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At long last, Apple has finally entered the AI race. That was the first line in my story about Apples announcements at WWDC 2024, almost exactly one year ago from today. After the company announced a bunch of highly personalized AI features last June, Apple seemed poised to finally reap the rewards of its long-time effort to build trust around user data privacy. At last years WWDC, Apple software head Craig Fedherighi said the company intends to offer a personal intelligence model on users phones that draws on personal context. Apple, it seemed, was finally going to leverage its considerable strengths and deliver proactive AI features that leverage the users own personal data. But 12 months later, that still hasnt come to fruition. Fedherighi said early on in todays WWDC 2025 keynote that the AI personalization features, which tap into private user data to offer proactive AI-generated insights, had failed to reach Apples high bar for quality. More announcements on that front, he added, would arrive in the coming year. Meanwhile, the world outside Cupertino moves on, and the generative AI boom continues to accelerate. After last years keynote, this years presentation felt like a throwback to years past, with Fedherigi and friends running through a litany of modest UX and feature upgrades to iOS and the other Apple operating systems. In iOS, they showed us a breezy new UX look (featuring translucent app and widget panels), refreshed icon design, a live translation feature, and Mixmoji (combine two existing emoji into one!), etc. Theres also a new AIpowered 3D effect that shifts a lock screen images perspective as the user tilts their phone. (Didnt the ill-fated Amazon Fire phone do that?) There were also some updates to the AI Visual Intelligence features announced last year. iPhone users can already tap on real-world objects via their phone camera to get more information. Now, they can do the same within any app, including social media, to identify and learn about objectsand in some cases, on where to buy the items. The screenshot interface now lets users search for items within the image or ask ChatGPT deeper questions about them. (Google announced the addition of on-screen object search earlier this year.) But while Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are integrating their AI models with users’ personal and professional data, Apple seems stuck in neutral Apple had every opportunity to own personal AI. It had a big head start with the acquisition of Siri way back in 2010. It controls billions of devices, it designs the chips, and it has the trust of billions of consumers. And Apple users already store a wealth of personal data on their phones, which the company could leverage to offer a personal assistant with an intimate knowledge of the user. Instead, while Apple talks about new icons and Genmoji, OpenAI continues embedding itself deeper into consumer workflows and digital habits. ChatGPT is learning users tastes, preferences, and memory. And now, Apples former design guru is helping OpenAI build a hardware device that could harness all that power. I was optimistic when Apple hired John Giannandrea from Google in April 2018 to lead its machine learning and AI strategy. Reporting directly to Tim Cook, he seemed like the right person to inject new life into Apples AI ambitions. After all, transformer modelsthe foundation of the generative AI revolutionwere invented at Google while Giannandrea was still there in 2017. They sparked immense excitement and innovation at Google, and I hoped hed bring that same energy to Apple, baking it into core products like the still-lagging Siri. He didnt. Giannandrea still leads Apples core AI division, but Siri and robotics have since been moved out from under his leadership. Still, thats not to say Apple is anything close to cooked. The company makes the biggest and best smartphone in the world, and will for a long time. And it sells digital services through its devices better than anyone else. Still it’s worrying that it doesn’t seem to be acting with the urgency that the moment demands. The next big thing is here, and Apple isnt at the forefront. Separately, Apple researchers released a widely discussed paper over the weekend that calls into question whether new large reasoning models are capable of the kind of cognitive function that could lead to artificial general intelligence, where the AI performs as well or better than humans at most tasks.
Category:
E-Commerce
U.S. seaborne imports of goods from China dropped 28.5% year-over-year in May, the sharpest decline since the pandemic, as President Donald Trump’s 145% tariffs took hold, supply chain technology provider Descartes said on Monday. China is the top U.S. supplier of goods that enter through seaports, including the nation’s busiest in Los Angeles/Long Beach. Domestic businesses ranging from retailer Walmart to automaker Ford depend on those goods to operate. Overall U.S. seaborne imports in May tumbled 7.2% from the year earlier to 2.18 million 20-foot equivalent units – snapping a streak of near-record increases fueled by companies frontloading goods to avoid higher duties. “The effects of U.S. policy shifts with China are now clearly visible in monthly trade flows,” Descartes said in a statement. West Coast ports are more dependent on China trade and bore the brunt of the declines. From April to May, the nation’s busiest seaports in Long Beach and Los Angeles experienced steep drops in goods from China, 31.6% and 29.9%, respectively, Descartes said. Top imports from China included furniture, bedding, plastic goods, machinery, toys and sporting goods. The United States and China agreed to a 90-day pause on punitive tit-for-tat tariffs last month. U.S. and Chinese officials met in London on Monday to defuse the high-stakes trade dispute between the world’s largest economies. Port executives and shipping consultants expect volume from China to rebound during the tariff truce, albeit at a more moderate level. That’s because the U.S. lowered the tariff for many goods from China to 30% during the pause. “China-origin imports may continue to soften in the months ahead as importers reassess sourcing strategies amid rising landed costs,” Descartes said. Lisa Baertlein, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
Apple’s finally making it easier to remember the name of its latest operating system. After naming its iOS sequentially from iOS 1 in 2007 to iOS 18 last year, Apple announced that it would now name its latest operating system after the current year. What would have been iOS 19 is now iOS 26, since the system, which comes out this year, will be good through fall 2026. The new year-based names applies to Apple’s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS. The rebrand brings Apple operating system names in line with the conventions of other industries, like automakers (the 2026 Ford F-150) and sports franchise video games (Madden NFL 2026). And it’s also a smart branding play since it keeps things simple. The names of the company’s ever-changing hardware and software updates can become a jumble of numbers over time. By naming it after the upcoming year, knowing the latest iOS update is as easy as knowing the date. The company made the announcement at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), confirming a Bloomberg report last month about the change, but what Apple didn’t say was that it will change what it calls its hardware. Its latest iPhone model is the iPhone 16, and the company hasn’t made any indication it’s rebranding the smartphone or other products to year-based names. The care Apple takes in naming in products, services, and applications, though, mirrors the simple, intuitive design of its software and hardware. It’s meant to make sense, and competitors take notice. Dell this year adopted Pro and Max suffixes for its new laptop names, which Apple also uses in product names.
Category:
E-Commerce
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