(https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/10/27/google-paid-26-billion-i...)

And they were of course mostly unaffected by the Cloudstrike outage.

Either way, I think it’s a strong point for Apple that antivirus is not required because the iOS security model protects against viruses pretty thoroughly. That’s just not the case for Windows most of the time. Also, do tech companies run antivirus on their linux-based containerized cloud workflows? Not really, the security model doesn’t require it. Points against windows server here

Fingerprint issue has been super annoying though. Only happens when waking, where it wakes and then turns it off immediately again.

My macs have thankfully never once randomly turned on or done an unexpected update; you normally tell it “update later tonight.”

Not safely interfacing on existing roads — that’s 100% true. And cyclists would love parallel infrastructure. Problem is, in the US, it’s seen as anti-car (and therefore anti-american), and so is much less common than it should be. But in the Netherlands, this is how they make biking one of the primary transport modes.

I can’t use my balcony in a downtown city center because the baseline tire noise from the highway is so loud, and that’s without the obnoxious exhaust

1. Privacy makes them a lot of money right now; it's a huge part of their brand, and one the CEO talks about frequently.

2. Media coverage of Apple Intelligence talks a lot about how privacy is a core differentiator for Apple's AI approach compared to Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Apple's approach is on-device-by-default approach, going as far as to have an explicit opt-in per interaction if you want to talk to chatGPT.

3. Apple clearly spent a lot of time and money on their "private cloud compute" approach to larger server models -- why would they immediately squander that by switching to ad-tech.

4. If they were going to use that treasure trove of information, why would they spend so much time not doing that in the lead-up to their big launch of Apple Intelligence?

5. Apple has spent a lot of effort making that personal local context local-only, and designing APIs and training models on schemas for apps to provide local context & local actions to local Siri. That's part of their killer feature set.

Ad tech team doesn't really require any of this data. That's an entirely different business model, and Apple is a lucrative business because they didn't do what Google did.

It all comes down to this: Apple spent the past decade plus building up a brand based on privacy, and spending a lot of extra time, money, and effort doing things more privately than their competitors. It's now a compelling differentiator for Apple, and I have a lot of trouble seeing why they would squander a reputation they clearly spent a lot of energy building.

I almost completely agreed with you, but this is not true! Apple is trying to solve the task & API problem with “task intents”, on which they go into more detail outside of the keynote: https://youtu.be/Lb89T7ybCBE

The new Siri models are trained on a large number of schemas. Apps can implement those schemas to say “I provide this action” (aka, the user intends to do this action). Siri can use the more advanced NLP that comes with GenAI to match what you say to a schema, and send that to an app.

These app intents are also available to spotlight and shortcuts, making them more powerful than just being Siri actions

Apple, on the other hand, has made a pretty serious effort to ensure that no employee can access your data on these AI systems. That’s hugely different! They’re going as far as to severely restrict logging and observability and even building and designing their own chips and operating systems. And ensuring that clients will refuse to talk to non-audited systems.

Yes, we can’t take Apple’s word for it. But I think the third party audits are a huge part of how we trust, and also verify, that this system will be private. I don’t think it’s far to claim that “Apple knows what you’re doing.” That implies that some one, at some level at Apple can at some point access the data sent from your device to this private cloud. That does not seem to be true.

I think another facet of trust here is that a rather big part of Apple’s business model is privacy. They’ve been very successful financially by creating products that generate money in other ways, and it’s very much not necessary or even a sound business idea for them to do something else.

While I think it’s fair to be skeptical about the claims without 3rd party verification, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Apple’s approach isn’t better for your data and privacy than openAI or Google. (Which I think is the broad implication — openAI tracks prompts for its own model training, not to resell, so it’s also “only openAI knows what your doing.”)

It sounds like a bigger update, where they’re applying gen AI models more broadly across tons of things (including I things like photo categorization), but I guess we’ll see.

Plus, they talk about live phone call transcriptions, voice transcription in notes, the ability to correct words as you speak, contextual conversations in siri, etc. It 100% sounds like better voice recognition is coming

It's very clear, the keynote demonstrates that Siri passing a prompt to chatGPT is completely opt-in and only happens when Siri thinks the prompt needs the more generative/creative model that OpenAI provides.

Clarification: All other AI features within the OS are powered by on device models which can reach out to the private cloud for larger workflows & models.