Changing the narrative
It’s in this context that Apple will seek to drive home a positive story about its platforms and change the critical narrative around its own brand. One way it might achieve this would be to introduce the world’s biggest smartphone artificial intelligence platform with the announcement of the backwards-compatible iOS 18.
Called by some the “biggest iOS update” in company history, Apple’s next-generation AI fueled smartphone operating system will run on hundreds of millions of devices from the get-go. (Every Apple Silicon chip released in the last few years has untapped capacity.) It seems likely it will run across all of Apple’s devices, and it is also likely you’ll be able to use third-party AI services such as those from Baidu or Google Gemini alongside Apple’s own, as the company is allegedly speaking with them.
Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring in January wrote: “We believe Apple’s efforts to bring these features to market are accelerating, increasingly the likelihood of an ‘AI iPhone’ launch as soon as Fall 2024.”
Will Apple AI sink or swim?
I’ve written before to explain how I think AI in iOS 18 will manifest itself as an edge intelligence built into the device to enable people to get important stuff done while maintaining privacy.
These powerful tools will be the big announcement at WWDC. But we’ll have to wait and see whether industry perception will cast the company as forging ahead or repeat the mantra that it is still playing catch-up.
I suspect some lazy thinkers will stick with the latter, if only because Apple seems likely to focus on narrow task-specific AI that’s really good at specialized tasks, supplemented by public LLM systems such as those from Chat GPT.
