Tim Cook plans to step down from his CEO role in September, handing the reins to hardware chief John Ternus. Ternus may be inheriting one of the most durable businesses in tech, but he’s also stepping into a very different ecosystemthan the one Cook spent decades shaping. The App Store’s 30% cut is under pressure, the behind-the-scenes power Apple once […]
AirPods Pro 3 | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Apple's rumored AirPods with cameras are nearing a stage where the company will test early mass production, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports. Currently, Apple testers are "actively using" prototypes that are in the design validation test stage, which is one step before the production validation test stage.
The AirPods' cameras "aren't designed" to snap photos or video but instead can take in "visual information in low resolution" that users can query Siri about, like asking the AI assistant what they should cook with the ingredients they have in front of them, according to Gurman. They may also use the cameras to help with things like turn-b …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) takes place in just a few weeks. Everyone expects the company to explain its approach to AI deployment on its platforms. With that in mind, here’s what several months of speculation suggest Apple will announce, though the details remain to be disclosed.
Apple is investing billions of dollars in these plans; R&D spending reached 10.3% of revenue in the second quarter, up from 7.6% in Q1. Given Apple’s accelerating revenue, on a dollar basis this means the company’s R&D spend is up 34% from a year ago.
“We believe AI is a really important investment area for Apple, and we’re going to be doing that incrementally on top of what we normally invest in our product roadmap,” said Apple CFO Kevan Parekh during Apple’s latest fiscal call. (AI isn’t Apple’s only spending target, either.)
While the billions Apple is investing are dwarfed by the huge infrastructure investments made by pure AI players, Apple’s infrastructure already exists — in the form
Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging it misled consumers about the AI capabilities of the iPhone 15 and 16. The complaint claimed Apple exaggerated the readiness and functionality of Apple Intelligence features, particularly an upgraded Siri, influencing purchase decisions with capabilities that were incomplete or delayed. Without […]
A familiar pattern has emerged in robotics and autonomous systems: a flagship demo runs beautifully on stage, the same system stumbles in a live warehouse two weeks later, and the post-mortem blames “reality” for being messier than the test environment. Some voices in the field argue the missing layer is hardware — better grippers, force-torque […]
The mishaps around Apple Intelligence have gone beyond denting Apple’s reputation – they have also cost the company $250 million in damages over smarter Siri delays.
Think back to the original introduction of Apple Intelligence and you might recall a promotional video that explained how a new and smarter Siri would act as your contextually-smart AI companion, helping you get things done. Almost two years later, that smarter Siri still hasn’t shipped — and while Apple has made major changes in management, AI strategy, and approach, this contextual companion isn’t now expected until later this year.
Hopefully.
Apple Intelligence can be seen as a Maps-launch style debacle on the part of the company. (Apple even had to deny that the video presentation for those features shown at WWDC 2024 (no longer officially available) was made up.)
Apple Intelligence’s $250M punishment
The entire affair left some iPhone users unhappy, so they launched a class action lawsuit against the company for dela