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- Thursday June 11
- 11:15 amAmazon’s ‘Story so far’ feature rolling out to US Kindles and iPhone app
Kindles have long offered a recap feature intended to act like the “Previously …” feature often seen on TV shows. It’s intended to remind you of a book’s story and characters when restarting reading after a lengthy gap. Amazon last year announced a far more sophisticated Story So Far version, and the feature is now finally rolling out to Kindles and the iPhone app in the US …10:55 amApple working with British police to tackle iPhone theft
The head of London’s Metropolitan Police has described how the service is working with Apple to tackle iPhone theft. The partnership includes sharing data with each other to measure the effectiveness of Apple’s anti-theft protections, with significant successes noted to date …10:45 amHow much Gemini is really inside Siri AI?
Macworld Apple this week announced a dramatically improved version of Siri, aptly named Siri AI. But instead of accolades, among the Apple enthusiasts in places such as X and Reddit, it’s already been decided: Siri AI is just a slightly older version of Google’s Gemini, with its own interface and voice. You’d be forgiven for believing this. After months of rumors that Apple was turning to Google’s Gemini technology to bring Siri up to speed, and a purposefully vague joint statement to that effect this January, it certainly seemed like the new Siri would be exactly that. But then the big WWDC keynote came and went, and Gemini was barely mentioned at all. Following the keynote, Apple held a private “technical deep dive” for journalists after the event (which was not officially recorded and streamed), where Craig Federighi and three Apple VPs in charge of Siri and AI explained Siri’s relationship with Google in greater detail. As it seems is always the case with AI, the truth is complicated, and every company involved is using very precise and opaque language that is more about what they don’t say than what they do say. But there’s a lot of information out there that can help us get a clearer picture of what Apple’s new Siri AI actually is, how it works, and how Google’s Gemini is involved. Apple’s new Foundation Models Let’s start at the bottom. Apple used the term “Foundation Model” a lot during WWDC. In a nutshell, it’s a big AI model that is trained on a huge amount of data that is then used in whole or in part to deliver specific AI experiences in apps. They can be language models, vision models, image generation models, or audio processing models, though modern foundation models are what are called multi-modal, which means they understand and produce results among all these things together. Most companies scale their big foundation models to different sizes. The most advanced version of the model is so big it can only fit in and run well on huge AI servers with hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and massive, expensive, high-powered processors. So companies produce smaller versions with fewer “parameters” that can run on smaller servers, desktop computers, and laptops, and even little models that run directly on a smartphone. Apple has five foundation models that handle tasks related to Siri and Apple Intelligence.Apple Apple has five new third-generation Foundation Models, as explained in a post on Apple’s Machine Learning research site. The first two are the small models made to run directly on device: AFM 3 Core: The next generation of our 3-billion-parameter dense model that delivers a step up in quality. AFM 3 Core Advanced: Apple’s most powerful on-device model. It’s natively multimodal, enabling helpful features like expressive voices and higher-accuracy dictation. Built on cutting-edge Apple research, this 20-billion-parameter model uses a sparse architecture, activating just 1 to 4 billion parameters at a time depending on the request. This model only runs on the latest Apple devices. Those two are made to run directly on-device for all supported hardware. The AFM 3 Core Advanced model requires an iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air, Macs with an M3 and at least 12GB of RAM, or iPads with M4. You’ll notice that Apple says it has a “sparse architecture,” which means that it is broken up into chunks that specialize in different areas, and only the pieces that are needed are loaded up when you make a request. For example, a piece devoted to math wouldn’t be loaded if you ask how tall the Burj Khalifa is, but would be when you follow up to ask how many Burj Khalifas fit between the Earth and the moon. The on-device models are joined by three new cloud-based models: AFM 3 Cloud: Apple’s server-side model, optimized for speed, efficiency, and performance. ADM 3 Cloud (Image): Devoted to image generation and editing, which unlocks advanced photo-editing tools, the all-new Image Playground, and more. AFM 3 Cloud Pro: Apple’s most capable server-based model, which powers our most demanding use cases, including agentic tool use and complex reasoning. AFM 3 Cloud is the big server model that handles most things, but for the really complicated requests, there’s an AFM 3 Cloud Pro. They are joined by a special image-centric model that is used for Image Playground (and all the apps that call on the Image Playground framework), genmoji, and all the new AI image editing tools: Clean Up, Extend, and Reframe. Apple used its own Private Cloud Compute to keep requests encrypted and secure.Apple Apple is using its own servers (mostly) The first important point is that the first four models—the on-device models and the first two cloud models—run on Apple Silicon. The cloud models use Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture that makes the code open for researchers to ensure that the only data sent to the cloud is necessary to complete the request. After the query, the data is deleted and never retained. The biggest cloud model, AFM 3 Cloud Pro, requires more muscle than the current Apple Silicon-based servers can provide. It is built to run on Google’s cloud infrastructure with Nvidia GPUs, but this is not off-the-shelf server leasing. Apple is running its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure here, too. All the core PCC requirements are met: stateless computation, no privileged runtime access, non-targetability, and verifiable transparency. You can about how Apple is extending Private Cloud Compute to Google’s servers with Nvidia hardware on Apple’s Security Research site. Siri is Apple. Apple is Siri. What you see on your iPhone has nothing to do with Gemini.Apple How does Siri AI even work? When you make a request to Siri, it first gets interpreted, either by typing or through a voice recognition model. Then, a component called the System Orchestrator turns what you said into a sort of underlying invisible prompt and decides which model or models it should go to. If you’re asking Siri to turn on a light at home, start a timer, or tell you the weather, the on-device model handles that. But if you want to generate a few paragraphs of text, the system orchestrator will send the prompt to the Private Cloud compute cluster for processing. It will also send the appropriate data necessary to fulfill that request. Screenshot Foundry For example, if you’re writing an email with a menu of items guests are bringing to a potluck, the system orchestrator might first pull relevant text messages from the search index. Perhaps it could include a screenshot of what’s on your iPhone’s screen if it includes relevant info. After the text is generated and sent back down to your device, the request and any associated data are deleted. All of this happens with as much encryption and pseudonymity as possible, so nobody at Apple or Google can access your requests, data, or results. This is one reason why some of the new AI image processing tools seemed slow in the iOS 27 demos, because images and data need to be uploaded and processed in the cloud. Turn on Airplane mode and disconnect from Wi-Fi, and you can’t use the new AI image tools at all. Where does Gemini come in? In the post-keynote discussion at WWDC, Federighi explained why Siri AI is not Gemini: Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part of how we run on iOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploys to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers. And then, when it comes to the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google Search or anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope that’s clear. The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none. Read Craig’s words carefully, and you’ll notice he’s specifically saying that the client experience (the app and assistant) is not Gemini, nor are the specific servers the same ones Google uses to serve Gemini to its customers. Furthermore, Siri AI doesn’t pull info from Google’s web search or knowledge graph; it uses its own. However, Federighi is not claiming that Apple’s models themselves are not based on Gemini code. In fact, he explicitly says the four models made to run on Apple Silicon are “trained using proprietary data with reinforcement learning and refined using outputs from Gemini frontier models.” It’s likely that the biggest model is trained using both Google and Apple’s proprietary data, or has some other distinguishing characteristic other than its size that made him leave it out of that statement. Apple So what does that mean? It seems like Apple started with Gemini’s foundation models, optimized and rebuilt them for Apple Silicon and the model sizes it needs, and retrained them with its own data, weights, and guardrails. As a user, you shouldn’t expect the same performance, capabilities, and results from Siri AI on your iPhone as you would get from Google’s Gemini on a Pixel phone. An analogy I like to use: Apple used Unix (technically, the Unix-derivative called Darwin) as the core for every operating system going back to Mac OS X. But that doesn’t mean Apple’s OSes share the same compatibility, features, or characteristics as Unix. Nor does it mean Apple lacks the world-class operating system engineers necessary to make a great OS. Unix is merely a foundation to start on, and a quicker way to get a leg up on development. In much the same way as it did back in 1999 and 2000 when building Mac OS X (and then later iPhone OS and so on), Apple used someone else’s work to get started and then built its own thing that’s indistinguishable from where it began.10:30 amApple’s OS 27 releases are out of the ordinary–in a good way
Macworld The last two years at WWDC, Apple has felt like it’s been in a hurry. In 2024, in a hurry to catch the AI wave before it entirely passed them by. (They didn’t catch that wave–they wiped out, lost their surfboard, and may have been partially gnawed on by a shark.) Then last year it felt like it was trying to cover up its embarrassment about AI failures by rushing out a new design scheme that felt ill conceived, especially when it came to the Mac. This year feels different. Apple is unveiling a second take on its AI plans, but it feels like they’ve spent the intervening two years trying to make sure that this time, it sticks. And when it comes to almost every other announcement at WWDC, it feels like the company is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once. As famed basketball coach John Wooden warned his young charges, it’s important to be quick but not to hurry. Snow Leopard memories It’s been 17 years since OS X Snow Leopard (and yes, that’s a link to my review of it for this very site), but its memory looms large. It is famously one of Apple’s relatively rare OS releases that mostly avoided huge tentpole features in favor of a focus on speed, efficiency, and quality-of-life tweaks that make the experience of being a Mac user better. It’s easy to understand why these sorts of releases are rare. Just look at the reaction to this week’s WWDC: I’ve seen several people refer to the keynote as “boring.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the presentation’s initial segment about platform updates was really hard to focus on… because it didn’t have a focus! It really couldn’t, unless you count the slide that contained a hundred little blurbs of text detailing individual changes or additions across all of Apple’s operating systems. There’s a lot of good stuff in this list of changes accross Apple’s operating systems.Apple It’s hard to sell “we fixed lots of stuff.” It’s a lot easier to hype people about a handful of high-profile features. And so lots of tech companies tend to prioritize the shiny objects rather than “sweating the details,” as Apple’s Craig Federighi said right at the top of the WWDC keynote. This week at Apple Park, I heard more than one Apple person explicitly reference Snow Leopard, as well as iOS 12, as inspiration for the current set of OS releases. Changes big and small macOS Golden Gate feels like a real apology to Mac users. Say what you will about macOS Tahoe–for the record, I really loved the productivity features–there’s no denying that its implementation of Liquid Glass was half-baked at best. While Apple’s official position on Liquid Glass is, unsurprisingly, that it’s just in need of some tweaks based on user feedback, the story on the Mac is more dramatic. The Mac gets a rollback of several Liquid Glass missteps, including the disastrous sidebar design and the reintroduction of an actual toolbar. Corners? Who cares about corners on windows? Software developers do.Apple And while you couldn’t hear it on the live stream, at Apple Park, there was loud applause from the audience when Apple announced that it was standardizing the corner radius on all Mac windows. Seems esoteric, right? But realize, every single one of those developers doesn’t just write software for Apple platforms, but uses the Mac to write that software. They are Mac users who are technical enough to recognize some of the biggest design messes of the 26-era OSes, and knew to applaud when those goofs were being addressed. You can’t predict what will arrive for all users in the fall based on the first developer beta, but when I booted into macOS Golden Gate on a spare laptop this morning, I was taken back to the very earliest days of OS X. Yes, the sidebars in Finder feel like coming home, and toolbars are much clearer. But it’s the glass effect on buttons–they’re bright, with highlights and an outline–that really brought on the nostalgia trip. It’s starting to feel like Liquid Glass is intentionally riffing on Aqua, the original OS X design language. Nothing says Aqua like big glossy buttons, and while I made no attempts to lick the Golden Gate interface, I did get some serious early-2000s vibes. But honestly, the new feature that gives me the biggest flashback to the olden days is actually one of the most cutting edge of all the features Apple announced this week. Apple has always, from the very beginning, been guided by the principle of bringing high technology to regular people to solve their problems. And from the days of HyperCard in the 1980s through the introduction of AppleScript in the 1990s and Shortcuts in the 2010s, Apple has attempted to find ways to put the power of programming and automation in non-programmers. I experienced the closest Apple has ever come to fulfilling this dream last Monday, as I sat in front of an iPad typing normal English sentences into Shortcuts, pressing Return, and watching as Apple’s AI model fashioned those requests into entirely functional Shortcuts, complete with scheduling. Typing “give me a summary of my day’s events and to-do’s every day when I wake up” actually just… worked? “Go into Do Not Disturb when I connect to my shower speaker,” too. Even a more complex command like “ask me for text and add it to a text file with today’s date on it, saved on the Desktop, prepended with the time, and create the file if it’s not already there” generated an entirely functional Shortcut. There are a lot of caveats. The model creating Shortcuts can get a little confused, it doesn’t always work (especially with more complex actions), and it doesn’t work with third-party apps. But leaving all that aside, it’s a new-school solution to an old-school problem, one Apple’s been trying to solve forever. For a supposedly quiet operating-system release cycle, it was a pretty revelatory experience. If these are the sorts of features we have to look forward to this summer and fall, it’s going to be a pretty great cycle–regardless of the lack of flash.10:19 amiOS 27: Your iPhone can now boot into a new Mac-like recovery mode
iOS 27 introduces a new device recovery mode. This is a Mac-like recovery feature where the iPhone is able to boot into an alternative UI that doesn’t involve loading the entirety of the main operating system. In the new recovery mode, you can use restore your software, enter diagnostics mode, erase the device, and perform some automated fixes using Recovery Assistant.10:00 amMy favorite Android feature just landed on my iPhone and I’m in love
Macworld Apple talked a lot about its brand-new AI-powered Siri during its iOS 27 unveiling at its WWDC keynote, but the update also adds many small new features and improvements aimed at enhancing the user experience. Buried among all these improvements is a specific feature that Apple quietly introduced with iOS 27 and is already my favorite: the ability to paste copied content directly from the keyboard. And honestly, it’s kind of shocking that this took so long. Fixing the little things For years, copying and pasting on the iPhone has felt unnecessarily clunky. Now Apple is finally catching up with a small improvement that really makes a big difference in productivity. If you copy text or an image in iOS 27, the keyboard now shows a dedicated paste suggestion right above the keys where text suggestions usually appear. Instead of long-pressing a text field and hunting for the Paste option, you can simply tap the new button instantly. It also works for quickly sharing a screenshot with someone, which is quite useful. That may sound a tiny improvement, but it removes one of those annoyingly repetitive interactions people do dozens of times every day. iOS 27 includes a new shortcut for pasting clipboard content between apps.Foundry Android keyboards like Gboard have supported clipboard suggestions and quick paste shortcuts for years. On many Android phones, copied content automatically appears above the keyboard so users can paste it instantly. It’s one of those features you stop thinking about once you have it. Yes, iOS already has other text management features that are great. Universal Clipboard is a great example, since it lets you copy and paste between your Apple devices wirelessly. Still, the copy-and-paste process felt really outdated. And after using Android devices with Gboard over the years, going back to the iPhone always made copy-and-paste feel slower than it should. That’s why this iOS 27 change matters more than it sounds. Simple upgrades that matter Aside from how useful it is, what’s best about this feature is that it reflects a broader trend in iOS 27. This year’s update isn’t really about dramatic redesigns or overwhelming users with features they probably won’t use. Instead, Apple seems focused on refining everyday interactions. The company improved performance across the system, sped up animations, rebuilt search experiences, and made older iPhones feel faster again. The new paste button fits perfectly into that idea. And honestly, those are often the best kinds of software updates. iOS 27 is available now as a developer beta, with a public beta to arrive next month. The official release will land on iPhones this fall.08:00 amCancel your VPN—this one’s only $25 for life for the next 3 days
Macworld TL;DR: Through June 14, you can get a FastestVPN Pro lifetime subscription for only $25. Most VPNs charge you every month, and the bill never stops. FastestVPN Pro takes the opposite route. One payment covers your Mac and up to 14 other devices for good, and it’s on sale for $24.97 right now (reg. $600). A single FastestVPN Pro account protects 15 devices at the same time, so your MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and router can all run it together. The network spans more than 900 servers across 100-plus countries with unlimited switching and no data caps, all locked down with 256-bit AES encryption and a zero-logging policy that keeps your browsing activity off the books entirely. The Pro tier adds protection you don’t get on the standard plan. Double VPN routes your traffic through two servers when you want an extra layer, and a kill switch cuts the connection instantly if the VPN drops, so your real IP never leaks. A NAT firewall, ad blocker, anti-malware, split tunneling, and IPv6 leak protection are all included rather than sold as separate add-ons. Nobody likes throttled bandwidth when you’re just trying to watch a movie. Dedicated streaming servers keep Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and BBC iPlayer running smoothly, and P2P-optimized servers handle fast downloads. This deal also throws in a free one-year Passhulk password manager subscription, so you can store logins, bank details, and card numbers in one encrypted vault, which is a whole lot better than writing them on sticky notes. Get a FastestVPN Pro lifetime subscription for $24.97 (reg. $600). Offer ends June 14 at 11:59 p.m. PT. FastestVPN PRO: Lifetime Subscription (15 Devices)See Deal StackSocial prices subject to change.07:31 amMacworld Podcast: New Siri AI and WWDC26 keynote impressions
Macworld The WWDC26 keynote was filled with AI. What do we think about the new features in the xOS 27 software? That’s in this episode of the Macworld Podcast. This is episode 987 with Michael Simon, Jason Cross, and Roman Loyola. Watch episode 987 on YouTube Listen to episode 987 on Apple Podcasts02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…02:12 amApple’s iPadOS 27 beta downloads briefly included two unsupported iPad Pro models
Apple briefly listed iPadOS 27 beta 1 restore images for two older iPad Pro models before removing them from its developer downloads page. Here are the details. more…