Craig, Joz, thank you so much for sitting down with me at your big developers conference.
Yeah, it was a big day yesterday.
So, I do wanna get to what you announced yesterday, and some of the big announcements. I wanna talk a little bit about last year's WWDC. Start there. Last year you announced a smarter AI-driven Siri. Where is she?
Yeah, well, you know, back then with Apple Intelligence, I think we spent about 40 minutes on Apple Intelligence in a 100-minute show. Siri was building on Apple Intelligence. We spent about eight minutes on Siri there. Four minutes of those we were able to ship this year. In four minutes, we didn't. So we were able to deliver a great new Siri UI, new features like typing to Siri. Siri understands fluency better, conversational context better, product knowledge better. But there were a couple of really significant features that we weren't able to get to. And we had laid the foundation with Apple Intelligence, with a semantic index, with on-device, really powerful on-device large language models that power a bunch of other features in Apple Intelligence, with breakthrough private cloud compute of intelligence there. And all of those, and a semantic index that we use in lots of features like searching your photos with natural language, which of course we delivered, which all are foundational to new capabilities we wanna add to Siri. We had a really two-phase plan, two versions of an architecture to deliver a great Siri. And as we got into the conference, we had V1 working to do basic capabilities that we showed off at the conference. So we had some real software. We were able to demonstrate there and show what was coming, but it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to. We had something working, but then as you got off the beaten path, and we know with Siri it's open-ended what you might ask it to do, and the data that might be on your device that would be used in personal knowledge. And we wanted to be really, really reliable and we weren't able to achieve the reliability in the time we thought initially we could get it done by the end of the year and then by the spring. And when we realized in the spring that it just wasn't gonna hit the Apple quality level, we had to make the announcement that we were gonna move on to V2 of our architecture that really had the legs to get us to the quality that we want for our customers. And that we'd be announcing when it was ready, we'd be announcing it. And so that's where we are today.
But there was a working version of this.
This wasn't just vaporware.
Oh, no, no, no, no, of course. No, we were filming real working software with a real large language model with real semantic search. That's what you saw.
Yeah, there's this narrative out there that, yeah, it was demoware only. No, it was, again, something we thought as Craig said, we'd actually ship by later in the year. And look, we don't wanna disappoint customers. We never do. But it would've been more disappointed to ship something that didn't hit our quality standard that had, you know, an error rate that we felt was unacceptable. So we made what we thought was the best decision. I'd make it again, so.
So two parts of this that I wanna unpack. I mean, one is that you marketed it though. You showed this. How did that happen?
Well, again, as Craig said, we thought we were gonna deliver it by the end of the year. That was our plan. So in October, we had one round of that Bella Ramsey ad that showed one of the things that we could do with Apple Intelligence. We had a whole series of things, and this was one of 'em. We expected it. And there you go.
Yeah, I think most of our marketing really, and I mean, I'm not the expert here, but was about Apple Intelligence. And we had, I don't know, 20 different capabilities of Apple Intelligence. And our, as I say, like even in what we were saying in the event, you'd swear in retrospect, if I'm to read what people write, that our entire event last year was about Siri. As I said, 4% of the minutes in our event last year were about the parts of Siri that we didn't deliver. The 96 other percent of that event was about other things. And most of Apple Intelligence was about all sorts of powerful capabilities that we shipped. And so, yeah, we've been marketing Apple Intelligence a lot because we think both it's great now, and it's a huge foundation for the future. If every time you hear us market Apple Intelligence, you hear in your mind chatbot, which of course, we were 100% not thinking, and saying that was what we thought Apple Intelligence was or what the future of our platform was. Well, then you're gonna think this, but that in fact isn't what we were doing. There was a Bella Ramsey ad that was specifically about Siri, but you know, by and large, we've been marketing Apple Intelligence.
Yeah. And there's over 20 features that we did deliver. So we delivered almost everything that we promised. That was something we didn't, again, and Craig explained why.
It's great that you set this high bar, but you're also Apple. I mean, you've got more engineers, more cash than most companies, maybe any company. Why couldn't you make it work?
I mean, this is new technology. I think when it comes to automating capabilities on devices in a reliable way, no one's doing it really well right now. And we wanted to be the first, we wanted to do it best. And like I say, we had very promising early results in working initial versions, but not to the level that as we began living on it internally, and feeling like, this just doesn't work reliably enough to be an Apple product. So this stuff takes hard work, but we do see AI as a long-term transformational wave, as one that's going to affect our industry, and of course, our society for decades to come. We wanna get it right. There's no need to rush out with the wrong features, and the wrong product just to be first. We ultimately want to build the right products for our customers.
So many people associate Apple and AI with Siri. Since 10 years ago now. And so, there is a real expectation that Siri should be as good, if not better than the competition.
Oh, and I think ultimately it should be.
That's certainly our mission. Yeah. But that's our mission. You know, we set out to tell people last year where we were going, I think people were very excited about Apple's values there, experience that's integrated into everything you do, not a bolted-on chatbot on the side, something that is personal, something that is private. We started building some of those and delivering some of those capabilities. And we do wonderful semantic photo search right now. You know, we do all kinds of tools that are directly integrated into how you use your device. I think people are excited for that future. And in a way, appreciate the fact that people really wanted the next version of Siri. And we really want to deliver it for them, but we wanna do it the right way.
When's the right way gonna come along?
Well, in this case, we really wanna make sure that we have it very much in hand before we start talking about dates for obvious reasons.
And will that include these features that you had previously announced and more, I mean, is this the effort to make Siri this more interactive AI companion?
Sure. Well, I mean, look, on the one hand, I would love to dish about my enthusiasm for our future plans, but that's exactly what we don't want to do right now, right? To, you know, misset expectations. We wanna deliver something great that you and all of our customers really appreciate.
You have mentioned Apple Intelligence a lot. And you know, to be honest, I'm not really a big user of Apple Intelligence. I'm using a lot of your competitors' products. Can you or will you keep up with that competition?
Well, again, it is important to realize our strategy is a little bit different than some other people's, right? Our idea of Apple Intelligence is using generative AI to be an enabling technology for features across our operating system. So much so that sometimes you're doing things you don't even realize you're using Apple Intelligence or, you know, AI to do them. And that's our goal. Integrate it. Make your products that you use every day, make the features you use every day better. Not even have to think about, there's no destination, there's no app called Apple Intelligence, which is different than a good chatbot. Which again, what I think some people have kind of conflated a bit, like, where's your chatbot? We didn't do that. What we decided was that we would give you access to one through ChatGPT, because, you know, we think that was the best one. But our idea is to integrate across the operating system, make it features that, you know, I certainly use every day.
And I think, I mean, AI is one of those massive technological waves like the internet, like mobility. When you look at the internet, I don't think anyone was saying, 'Gosh, Apple, I find myself using amazon.com. And I'm not using, you know, I use that a lot. Why don't you have one of those? I find this web search thing really useful. I'm enjoying, you know, streaming cat videos. I find this useful. Why is this not in your product?' Well, of course the internet was vast. It was opportunity for many, many companies for users to do a wide diversity of things. It was also huge enabler for Apple. And I think Apple made the internet accessible in a lot of ways, more than anyone. And it was super empowering for our customers and for our products. But that didn't mean that every experience that you might take on necessarily is gonna happen inside of Apple or ultimately happen with Siri. They're gonna be places where hopefully Siri is a huge, and maybe ultimately indispensable part of your daily routine. But that doesn't mean it's a problem if you are using something else for other tasks you wanna do.
I do wanna get into iOS 26, and some of the new operating systems. But staying on AI for a second, you do have some more of OpenAI and ChatGPT threaded through, it's specifically in visual intelligence. When are you guys thinking about using your models versus another company's models like OpenAI's?
Well, we do already. So today, when you use writing tools, and say you wanna make something more concise, put it in a bulleted list, create a table, or even give an ad hoc command on how you wanna modify something into being, you know, haiku or something like that. That's all using Apple's models in private cloud compute. And so we're using our models for more and more. We use them for some of our visual intelligence experiences as well. But ChatGPT offers some really great capabilities. And so we have integrated more and done some really powerful things with them. As you point out, they're available in visual intelligence, which is now available not just for things around you with your camera, but also things on your screen. But we also integrate lots of other tools into that flow. We also make ChatGPT's image generation capability available both inside of Image Playground, but also since you can pull up that image generation capability inside of all sorts of apps, Apple apps and third party apps, you also now have access to ChatGPT's image generation right there in the flow of using those apps. So, and we announced some really exciting coding tools actually in Xcode that got, you know, huge reaction from our developers yesterday where you can use ChatGPT as well as other models like from Anthropic to do coding in Xcode, which is fantastic. So we will keep building up the capability of our own models, but we see lots of people doing other exciting things with theirs, and we wanna make sure our customers can access the best of everything.
You know, looking ahead, does Apple want to be the company making some of these models? Would you like to have some of the capabilities that OpenAI has in their models or Anthropic central to Apple living in Apple's models?
Oh, I mean, we already are, in fact, we published a paper again this year describing our latest releases of both on-device models and our private cloud compute model. Both have undergone significant architectural enhancements. Our PCC private cloud compute model is much larger and more powerful and is GPT-4o class in many regards. So this is something absolutely that's what we've been doing. But our goal again, is not to create another chatbot, right? It's to integrate these capabilities across our operating system and our features.
But that powerful intelligence behind those capabilities.
Let's talk about Liquid Glass. You guys really like glass? Why do you love glass so much?
Well, I think the glass, you know, we could have gone with, you know, ancient brick or teak wood or something as a material. But it turns out glass has some really useful properties when it comes to user interfaces and especially the kind of adaptive glass we were able to build into the product. You know, what we really wanted is, as our displays have gotten both larger, but also with these rounded edges, we wanted to make your content feel open, like it owned the entire screen edge to edge. Glass allows us to put controls inset, concentric to that experience that on the one hand feel almost like they're not there. Like your content just owns the screen, which is wonderful, but at the same time, define space in a way that, 'Oh, I know what the buttons are. The controls are extremely clear.' Glass also is wonderfully adaptive. It both can transmit through translucency, the background, but we can adapt its properties so that you get contrast to be able to see the content of both what's behind it, and what you're trying to read. And so Glass is just, has these wonderful properties for being part of the UI and it just looks super cool.
Well, we've gotten to the point where the hardware has evolved both the processing power to enable us to do this glass, like doing refraction of content that's far away from the glass, along the edges of the glass, transmitting content through the glass. This is all computationally intensive, but we have now the power with Apple Silicon to do this across the breadth of our product line. So that's step one. But we also have these amazing displays. Some of them high definition or HDR displays that allow us to show spectral highlights on glass. And then the screens have gotten larger. The ID has changed to the point where that centricity was a real driver. All the factors came together to enable us to take a big step forward. And then we also saw the opportunity to bring something consistent across our entire product line, something universal. And it's taken years from, if you look at the starting point of iOS and macOS, and how, you know, far apart their origin was as an interface, and how over many years we brought them together, uniform typefaces, starting to bring together the design language to where we really could have a single design that spanned across our whole product line. That was now in reach. And this year we were able to deliver on it.
And it's probably worth saying too, inspired by the years of work that the team put in Vision OS, right? And what we learned from that, how much we liked that, how much users loved that, you know? So certainly there was inspiration at a design level for that.
You mentioned bigger screens or making this screen feel bigger. Is this a sort of a precursor to a bigger screen iPhone? What about a foldable iPhone? I feel like this would look very nice on a foldable iPhone.
It's so large right now. Geez, it's so nice.
Well, yeah, that's why you fold it.
That's why you'd fold it.
It would break it, wouldn't it? I don't know.
No, no. You would make a foldable iPhone. It's not something you're thinking about?
Who's is this? I did wanna talk a little bit about the iPad OS. And that seems like a real move to trying to make the iPad more of a computer. But as you know, I've long asked, you've got an iPad with iPad OS. You've got Mac, Mac OS. Why not? Why not think about bringing these two things?
Both are super popular and both doing great.
Never gonna bring 'em together.
They're great. I mean, I think I love 'em both. I think everyone, if they can should own both. And they are products that come from just different places. Their center is different. They share a lot in common. And I think we all love using them both in their distinct and overlapping ways. But the Mac has always been optimized for keyboard and trackpad or mouse. High precision, fine targets on the UI. iPad, it's the ultimate touch device. You're just holding computing in your hand. It's wonderful to interact with directly. But there are things about them as the iPad has grown, larger screens, more powerful computationally, where our customers have wanted to do more with iPad. I think we've all found ourselves going from using it for, you know, a lot of sort of consumption and a little bit of productivity into a lot more productivity. And as we reached for the ways to do that in a way that was true to iPad, we found that with some of the idioms of the Mac, they actually translated over pretty well. And so we've wanted to be consistent where it made sense, but really embrace what's unique about iPad at every step.
So what you're saying is there's a chance you're gonna bring these things.
That is an interesting interpretation, Joanna.
