twolf2919

What is the current status of the blood oxygen sensor in Apple Watches?  I have an Apple Watch Ultra, which still has that sensor, but from what I understand, Apple lost a legal battle with another company claiming Apple stole their IP and was forbidden to sell that feature in the US..  If true, from a sensor perspective, all current Apple watches are inferior to prior generations.

Personally, the only thing that would move me to a new Apple Watch is additional sensors.  Obviously, since I'm wearing an Ultra, I don't care much about thickness or size.  And I don't really use any third-party apps except iPhone apps that have Apple Watch extensions (e.g. Alltrails).  But I do care a whole bunch about more statistics about my body.  The long rumored blood pressure and glucose sensors would have me running to the nearest Apple store and wait in line.

Is there a list of what new iOS 18 features are actually in the first developer beta?  I don't see any AI improvements, no new Siri, nor any of the email improvements mentioned above.  On the mac side, I don't see iPhone Mirroring or any of the above email improvements either in macOS 15 first developer beta.  Hard to know what to test/try when you don't know what to look for.

I read this article and kept waiting to read something that actually required AI.  Other than  in the Photos app and automatic mail categorization, I didn't see much.  Maybe I'm missing something and all these "in-app" actions that Siri is now capable of don't require specific wording to use and AI is used by the system to derive at your intention?

blastdoor said:

I haven't discounted that.  I have no doubt, any existing Apple users - including myself - will appreciate any significant  new features Apple bestows on them.  But if Apple's great AI announcement turns out to be a partnership with OpenAI, where interactions are sent off-device to ChatGPT servers, it's hard to see how that would lead to some great "super" upgrade cycle as analysts are currently predicting.  After all, if all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud, why would you need a new phone?  Just install iOS 18 on your existing device and you're ready to go!

On the other hand, if Siri received a real overhaul using AI and finally became a really useful personal assistant - with my privacy kept intact by using an on-device LLM - I'd certainly stand in line for a new phone that has the required power/RAM to do this.

People don’t care how/why the feature is there, only that it is there. The how/why is interesting to nerds, but not to normals. Mac sales went up when Apple switched to Intel because switching to Intel made the Mac better — people didn’t care that Apple was abandoning a processor they helped develop for the dreaded x86. 

It’s true that if all new features can be accessed from existing phones then there is little reason to upgrade BUT working with OpenAI doesn’t mean that’s the case. There will likely be many features that require, or work better on, a new iPhone.

Note that Microsoft heavily uses OpenAI but still requires a beefy NPU for a new PC to meet their new AI branding requirements. They aren’t just doing that to help out the chip guys. 

Exactly - except that iPhones, unlike most PCs, have already been including the Neural Engine - aka NPU - for the last 7 years.   So other than Siri, it's not clear to me what other *user visible*  AIfeatures Apple could be adding that couldn't already be done with NPUs of the last couple years.  I guess we'll have to wait.

tmay said:

twolf2919 said:

Opt-in would make sense since agreeing to it will likely mean giving up some privacy to ChatGPT servers in the cloud.

If I had guts, I'd short AAPL stock - it's been rising for the past few months simply on analysts' expectation that Apple will make big announcements regarding AI.  I.e. letting the world know that it isn't behind in AI, after all.  But if, instead, we find out that they are indeed hopelessly behind - by essentially offering us another company's AI on their devices - the stock will go down, for sure.

And this sounds about right - Apple hasn't managed to improve Siri in 10+ years.  There's no reason to believe Apple could inject a massive improvement into it in the 1-2 years that AI has become a hot topic.

You seem to discount that fact that Apple has something on the order of 1.45 B iPhone users, and it those users haven't abandoned Apple from the lack of noticeable Siri improvements, then likely, there isn't any impact to Apple from "leading from the back" in AI. pp

I haven't discounted that.  I have no doubt, any existing Apple users - including myself - will appreciate any significant  new features Apple bestows on them.  But if Apple's great AI announcement turns out to be a partnership with OpenAI, where interactions are sent off-device to ChatGPT servers, it's hard to see how that would lead to some great "super" upgrade cycle as analysts are currently predicting.  After all, if all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud, why would you need a new phone?  Just install iOS 18 on your existing device and you're ready to go!

On the other hand, if Siri received a real overhaul using AI and finally became a really useful personal assistant - with my privacy kept intact by using an on-device LLM - I'd certainly stand in line for a new phone that has the required power/RAM to do this.