AppleInsider · Kasper's Automated Slave

In the days before WWDC, it was widely believed that Apple would be playing catch-up to everyone else in the consumer tech industry by rushing to bolt a copy of ChatGPT onto its software and checking off the feature box of "Artificial Intelligence." That's clearly not what happened.

Apple Intelligence is on the way.

Rather than following the herd, Apple laid out its strategy for expanding its machine learning capabilities into the world of generative AI in both writing and creating graphic illustrations as well as iconic emoji-like representations of ideas, dreamed up by the user. Most of this could occur on device, or in some cases, delegated to a secure cloud instance private to the individual user.

In both cases, Apple Intelligence, as the company coined its product, would be deeply integrated into the user's own context and data. This is instead of it just being a vast Large Language Model trained on all the publicly scrapeable data some big company could appropriate in order to generate human-resembling text and images.

At the same time, Apple also made it optional for iOS 18 and macOS Sonoma users to access such a vast LLM from Open AI. They did this by enabling the user to grant permission to send requests to Chat GPT 4o, and even take advantage of any subscription plan they'd already bought to cover such power hungry tasks without limits.

Given that Apple delivered something vastly different than the AI tech pundits predicted, it raises the question: is it possible that Apple Intelligence isn't really delivering true AI, or is it more likely that AI pundits were really failing to deliver Apple intelligence?

The Artificial Intelligence in the tech world

Pundits and critics of Apple long mused that the company was desperately behind in AI. Purportedly, nobody at Apple had ever thought about AI until the last minute, and the cash strapped, beleaguered company couldn't possibly afford to acquire or create its own technology in house.

Obviously, they told us for months, the only thing Apple could hope to do is crawl on its knees to Google to offer its last few coins in exchange for the privilege of bolting Google's widely respected Gemini LLM onto the side of the Mac to pretend it was still in the PC game.

It could also perhaps license Copilot from Microsoft, which had just showed off how far ahead the company was in rolling out a GPT-like chat-bot of its own. Microsoft had also paid AI leader Open AI extraordinary billions to monopolize any commercial productization of its work with the actual Chat GPT leading the industry in chat-bottery.

Apple does allow users to use ChatGPT on their iPhone if they want.

A few months ago when Open AI's unique non-profit status appeared on the verge of institutional collapse, Microsoft's CEO was hailed as a genius for offering to gut the startup for brains and leadership by hiring away its people out from under its stifling non-profit chains.

That ultimately didn't materialize, but it did convince everyone in the tech world that building an AI chat bot would cost incredible billions to develop, and further that the window of opportunity to get started on one had already closed and one way or another, Microsoft had engineered a virtual lock on all manner of chat-bot advancements promised to drive the next wave of PC shipments.

Somehow, at the same time, everyone else outside of Apple had already gained access to an AI chat-bot, meaning that just Apple and only Apple would be behind in a way that it could never hope to ever gain any ground in, just like with Apple Maps.

Or like the Voice First revolution lead by Amazon's Alexa that would make mobile apps dry up and blow away while we delightfully navigate our phones with the wondrous technology underlying a telephone voicemail tree.

Or the exciting world of folding cell phones that turned into either an Android tablet or just a smaller but much thicker thing to stuff in your pocket because iPhones don't fit in anyone's pockets.

Or smart watches, music streaming, or the world of AR/VR being exclusively lead by Microsoft's HoloLens in the enterprise and Meta and video game consoles among consumers. It keeps going but I think I've exhausted the limits of sarcasm and should stop.

Anyway, Apple was never going to catch up this time.

Apple catches up and was ahead all along

Just as with smart watches and Maps and Alexa and HoloLens, it turns out that being first to market with something doesn't mean you're really ahead of the curve. It often means you're the beginning of the upward curve.

If you haven't thought out your strategy beyond rushing to launch desperately in order to be first, you might end up a Samsung Gear or vastly expensive Voice First shopping platform nobody uses for anything other than changing the currently playing song.

It might be time to lay off your world-leading VR staff and tacitly admit that nobody in management had really contemplated how HoloLens or the Meta Quest Pro could possibly hope to breathe after Apple walked right in and inhaled the world's high end oxygen.

There's reason to believe that everyone should have seen this coming. And it's not because Apple is just better than everyone else. It's more likely because Apple looks down the road further and thinks about the next step.

That's obvious when looking at how Apple lays its technical foundations.

Siri was Apple's first stab at offering an intelligent agent to consumers.

Pundits and an awful lot of awful journalists seem entirely disinterested in how anything is built, but rather only in the talking points used to market some new thing. Is Samsung promising that everyone will want a $2000 cell phone that magically transforms into an Android tablet with a crease? They were excited about that for years.

When Apple does all the work behind the scenes to roll out its unique strategic vision for how something new should work, they roll their eyes and say it should have been finished years ago. It's because people who have only delivered a product that is a string of words representing their opinions imagine that everything else in the world is also just an effortless salad tossing of their stream of consciousness.

They don't appreciate that real things have to be planned and designed and built.

And while people who just scribble down their thoughts actually believed that Apple hadn't imagined any use for AI before last Monday, and so would just deliver a button crafted by marketing to invoke the work delivered by the real engineers at Google and Microsoft or Open AI, the reality was that Apple was delivering the foundations of a system wide intelligence via AI for years right out in the public.

Apple Intelligence started in the 1970s

Efforts to deliver a system wide model of intelligent agents that could spring into action in a meaningful way relevant to regular people using computers began shortly after Apple began making its first income hawking the Apple I nearly 50 years ago.

One of the first things Apple set upon doing in the emerging world of personal computing is fundamental research into how people used computers, in order to make computing more broadly accessible.

That resulted in the Human User Interface Guidelines, which explained in intricate detail how things should work and why. They did this first in order for regular people to be able to make sense of computing at a time when you had to be a full time nerd hacker in order to load a program off tape and enable it to begin to PEEK and POKE at memory cells just to generate specific characters on your CRT display.

Apple Intelligence started with Lisa Technology

In Apple's HUIG, it was mandated that the user needed consistency of operation, the ability to undo mistakes, and a direct relationship between actions and results. This was groundbreaking in a world where most enthusiasts only cared about megahertz and BASIC. A lot of people, including developers, were upset that Apple was asserting such control over the interface and dictating how things should work.

Those that ignored Apple's guidelines have perished.

Not overnight, but with certainty, personal computing began to fall in line with the fundamental models of how things should work, largely created by Apple. Microsoft based Windows on it and eventually even the laggards of DOS came kicking and screaming into the much better world of graphical computing first defined by the Macintosh, where every application printed the same way, and copy/pasted content and open/saved documents using the same shortcuts, and where Undo was always right there when you needed it.

An era later, when everyone it the tech world was convinced that Microsoft had fully plundered Apple's work and that the Macintosh would never again be relevant and that Windows would now take over and become the interface of everything, Apple completely refreshed the Mac and made it more like the PC (via Intel) and less like the PC (with OS X). Apple incrementally clawed its way back into relevance, to the point where it could launch the next major revolution in personal computing: the truly usable mobile smartphone.

Apple crushed Microsoft's efforts at delivering a Windows Phone by stopping once again to determine -- after lengthy research -- not just how to make the PC "pocket sized," but how to transform it so that regular people could figure it out and use it productively as a mobile tool.

iPhone leaped over the entire global industry of mobile makers, not because it was just faster and more sophisticated, but largely because it was easy to use. And that was a result of a lot of invisible work behind the scenes.

Windows Phone failed in the face of iPhone

Pundits liked to chalk this up to Apple's marketing, as if the company had pulled some simple con over the industry and tricked us all into paying too much for a cell phone. The reality was that Apple put tremendous work into designing a new, mobile Human User Interface that your mom-- and her dad-- could use.

Across the same decades of way-back-when, Apple and the rest of the industry was also employing elements of AI to deliver specific features. At the height of Apple's actual beleaguerment in the early '90s, the company strayed from its focus on building products for real people and instead began building things that were just new.

Apple's secret labs churned out ways to relate information together in networks of links, how to summarize long passages of text into the most meaningful synopsis, how to turn handwriting into text on the MessagePad, and how to generate beautiful ligatures in fonts -- tasks that few saw any real use for, especially as the world tilted towards Windows.

What saved Apple was a strict return to building usable tools for real people, which started with the return of Steve Jobs. The iMac wasn't wild new technology; it was approachable and easy to use. That was also the basis of iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple's subsequent successes.

At the same time, Apple was also incorporating the really new technology Apple had already done internally. VTwin search was delivered as Spotlight, and other language tools and even those fancy fonts and handwriting recognition were morphed into technologies regular people could use.

Rather than trying to copy the industry in making a cell phone with a Start button, or a phone-tablet, or a touch-PC or some other kind of MadLib engineered refrigerator-toaster, Apple has focused on simplicity, and making powerful things easy to use.

In the same way, rather than just bolting ChatGPT on its products and enabling its users to experience the joys of seven finger images and made-up wikipedia articles where the facts are hallucinated, Apple again distilled the most useful applications of generative AI and set to work making this functionality easy to use, as well as private and secure.

This didn't start happening the day Craig Federighi first saw Microsoft Copilot. Apple's been making use of AI and machine learning for years, right out in the open.

It's used in finding people in images, and text throughout the interface for search indexing and even in authenticating via Face ID. Apple made so much use of machine learning that they started building Neural Engine cores into Apple Silicon with the release of iPhone X in 2017.

Apple was talking about privacy and machine intelligence for years

Artificial Intelligence gets a euphemism in AI

Apple didn't really call any of its work with the Neural Engine "AI." Back then, the connotation of "Artificial Intelligence" was largely negative.

It still is.

To most people, especially those of us raised in the '80s, the notion of "artificial" usually pertained to fake flowers, unnatural flavorings, or synthetic food colors that might cause cancer and definitely seemed to set off hyperactivity in children.

Artificial Intelligence was the Terminator's Skynet, and the dreary, bleak movie by Steve Spielberg.

Some time ago when I was visiting a friend in Switzerland, where the three official languages render all consumer packaging a Rosetta Stone of sorts between French, Italian and German, I noticed that the phrase "Artificially Flavored" on my box of chocolatey cereal was represented with a version of English's "artificial" in the Latin languages, but in German used the word Kunstlich, literally "Artistic."

I wondered to myself why German uses "like an artist" rather than the word for "fake" in my native language before suddenly coming to the realization that artificial doesn't literally mean "fake," but rather an "artistic representation."

The box didn't say I was eating fake chocolate puffs; it was instead just using somebody's artistic impression of the flavor of chocolate. It was a revelation to my brain. The negative connotation of artificial was so strongly entrenched that I had never before realized that it was based on the same root as artistic or artifice.

It wasn't fraud, it was a sly replacement with something to trick the eye, or in this case, the tastebuds.

Artificial Intelligence is similarly not just trying to "fake" human intelligence, but is rather an artistic endeavor to replicate facets of how our brains work. In the last few years, the negative "fake" association of artificial intelligence has softened as we have begun to not just rebrand it as the initials AI, but also to see more positive aspects of using AI to do some task, like to generate text that would take some effort otherwise. Or to take an idea and generate an image a more accomplished artist might craft.

The shift in perception on AI has turned a dirty word into a hype cycle. AI is now expected to respark the doldrums of PC sales, or speed up the prototyping of all manner of things, and glean meaningful details out of absurd mountains of text or other Big Data. Some people are still warning that AI will kill us all, but largely the masses have accepted that AI might save them from some busy-work.

But Apple isn't much of a follower in marketing. When Apple began really talking about computer "Intelligence" on its devices at WWDC, it didn't blare out term "Artificial Intelligence." It had its own phrase.

I'm not talking about last week. I'm still talking about 2017, the year Apple introduced iPhone X and where Kevin Lynch introduced the new watchOS 4 watch face "powered by Siri intelligence."

Phil Schiller also talked about HomePod delivering "powerful speaker technology, Siri intelligence, and wireless access to the entire Apple Music library." Remember Siri Intelligence?

It seems like nobody does, even as pundits were lining up over the last year to sell the talking point that Apple had never had any previous brush with anything related to AI before last Monday. Or, supposedly, before Craig experienced his transformation on Mount Microsoft upon being anointed by the holy Copilot and ripped off all of its rival's work -- apart from the embarrassment of Recall.

Apple isn't quite ashamed of Siri as a brand, but it has dropped the association -- or maybe personification -- of its company wide "intelligent" features with Siri as a product. It has recently decided to tie its intelligence work to the Apple brand instead, conveniently coming up with branding for AI that is both literally "A.I." and also proprietary to the company.

Apple Intelligence also suavely sidesteps the immediate and visceral connotations still associated with "artificial" and "artificial intelligence." It's perhaps one of the most gutsy appropriations of a commonplace idea ever pulled off by a marketing team. What if we take a problematic buzzword, defuse the ugly part, and turn it into trademark? Genius.

The years of prep-work behind Apple Intelligence

It wasn't just fresh branding that launched Apple Intelligence. Apple's Intelligence (nee Siri) also had its foundations laid in Apple Silicon, long before it was commonplace to be trying to sell the idea that your hardware could do AI without offloading every task to the cloud. Beyond that, Apple also built the tools to train models and integrate machine learning into its own apps-- and those of third party developers-- with Core ML.

The other connection between Apple's Intelligence and Siri: Apple also spent years deploying the idea among its developers of Siri Intents, which are effectively footholds developers could build into their code to enable Siri to pull results from their apps to return in response to the questions users asked Siri.

All this systemwide intelligence Apple was integrating into Siri answers also now enables Apple Intelligence to connect and pool users' own data in ways that is secure and private, without sucking up all their data and pushing it through a central LLM cloud model where it could be factored into AI results.

With Apple Intelligence, your Mac and iPhone can take the infrastructure and silicon Apple has already built to deliver answers and context that other platforms haven't thought to do. Microsoft is just now trying to begin pooping out some kind of AI engines in ARM chips that can run Windows, even though there's still issues with Windows on ARM, and most Windows PCs are not running ARM, and little effort in AI has been made outside of just rigging up another chat-bot.

Apple Intelligence stands to be more than a mere chat bot

The entire industry has been chasing cloud-based AI in the form of mostly generative AI based on massive models trained on suspect material. Google dutifully scraped up so much sarcasm and subterfuge on Reddit that its confident AI answers are often quite absurd.

Further, the company tried to force its models to generate inoffensive yet stridently progressive AI that it effectively forgot that the world has been horrific and racist, and instead just dreams up history where the founding fathers were from all backgrounds and there was no controversies or oppression.

Google's flavor of AI was literally artificial in the worst senses.

And because Apple focused on the most valuable, mainstream uses of AI to demonstrate its Apple Intelligence, it doesn't have to expose itself to the risk of generating whatever the most unpleasant corners of humanity would like it to cough up.

What Apple is selling with today's AI is the same as its HUIG sold with the release of Macintosh: sales of premium hardware that can deliver the value of its work in imagining useful, approachable, clearly functional and easy to demonstrate features that are easy to grasp and use. It's not just throwing up a new AI service in hopes that there will someday be a business model to support it.

For Apple Intelligence, the focus isn't just catching up to the industry's "artificial" generation of placeholder content, a sort of party trick lacking a clear, unique value.

It's the state-of-the-art in intelligence and machine learning.



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A conservation veterinarian discovered that if you've got a sedated lion on your hands and need to monitor its heart rate, wrapping an Apple Watch around its tongue does the trick.

Using an Apple Watch to measure a lion's heartrate is the best use of this technology we've seen.

Australian wildlife veterinarian Dr Chloe Buiting, who is Instagram user Jungle_doctor posted a video of an anesthetized lion with an Apple Watch strapped to its tongue.

Dr. Buiting called this hack an "off-label" use of Apple's technology and she described how the Apple Watch is helping conservation vets monitor their furry, scaly, or spikey patients during medical exams and surgeries.

The trick for monitoring the heart rate of this ferocious furry animal came from Instagram User Dr. Fabiola Quesada who is a prominent wildlife and conservation veterinarian.

Dr. Buiting says the Apple Watch has even been used to monitor the heart rate of an elephant by taping the watch to their ears.

Apple has no specific rating for slobber resistance. With any luck, existing water resistance will have to suffice.

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A post shared by Dr Chloe Buiting | Wildlife Vet (@jungle_doctor)

It's not possible to tell which Apple Watch is being used to monitor heart rate here, but all models of the Apple Watch include heart rate monitoring. So, maybe don't risk your new Apple Watch Ultra, when any model will do.



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If you're not happy with Apple Intelligence, Apple will allow you to use ChatGPT privately for free instead via Siri and system wide like with Writing Tools.

ChatGPT is coming to iOS 18

Apple's partnership with OpenAI has been detailed during WWDC 2024. ChatGPT will be available as a free and private option in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later in 2024.

Even though Apple has introduced Apple Intelligence and server-side LLMs powered by Apple Silicon, the company has given users an option to utilize ChatGPT instead. For example, the option may appear when asking Siri a question or when writing with Writing Tools.

The partnership allows users to access ChatGPT's 4o model for free, at least to some extent. Users can also connect their premium account for more specific options, rather than relying on a GPT app.

Those using the free ChatGPT integration can do so without privacy concerns. Requests aren't logged and user data isn't saved.

Apple also hinted that other models may be available at a later date, like Google Gemini.

iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia are available to developer beta testers on Monday. The ChatGPT integration won't be available until sometime after the public release of the operating systems in the fall, so don't expect early access to the feature.



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Apple's iPadOS 18 introduces more changes to the iPad's operating system, with the latest edition including accessibility and a Calculator app, among other features.

iPadOS 18

Apple has detailed many changes arriving on iPadOS in the fall of 2024 as part of its iPadOS 18 release. The numerous changes promise to give many users a massive update to the iPad experience.

Accessibility

Apple has already previewed the accessibility functions arriving in iPadOS and its other operating systems in May as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

The biggest change is eye tracking, allowing users to navigate the operating systems' interface with their eyes. While borrowed from the Apple Vision Pro, the feature will only require the front-facing camera of the iPad to function.

Personalisation

Just like iOS, iPadOS users will be able to personalize their home screen. App icons can be moved and anchored to different parts of the screen, allowing for more of a user's background to be viewable.

Dark mode versions of icons are available, but you can change them with the system setting. Icons can also be tinted, allowing further customization for Dark Mode icons.

Control Center gains the ability for developers to add more controls to it, giving users another way to access important features and actions via a Controls API.

SharePlay

SharePlay's screen sharing is being updated to allow you to tap and draw on a screen to instruct others on what they should do on their own device. It's also possible to get assistance from iPhones.

Tab Bar

A new redesigned tab bar now floats above app content. The floating tab bar can turn into a sidebar, offering more functionality.

This includes being able to reorder and add more tabs from the sidebar and increasing customization for apps.

Calculator

The Calculator's finally on iPad, which takes advantage of the Apple Pencil with its Math Notes feature, which AppleInsider broke in April. Writing in expressions, the Calculator will immediately solve problems once an equal sign is written.

Calculator is finally on iPad

It'll also include functions like a scientific calculator. Importantly, it will also save notes for later use.

Messages

Users can now format text in Messages using bold, italics, or underlining words. Animated text effects are also available, along with redesigned Tapbacks for reactions.

Scheduling of messages is also available, just in case a message must be sent when the recipient isn't available.

Freeform

The Freeform app gains Scenes, giving a way to quickly navigate around a Freeform document. This should improve group productivity and help guide new document users around what's already been documented in the app.

Safari

As part of Safari's changes, there's a redesigned Reader experience and Highlights. Machine learning will show users key information from a webpage, allowing them to quickly understand its contents.

Photos

As part of the biggest redesign to the app, it's now easier than ever for users to find the images they want. Unified to a single view, the Library view adds filters to quickly narrow down the content types, even screenshots.

A new carousel view shows highlights that update each day, featuring a variety of subjects. Content also autoplays while browsing.

Notes

Part of the Notes app, iPadOS now lets users perform text editing on their handwriting through a feature called Smart Script. For handwritten notes in Notes, users can now spellcheck their text, with changes made to blend into the user's scribbles.

Updates to the Notes app improves a user's handwriting as they wrote

The changes also apply when users move text, restructuring what's written to allow more text to be added, just like normal typed text.

There are also collapsible sections in Notes, allowing users to more easily see the key points of their notes while temporarily hiding less important elements.

AppleInsider urges you not to install beta software on any device you depend on for work.



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The Sonos Ace is the company's new push into premium personal audio. Here's how it fares when compared to Apple's AirPods Max.

Sonos Ace and AirPods Max

The Sonos Ace were launched as a premium pair of headphones, its first foray into personal audio. They're a stylish pair of headphones that ticks many of the premium audio boxes for consumers.

It's hard not to make a direct comparison of them to AirPods Max. As over-ear headphones with metal accents and a leaning towards audio quality, it's hard not to do so.

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This is what Sonos' new personal audio offering brings to the table, and how it competes against Apple's high-priced and aging competitor.

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - Specifications

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - Design

Made from aluminum and steel, the AirPods Max are a reasonably hefty pair of headphones. Using telescoping arms, it has a headband with stainless steel arms and a breathable knit mesh that is springy and doesn't require foam.

The cushions on the earcups are made with a mesh textile for comfort.

You can see a few Max-inspired elements in the design of the Sonos Ace. Chiefly the use of a shiny arms connecting the headband to the earcups. However, it decided to hide the hinges it uses inside the earcups, which could help increase durability.

Wearing the Sonos AceWearing the Sonos AceWearing the Sonos Ace

The headband of the Ace is more traditional, with a leather-free cushion padding the band on the user's head. The cushioning on the earcups is handled the same way, with the material used being somewhat easier to wipe clean than Apple's knit choice.

Both headphones use magnets to hold the earcup cushions in place, which makes it easier to replace and maintain. However, Sonos has been a bit more smart about their construction.

If you place the cushions into the wrong earcup, you'll cover sensors. To help beat this, Apple includes a letter inside each earcup for identification.

Sonos takes this further, by color-coding the internal 3D mesh with the inside of the earcup for easier matching. Also, the magnets have opposing polarities for each cup, so the cushion won't snap into the wrong earcup.

You can tell which earcup the cushions go into by color on the Sonos Ace.

Despite lacking as much padding overall, the AirPods Max will also weigh heavier on your head at 13.6 ounces. The 11.04-ounce Sonos Ace will be easier to wear for longer periods, but they're still reasonably heavy.

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - Physical Controls

Apple and Sonos both love their unique controls. AirPods Max has a singular button next to a multi-use Digital Crown. This is effectively the same control you'll find on an Apple Watch.

The Digital Crown is really nice to adjust volume or playback. However, sometimes a pillow or seat can hit the Digital Crown, causing the volume to change.

Some physical controls on the Sonos Ace

Sonos uses three buttons: one at the base of the left earcup, a round button on the right earcup, and one it refers to as a Content Key. It's made from stainless steel and is spring loaded, bouncing back with a delightful little snap.

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - Audio Processing

Each use custom 40mm dynamic drivers to reproduce exceptional sound. After years of listening to AirPod Max and weeks listening to Sonos Ace, the latter is a little bit better.

The soundstage on the Sonos Ace sounded more realistic. Sonos was able to better separate things like vocals from the instrumentals, while making it sound as if the music was coming from all around me.

Apple has Spatial Audio and excellent sound quality on the AirPods Max. But listening to them back to back to back, the Ace almost sounded as if I was there.

The vocals were right in my ears while the instruments came in all around it. The AirPods Max, in comparison, sounded slightly more closed off.

We're talking about audio on a very high level here, so by no means did either of these sound bad.

Both do offer Spatial Audio, but there's a lot of difference in how each pulls it off.

Using an app to manage the Sonos AceUsing an app to manage the Sonos AceUsing an app to manage the Sonos AceUsing an app to manage the Sonos Ace

Apple owns the entire stack here, which means it have a unique advantage in tracking where your iPhone, iPad, or Mac is. You have the option of turning spatial off, tracking your head, or keeping the audio sourced fixed in front of you.

For example, when you're watching a movie, the audio will always be coming from in front of you, no matter where you turn your head.

Sonos doesn't have the ability to monitor your phone's location and calculate its position in 3D space. Therefore the speaker-maker had to do something else.

It basically monitors your movement so when you're sitting, it locks that in as front. Then any other head movements will result in the audio staying in front of you.

If you get up and walk around, it detects that and pauses head tracking.

That makes not quite as effective and ubiquitous as Apple's, but in effect it works just about as good without Apple's first-party benefits. This is especially true when used with your soundbar.

Say you wanted to use your headphones with your TV to watch a movie. If you have an Apple TV, it's easy to connect your AirPods Max via Control Center.

Sonos Max is even easier - assuming you have a compatible Sonos soundbar. All you have to do is press and hold the content key on the side of the headphones and the audio will jump to your ears.

This works by establishing a direct Wi-Fi connection between the soundbar and your headphones. You're able to experience true Dolby Atmos spatial audio with the headphones.

At launch, this feature is limited to the Sonos Arc. Soon, it will roll out to the Beam, Beam Gen 2, and Ray.

Sonos Ace [above] and AirPods Max [below]

Another feature that isn't out yet at the time of review is TrueCinema mode. This uses the onboard mics to understand the acoustics of the room you're in, then adjusts your headphone audio so that it matches your physical environment.

It's a really cool feature that goes more towards making the headphones fade away.

Both headphones have Active Noise Cancellation. Sonos also has an Aware mode, which blends ambient sound with a user's content, somewhat reminiscent of Apple's Transparency mode.

Both headphones have support for lossless, kind of. With AirPods Max, you can listen to lossless if you use a wired Lightning connection.

Sonos Ace can do lossless over Bluetooth with AptX HD, but Apple doesn't support it. Then again, it also works when connected via USB-C.

If you're a fan of digital assistants, you have your options cut out for you. AirPods Max stick you with Siri - for better or for worse. You can invoke Apple's digital assistant by saying "Hey Siri" entirely hands-free.

Sonos Ace can use your phone's assistant when you hold the button on the side. It works fine with Siri, but lacks a hands-free option.

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - Connectivity and Battery Life

For wireless connectivity, both use Bluetooth. However, while the AirPods Max work with Bluetooth 5.0, Sonos supports Bluetooth 5.0.

Both also have physical connectivity, with Apple opting for Lightning while the Sonos Ace uses USB-C.

The battery in the Sonos Ace is a 1,060mAh unit. Sonos claims it can last for up to 30 hours of listening or 24 hours of call time with ANC or Aware mode enabled.

Apple says the AirPods Max can go up to 20 hours for listening on a single charge with ANC or Transparency enabled, or 20 hours of talk time.

Both charge rapidly, with five minutes of charge equating 1.5 hours of listening time on the AirPods Max. Sonos goes better, with up to three hours of listening time from three minutes of charge.

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - Cases

Apple has its own bra-like cover that slips over both earcups. The magnets in the case turn your headphones off, as Apple's offering lacks any physical off button.

The Sonos Ace case [left], AirPods Max [right]

The Sonos Ace has a felt case made from recycled plastic bottles. It's a great-looking case and this white one has a sage green interior.

It zips around the outside and your cables are all stored in this bonus pouch. And best of all, that holder magnetically holds to the inside.

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - A new-found rivalry

A lot of this comparison sways in favor of the Sonos Ace. I prefer the look, comfort, sound quality, and that it uses USB-C.

That said, Apple has a lot of its own software features. There's adaptive EQ, audio sharing, hands-free Siri, and automatic device switching, and potentially more as Apple rolls out software updates.

The thing is, though, AirPods Max are a few years old. They lack many of the quality of life features of other products, like AirPods Pro and its personalized volume, adaptive audio mode, Find My, and USB-C.

If Apple had these features, it would be a lot easier to recommend the AirPods Max.

For now, the Sonos Ace may be the better pick for many users. It's $100 cheaper when full retail prices are compared, and offers a considerable experience that Apple needs to catch up on.

The ball is now squarely in Apple's court.

AirPods Max vs Sonos Ace - Where to Buy

Sonos Ace headphones, which retail for $449, are available at Sonos directly, as well as at Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo and Best Buy. At press time, Sonos is running a sale on bundles through its direct and retail channels knocking up to $248 off kits featuring the over-ear headphones.

AirPods Max, meanwhile, are nearly always on sale on their own, with the lowest prices available in our AirPods Price Guide. At press time, every color can be found for under $500.



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