apple

This year’s WWDC theme has bee uncharacteristically telegraphed: AI. Apple has been drawing more attention than normal to the neural engine found in Apple Silicon chips, they’ve published OpenELM (on-device language model), actually mentioned AI in press releases/events, and are actively working on contracts with OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Google (Gemini). What this translates to is, likely, a whole new Siri and perhaps additional SDKs for integrating Generative AI and/or Chat Bot experiences into applications on Apple platforms....

With the advent of new iPads, Apple has increased the prices of all of the Pro models. To me, this has made the choice of getting a new iPad more confusing from a value perspective. Let’s start with requirements for my usage: 1TB of storage 16GB RAM (minimum) Keyboard and trackpad Large screen To meet this criteria, I would need to order a 1TB 13" iPad Pro and the new Magic Keyboard....

The recent legal actions against Apple have started to crack the walled garden. Other companies, however, are targets of similar actions, but fewer issues due to a difference in business strategy. Rather than creating lock in on hardware, there is a pseudo lock in within the ecosystem. Microsoft and Google offer their apps/services on all platforms, whereas Apple has limited the majority of their apps/services to their hardware. This kind of vendor lock in makes it difficult to change platforms, which is Apple’s goal....

Prior to iOS 11, developers could leverage SFSafariViewController to interact with Safari in app view a remote view controller for authentication. However, because this is a view controller, it can be hidden from the user. As a result, malicious actors abused this API to track end users without their consent. Apple’s strategy to combat this was to limit the data sharing capabilities of this API to only the app (i.e. creating a sandbox)....

As communicated at WWDC, Apple has published the list of APIs it now deems sensitive and frameworks/apps must include a justification for using them. The APIs are divided into five categories: file timestamp access, system boot time access, disk space access, active keyboard access, and user defaults. As with some other recent attempts by Apple to prevent fingerprinting and tracking, legitimate use cases get caught in the crossfire. Take for example the file timestamp access APIs (both metadata and stat/fstat) and needing to reconcile data on device and a server....