apple is reportedly planning to ship a new iPad mini this October, and for once the update is not just a spec bump. This is the mini's biggest overhaul in roughly five years, and the headline feature is the one thing that matters most on a device you stare at from six inches away: the display.

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Apple Tests Recording Genius Bar Visits with AI, and It’s Called Live Notes

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,

You know the Genius Bar dance. You explain your problem, the person across the table nods and types, and you spend half the appointment wondering how much of what you just said actually made it into the notes. Apple has an idea about that, and it involves a microphone.

The company is quietly testing something called Live Notes, an AI system that records your support session, transcribes it, and writes a summary the employee can save to Apple's internal files. That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reports the pilot is running at a handful of retail stores right now. The pitch is simple: let the Genius actually look at you and fix your phone instead of hammering out notes while you talk.

Click to continue reading Apple Tests Recording Genius Bar Visits with AI, and It’s Called Live Notes

Apple’s iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate Public Betas Are Here, and Siri Is Finally the Reason to Care

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

For two years, the pitch for a smarter Siri has been a promise about the future. This week the future finally showed up in a form you can actually install: Apple has released the first public betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate, which means the overhauled, do-more-for-you Siri is no longer a keynote demo. It is a thing you can put on your phone tonight and argue with over dinner.

If you have been waiting to test-drive Apple's big AI year before committing, this is the moment. The public betas landed after about a month of developer testing, the full release is still coming this fall, and there is a very Apple twist to the timing: the company also kicked off its annual Back to School promotion the same week, so the software you are curious about and the hardware you might buy to run it are both on the table at once.

Click to continue reading Apple’s iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate Public Betas Are Here, and Siri Is Finally the Reason to Care

Apple Just Retook the Most-Valuable Company Crown from Nvidia, and Playing It Safe on AI Is Why

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,

For the last two years, the story of the tech industry has been simple: Nvidia builds the shovels, everyone else digs for AI gold, and the shovel company gets impossibly rich. Apple, meanwhile, kept getting scolded for showing up late to the party with a half-finished Siri. So here is the plot twist nobody had on their bingo card. On Friday, Apple slipped past Nvidia to become the most valuable company on the planet again, brushing up against a $5 trillion valuation. And it got there partly by not spending like everyone else.

The pass happened during intraday trading on July 17, and it was close. Apple touched roughly $4.88 trillion while Nvidia's stock slid a few percent on a broad chip sell-off. Nvidia clawed back the lead later in the day, so this is less a coronation than a photo finish. But the fact that it happened at all is the interesting part, because the thing moving these two stocks in opposite directions is the same thing: AI.

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Apple Just Told 40 Ex-Employees at OpenAI: Don’t Delete Anything

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,

Imagine opening your email inbox at your new job and finding a letter from your old employer's lawyers telling you not to delete anything. That is roughly the week that about 40 former Apple engineers just had, all of them now working at OpenAI.

Apple has sent legal preservation letters to those ex-employees, ordering them to hold onto any documents and messages that might matter to a trade secret lawsuit the company filed last week. In plain terms, Apple is telling people it used to pay: whatever you have, keep it, because we may come looking.

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Apple Music Just Got More Expensive, and It Was Only a Matter of Time

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Music,

If you pay for Apple Music, your next bill is going up. Apple bumped the price of its music service today, and it's the first time the company has touched that number in almost four years. The last increase landed back in October 2022, so if you felt like you'd been paying the same amount forever, you basically had been.

Here's the damage. Apple Music Individual moves from $10.99 to $11.99 a month. The Family plan takes the biggest hit, jumping from $16.99 all the way to $19.99. And the student plan, the one plenty of people stretch out for as many years as they can get away with, ticks up from $5.99 to $6.99. All of it takes effect today, July 17, in the US and a handful of other countries.

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You Won’t Look At Apple’s Siri AI The Same Way After Watching This (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Google, Software, Videos, Artificial Intelligence,

Here's the story you probably heard: Apple fell behind on AI, panicked, and quietly handed Siri over to Google. So when a much smarter Siri showed up at WWDC, the case seemed closed. Siri was just Gemini wearing an Apple logo. It was a tidy narrative, repeated everywhere, and it turns out to be wrong.

During WWDC, I was invited to a closed-door media briefing with Craig Federighi and his team. Craig took the Google question head-on, first walking us through how a typical chatbot app like ChatGPT or Gemini works, then explaining what Apple built instead. His conclusion was blunt: "The amount of Google Assistant we use is none." No Gemini client code in iOS, none of the models Google deploys to its own customers, and not even Google Search as the foundation of Siri's world knowledge.

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