Unleashing Creativity and Intelligence: APPLE's Leap into AI at WWDC 2024

As the world’s tech darlings set about to not just evolve their products, but to leap centuries into the future, Apple promises to bring the whole telescope to bear on the promise of tomorrow. In June this year, at the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC 2024) in San Jose, California, technological titan Apple Inc will expand its ecosystem to embrace generative artificial intelligence (AI). This is likely going to be the most significant event in recent technological history. It represents a trajectory that raises the stakes for user experience and promises a newfound high tide mark for technological prowess.

APPLE's AI Ambitions: A New Dawn

Apple’s AI venture goes beyond a mere portfolio expansion or a personal project of the boss. Rather, it’s a statement of intent for the company’s future: if Apple’s collaboration with OpenAI through iOS 18 leads to ChatGPT being integrated with Apple devices, it’s a signal that it is serious about competing with Google, Microsoft, and Samsung, who are doing very well in AI. Don’t be surprised to see a WWDC that’s more AI than any of the previous ones.

Siri's Evolution: Beyond Voice Commands

While Apple’s chatbot appears to still be in stealth mode, the latest improvements to Siri hint that, in the future, digital assistants won’t be helpers for users; they’ll be intuitive and indispensable co-pilots. When it comes to email or opening documents, for example, users will be able to ask Siri to ‘email my friend about the meeting’ or ‘open the PDF in my mail’, amid a host of other helpful commands. The changes, Travis Bargell, director of platform product marketing at Apple, wrote in a company blog post in April 2022, are ‘trait-based’, meaning that they rely on the GPT-3 large language model. These upgrades, scheduled to roll out in late 2025, are merely a preview of a future in which Apple’s AI will be embedded deeply into users’ interactions with their operating system.

IOS 18: A Canvas for AI Innovation

And with AI baked into iOS 18, Apple is promising users such an experience as never before! Voice memo transcriptions… conversational Siri… The possibilities seem limitless. Imagine if your phone knew your commands before you gave them, and adapted your experience to your behaviour. Imagine if your phone understood your needs, and offered a personalised news summary. Imagine if your phone was so good at understanding your conversations that it could create the best emojis on the fly to describe what you’ve been texting about. That’s the future Apple has in mind for your future with iOS 18.

The RCS Messaging Revolution

Meanwhile, Apple’s positioning around Rich Communication Services (RCS) suggests that the company is attempting to create a seamless and secure communicative experience for a much larger portion of humans. If the RCS standard can be made scalable and secure, the benefits that iMessage offers iPhone users will become available to most Android users, too. This move comes as Apple continues to fend off antitrust action, suggesting that, despite these challenges, the company is able and willing to innovate.

The macOS 15 Experience: Mirroring IOS Innovations

MacOS 15 will be similarly updated together with iOS, making your experience between the iPhone, iPad and Mac more consistent throughout. Whether with new Apple apps or new apps, new features and new technology, everything is moving towards making your mobile and desktop experience consistent, creating a platform ecosystem that delights and locks-in users.

Anticipated Hardware Innovations: What's Next?

And while hardware announcements won’t be a focus of WWDC 2024, the promise of cutting-edge chips reflects Apple’s continuing quest for better-than-best. Likely forthcoming are the A18 chip and new M4 chips for iPad Pro models. With them, Apple will continue to drive a virtuous cycle of hardware and software innovation.

An APPLE a Day: The Essence of Innovation

Apple has always been about creating what comes next – redefining what technology can do to improve our lives – and we stand to leave WWDC 2024 feeling like that’s what’s happening again. Because Apple isn’t just adding features to the existing ways we live. It’s leaping forward to recreating what a life lived amid gadgetry means. In that way, Apple isn’t asking us to come to the future – it is setting those expectations season after season.

After all, it is not iWatches or other devices that are at the heart of Apple’s innovation, but rather its incessant drive to go where nobody has gone before. This might just be the kind of future you can expect from WWDC 2024, and the years to come. The future will not be about the gadgets. It is boundless and Apple is paving the way.