2024 Apple WWDC: The Morning After

To recap some of the advancements from this year’s WWDC: updated features include AirPods now allowing a head nod ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to communicate with Siri, as well as being able to control your phone through Mac. This includes disabling account features remotely, as well as opening Maps and tracking the phone’s live location (ideal for someone who is always losing their phone!). Substantial updates are coming to iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11 including a new Passwords app, redone calculator, and FINALLY a proper calculator function on iPads.

And, of course the moment we’d all been waiting for – A.I. in the form of Apple Intelligence. The biggest unveil was that ChatGPT will be integrated into Siri and the other Apple (AAPL) operating systems moving forward. After extensively reading about the new and improved Siri functions, the overall takeaway is Siri is intending to become more useful in linking Apple’s operating systems and Apps. Siri – coined now as the ultimate personal assistant – will help Calendar, Maps, Email, and iMessage all communicate with each other. OpenAI’s newest large language model, GPT-4o, will be integrated into Writing Tools to help compose and summarize various texts. Apple Intelligence will offer grammar tips, word choice options, and sentence structure revising as well as claiming it can read and mimic the tone of its user’s writing.

Doesn’t this sound like a lot of what… already… exists?

Apple – famously not known for reinventing the wheel but rather mimicking/upgrading it – has taken heat this year for its lack of innovation in the A.I. field. So, while this was definitely an entry into the ring, it was a mild one at best. Plus, Apple Intelligence will be offered to iPhone 15 and Pro Max users, or those with M1 (or higher) chipsets, which limits this so-called “massive” upcoming upgrade cycle anticipated with the iPhone 16. The stock has rebounded from yesterday’s nearly 2% slide and rallied to a new intra-day all time high above $200 a share.