Apple WWDC 2024 Live Blog: 'Apple Intelligence,' iOS 18, Siri, Math Notes and More

Well, that's all, folks! Apple unveiled a lot updates, for everything from MacOS, iOS and iPadOS to TVOS and VisionOS. As expected, AI was a key theme, from ChatGPT integration to Apple Intelligence -- Apple's way of saying AI without saying AI. If you missed it, check out our WWDC 2024 live blog updates, and stay tuned for more coverage and analysis. 

ChatGPT may not be the only AI chatbot on the market, but it's certainly one of the most popular. As Apple revealed at WWDC 2024, Apple apps including Siri are poised to gain OpenAI's ChatGPT, with GPT-4o support. You can leverage ChatGPT from within Siri. Apple used the example of relying on ChatGPT in Siri to generate menu ideas for a meal with friends, using freshly caught fish along with ingredients from a garden. Additionally, you can include photos in prompts to ChatGPT -- like taking a picture of your deck and asking for decorating ideas, as Apple demonstrated onstage. And of course, you can generate text using Apple's ChatGPT integration in its systemwide writing tools.  

Another iPhone feature reminiscent of what you'll find on high-end Android phones: the new Clean Up tool, which can remove anything in your photo you don't want, like people in the background, for a cleaner final image. This is similar to the Magic Eraser tool on Google Pixel phones, or the Object eraser on Samsung Galaxy phones. It doesn't quite appear to be at the level of Google's Magic Editor, which can generate backgrounds and let you move subjects using AI. 

Apple Intelligence is going to make Siri more natural, more contextually relevant and more personal, according to Apple's WWDC keynote event. One of the changes to Siri announced at the event involves the design. Calling on Siri creates a new light effect around the edge of your screen. You'll also be able type to Siri if you double tap the bottom of your screen.

According to Apple, Siri will hold a better knowledge of features and settings, which could be useful if you want to do something on your Apple device but don't know what a feature is called. In addition, if you can't remember if information is in an email, a text or a shared note, you'll be able to ask Siri.

Apple Intelligence -- Apple's way of saying AI -- can handle a lot of productivity tasks, like composing emails, proofreading documents or generating images in its apps like Keynote or Notes. With its "Genmoji" feature -- presumably a portmanteau of "generative" and "emoji" -- you don't have to search around for the perfect emoji. Instead, you can create custom emojis for any situation. Then, you can send these to friends or even react to messages. 

Apple's news that it's built AI into all its apps and services brings it in line with recent announcements by Google. Apple says its AI features will work on your behalf to save you time by tapping into personalized information about your life and work to allow you to create images and emails on the fly -- and even emojis (Genmogis -- a play on generative AI). "Apple Intelligence" will scour your emails and calendars and allow you find out who booked that flight and when; where you're meeting someone for dinner; or what you should say to somebody in a reply to a request.

Like Google, Apple is asking you to trust it to access all that personal information in bringing you this AI-powered vision. But should we trust Apple -- or Google, Microsoft or OpenAI -- to do the right thing when it comes to making sure our data is kept private and not co-opted in ways we're uncomfortable with?  

The devil is in the details, so expect this privacy question to be one of the big topics of discussion going forward. As with Google, Apple's products are used by billions of people, so we all need to pay attention to how these systems work, how they're trained, what information they're pulling from us and what guardrails the companies are putting in place to make sure all the data they're slurping up is secure.

Just a reminder: MacOS and iPadOS are still separate, and Apple didn't do much to change that at WWDC.

The iPadOS announcements made during Apple's WWDC keynote event were more focused on Pencil improvements, Math Notes for live-scribbling equations, and live-scribbling on a friend's iPad remotely. But running apps in a more Mac-like way wasn't on tap.

iPadOS will be able to take advantage of Apple Intelligence, Apple's cross-OS generative AI services announced at the show, but keep hopes of iPad and Mac being interchangeable for further off in the future.

Apple has long stressed privacy as a key differentiator of its products, and it seems set to extend that to its use of AI. It says its use of AI will be run both locally on its devices and in the cloud, with the latter taking advantage of what it calls "Private Cloud Compute." For the times when Apple needs to go to the internet to process requests, it won't store or give Apple access to your data, and the data it needs is used "exclusively to fulfill your request." 

Apple even stresses that your iPhone, iPad or Mac "will refuse to talk to a server unless its software has been publicly logged for inspection." 

Apple, typically not the first to market in new device categories (or even with software features, as today's WWDC announcements show), is now stepping into the AI market with a host of capabilities. But in typical Apple fashion, its AI pitch started with marketing wordplay: AI is "Apple Intelligence."

Here's how Apple CEO Tim Cook set up the news about how AI is really about "personal intelligence."

"It's always been our goal to design powerful personal products that enrich people's lives by enabling them to do the things that matter most as simply and easily as possible. We've been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for years to help us further that goal," Cook said. "Recent developments in generative intelligence and large language models offer powerful capabilities that provide the opportunity to take the experience of using Apple products to new heights. So as we look to build in these incredible new capabilities, we want to ensure that the outcome reflects the principles at the core of our products. It has to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most to you. It has to be intuitive and easy to use. It has to be deeply integrated into your product experiences. 

"Most importantly, it has to understand you and be grounded in your personal context, like your routine, your relationships, your communications and more. And of course, it has to be built with privacy from the ground up together. All of this goes beyond artificial intelligence. It's personal intelligence the next big step for Apple."

Apple Intelligence, the way Apple is branding AI, can do things like organize your texts or help with emails. This includes being able to help you write or proofread emails. Apple will also allow you to generate images in three different styles, including sketch or cartoon. The company is showing this is as a fun tool for playing with images in messaging. Apple also says AI is used in its new Math Notes feature, shown off earlier in the show. 

The company is calling AI's ability to adapt to you "personal intelligence." Apple also says it's using on-device AI capabilities to avoid having data to process in the cloud. The company says this is a more secure way of giving users AI capabilities, without having their data being used to train models. But not all these models can run on-device. So, some features will have to offload capabilities to outside servers. To handle this, Apple has created Private Cloud Compute. 

Apple's new AI system can generate images for you inside a variety of apps, including Messages, Keynote, Pages, Notes and Freeform. It can even generate new images based on photos you have of a person. 

Apple is calling its foray into the field "Apple Intelligence." 

Thanks to the Apple's Game Porting Toolkit 2, more games will be coming to Apple devices, including iPads with Apple Silicone chips and the latest iPhones. Using Metal, Apple's 3D graphic and compute shader API, it'll mean games like the upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows, Dead Island 2 and Control can make their way to a slew of Apple devices. Assassin's Creed Mirage is already available. 

Rejoice, iPad users. Apple's tablet has lacked a dedicated calculator app since its inception, but Apple has decided to finally add one with iPadOS 18. The new app will even work with the Apple Pencil, so you can take "math notes."

We're 45 minutes into the WWDC keynote presentation and no one's said AI or "artificial intelligence." Instead, we've heard presenters say "intelligence" or "machine learning." And every time they say "insightful," know that's code for AI/ML.

Apple is revamping the Photos app to help you keep your always-growing library more organized. The tech giant showed off the redesigned app during its WWDC keynote event, and one change is that the app now shows a photo grid at the top and your library organized by theme beneath it. The revamped app will arrive with iOS 18.

The streaming service Apple TV Plus is getting a new feature, called InSight, as announced at WWDC 2024. Apple TV Plus' InSight option shows which actors are on screen or lets you identify songs playing in an episode or movie and even quickly add tracks to an Apple Music playlist. InSight is available with a quick swipe down on your remote. The Apple TV streaming device gets upgrades for home theater enthusiasts thanks to TVOS updates. On the audio side, there's enhanced dialogue compatibility for TV speakers, home theater receivers and Bluetooth devices such as Apple AirPods. Enhanced dialogue is intended to boost voices even in the midst of scenes with lots of effects. From a visual standpoint, the Apple TV's TVOS gets 21:9 aspect ratio support for better widescreen display. There are also new screensavers to pick from, like your own photos, art galleries or content from your favorite movies and shows -- Apple highlighted a cute Snoopy and Woodstock screensaver featuring the beloved Peanuts characters.   

Apple is finally adding some of the health features I've been asking for. With WatchOS 11, you'll be able to customize activity goals according to the day of the week, learn when multiple health metrics are off base with a new Vitals app, and pause goals when you need a rest day. These updates will surely make the Apple Watch more competitive with rivals like Oura, Fitbit and Samsung. 

For training, Apple says its new Training Load feature will use more of your personalized data to tell you how much effort your exerting during exercise. Apple says this involves using algorithms to better tune fitness goals to you personally. 

"RCS message support" is coming, but Apple didn't provide any additional details during the WWDC 2024 keynote. That's unfortunate, because it would've given us the first opportunity to learn about improved texting between the iPhone and Android. But I guess Apple's going to kick the can down the line on green bubble texts.

Apple is bringing some cool gesture features to the AirPods Pro. They include being able to accept or reject a call just by nodding your head. Apple also said that better outside noise isolation will mean clearer calls. And Apple is bringing personalized spatial audio to video games. The first game to show off this feature is Need for Speed by Tencent and EA. 

Mobile gaming is on the rise, whether with Apple Arcade titles; native iOS and iPadOS games; or Apple's recently announced emulation support. At WWDC 2024, the company revealed a new Game Mode feature for iPhones. Game Mode limits background activity to provide a better mobile gameplay experience, such as higher frame rates. Apple's iPhone Game Mode also improves connectivity with AirPods and wireless video game controllers for faster responsiveness from wireless peripherals. 

As part of a slew of updates coming to the Messages app in iOS 18, Apple announced that people with an iPhone 14 or later will be able to use satellites to send iMessages and texts to contacts even in places where they don't have internet or cellular connectivity (but can still see the sky). Apple has allowed for using satellites to connect with emergency services before, but this will allow you to message others and not just first responders.

It remains to be seen if Apple will charge extra for the service. Apple has included the satellite connectivity feature for free since adding it to the iPhone 14 in 2022, and last year the company decided that it would push off the idea of charging for it for at least another year. 

We're 28 minutes into Apple's WWDC keynote presentation and there's been no mention of AI yet. The market is waiting, impatiently.

The Apple Vision Pro's latest software updates were the first thing announced at this year's WWDC developer keynote. The news might be a disappointment to anyone wanting major changes to Apple's four-month-old mixed reality headset, but some of the features look helpful: and the headset is becoming available in countries outside the US, too.

The Vision Pro is arriving June 28 in China, Japan and Singapore, and July 12 in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the UK. The headset was previously US-only.

VisionOS 2 has a few key new features. Apple's introducing new hand tracking shortcuts to get back to the app grid, bring up control center, or check on time. There's also a clever new converter in the Photos app that promises to turn older photos into 3D "spatial" photos.

Apple also discussed new developer tools that should allow full 3D environments and apps to run side by side, or place mixed reality experiences more easily on tables. There's also an enterprise business toolkit for making manufacturing or other industry-focused apps, an area that seems like a growing territory for Apple's expensive headset.

Mac extended displays on Vision Pro are getting larger, up to a promised double 4K size, and in a curved widescreen format. But it doesn't look like multiple monitors will be offered, and Apple mentioned nothing about Vision Pro working with other devices like iPad, iPhone or Apple Watch.

Apple also teased more Immersive videos coming, including a Red Bull sports series and a project featuring The Weekend.

Apple shared some updates to Messages, including the option to send texts later, add text effects and send messages via satellite, including SMS texts. What Apple didn't talk about: RCS. No mention -- at least not yet -- of the new messaging standard coming to iPhones. I'm not giving up hope yet.

During WWDC, Apple wasted no time in highlighting its Apple TV Plus entertainment offerings. Severance is due for a new season, but Apple didn't reveal the release date today (at least not in its sizzle reel). It's no secret that Apple could use some more conversation-dominating content with the streaming landscape being as crowded and competitive as it is, and Ted Lasso seemingly isn't returning for more seasons. The next installment of Apple's addicting sci-fi show can't come soon enough.

It's great that iOS 18 will let you place your icons wherever you want -- but this has been a selling point for Android forever. Nova Launcher Prime was my preferred way to do this while I was using a Pixel phone. I'd love to see launchers coming to the iPhone one day, but one thing at a time.

The news that the Vision Pro would go on sale outside the US? Tim Cook literally shouted it from the rooftop -- of Apple Park of course! "I'm happy to announce we're bringing Apple vision Pro to these eight countries next, starting with China, Japan and Singapore on June 28. And Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom on July 12."

Apple's VR headset, the Apple Vision Pro, entered the virtual reality scene in February 2024. Already, it features over 2,000 apps created for the AVP, alongside more than 1.5 million compatible iOS and iPadOS apps. The company announced Apple Vision OS 2 updates at its WWDC 2024. There's a new spatial photos feature that provides additional realism -- Apple demonstrated the ability to toggle on left and right eye views from two-dimensional images, providing more depth. The Photos app in Apple Vision OS 2 offers the capability to enjoy spatial videos, photos and panoramas in the Apple Vision Pro headset. For better navigation, Apple unveiled eye, hands and voice navigation support in its VisionOS.

The control center in iOS 18 gets a major upgrade as well. For example, not only is it more customizable, but you can also add systems from other apps. If you have a Ford car, for instance, you can add Ford car controls in the control center for quick accessibility. 

Well, it's about time. Apple has finally taken a page from Android's book and made it possible for iPhone users to place app icons wherever they want on their home screen. You can also choose custom colors to better suit your preferences. Better late than never.

Apple lets you move your apps around in any arrangement you want! It's bizarre that this is a feature worth writing about in 2024, because it's been something available on operating systems for decades. In iOS 18 you can also change the color of your apps. 

Well, that was a lively opening -- Apple began its WWDC keynote presentation with a clip of Craig Federighi, the company's senior vice president of software engineering, jumping out of a plane, Apple Watch on his wrist, with a group of other people donning parachutes and saying things like "iOS," "MacOS" and "iPadOS." All leading to CEO Tim Cook officially opening up the keynote event at Apple Park. 

Apple is leading WWDC 2024 with an Apple TV Plus sizzle reel, showing off its best shows and movies. Apple says it has the highest-rated originals out of all the streaming services. Unfortunately, no release date for Severance season 2. 

There have been many hints about what Apple might add in the way of AI to its products, with a big pointer back in March when researchers at the company shared news about a new AI model, called ReALM. Their 15-page paper  describes an approach to how a large language model, or LLM, can provide context for every element on a screen — including text, images and "forms of entities on screen that are not traditionally conducive to being reduced to a text-only modality." 

What does that mean? it means they were working to allow an AI agent, say like Siri, to understand voice commands and also interact with what's displayed on the screen. 

Here's how the researchers put it: "Human speech typically contains ambiguous references such as 'they' or 'that', whose meaning is obvious (to other humans) given the context. Being able to understand context, including references like these, is essential for a conversational assistant that aims to allow a user to naturally communicate their requirements to an agent, or to have a conversation with it."

To illustrate, this is what the Apple researchers shared in that paper under the headings "Speaker" and "Dialogue."

User: Show me pharmacies near me.

Agent: Here is a list I found. 

Agent: ... (list presented) 

User (eg 1): Call the one on Rainbow Rd. 

User (eg 2): Call the bottom one. 

User (eg 3): Call this number (present onscreen)

The researcher added, "It is immediately apparent that it would not be possible for the Agent to understand or complete the user's query without the ability to use and comprehend context. It also stands to reason that there are multiple types of context that are necessary to handle user queries: conversational context and on-screen context being two prime examples."

What this may all add up to is a smarter, AI-savvy Siri that gets closer to that Star Trek vision of how we talk to AI agents. We'll find out shortly what Apple is up to.

We're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the Apple Watch, so I'm expecting Apple will want to save a lot of the big, flashy features for that announcement sometime in September. Where does that leave WatchOS 11 in the meantime? I'm hoping to see some news about deeper Siri integrations so you can do more with Apple's virtual assistant, especially when you're not connected to a phone or the internet. 

Last year's WatchOS 10 brought some much-needed improvements to Siri, including faster response times and being able to log health data with your voice on the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. I'd love to see Apple take this integration (and reliability) even further, so you can really use Siri as a standalone assistant on the watch. Maybe even being able to leverage Siri when launching a Shortcut from the Apple Watch Ultra 2's Action Button so you could have a more complex conversation?

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-owner OpenAI, is in attendance at WWDC. As spotted by our own Scott Stein, Altman is seen walking in Apple Park ahead of today's event. Rumors suggest Apple is about to announce a partnership with OpenAI to have ChatGPT power some of Apple's new AI features. Could we see Altman on stage? 

The only time I interact with Siri on my MacBook is when I accidentally hit a key combination that summons the voice assistant. Siri is more adept at handling simple task requests and questions -- "Set a timer," "Create a reminder," "How tall is Luka Dončić?" "How old is Al Horford?" -- that I make on my iPhone than answering more complicated questions that might arise when I'm working on my MacBook. Plus, with my MacBook, I can simply use the keyboard right in front of me to type a question in Spotlight Search or Google to find my answer.

AI is expected to be the focus of WWDC, and Siri will likely be the showcase for the AI advancements Apple will unveil for the next versions of iOS and MacOS. The rumors surrounding MacOS 15 -- a new-and-improved calculator and a System Settings redesign -- are difficult to get excited about outside of the arrival of a smarter Siri. I'm hoping that the AI advancements Apple previews for Siri with iOS 18 will also arrive with MacOS 15 this fall. If Siri is able to complete complex, multistep tasks across different Mac apps, then it could quickly become a regular -- or at least occasional -- part of my workflow. And then my usage scenario might flip, where I use Siri more on my MacBook than on my iPhone.

Apple is late to the AI race, with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft all rolling out AI tools for the past two years. But Apple is savvy in the way it markets its entrance into new categories, to make it feel as if the company has been innovating all this time. Apple wasn't the first company to release a VR headset, for example, but its Vision Pro certainly set a new standard for how people experience virtual and mixed reality. 

Apple will brand its AI push "Apple Intelligence," according to a report from Bloomberg this past Friday. Don't expect Apple Intelligence to work like ChatGPT or Dall-E. You won't be generating novels or bizarre pointillist images. Instead, it'll work much in the same way AI works on Google Pixel phones. For the iPhone, AI will work in the background, helping with things like photo editing, automatic transcriptions, summarizing notes, and help with writing emails and messages. Siri, too, will get some much-needed AI smarts.  

We're in a golf cart at Apple Park, on our way to the media area for today's WWDC 2024 keynote presentation. 

Apple is providing some swag, so far in the form of pins that include a rainbow-like Apple logo and a Vision Pro headset.

There are a lot of rumors about what iOS 18 could bring to iPhones, like a smarter version of Siri and RCS support for iPhones. But honestly, after testing out what feels like hundreds of different iOS features, I'm not particularly excited about any of the rumored ones in iOS 18 -- and don't get me started on the rumored partnership between Apple and OpenAI. None of these rumored features sound like they'll change the way I use my iPhone. Even the scuttlebutt about an on-device generative AI doesn't sound exciting to me because the rumored functions aren't useful to me. So it'll create weird emoji? Cool, I guess. It'll summarize messages and news stories? Yeah, no thank you. 

Give me something exciting that I'll actually get some use out of. Let me schedule messages to send to friends and family. Let me customize my lock screen functions like in Android. Give StandBy mode more functionality. Bring split-screen to iPhones when in landscape mode, even if it's just for the Max models. And please, give me something that's not really buggy.

WWDC is a software-focused show, but announcements still hold clues to what we can expect in Apple's upcoming lineup of hardware. Rumors suggest the iPhone 16 will be the first to have the sort of more-advanced AI that we've seen on other phones, like Galaxy AI on the Samsung Galaxy S24 series. If what we see at WWDC suggests Apple's phones are getting AI, it's reasonable to expect that its hardware -- specifically, the A-series Bionic chipset at the core -- is getting revamped, too.

That's because the AI phones we've seen so far have touted packing the latest Qualcomm chipsets to use their generative AI features. The aforementioned Galaxy S24 phones have the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 introduced last fall, which enables on-device generative AI. Perhaps that means Apple's phones will need new A-series chips to use their top-end AI features. 

If that's true, maybe only the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max will get these features, as Apple has adopted a strategy of only putting its newest A-series chips in its more premium phones -- so the presumed iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus may not get all the AI features we see teased on the WWDC stage after all. 

In light of the US Department of Justice's antitrust suit against Apple, it'll be interesting to see if and how the iPhone maker shines a light on efforts to bridge gaps with third-party devices. With the DOJ alleging the company "undermines cross-platform messaging" by not making its iMessage service available on Android, will Apple highlight its pledge to support RCS? Will it make linking third-party smartwatches with the iPhone easier? Ultimately, how much of this keynote event will be dedicated to (deftly) contradicting claims leveraged against it and its alleged unwillingness to play nice with competitors? (And, perhaps most importantly, will texts with non-iPhone users still be green?)

WWDC is usually jam-packed with news on all of Apple's biggest software platforms: iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, MacOS, TVOS and now VisionOS. It also, as noted by 9to5Mac, is an event that usually runs two hours, so assuming Apple sticks to that template and doesn't extend the keynote event, well, something needs to give. 

With AI set to be a key piece of this year's show and expected to be a star feature of iOS 18, that platform should command a bulk of the spotlight. With the new M4-powered iPad Pros seemingly packing way too much power for the current iteration of iPadOS, a big update there also seems likely. Plus the Vision Pro is Apple's platform of the future and one would imagine the company would want to continue hyping that up. 

TVOS and audio products (like AirPods and HomePod) are usually a quick update, so that could be one way to save a little time, but will this be a quiet year for MacOS? Will Apple save major WatchOS news for the fall when it presumably releases the 10th-anniversary Apple Watch that may also feature a major redesign?

At WWDC 2023 last year, Apple put its new Vision Pro front and center, holding it up as the latest pinnacle of product design and innovation. But at this year's WWDC 2024, rumors aren't pointing to new hardware to take the stage. Instead, we expect AI to steal the spotlight.

That's not a big surprise, given that AI -- specifically, generative AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney -- has dominated both hardware and software announcements for the last year, in everything from Adobe launches to smartphone debuts. Why should Apple be any different, even if it's been late to the AI game thus far?

The big question is whether the house of iPhone and Mac will have enough to announce about AI. Even though WWDC is a developer-focused event, it's still a bellwether for Apple's direction, from the products it will announce in the fall to its greater direction in the years to come. The Vision Pro showed us how much the company believes in virtual and augmented reality -- enough to launch a pricey headset to set the bar for the mixed-reality industry. Will Apple's WWDC 2024 announcements do the same for AI?

Apple revealed its M4 processor last month when it announced the newest iPad Pro tablet, just six months after revealing the M3 chip that powers the current line of MacBook computers and the iMac. 

Apple said the M4 chip helps power the iPad's display while allowing the tablet to be thinner than an iPod Nano, but its M2 and M3 processors are still powerful in their own right. Even so, Apple's highest-end Mac Studio and Mac Pro computers might be due for an update to include this new M4 processor. Maybe we'll see M4 Pro and M4 Ultra variants tailored for these more powerful computers.