Looking back at this week’s Apple news and headlines, including the latest iPhone 16 leaks, the iPhone’s AI limitation, a new MacBook Pro for Christmas, Apple’s open-source AI, when Siri gets Apple Intelligence, an AI super cycle of iPhones, and whatever happened to Apple’s i?
Apple Loop is here to remind you of some of the many discussions surrounding Apple over the past seven days. You can also read my weekly roundup of Android news here on Forbes.
iPhone 16 case directions
A large number of iPhone 16 cases were spotted on display this week. They may not show the internals of the next generation iPhones, but it does give us more potential information about the camera and its uses beyond Apple’s Spatial Computing plans:
“The photos once again point to a subtly updated design for the iPhone 16, with two vertically aligned camera lenses. One theory suggests that this setup is intended to bring spatial video recording capabilities to Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset, even on the base models. For optimal spatial recording, the lenses should be aligned horizontally, simulating the position of the human eye.”
(TechNetbooks).
A laptop keyboard and Apple logo (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
iPhone AI limitations
Apple has confirmed that of the current iPhones, only the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max will support Apple Intelligence AI. This is due to a mix of memory, processor and bandwidth on the board, as Apple’s John Giannandrea explained in a recent “Talk Show” podcast:
“So these models, when you run them at runtimes, it’s called inference, and the inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. And so it’s a combination of bandwidth in the device, it’s the size of the Apple Neural Engine, it is the power of the device to actually run these models fast enough to be useful. You could theoretically run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it wouldn’t be useful.
(Forbes).
M4 MacBook Pro before Christmas
Apple took the surprising step of introducing the latest M4 silicon in the iPad Pro, rather than any Mac. At some point, the macOS family will see the M4 arrive, and it’s likely the MacBook Pro that will be first in line:
The entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro is expected to get an M4 chip, while the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models will be updated with M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. The Mac mini will get M4 and M4 Pro chips. The MacBook Air, Mac Studio and Mac Pro models won’t be updated with M4 chips until 2025, and it’s not yet clear when the iMac will see an update with the updated chip technology.
(MacRumors).
Apple’s open source AI efforts
While Apple has not yet released Apple Intelligence AI software to the public, some of its AI efforts are already available. Hugging Face is an online open source service that shares machine learning models and datasets. Apple has uploaded an additional 20 models to the service, in addition to those uploaded earlier this year:
“Apple has taken a significant step in its efforts to provide developers with advanced AI capabilities on devices. The tech giant recently released twenty new Core ML models and four datasets on Hugging Face, a leading community platform for sharing AI models and code.
(Venture beat).
AI will be late to the iPhone party
As for the public arrival of Apple Intelligence? That will take longer than expected. While iOS 18 will ship with the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro in September, with a subsequent release for older iPhones, Apple Intelligence may not be released until early 2025:
“Siri in iOS 18 will still have some “new bells and whistles” in September, including a new interface that shines a light along the edge of the screen…[but] we’ll have to wait until next year to see Apple’s major improvements to Siri. An iOS 18 update in 2025 should bring the following improvements to Apple’s virtual assistant:
(MacRumors).
An AI dreams of a super cycle
With the launch of AI for the iPhone (regardless of when it arrives), Apple is expected to sell a lot of AI-enabled iPhones. With very little backward compatibility, will this cause a “super cycle” of iPhone sales? Analysts at Wedbush believe this:
“…if Apple’s AI strategy is rolled out, it will catalyze a long-awaited supercycle in Cupertino, with 270 million iPhones out of the 1.5 billion globally in the gold installed base not upgrading their smartphones in more than four years based on our estimates:
(9to5Mac).
And finally…
Everything once started with an ‘i’. Now the product names all start with ‘Apple’. What’s going on with that? Naturally, there’s a new Reddit discussion this week about Apple’s branding, which contains many theories as to why, including this one:
“Using Apple in the name is a marketing ploy to ensure brand recognition. Acura found that out the hard way in the 90s when they started calling their cars as Legend and Integra and no one knew who made them. The name of their changing cars to RDX, MDX etc. forcing people to bring “Acura” back into the conversation, I think Apple is doing it too”
(Medium via Reddit).
Apple Loop brings you seven days of highlights every weekend here on Forbes. Don’t forget to follow me so you don’t miss any news in the future. You can read last week’s Apple Loop here, or this week’s edition of Loop’s sister column, Android Circuit, is also available on Forbes.