A look back at this week’s news and headlines from Apple, including the latest iPhone 16 leaks, iPhone AI restrictions, the new MacBook Pro for Christmas, Apple’s open-source AI, when Siri gets Apple Intelligence, the iPhone AI supercycle. and what happened to me apple?
The Apple Loop is here to remind you of some of the many discussions surrounding Apple over the past seven days. You can also read my weekly roundup of Android news here on Forbes.
iPhone 16 case tips
A number of iPhone 16 cases have been spotted this week to be revealed this week. They may not show the innards of the next-generation iPhones, but they do give us more potential information about the camera and its uses, along with Apple’s plans for Spatial Computing:
“The photos again point to a subtly tweaked design for the iPhone 16, which includes two vertically aligned camera lenses. One theory suggests that this arrangement is to accommodate the spatial video recording capabilities of Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset, even on the basic models. For optimal spatial capture, the lenses must be aligned horizontally to mimic the position of human eyes.”
(TechNetbooks).
Laptop keyboard and Apple logo (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Limitations of the iPhone’s AI
Apple has confirmed that of the current iPhones, only the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max will support Apple Intelligence AI. This is due to the combination of memory, processor and bandwidth on the board, as Apple’s John Giannandrea explained on a recent “Talk Show” podcast:
“So these models, when you run them at runtime, it’s called inference, and inferring large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. And so it’s a combination of the bandwidth in the device, it’s the size of the Apple Neural Engine, it’s the oomph in the device to actually was making these models fast enough to be useful, in theory you could run these models on very old equipment, but it would be so slow that it wouldn’t be useful.”
(Forbes).
M4 MacBook Pro before Christmas
Apple has taken the surprising step of introducing the latest M4 silicon in the iPad Pro, not just any Mac. At some point, the macOS family will see the arrival of the M4, and it will likely be the MacBook Pro that will be first in line:
“The base 14-inch MacBook Pro is expected to get the M4 chip, while the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models will be updated with the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. The Mac mini will get the M4 and M4 Pro MacBook Air, Mac Studio and Mac Pro models will not be updated with the chips M4 until 2025, and it’s not yet clear when the iMac might get an update with updated chip technology.
(MacRumors).
Apple’s Open Source AI effort
Although Apple has yet to ship any of its Apple Intelligence AI software to the public, some of its AI efforts are available. Hugging Face is an online open-source service that shares machine learning models and datasets. Apple has uploaded 20 more models to the service, adding to the models uploaded earlier this year:
“Apple has taken a significant step in its efforts to provide developers with cutting-edge AI capabilities on devices. The tech giant recently released 20 new Core ML models and 4 datasets on Hugging Face, the leading community platform for sharing AI models and code.” .
(Venture Beat).
AI is Late to the iPhone Party
As for the public arrival of Apple Intelligence? It will take longer than expected. While iOS 18 will ship with the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro in September, with a subsequent release for older iPhones, Apple Intelligence may not arrive until early 2025:
“Siri in iOS 18 will still have some “new bells and whistles” in September, including a new interface that lights up around the edge of the screen…[but] we’ll have to wait until next year for Apple’s most significant improvements to Siri. The iOS 18 update in 2025 should bring the following improvements to Apple’s virtual assistant:
(MacRumors).
AI dreams of a supercycle
With the launch of iPhone AI (regardless of when it arrives), Apple is expected to sell a lot of iPhones with AI. With very little backwards compatibility, will this trigger a “super cycle” of iPhone sales? Wedbush analysts believe it will:
“…as Apple’s AI strategy is implemented, it will catalyze the long-awaited super cycle in Cupertino with 270 million iPhones out of 1.5 billion worldwide in a golden installed base that we estimate has not upgraded its smartphones in over 4 years:
(9 to 5 Mac).
And finally…
Back in the day, everything started with an “i”. Now all product names start with “Apple”. what’s up with that? Naturally, there’s a new thread on Apple Brand Reddit this week that has plenty of theories as to why, including this one:
“Using Apple in the name is a marketing ploy to ensure brand recognition. Acura got it right in the 1990s when they started naming their cars Legend and Integra and no one knew who made them. Renaming their cars RDX, MDX, etc. . forced people to put ‘Acura’ back into the conversation, I think Apple does too.”
(Medium via Reddit).
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