Subscriber Q&A: Live @ Apple WWDC

0:01So I tried this first a few weeks ago at Google I. I did a quick little subscriber Q &A slash live thoughts thing. People really liked it. And so I wanted to try it today. I've been here at Apple. I'm sitting outside of Apple Park. And sorry again for network stuff if this is blurry, but I'm sitting outside of Apple Park and wanted to take some live questions and also just share my raw kind of stream of consciousness reactions to the keynote today in person for and then also some on and off the record meetings I've been having with Apple leaders all day today. Hopefully you guys can hear me okay.

0:43I know I'm having some network issues, but hopefully you can hear me. The main takeaway I think today that I have so far is Apple really wants to make sure people understand this partnership that it has with Google and how it actually works because I think there's a lot of fear on the Apple side that people will think that they've given all of Siri and the AI strategy over to Google with the Gemini partnership. So if I were to have one big headline, it would be that. It would be that the Apple-Google partnership on AI is not... It's deep. It's certainly really deep, but it's not all-encompassing, as I think some people maybe thought.

1:33That was definitely a big message today. They should have just given Siri over to Google, Nick Wong says. Yeah, I mean, there's a legitimate argument to that. What happened is that, and this is, again, I'm kind of, for those who are just catching on, I'm synthesizing things I've learned from on and off the record conversations with Apple or on background conversations with Apple leaders today. I think things with OpenAI got a little hairy after that initial partnership where they had ChatGPT and Siri. And again, some more reporting. It will take some more reporting to fully know what happened.

2:11But yeah, let's just say it didn't seem like that partnership went well on multiple dimensions. And Apple model, but they didn't want to give over everything. And so they got this really unique setup with Google where they're basically ingesting Google's frontier models and then doing a ton of post-training, custom reinforcement learning on top of it and then hosting it on their own kind of private infrastructure. So it's not the Google stack, the Gemini AI stack that you're using in the Gemini app at all. Something of Hope says, I love the shade they threw on their AI players during the announcement.

2:55Yeah, there was some shade. Also, by the way, please ask questions, everyone. I'm here to take questions if anyone has any questions about any of this. Again, I've been spending all day here at Apple meeting with people about their AI strategy, so happy to take questions. And I'll be sharing a lot of this reporting in the newsletter in a couple hours, so you'll get a lot of this later too. But I wanted to just give you my raw reactions right here. A thing that was very unusual today that I don't think Apple has ever done, actually, I confirmed they've never done this, is they had a on-the-record presentation slash Q &A for press after the keynote.

3:28They took us over to a theater right across the street from where I'm sitting right now, across from the visitor center. I had Craig Federighi, Hair Force One, and some of the other Apple AI executives, Mike Rockwell, a new exec they hired from Google to help run AI, do a Q &A with press on the record, which for those who cover Apple or who know Apple really well, that's pretty unique. And I think the main goal of that was that they wanted to clearly explain and take questions on the Google partnership because they know that it's easy for people to probably assume that they're just giving everything over to Google.

4:03They did not answer my question that I submitted about their philosophy towards other models, namely OpenAI and Anthropic, and if they would ever work with other AI models in the same way they're working with Google. They did not answer that. But yeah, this was about an hour briefing, and I'll have the full write-up of kind of my takeaways from the newsletter soon. But Craig gave like what I would call an AI 101 talk where it was almost like a whiteboard type thing he had behind him where he was explaining how AI works, like LLMs work, and like delivering a chatbot experience works, and then how Apple's AI stack works.

4:40And there's a lot of pieces. So it was actually pretty helpful to see it all kind of displayed that way. And I'll include a photo in the newsletter later. And this was not live streamed, by the way. You had to be in the room to watch this. It was probably maybe 50 to 75 press influencers, analysts. Tim Cook and John Ternus were sitting in the front row watching as well. And Cook hung around after and said hi to people. I said hi to him after. But yeah, they talked about the strategy, but also taking some shots, right? Like there was a remark Craig said about like, we're never going to have ads, which is obviously a reference to ChatGPT and the ads that are in there.

5:17I think they really don't like the direction that OpenAI...

5:26And some of the negative headlines about, you know, how people have used ChatGPT for, you know, horrendous things. I assume that's also something that kind of reminds me of the Facebook social media narrative back in the day where they were doing all this kind of marketing, battling over privacy versus surveillance. And I think they're kind of extending that into AI now. But Maps has that. It's a good point. And also they're working with Google to supply their fundamental AI model. And Google was the largest advertising company on earth. Yeah, believe me, there's some contradictions in all of this.

6:05There always has been with Apple.

6:09What else was the takeaway? And by the way, ask questions. if anyone has questions. Oh, here's one. Now he says, is Apple doing anything like Amazon's project NARA, AI enhanced production infrastructure, AI studio? You know, not to my knowledge. I mean, they showed a lot of image stuff today with their foundational models where you can basically, I mean, they showed me in a briefing after where you could literally just change the backdrop and move the backdrop of a portrait of a photo to like, I don't want that building there. Another one was like hiding the leg of a kid was hit in the photo and you just tap it and it does cloud inference to like get rid of the thing in front of his leg.

6:50So you can see all of them, you know, in like a cute photo. So they're doing stuff like in the Photos app, in their apps. They don't have this like hub, this like product experience that is similar to NARA or like AI Studio. They're not really calling stuff AI that much, right? They call it Apple Intelligence. a lot of the photo stuff I saw, which is they were saying today their servers are melting because a lot of this is already accessible in beta. And yeah, their servers are melting and so a lot of the inference stuff on the photos is pretty slow. It reminds me of being here a year ago, actually.

7:23And again, it comes back to maybe why the Okanac partnership has not been working for them. I remember being in the briefings here a year ago and they were showing some of the ChatGPT innovations in iOS and macOS. And for some reason, I don't remember why,

7:39OpenAI was having some kind of average that day. And so in the briefings, which Apple is so meticulous with these briefings, everything's so... There's so much thought put into it. They were having all these averages and stuff wasn't working. You could see the Apple employees inwardly fuming about this. So maybe that also affected the OpenAI partnership. But anyway, yeah, they're doing a lot of stuff with their own models on images, but no, they don't have a concerted new product there. Steven, what's up, dude? What do you wish Apple would have announced but didn't? I don't know if this is a would have.

8:16I kind of expected them to have something to answer the rise of Cloud Code and Cursor and all of these agentic coding tools. They'll say Xcode uses all the Frontier models and they've iterated on the interface, which they have. I'm sure it's still one of the largest developer platforms, but When you look at what's happening in coding, sorry if it's loud, there's a car in front of me here. When you look at what's happening with coding, I mean, Apple, the interface just seems so far behind. I mean, you hear Boris, who runs Cloud Code, doing interviews saying like, you need to be doing loops now.

8:52Like you shouldn't even be prompting your AI to code. You should be like writing loops that prompt the AI. That's like one extreme. And you have Apple over here that's like not doing a ton. And so I would say, I don't know if I would have hoped, but I would have not been surprised to see a bigger kind of splash around Xcode, but there wasn't. Maybe they're seeding that kind of VibeCode ground to the other tools. And I did get that message for sure, and especially in some of the on-background briefings that they think all this is super early, VibeCoding and agents too. And so maybe they're just taking a C approach.

9:25I mean, the benefit of Apple that's, you know, being Apple is they sell all the devices that power this AI. And as long as people aren't switching to new hardware, Apple's going to be fine, right? When OpenClaw came out, Mac mini sales went through the roof, right? So they're benefiting kind of no matter what right now. Now, long term, what happens is more interesting and something I couldn't really get out of anyone today. But now that that's coming to mind, agents, during the very interesting on the record Q &A earlier today with Craig and other Apple execs, he was asked about agents. And he laughed and said, oh, you all must have just been at Google I.O.

9:59Because for those who don't know, at Google I.O., it was all agents all the time. They said it over and over and over like a buzzword. And everyone just laughed like crazy in the room when he said that because it's rare. It's honestly very rare for an Apple exec to have any kind of off script moment at all. But kind of through... Basically, the idea that agents are here now in a material way beyond coding said they were exciting experiments, but very early. So yeah, at Build last week or whatever, Microsoft went all in on OpenClaw. I had an issue about that last week in the newsletter. I don't expect Apple to do anything like that or embrace OpenClaw or anything like that anytime soon.

10:46Okay, great. We've got some more questions coming in. I'm only going to do this for a few more minutes because I've got to actually write the newsletter, guys. And believe me, it's going to be a good one. But please send me any questions and I'll get to them right now. And Joshua asks, what is the vibe that you're getting about John Ternus' software strategy? You know, really interesting. I mean, Ternus was like, he was not in the keynote today, which I think they wanted to do because it was Tim Cook's last keynote. Tim had a nice moment where he came out at the beginning and was acknowledging that it was his last.

11:15Ternus was around. Everybody's taking photos with him. He's walking around Apple Park. He actually came to the media reception last night that they hold before WWDC, which is something Cook never did, which I think kind of, and I'll have this in the newsletter, but I'm sensing a media shift in the way that Apple approaches media. Maybe it's a turnist thing. Maybe it's not. I don't know. But we definitely haven't seen anything about his strategy. You know, sorry to see that. I mean, he's a hardware guy. So I assume he'll have strong, you know, opinions there. But TBD on software. Natalie asks, did they comment on those Mac mini sales?

11:51And will this impact new devices? Yeah. be marketed like that at some point. You know, I don't think people market it as like their open claw machine. I think because, again, they're worried about agents being so early and the security risks. I was with an Apple exec literally just before I came here and they were saying, you know, like talking about prompt detection attacks and worried about that scale for people who don't understand all this stuff and people getting hacked, which is to me very understandable when you're Apple and you're like one of the largest platforms on Earth. They definitely love the Mac mini sales, though.

12:27I mean, they love when anything drives their hardware sales. And again, it goes to my earlier point that they're benefiting from AI even without being at the frontier. Yeah, saw the pixelated video. Ask Substack. I don't know. I think I have good Wi-Fi. The signal looks good. Haven't had any issue with FaceTime. Substack needs to get on it with my video. Sorry about the best I can do. if anyone wants to ask any more questions then talking about just spending all their WDW

13:22Thank you.

13:52Thank you.

14:22Thank you.

14:52Thank you.

15:22Thank you.