I'll explain with cake.

This week we saw the birth of Apple Intelligence, so happy birthday Apple AI!

It also happens to be my birthday week.

I am officially as old as the Macintosh.

I've grown up with Apple computers, and I have been reflecting on how computing at this point going forward will be fundamentally different, and it's not exactly what I wished for.

Whew.

You see, this year, we will witness a major split in Apple users.

You see, only people who have the most expensive iPhones or the newest devices can use it.

The rest can't.

And another portion thinks it's helpful, and others will find it lame or annoying.

And another slice of folks will just not like this deal that has chat GPT always there inside Siri.

Is Apple having a midlife crisis to even be making a deal like this with an outside company?

Am I just an older generation Apple user shaking my fist at the iCloud?

Am I the one with the midlife crisis?

Well one thing is clear, Apple is shoving this into our faces whether you like it or not.

Let's go over the big changes coming ahead, and let's get a glass of milk.

I'm Bridget Cary, and this is One More Thing.

Thank you.

Oh, and we'll talk about the iPad.

It's got a calculator now.

Apple's generative AI is called Apple Intelligence.

It creates content or pulls up data based on your prompts, and it's only going to come to the top-of-the-line Apple products.

So that means it's only going to work on A17 Pro chips and the iPhone 15 Pro models, and the M-series iPads and Macs.

Among the many things it can do, it can connect the dots between different tasks to make suggestions.

So you can get advice if a work meeting conflicts with that play your daughter texted you about, and it'll use maps to plug in the location directions to help tell if you're going to get to the event in time.

Siri is a big part of this system.

It even has a new look.

Goodbye to the glowing orb.

Now Siri is the whole phone.

It's glowing along the whole screen border, and it should be smart enough to understand you if you stumble over your words or if you ask a follow-up question.

What does the weather look like for tomorrow at Muir Beach?

Oh wait, I meant Muir Woods.

You can ask Siri to pull up something that was said in a text message you got a while ago, or ask to show a photo in your library that's based on an object that was in the snapshot.

This system has writing tools that will work across apps.

It's going to summarize emails without having to open a message.

It'll tell which notifications should appear at the top of your stack.

But the AI that everyone's going to use right away?

It's making goofy images.

You see, there's something called Genmoji, where you can ask it to make any type of emoji you want.

Even an emoji that looks like your friends?

And there is something called Image Playground.

This is where you can turn friends into cartoon images.

And every time one is sent to you, and you can't send one back, well, that will be a temptation to buy the newest iPhone so you don't feel left out.

And if you think people won't upgrade just to do something silly like this, then you forget how many people feel peer pressure over green text message bubbles.

What I find interesting is that the images you can create with Image Playground are not realistic.

Everything is cartoony, which means Apple can make sure its product is not being used to create misleading photos that could contribute to fake news and misinformation.

You see, there's a reason Apple calls it a playground.

Don't take it too seriously.

It's just a tool to play with.

Now, I have many questions about how this works.

Like, what limitations will there be on what you can create with Apple's AI?

Of course, you don't know what's possible until you take it for a spin.

But Apple will also get more people to dabble in AI because of its big promise on privacy.

Since Apple is going through your personal data to make this generative AI and make those suggestions, well, it says everything being created is kept private.

And if the processing cannot be handled on the device itself, well, it's going to be protected on its servers in the cloud.

Apple says it created a new private cloud compute standard as something that never stores your data.

Customers will have to trust Apple on that one, but Apple is inviting security professional outsiders to check its claims.

It also helps that Apple already has a good track record with protecting data and being privacy-focused since it makes money off hardware and products, not on advertisements and data.

There's one twist to this that's a bit of a wild card for Apple and for us users.

Apple partnered with ChatGPT.

If you ask Siri a question and it can't answer it unless it has broader information from the web, well, then Siri's going to ask if you want to take your question out of Apple's private garden and into ChatGPT.

People already could just use the ChatGPT app, but in this twist, Apple makes it so you don't need any ChatGPT account.

It just sends it over with a quick ask of Siri.

And in turn, ChatGPT's machine gets a steady stream of iPhone users trying it out who may never have downloaded the app before.

This whole system is giving millions of iPhone users different ways to dip their toes into generative AI, but it also holds our hand in leading us into a post-app world.

You could just talk to your computer for answers and it will just figure out what you mean by connecting data between various apps.

Hello, computer.

It's going to take some getting used to, but we may soon say that hopping in and out of programs may be as antiquated as using a mouse.

Especially when you see Apple letting a third party connect to its Siri assistant.

What other things will Siri connect to next?

And how is this going to shape how the next generation uses computers?

OK, not everything this week in Apple was about generative AI.

We got highlights for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and the new macOS, called Sequoia.

All of these are coming out in the fall, and they're coming to many older Apple devices.

Here's one more, one more thing, a quick list of the big news that isn't Apple Intelligence AI.

AirPods will let you pick up or decline a call based on how you nod or shake your head. iPhones can hide an app to keep someone from seeing it for some reason, that's not suspicious at all.

You can control where you place your app icons, and you can make them all the same color, which will be fun for people who organize their bookshelves by book color.

What's actually helpful is that you can schedule a text message to get to someone at a certain time so you're not weirding them out by texting them in the middle of the night.

But you can still be weird by making your text animate in silly ways.

I will do this often, I apologize in advance.

You can send someone money to their Apple wallet with tap to cash, but let's be honest, everyone will still keep using Venmo.

The iPad is going to make your handwriting look better with Smart Script, although I like to see it try to fix my reporting chicken scratch because I can't even read it.

And most impressive, the iPad has a calculator with something called Math Notes that will do complex equations as you write them down and draw up interactive graphs.

Guess a calculator app was worth the 14-year wait.

Well, it's time to start a new chapter of making AI work for us in a smart way, and we'll still call out the mistakes to keep these tech companies in check.

There's no going back now, but let me know if WWDC was everything you wished for.

If you have questions about certain things, shout it out in the comments.

I'll do my best to address it in next week's episode.

Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss one more thing every Friday.

Thanks for watching.