Apple Intelligence is AI, done Apple’s way

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Steve Jobs wisely said that to design great tech products, you need to begin with the user experience.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology,” he said in 1997. “You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”

Apple clearly demonstrated a commitment to this design principle while introducing a raft of AI features — under the umbrella term “Apple Intelligence” — during Monday’s WWDC24 keynote.

Take Memories, for example, a feature in the Photos app that lets you create short slideshows of photos and videos accompanied by music.

Currently, you can create Memories manually. It can be a real chore, hunting through your Photos library for photos and videos to include, then arranging, editing and scoring your mini-production.

But Monday’s keynote showed a Memory Movie created by Apple Intelligence from a simple prompt: “Leo learning to fish and making a big catch, set to a fishing tune.”

Apple Intelligence searched through the presenter’s photos and videos, identifying pictures of Leo (the presenter’s son) when he was near water, holding a fishing rod, posing with a big fish, and so on.

The resulting Memory Movie selected the appropriate photos and even arranged them in a coherent narrative arc, set to a suitable tune.

It’s but one small example from the nearly two-hour keynote that showed Apple has been thinking deeply about AI.

All too often, the tech industry seems to be doing the opposite of what Apple is doing: AI companies come up with cool AI features, and then figure out how to sell them.

But Apple took the extra step of taking cool AI features and figuring out how they can be used to do things the customer might actually want to do — like make nice Memories.

Monday’s keynote was a firehose of information. We’ve done our best to bring you news of the most important features and announcements.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• IOS 18 looks absolutely marvelous, especially the ability to really customize the Lock and Home Screens.

• It’s not just Emergency Notifications. You’ll soon be able to text by satellite, too.

• In visionOS 2, you’ll be able to turn your boring old 2D photos into amazing 3D Spatial Photos.

• AirPods Pro are getting gestures: You’ll be able to answer or reject calls with head nods or shakes.

• Hasta la vista, third-party password managers: iCloud Keychain is becoming a stand-alone Passwords app.

• And lots more…

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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