Opinion
IS SIGNING OUT OF THIS COLUMN, JUST AS APPLE’S ABOUT TO ENTER ITS NEXT BIG ERA OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES
A pple is just about to embark on WWDC 2024 as I write… (read all about it from p6) and the company is reported to have signed a deal with OpenAI to bring its GPT AI tech to Apple’s operating systems. It had long been rumoured, and we strongly suspected, that Apple would go hard on artificial intelligence (AI) in iOS 18.
A Siri that actually feels like a smart assistant is probably only the start – I expect we’ll see a flood of tools doing things like helping you to write emails, or summarising web pages and documents.
But we didn’t really know how Apple was going to do this.
Looks like ChatGPT will be a major part of what Apple builds into iOS 18
There are two major AI creators of note (OpenAI and Google), and we didn’t know if Apple was working on its own, or what. The company is no stranger to AI, having already lightly introduced it (back when we just called it ‘machine learning’) in everything from photo editing to background battery management tricks on its devices. But the kind of large language models we’re talking about when we discuss the power of ChatGPT or Google Gemini is a big step beyond what Apple’s tackled in the past (at least publicly).
So it now looks like ChatGPT will be a major part of whatever Apple builds into iOS 18. There are lots of different options for exactly what it will do with this tech, but there’s one thing I’m confident about it’ll start a new era. Apple could do an Eras Tour that would make Taylor Swift’s look flimsy by comparison. Its changes have come from personnel, from tech, and from products. I think the addition of AI will be akin to when Apple started making its own chips; it could accelerate all kinds of elements rapidly – iPhones got custom processors to make them better at certain tasks, iPads got power to challenge laptops, AirPods became smarter, and the M series of chips in laptops changed that industry, with Windows laptops about to switch en masse to low-energy Arm chips.
