Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/10 – The WWDC 2024 Keynote

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

All the headlines from WWDC. All the AI goodness, even if Apple spent half the time not even mentioning the words Artificial Intelligence. Also, what if the audio quality of cell phones didn’t have to suck? And what if AI could actually make every stoplight in the country more intelligent in real time? Sponsors: Miro.com Shopify.com/ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMebride home for Monday, June 10th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, all the headlines from WWDC, all the AI goodness, even if Apple spent half the time not even mentioning the words artificial intelligence. Also, what if the audio quality of cell phones didn't have to suck? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Here you go. WWDC 2024. The event kicked off with Tim Cook live on an actual stage in front of an actual crowd. They had the usual planet. about how inspiring the event is, how developers are changing the world. We didn't get to see all of that on the live stream. On the live stream, the first thing we saw was a video of a cargo plane

flown by Phil Schiller, and then Craig Federigi and crew doing a skydive out of the plane into the Apple HQ mission impossible style. And then it was over to Tim Cook on the roof of Apple HQ. We're going to introduce profound new intelligence capabilities, Tim said. Intelligence. That's how they're going to get around saying AI so very, very much, though one would note that AI could also stand for Apple Intelligence, of course. They gave shoutouts to Apple TV Plus shows and movies. Then it was on to Mike Rockwell and the Vision Pro and Vision OS. Apparently, the Vision Pro has actual apps now while no one was looking, including third-party apps. Who knew? They say over 2,000 apps have been created specifically for the Vision Pro at this point.

and the new version of the OS is VisionOS2. You can now spatialize photos from regular photos with advanced machine learning. You can now share photos together, or at least I guess look at them together, if you're both on Vision Pro headsets. Later this year, there's going to be an ultra-wide monitor version for the Mac virtual display. Canon is bringing out a new spatial lens for their EOS R7 camera. Then it was on to iOS 18. The first big changes there are coming to the home screen. As rumored, you can color or tint your widgets and icons to a specific color to complement your wallpaper.

You can put icons into any order on the grid. You can move icons anywhere. They don't have to stay strictly on the grid. Control Center allows you to swipe between multiple control center panels. You can add new controls to the control panel with a control gallery. There's a new controls API that let's developers make controls and also revamp the lock screen buttons and the action buttons. You can hide apps. You have installed on your phone, so no one else knows you're using that particular app. There's a new hidden apps folder that is locked by default. Messages got the ability to schedule messages to send later. Also the ability to bold, underline, and italicize text in messages. And now if you have zero cell connection, you can also send messages via satellite.

iPhone 14 and later. Also, RCS support is officially coming to messages. Mail has gotten on-device categorization, like a primary inbox, a folder for transactions and receipts, newsletters, and promotions. Maps has new topographic maps for hiking and stuff like that. Wallet is getting tap to cash, basically a way to exchange Apple Cash with people without sharing your phone number or email address, the better to share the tab when you're out at a dinner, say, just tap your phones together. There's also a new design for event tickets, which also now have an event guide. The Photos app got the biggest redesign ever, according to Apple. There's a powerful new way to filter things, like automatically sorting out screenshots or

creating collections, quoting David Pierce at the verge. You know, there's already a lot of AI in this keynote, and by the way, organizing your email, categorizing and collecting photos. That's the stuff everyone is shouting about doing better with AI, end quote. Just note that they haven't mentioned AI yet. Then it was on to the various things like TVOS gets 21 by 9 projector support. WatchOS is getting a new training mode to measure intensity and duration of workouts. You can now adjust goals for your activity rings by day of the week, and you can pause ring tracking for a while to keep your streaks alive, even if you're you're taking a day off, you can pause now for things like rest days. Your various metrics will

be highlighted when you're outside your normal range. There are new features for cycle tracking, pregnancy tracking, and heart rate notification, customization. Live activities are coming to the watch. Live translation is also coming to the watch itself. Then it was on to the iPad. The grid and home screen stuff we just talked about on iOS is coming there too. SharePlay will let you remote control another iPad. Yes, the calculator app is finally coming to the iPad with Apple Pencil support. That got a big cheer from the live crowd, apparently. And it's kind of interesting.

You can write equations using the pencil, and when you write the equal sign, it will solve that equation for you. You can draw like a table of numbers and get a sum just by drawing a line under a column. This is all called Math Notes. And speaking of notes, there's a new Notes app feature called SmartScript. It makes your messy handwriting better using on-device machine learning to, you know, make your handwriting straighter, more legible. You can paste text into a handwritten note and it'll show up in your handwriting. Again, this is all on-device AI, but note, they're not mentioning that yet.

See what I did there, note. Then it was on to MacOS, MacOS Sequoia, by the way. That's officially the name. Big news here. Continuity now has iPhone mirroring. You can see and control your iPhone in a window on your Mac. You can interact with your phone even if it's in another room, even if it's locked. In fact, your iPhone stays locked while you're in mirror mode, so no one can see what you're

doing with it when you're mirroring it. You can basically pin your phone to your desktop to interact with it all day long, grab things like videos, and drag them back and forth. And as rumored, there is a new passwords app. It's coming to the Mac iPhone, iPad, VisionOS, and Windows. It's built off of keychain, secure sync across devices, auto password fill, all that good stuff. Safari has a highlights mode to highlight things on web pages, keeping you on page, but still offering to summarize and highlight various things on page. Note that this is also on-device AI.

They're just not, shall we say, highlighting that. Again, see what I did there. And finally, though, an hour in, Tim was back to say the words artificial intelligence and large language models for the first time. Quoting Tim, what they are doing, quote, goes beyond artificial intelligence. It's personal intelligence, and it's the next big step for Apple, end quote. Yes, they are branding it Apple Intelligence. Craig Federigi was back to say the current generation of AI chat tools are cool, but they don't know enough about you. So Apple Intelligence will pull on your personal context. But I mean, they also are going to do this.

With privacy in mind, they couldn't stop mentioning how they were protecting your privacy as they're going to do what they are about to tell you they're going to do. What does it mean in practice? Well, the iPhone can now prioritize notifications. Writing tools can rewrite, summarize, and condense text across mail, notes, keynote, messages, third-party apps even. You can also create totally original images using photos in your photo library. Imagine creating a mid-jurney image.

like to create an image of your mom looking like a superhero, though there seems to be only three cartoony styles that you can do this in. And Apple Intelligence can take actions across your apps. Here are the examples they mentioned. You could say, pull up the files and it'll draw them from your email or your messages or whatever. Or you could say, play the podcast my wife told me about yesterday, and it can search for that, whether it be an email, messages, whatever. And it can, quote, orchestrate these and hundreds of other actions for you. It can reference the content on your screen. They say all of this is on device. It's aware of your personal data without sharing your personal data. There is an on-device semantic index to organize and surface information from across

your apps, they say, quote, many of these models run on device. There are times, though, when you need bigger models, servers can help with this, end quote. They are saying they created private cloud compute to do this. When you make a request, the device decides if it can handle that request on device or if it needs to go to the cloud. This is going to then send it to those Apple Silicon servers we've spoken about recently. Private cloud compute cryptographically locks your cloud to your phone. Apple says they can't see what you're doing in this special cloud. And then it was on to Siri. When was the last time Siri got a big platform to make news on? Siri now comes to light with a glowing light around the edge of your screen when you

you invoke her. There is more natural language interaction with Siri. You can adjust the question you're asking as you ask it. Then there is also the ability for Siri to remember your conversation and have contextual awareness of previous questions you've asked. You can now type to Siri in case you don't want to talk out loud to Siri. So Siri is, as guests, becoming a chatbot. It will have on-screen awareness so that if someone sends you their address, you can just say, hey, add this to a contact card and it'll do it. You don't have to leave the message app. You got that address in to make it happen. It will also take action inside of and across apps. There's an app intense API. They call all this orchestration. Another example. If you say, add this photo to Instagram,

Siri can just do that for you. Again, don't have to leave the app or make this photo pop. Siri will edit it without having to go to the photos app and do the editing. Siri can find a photo of your driver's license, for example, extract your ID number and just enter it into a web form for you. Though I will note here, they keep using the future tense. Siri will be able to do blank. This is just a glimpse of what Siri will be able to do. I wonder how soon stuff like this is actually going to be available to use, or if this will be something they'll be rolling out over time. There are now summaries of your email.

You can know the gist of an email without actually opening it. There's a smart reply option that will figure out the questions asked of you in an email and write potential answers based on what it knows from your other emails and messages and apps, etc, etc. Messages notifications can now summarize threads. So if you've been ignoring that huge chat chain that 12 people are on, you can find out what you've missed over the last 30 messages that you ignored because you didn't want to be bothered with. Say hello to Gen. Gen.A.I. emojis. Say you want to have a T-Rex writing a surfboard. You can get that as an emoji generated for you. You can even create gen mojis of people that you have photos of. There's a new,

feature in messages called Image Playground that walks you through image generating, working on device. It all looks very cartoony. I want to underline in the Pixar sense of that word. I want to stress it's cartoony. It's not photorealistic, but it still looks cool. Imagine being able to not just send emojis, which are basically cartoons someone else created, but cartoons that you've created about whatever you want. There's also a dedicated image playground app. There's a new thing called ImageWand that can turn your rough sketch into a better-looking drawing. Again, not photorealistic, but, you know, sketch a table and get a better sketch of a table. There's a cleanup tool in photos that can make objects in a photo disappear, sort of what the pixel

phones do, so Magic Eraser is now built into photos, too, essentially. Searching in photos and videos is getting smarter, too. If you were to say, hey, let's see Leo learning to fish. It will search your photos and videos of that fishing trip you took with Leo and make a video slash photo montage without you having to basically lift a finger. There is new AI recording and transcription and notes, but also in the phone app. They did not rebrand Siri, as I've been suggesting, but by the way, Siri does have a new icon. This is all free on all of Apple's new OSs's new OSs, by the way, and then it was on to the big news. ChatGPT-40 is integrated right into Siri.

When Siri wants to use chat GPT, it asks you in a prompt if it can send the question you just asked to chat GPT, you have to approve it. The chat GPT answer comes in as a Siri answer card. This is all free, they say, no need to create a separate account. I wonder how much Apple is paying, you know, open AI per usage. Sam Altman was there in the crowd, by the way, lots of people spotted him. He did not come on stage. I'll note. Chat GPT integration is coming later this year. We also intend to add support for other AI models in the future, they said, this is AI for the rest of us, Apple says. Apple Intelligence is coming to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPad and Max with M1 and later, all with the new OSs, of course. And that was it. Tim was back to wrap up after that,

which, hmm, I can't wait to see what the online consensus of all this was. Obviously, I'll have that for you tomorrow. Let me squeeze in some non-apple nuggets here real quick before we go. How many times have you thought, sure, everything being on cell phones now is great, except for actually making phone calls. The sound quality of a call these days is, I don't know, I'd say 50% worse than a landline call from 30 years ago. Well, what if it didn't have to be that way? Nokia CEO Pecca Lundmark made a phone call using new, quote, immersive audio and video tech that uses 3D sound on a 5G smartphone as part of the 5G advanced standard, quoting Reuters. We have demonstrated the future of voice calls, said Lundmark, who was also present in the room,

the first 2G call was made in 1991. Current smartphone calls are monophonic, which compresses audio elements together and sound flatter and less detailed, but this new technology will bring 3D audio where a caller will hear everything as if they were there with the other person. It is the biggest leap forward in the live voice calling experience since the introduction of monophonic telephony audio used in smartphones and PCs today, said a Nokia spokesperson. Nokia made the call using a regular smartphone over a public 5G network. Apart from person-to-person immersive calls, this can be used in conference calls where voices of participants can be separated based on their spatial locations.

And a vast majority of smartphones have currently at least two microphones with which this technology can be implemented by transmitting in real time. The spatial characteristics of a call, the executive said. The technology is part of the upcoming 5G advanced standard and Nokia aims to get licensing opportunities with the technology, which would likely take a few years to be available widely, end quote. obviously nothing more for you today because I'm hustling to get this recorded and out to you. Talk to you tomorrow.