The overlooked surprises of Apple's WWDC keynote
For some, Apple’s WWDC
keynote event went liked they hoped, with the company introducing some exciting
new products or technologies that hit all the sweet spots in today’s
dramatically reshaped tech environment. Augmented reality (AR), artificial
intelligence, smart speakers, digital assistants, convolutional neural
networks, machine learning and computer vision were all mentioned in some way,
shape or form during the address.
For others, the event
went like they expected, with Apple delivering on virtually all the big rumors
they were “supposed” to meet: updated Macs and iPads, a platform for building
AR apps on iOS devices, and a Siri-driven smart speaker.
For me, the event was
a satisfying affirmation that the company has not fallen behind its many
competitors and is working on products and platforms that take advantage of the
most interesting and potentially exciting new technologies across hardware,
software and services that we’ve seen for some time. In addition, they laid the
groundwork for ongoing advancements in overall contextual intelligence, which
will likely be a critical distinction across digital assistants for some time
to come.
Part of the reason for
my viewpoint is that there were several interesting, though perhaps a bit
subtle, surprises sprinkled throughout the event. Some of the biggest were
around Siri, which a few people pointed out didn’t really get much direct
attention and focus in the presentation.
However, Apple
described several enhancements to Siri that are intended to make it more aware
of where you are, what you’re doing, and knowing what things you care about.
Most importantly, a lot of this AI or machine learning-based work is going to
happen directly on iOS devices. Just last year, Apple caught grief for talking
about differential privacy and the ability to do machine learning on an iPhone
because the general thinking then was that you could only do that kind of work
by collecting massive amounts of data and performing that work in large data
centers.
Now, a year later, the
thinking around device-based AI has done a 180 and there’s increasing talk
about being able to do both inferencing and learning—two key aspects of machine
learning—on client devices. Apple didn’t mention differential privacy this
year, but they did highlight that by doing a lot of this AI/machine learning
work on the device, they can keep people’s information local and not have to
send it up to large cloud-based datacenters. Not everyone will grasp this
subtlety, but for those who do care a lot about privacy, it’s a big advantage
for Apple.
...the thinking around
device-based AI has done a 180 and there’s increasing talk about being able to
do both inferencing and learning — two key aspects of machine learning — on
client devices
On a completely
different front, some of Apple’s hardware updates, particularly around the Mac,
highlight how serious they’ve once again come about computing. Not only did
they successfully catch up to many of their PC brethren, they were demoing new
kinds of computing architectures—such as Thunderbolt attached external graphics
for notebooks—that very few PC companies have explored. In addition, bringing
10-bit color displays to mainstream iMacs is a subtle, but critical distinction
for driving higher-quality computing experiences.
On the less positive
front, there are some key questions on the detailed aspects of the HomePod’s
audio processing. To be fair, I did not get to hear an audio demo, but
conceptually, the idea of doing fairly major processing on a mono speaker of
audio that was already significantly processed to sound a certain way on stereo
speakers during its creation strikes me as a bit challenging. Yes, some songs
may sound pleasing, but for true audiophiles who actually want to hear what the
artist and producer intended, Apple’s positioning of the HomePod as super
high-quality speaker is going to be a very tough sell.
Of course, the real
question with HomePod will be how good of a Siri experience it can deliver.
Though it’s several months from shipping, I was a bit surprised there weren’t
more demos of interactions with Siri on the HomePod. If that doesn’t work well,
the extra audio enhancements won’t be enough to keep the productive competitive
in what is bound to be a rapidly evolving smart speaker market.
The real challenge for
Apple and other major tech companies moving forward is that many of the
enhancements and capabilities they’re going to introduce over the next several
years are likely to be a lot subtler refinements of existing products or
services. In fact, I’ve seen and heard some say that’s what they felt about
this year’s WWDC keynote. Things like making smart assistants smarter and
digital speakers more accurate require a lot of difficult engineering work that
few people can really appreciate. Similarly, while AI and machine learning
sound like exotic, exciting technological breakthroughs, their real-world
benefits should actually be subtle, but practical extensions to things like
contextual intelligence, which is a difficult message to deliver.
If Apple can
successfully do so, that will be yet another surprise outcome of this year’s
WWDC.
Bob O’Donnell is the
founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting and
market research firm. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech. This article
was originally published on Tech.pinions.
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