After years of development, we finally launched the 5th major version of Firetask yesterday. Since Firetask is a side project, progress has always depended on when we could find the time. That made the journey longer — but also makes us extra proud of what we’ve achieved. With Firetask 5 we hit our design goals: the app feels more intuitive, natural, and enjoyable to use than ever before. If it’s been quiet here on ApplePi for a while, now you know why :-).
Firetask has always been about personal task management. It’s not built for large business teams, but rather designed with entrepreneurs, freelancers, and individuals in mind. Our goal has been to strike the perfect balance between the power of high-end task managers like OmniFocus and the simplicity of to-do apps like Things. With Firetask 5, we believe we’ve finally nailed that balance.
As a side project, we don’t have a huge launch budget, so we leaned on free resources such as Product Hunt. We ended up with 103 upvotes and #23 of the day, which felt like a strong start given how busy Tuesdays can be. We also had to stay focused on the essentials: that meant holding back features like Apple Watch and Vision Pro support for now.
"Firetask 5 is all about balance. We wanted to bring more power to our users without losing the clarity and simplicity that make Firetask unique." [Wolfgang Bartelme, Designer of Firetask on Sep 30, 2025]
From a developer’s perspective, Firetask 5 is also exciting because it’s the first app we built entirely with SwiftUI. Yes, there were moments when we nearly lost our minds over how tricky some seemingly simple things were to implement, but overall we’re glad we went all in. The only real place we had to drop back to native components was text editing — and even there, the latest iOS and macOS releases are making things easier (though we couldn’t take advantage of those changes in time for launch).
Along the way, we learned a lot about SwiftUI — and its quirks. We stumbled upon some interesting insights that we’ll be sharing here over the next few months.
So stay tuned (especially if you’re into SwiftUI), and if you have a moment, check out Firetask 5 on the Mac and iOS App Store. You can use it free with up to 10 open tasks and 3 active projects, plus we’re offering a free month of the full version so you can test everything with unlimited tasks.
It all started with the misguided cookies law, then came GDPR, and now the DMA, the Digital Markets Act. And this is not enough, the same people who already failed miserably at least three times before are now working hard to also kill all AI innovation in Europe. Or as Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip put it on the front page in January: "Europe Regulates Its Way to Last Place".
"From mergers to AI, the EU’s aggressive rule-making hampers its ability to compete with China and the U.S. [...] There is one field where the European Union still leads the world: regulation." [Greg Ip, Wall Street Journal on Jan 31, 2024]
As someone who is an entrepreneur who welcomed the idea of Austria becoming part of the EU in January 1995, I basically cannot understand what has been going on inside the brains of EU politicians during the last 20 years. Sure, we are not sending the "crème de la crème" to Brussels, but still...
If you read the comments of Margrethe Vestager or Thierry Breton, both leading figures behind the DMA, three things are pretty clear (given that they really believe what they say):
They have no clue about the global IT market dynamics
They are totally misguided about the importance of Europe within the global digital markets (e.g., the EU's share of global Apple App Store revenue is probably less than 7% -- based on current, publicly available financial statements)
They are completely wrong that the majority of EU developers want these changes (for instance, they are indirectly forcing indie developers to publish their phone numbers -- this not just dumb, this is insane)
They are completely wrong that the majority of EU users want these changes (or even care about them, e.g., a good example is Android: everyone can distribute apps, but only Google's Playstore really makes any significant revenue)
And apparently, they have no idea what the words "simple", "easy" or "unbureaucratic" mean (just take a look at the definition of a "trader")
Again, just like with GDPR the EU will achieve the opposite of what they set out to: they will or are already hurting the European IT companies -- not the big players. For the big players these things are annoyances, for a small company or an individual developer it might just be the final blow to either give up or immigrate to a country that is not as opposed to innovation as the EU 27.
"Trader means any natural person, or any legal person irrespective of whether it is privately or publicly owned, who is acting, including through any person acting in his or her name or on his or her behalf, for purposes relating to his or her trade, business, craft or profession." [REGULATION (EU) 2022/2065 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act)]
You know, GDPR compliance has cost European IT companies billions of Euros, even though most companies are B2B companies and should not even have been affected by the law in this way. But in Brussels of course no one cares.
And I am not saying the core idea behind GDPR is bad, but the law and how it is executed in the member states is a bureaucratic nightmare with little concrete value. And the same is true for the DMA: it is overly complex and targets the wrong problems, e.g., forcing indie developers to publish their phone numbers and (typically) private home addresses on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
But it is not just IT. The EU is over-regulating everything from cars to farms to finance and slowly this kills our economy. Which is tragically comical: as the EU was born as the "European Economic Community (EEC)" in the 1950s with the main goal to form an economic community to better compete in the emergent global markets.
"The European Communities (EC) were three international organizations that were governed by the same set of institutions. These were the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom), and the European Economic Community (EEC); the last of which was renamed the European Community (EC) in 1993 by the Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union." [Wikipedia article about the "European Communities"]
And they keep on going even though they must have some idea that the majority of EU inhabitants do not share their beliefs. Are they really so naive that they think the reason why the far right parties get so many votes are only the migration problems? Have they learned nothing from Brexit or the recent farmer protests throughout Europe?
To be honest, if I would not have my family here in Europe I would have already left the continent for the US or Canada. North America is also not the golden land, but for an IT entrepreneur, the EU commission and parliament make it very clear that you are not welcome in the EU. Unfortunately, this is not overdramatic, it's reality.
I only realized that the Mac is becoming 40 earlier this week when Seth Godin's Monday blog post message appeared in my inbox titled "It's Mac Day (#40)". As one of the marketing gurus of our age (I have read many of his truly excellent books myself) he naturally focused on the introduction of the Mac with the well known "1984" TV spot (directed by Ridley Scott) during Super Bowl XVIII. The actual launch of the Mac happened two days later on this exact day 40 years ago.
"CUPERTINO, Calif., January 24, 1984 -- Apple Computer today unveiled its much-anticipated Macintosh computer, a sophisticated, affordably priced personal computer designed for business people, professionals and students in a broad range of fields." [Macintosh Launch Press Release]
While the original "Macintosh" was a little bit limited in memory (128k), disk storage (a single floppy disk drive) and CPU power, it delivered the promise of a future which looked very different from what people were used to in terms of personal computers. Before the Mac, text-based terminals were the status quo including Apple's earlier computers such as the Apple II and its direct successors.
The Macintosh 128k (as it was later rebranded to) was a game changer: it introduced the first graphical user interface for a personal computer and shipped with a mouse. Although Apple did not "invent" the GUI (Xerox PARC more or less did this), it democratized it.
"Guy Kawasaki brought me one to use as a beta tester. I was 23 years old and amazed. What I didn’t realize was that revolutions like this were extremely rare, and here was one, at exactly the right moment for my career and for a new cadre of creators." [Seth Godin via his blog]
An interesting fact that I did only learn about recently: the Macintosh 128k shipped with "MacProject", a graphical Gantt chart-based project management tool that already implemented the critical path method. Apple published and distributed the SoloSoft app in order to market the Mac to project managers, as the graphical user interface naturally provided an exciting new way to manage Gantt charts on a computer.
If you think about it, the original iPhone (launched in January 2007) was not so different to the original Mac: although limited in practical day-to-day usage (very limited bandwidth, weak battery life) it changed the meaning of the term "smartphone" instantly and forever. Luckily for Apple, the iPhone (in contrast to the original Mac) also quickly became the company's most successful product ever in terms of units and revenue.
Now, 17 years later we witness the launch of Vision Pro, Apple's first "spatial computer". Similar to the original Mac and the original iPhone, it is "version 1.0" hardware: impressive, but limited in terms of weight, battery life and affordability. But again it's the promise of Vision Pro what counts. The big question is: will it live up to its promise?
Many Apple critics argue that Apple locks users into their closed ecosystem via things such as special cables (actually a thing of the past now) or relatively closed systems such as iCloud or Apple Music. While this is certainly an important part of Apple's strategy I believe that the "positive lock-in" that they achieve via (relative) consistent good usability and interoperability across their platforms weighs much more.
Just think about the new three dimensional double tap on Apple Watch that just launched yesterday with watchOS 10.1. In a way it is a logical evolution of the two dimensional double tap that we use on iPhone and iPad which in turn is a natural extension of double-click on the Mac (or prior, the Apple Lisa).
"A double-click is the act of pressing a computer mouse button twice quickly without moving the mouse. Double-clicking allows two different actions to be associated with the same mouse button. It was developed by Bill Atkinson of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) for their Lisa project." ["Double-click" article on Wikipedia]
How you double-tap on your watch according to Apple: "Users can tap the index finger and thumb of their watch hand together twice to quickly perform many of the most common actions." Note that this is exactly the same way how double-tap works (in terms of how you perform the gesture) on Apple's new Vision Pro headset which will launch early next year in the US.
I personally remember a few cases where I wanted to stop a timer or get rid of an incoming message or call on Apple Watch while cooking or training and I had only one hand free. I think that the new double tap will come in very handy for such use cases.
"The one thing you have to get used to is that the watch only listens for the double tap gesture when the display is fully-on. You need to tilt your wrist to look at your watch before double tapping." [John Gruber on Daring Fireball]
I think that this consistent behavior across platforms is what many Apple users really like and what draws them to the Apple ecosystem (or the other way round, let's them stick around). It is also what Apple nearly messed up a couple of years ago, but recently again improved on a lot (especially with making the Mac more and more iOS-like where it makes sense).
The other major magnet that draws people to Apple's ecosystem is (in my opinion) the interoperability between the individual devices -- just think about a few things Apple introduced over the years that might be only small things, but that are really practical:
If you join a Wi-Fi network on one device your other devices will also instantly know about the network. Very convenient when checking into a hotel for the first time -- try this using a PC and your Android phone...
If you play music from your iPhone you can raise your Apple Watch to skip to the next song or adjust the volume
You can use AirDrop to quickly share files peer-to-peer between any Apple device (I use this all the same when testing new Mac binaries or for sharing full-resolution photos). The new NameDrop that Apple also launched yesterday is another useful application of the same base technology
And one of my favorites: copy & paste across devices. Super useful for copying transaction codes or other small things
And of course iCloud: I use Dropbox less and less as the Files app on iPhone and iPad gets better with each release and syncing photos really works now very well and totally transparent
Finally, there is also Handoff for continuing tasks on another device, but to be honest: I (personally) rarely use it; if I start writing on the iPad and want to polish the text later on the Mac I simply save the file in iCloud
Naturally, many of these things only work if you are signed into all your devices with the same iCloud user. In other words, you have to use iCloud in order to benefit from most newer interoperability features. I know that some very privacy focused people have a problem with this. On the other hand I strongly believe that Apple is here really the best choice in terms of privacy when you think of big tech. I think even most Apple haters will agree that neither Microsoft, nor Google are generally seen as more trustworthy than Apple.
On an interesting side note, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted in a recent interview at Business Insider that it was a mistake to abandon Windows Phone, or that the whole episode could have been handled in a better way. If you look at the quote below it is pretty clear that Nadella is referring to an ecosystem that Microsoft had given up. And due to the success of Azure Cloud and Xbox Game Pass, Mr. Nadella knows how valuable good ecosystems are.
"In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones." [Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on abandoning Windows Phone at Business Insider]
Of course this sometimes comes with a higher price as also the recent price increases across Apple's services show. However, also here you see their strategy at work: naturally the "Apple One" service bundle price increase was much more modest as for the individual services. We will see if the second price increase for Apple TV+ was not "too much" -- after all, the service is now basically double as expensive as two years ago.
Anyway, for me the launch of double tap comes at the exactly right time: as the battery of my Apple Watch Series 4 is now slowly getting worse (which is totally OK as I charge it every night -- if you consider the number of charging cycles for a lithium ion battery) I am thinking about getting a new one before Xmas. Therefore, I hope for a nice discount on the new Series 9 during the usual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales that we will surely see in time for Thanksgiving (this year on the 23rd of November, as not everyone here in Europe will know :-).
Since I have been quite critical about some aspects of BMW's Vision Dee concept (especially in terms of practicality and design) in spring, it is only fair to highlight also four very positive surprises from BMW this year. So let's dive right into them:
BMW is switching to the open source variant of Android Auto OS in the 9th major version of its car operating system. This is a significant change of strategy from a car manufacturer that when Apple CarPlay first launched created one of the largest shitstorms on Twitter at that time with their opinion that they can do this better than Apple or Google. Note also that they seem to only switch for the user facing part -- the backend system stays on pure Linux meaning that they will still have full control over all low-level functionality. I think this is quite smart; I am however not so sure about the decision to not include Google's PlayStore, but go for their own app store
With the new BMW 5 series sedan they managed to build a plug-in hybrid car that features a full-sized trunk (with 520L the same size as for the non-hybrid versions) and a sensibly sized fuel tank (60L). For someone with two small kids this is a big deal: we finally get a plug-in hybrid with sufficient storage space and competitive range. I have never been a fan of hybrids, as until now they have been neither fish, nor fowl. But this might change with the new BMW 5
BMW has finally given up on the idea of charging a monthly or yearly service fee for things such as heated seats. I always thought this was one of the most stupid ideas ever that came out of the automotive sector. Thankfully, they realized this now themselves -- though the major backlash from customers probably helped. This was also for me the main reason for switching from BMW to Audi at that time, because I thought that with a management that comes up with such ideas and thinks that their infotainment has better usability than iOS, we cannot expect solid, forward-looking car technology in the years to come (back then)
Real BMW-style design and practicality seems to be coming back to the latest BMW cars. This might be more personal taste than an objective analysis, but at least in my opinion, design is now also going into the right direction again and I don't see major design flaws looming like the i3's rear doors :-)
So all in all (at least in my humble opinion) very positive signs from BMW in terms of design, practicality and forward-thinking. Also a sign that at least some German car makers are starting to react to the increased competition from Tesla and China in the right ways.
"If you were to buy a 6-series, I recommend you select reverse when leaving friends’ houses so they don’t see its backside." [Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear in 2004]
Also a sign for me to seriously think about switching back to BMWs: the new BMW 5 Touring that should be out early next year looks pretty cool. The only drawbacks being that it probably will not get the new Android Auto-based OS 9 yet [why?], it is more than 5m long with only 2.5 degrees rear steering resulting in a minimum turning radius of 11.7m.
[For my readers in the US: yes, in the small parking garages here in central Europe this is something that is actually worth considering... ;-]
Some of our apps at Elemental Tools use iCloud syncing for Core Data which works fine, but you do not want to mess with the database schema too much. Therefore, when we are thinking about future new features that might need database changes we are trying to prototype these at least so far, so that we know what we have to prepare on the database level.
One of these features we might want to add in the future is some kind of sharing based on Apple's CloudKit (which also powers iCloud Core Data syncing). We also looked into Core Data iCloud sharing, but this concept is too limited for our use case in terms of how it works. So we had to dig deeper and take a closer look at CloudKit sharing directly.
As you might know if this topic is of interest for you (if not you probably already stopped reading which is totally ok :-) there are two types of CloudKit sharing:
Hierarchical per-record sharing
Zone-wide sharing of custom zones (which came later)
We decided on zone-wide sharing, since we have not the typical sharing use case in mind and there is no logical hierarchy between the objects we want to share. But most of the things that we came across when playing with CloudKit sharing is relevant for everyone who uses the technology directly (i.e., not via Core Data) and I hope it is useful for some of you. It would at least have been useful for us if someone else would have summed this up already ;-).
"CloudKit allows you to share both record zones and record hierarchies. If you want to share an unbounded collection of records that don’t have natural parent-child relationships, share their containing record zone. However, if you want to share only a specific set of related records, define an explicit record hierarchy and share that instead." [Documentation on CloudKit Shared Records, Apple]
So let's dive into the details. These are the five things that surprised us the most. Not because they do not make sense, but because documentation is often sparse and the answers you find on the Apple Developer Forum or on StackOverflow are of course helpful, but unfortunately sometimes also misleading, outdated and in rare cases also contradictory:
When you create a zone-wide share for a custom zone (naturally it has to be a custom zone) the shared data stays in the private database of the zone's owner. If you think about it this is actually pretty straightforward. However, a lot of documentation talks about the data being "moved" to the shared database -- which is simply wrong. Instead the shared zone in the shared database acts as a kind of virtual "view" into the private database of the shared zone's owner
If a participant in a share has write permissions to a shared zone any records the participant creates will be created in the private database of the shared zone's owner (and only be visible from the shared database for all participants as well). Again pretty logical when you know it, right? But good luck trying to search for this fact on Google or asking ChatGPT...
Most examples about CloudKit sharing use the built-in UI helpers for inviting participants which I would also recommend for standard use cases. It makes you think that doing this manually in code would be hard, but it actually is not. On the contrary, if you use the newer API methods on CKContainer for looking up share participants (fetchShareParticipant) and accepting (fetchShareMetadata & accept) it is really quite simple. If you need the unique invitation URL you can simply get it directly from the SKShare object and don't bother setting the acceptanceStatus of a share participant to pending: the member is now read-only and this is done automatically anyway
Many developers seem to think that a shared zone on the participant side cannot be looked up directly, because some "magic" suffix has been added to the zone ID. Not quite. The "magic" suffix is that the zone owner name has been set to the user record name of the shared zone's owner. So if you know the user record name of the zone owner it is very easy to create a valid record zone ID by using the appropriate initializer
As the user record name is used in many cases you could think that it is also always used for the lastModifiedUserRecordID metadata field in a CloudKit record. Not always. It is set for all other users, but if the current user made the last modification you will have to compare against CKCurrentUserDefaultName which is a CloudKit constant that is also used, e.g., as the zone owner name for record zones in the private database
At least for us, knowing about these few facts helped a lot with finalizing the prototype and answering all the conceptual design questions. Decisions we of course had to make in order to come up with the database fields we might need in the future and for preparing them in our database schema.
If you are interested in CloudKit sharing I would definitely recommend looking through these resources first. As indicated earlier there is a lot of outdated information out there and many articles only scratch the surface, thus not really adding much value at all. Apples reference documentation about CloudKit is also not bad, but it could be much more specific in a lot of areas. But unfortunately this is not really news, so let's leave it at that ;-).
Apple did not only announce interesting new products, it also released a lot of good stuff for developers at WWDC 2023. Especially SwiftUI, Apple's modern, declarative UI framework, gained many practical new additions that we will already use in Firetask 5, the next generation of our GTD® task management app. Examples include a focus management system that now works as you would expect it for iPad and Mac and a number of scroll view improvements that many developers have been waiting for for some time.
But the most interesting thing was probably a new Swift framework, namely SwiftData: a "swifty" wrapper around Core Data that should make persisting information between app launches a lot easier.
"SwiftData is a powerful framework for data modelling and management and enhances your modern Swift app. Like SwiftUI, it focuses entirely on code with no external file formats and uses Swift's new macro system to create a seamless API experience." [Ben Trumbull introducing SwiftData at WWDC 2023]
SwiftData has so many really cool concepts which meant I simply had to try it out to see what it can already do (and what not).
[Disclaimer: You might want to skip to the conclusion below if you are not a technical person, or do not know anything about Core Data... :-]
So, what did I like about SwiftData? What works really well?
First of all, SwiftData has very clean, practical and straightforward APIs
All schema definition is done in code using attached macros
SwiftData's "ModelContainer" is even easier to set up than NSPersistentContainer -- and history tracking is always enabled
Persistent objects can be created without a context
Automatic tracking of changes works really nicely with the new SwiftUI observation concepts
All query predicates are typed and are created using a simple, but powerful predicate builder
The SwiftUI query integration feels even more natural than for Core Data fetch results -- although I did not see a way yet to create a sectioned fetch (which I could have missed, or it could still arrive in a later beta)
OK, but there are always some strings attached. So what does not work [yet]? What kind of limitations are there that will most likely also not go away in the first production version later this year?
There is no easy way to react to lifecycle events per object
I did not find a way to specify an index for an attribute
No explicit support for child contexts -- although maybe not needed anymore, as you can create objects outside of a context
No support for derived attributes
It seems also no support for ordered collections -- at least arrays do not preserve their order, but behave more like sets (which is OK for me, I like to implement these things myself and it does not work anyway with CloudKit syncing)
It is unclear how to do explicit history tracking using ModelContainer, e.g., for communicating with app extensions
Finally, CoreSpotlight integration is there, but seems to be not really usable yet
Bottomline: SwiftData in its very first version is definitely more complete than SwiftUI when it was introduced -- which is not surprising, as SwiftData is only a wrapper around CoreData rather than a whole new framework based on totally new concepts. However, maybe comparable to SwiftUI two years ago, SwiftData (in its current state) is lacking many important ingredients for building larger, more complex applications. You can maybe already use it for simple apps, but I would be very careful.
We would have really loved to use SwiftData already for Firetask 5, but the risk is too high and the framework is simply not ready yet. Besides lacking vital functionality, a lot of things are still unclear, detailed documentation is very limited (as always at this stage, let's hope it gets better -- it not always does unfortunately...) and especially interaction with CloudKit for more complex use cases (e.g., deduplication) seems to be problematic.
"There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take." [Peter Drucker]
But it also felt wrong to do nothing, as SwiftData is really great from a conceptual point of view, so we voted for writing a very thin layer that feels already a bit like SwiftData, but simply wraps our current Core Data infrastructure. We hope that this will help us writing more maintainable code and save us work in the long run when we will be able to adopt SwiftData in a couple of years from now ;-).
The most important thing that the WWDC 2023 keynote confirmed is something we all secretly already knew: Craig Federighi has had Jedi training (the flying iPad scene for those who did not watch the video yet). And watchOS seems now finally to be able to detect if its wearer might be a vampire by counting the numbers of hours in bright daylight.
“First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good.
After a roughly 30-minute demo that ran through the major features that are yet ready to test, I came away convinced that Apple has delivered nothing less than a genuine leapfrog in capability and execution of XR — or mixed reality — with its new Apple Vision Pro.” [Matthew Panzarino on TechCrunch]
And of course there is Vision Pro. But these things are not the only interesting pieces of information that Apple dropped at the kick-off of this year's world-wide developer conference:
iOS is getting a new predictive language model for further improving typing on the virtual keyboard. Using concepts from large language models (LLM) is of course a no-brainer, but the interesting fact here is that Apple states it is doing it on device which shows how far it has come already with its Neural Engine. Other interesting new features include StandBy with a reddish night mode which could be a reason for me to switch the always-on display on my iPhone 14 Pro back on
iPadOS gains a simple, but very useful feature for preventing nearsightedness to develop for kids by extending ScreenTime with a feature that monitors how close a kid holds the iPad in front of their face. Myopia is increasing world-wide at an alarming rate and researchers strongly believe that extended usage of digital screens by kids plays a strong role
watchOS gets its biggest redesign since its launch: new navigational concepts, more color, more consistent design across all built-in apps. The smart stack of widgets that can be accessed from any watch face also looked quite interesting. As a big Peanuts fan, I personally can't wait to see the new Snoopy watch face :-)
macOS finally gets widgets right: you can place them directly on the desktop, but they dim when an application window is active. I have already tried out the first developer beta and this little trick might just be the reason why many more people will use widgets on the Mac later this year
And new hardware: we basically got everything we expected: the 15inch MacBook Air, the M2 Ultra chip, updated Mac Studio's, an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro and of course Vision Pro, a mixed reality headset or how Apple put it: a spatial computing platform -- the first of its kind
And it really seems to be the first of its kind. Because it does something that all the other [VR] headsets do not: it brings the real world into the equation which also means it solves my biggest problem with VR headsets: you can actually go to the fridge, you can drink a beer and you can eat chips without taking off the headset. You are even aware when other people enter the room. And you do not need any special controller: you just use your hands. In my opinion this makes a big difference.
“There are certain products that shift the way we are looking at technology and the role it plays in our lives. We believe Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary product with the performance, immersion, and capabilities that only Apple can deliver.” [Tim Cook in the WWDC 2023 keynote]
I have some more thoughts on this and possible business applications, but let's save this for another day.
Maybe one more thing: there was nothing about Siri (despite the fact that they dropped the "Hey Siri" phrase by default). Also it seems so far no new APIs. Which again makes a lot of sense: ChatGPT and other generative LLMs make the complex intents-based Siri APIs look totally outdated. We need something new here, something much more simple. And it wouldn't be Apple if they just released "something": they will do some deep thinking about how generative AI could work together with our apps in a way that really makes sense and hopefully present it to us at next year's WWDC.
Steve Jobs always had a very special, intense and also direct way of communicating. I never had the privilege of meeting him in person, but I greatly enjoyed watching his keynotes, public talks and interviews. I cannot remember any other person in the technology business that could create such tension on stage and at the same time talk about everything in such a natural and interesting way.
Naturally, I was one of the first to check out the "Steve Jobs Archive" when it went online. However, I never really had the time to go through everything in detail, so I really appreciated when they launched "Make Something Wonderful": a free e-book containing a "collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and emails". Now I could read the book during my ten-hour flight to Denver a few weeks ago.
And I really liked it. It is just as they described it on the Steve Jobs Archive: a loose collection of speeches, interviews and emails, roughly put into chronological order. If you liked the way Steve talked you definitely have to download the book and read it. Of course you can also read it online, but - at least in my opinion - it is not the same. There is a reason why we have e-readers like Apple Books.
There are many great quotes in this book, but I want to mention one that caught my intention as, on one side, it is so relevant in the dawn of generational AI, and on the other side, it also showcases his special way of connecting art and science:
“The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life — his or her whole life — and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.” [Steve Jobs in "Make Something Wonderful"]
With the upcoming advancements we see in GPT-4 and other next-generation large language models we probably in fact can emulate a discussion with Aristotle. Or with the late Steve Jobs maybe? If we are talking about other persons we probably have to ask whether we should do it. But even though I never met him, I am pretty sure that Steve would have liked the idea - regardless of whether the AI Steve will give the right answers, or not. Who knows, maybe this is already something the makers of the Steve Jobs Archive are discussing right now...?
Ever since Apple has announced WWDC 2023 late last month the usual annual guessing game about what will launch and what won't is going into overdrive. As always, we know nothing for sure, but three key pieces of hardware are quite probable to at least make an appearance as part of the WWDC keynote on June 5:
A New Mac Pro. WWDC is the event for Apple developers, so it makes perfect sense to at least announce the new Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro. Additionally, the Mac Pro is the last piece missing from the Apple Silicon puzzle: it is the last current device still running on an Intel chipset. Analysts expect it to be slightly smaller than the Intel-based Mac Pro and to use a potentially supercharged version of the M2 Ultra chip.
A 15-inch MacBook Air. The 15-inch MacBook Air has been rumored for some time now and it is also very likely to make an appearance at WWDC. According to some insiders it might even launch at the event and might be available in stores only days later.
An AR/VR Headset. Finally, according to highly credible long-time Apple guru Mark Gurman, Apple will reveal its new mixed reality headset at this year's WWDC. Also other analysts see hard evidence that Apple is ramping up mass production of the device for a fall 2023 launch, making a WWDC announcement extremely likely.
Of course we will also get a sneak peak at the new major operating system releases such as iOS 17 and macOS 14, but this is not really worth discussing. More interesting will be the first version of Apple's new mixed reality operation system (rumored to be called "xrOS") which will most likely be based on iOS and whether we will see any groundbreaking new applications for a dedicated AR/VR device.
"The headset will be a risky, but potentially monumental launch for Apple. It will herald mixed reality as its next major product category, offering a glimpse of a future where people are interacting with the world via headsets and not pocketable touch screens." [Mark Gurman on his Bloomberg Newsletter]
The jury is still out whether there is a real mass market for dedicated AR/VR devices. As always it will come down to the "killer app(s)" -- or the lack thereof. The more this is an interesting time for Apple and developers alike: for developers to see for the first time what the device is capable of and if we will see anything unexpected and for Apple how developers will react to the new device and its operating system.
I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to WWDC and really hope that we will finally see Apple's mixed reality device in reality.