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# The Deep View Conversations E49 - WWDC 2026 Special Episode Full Transcript
**[00:00:00] Jason Hiner:** Welcome to the Deep View Conversations Podcast. This is a special episode coming to you from Apple Park. We've just finished WWDC and we're here to give you all of our analysis and takes from the Deep View. I'm Jason Hiner and I'm with my co-host Sabrina Ortiz.
**[00:00:26] Sabrina Ortiz:** I'm super excited to be here. As you all know, Jason and I have been super invested in the AI space for years now. I've been covering it since my first story was the launch of ChatGPT and this event cannot be more fitting for us right now because it was basically an AI event. So let's get into it.
**[00:00:43] Jason Hiner:** Yeah, so we're going to do a few things. We're going to talk about the things that were our favorite announcements, things that we've been waiting for, things that maybe we didn't expect as well as where we think all this fits in to the AI space. And then we'll do a few other things. We'll get the chance to ask each other some questions because we also as always have some of our own hot takes on a few things as ever. So Sabrina, when we did our stories on day one afterwards, you talked about Siri. I sort of talked about the bigger picture of where Apple Intelligence fits in with Apple's strategy, with the rest of what the AI industry is doing. Why don't we start with Siri? What were the other things connected to Siri? What were your first sort of favorite thing that you're excited to talk about?
**[00:01:33] Sabrina Ortiz:** Yeah, so with Siri and we'll get more into all things personal context and everything. But we finally saw Apple deliver on what we've been waiting for for now two years and all those initial promises, such as being able to browse your or reference your messages, your emails, all your photos, all your personal context to give you better assistance finally came true. But I think what really stood out to me, my favorite, I guess more broadly speaking, Siri upgrade is the fact that it's been really baked in super natively into the device ecosystem. So a really great example is the visual intelligence being now accessible in the camera app. So you just have to like point at whatever you want assistance with, snap a photo, and then you could get the AI help you need instead of having to like, you know, click a bunch of different buttons, go to another app. So broadly, largely speaking, of course we could dive into some of the more specific features. I would say Apple's really thoughtfulness in baking in all the features in a way that make it super seamless for users is, I think, my biggest stand out.
**[00:02:42] Jason Hiner:** Taking the AI out of the chatbot, it's like the AI, and we talked a little bit about this in 2024, you and I did, but clearly it was more fully deployed in this edition, coming to iOS 27, where the AI features have escaped the chatbot, where it wasn't just you had to go to a chatbot application to do it. Now, there isn't a Siri chatbot app now, it is its own app, but that's mostly for you to go in and find the older conversations that you had. I actually think that like the app is a lot different than what we're seeing from other
**[00:03:18] Sabrina Ortiz:** apps because again, it's very natively built into your devices. So for instance, like one of the things that stood out to me was being able to say, "Hey, let Jason know I'm five minutes away." And Apple Intelligence Siri would be able to say, "Okay, Sabrina is probably talking about Jason Hiner. She usually texts him and create the message, put it in like the text app, and then let me just approve of it or let it go." Yeah. That's something that none of the other, that kind of deep integration into your device, into your ecosystem, into your software, is something none of the other standalone apps could quite do yet. It's not really possible. You wouldn't necessarily trust everybody to sort of understand all
**[00:04:02] Jason Hiner:** of your, have all your text messages to have all of that context. So that's big. So it's the, and what we'll get a little bit more into personal context and effect, I'll talk about that in a second because it was sort of my first favorite thing. But the aspect of taking these features, not in an app you have to do, but putting them everywhere, the place you're going to access them the most is big for this to get beyond. Only, you know, we talked about it a lot on the deep view. Only 16% of the population of the world regularly uses AI today. For it to get more useful, it has to be not just something you go to a chat bot to do. And I think people have AI fatigue and I don't blame them. Like I cover this every
**[00:04:41] Sabrina Ortiz:** day and we'll get into this later too of agents and such, but I use it, of course. I've used it from the very beginning, partially because it's, well, my job, what I get paid to do, but also because I have found some ways it makes my life better. But when I don't have to use it, if I don't have to open up another app, I will avoid it at all costs. I think Apple is really catering to that type of audience of people who don't necessarily want to go out of their way to use it. But if it can make your life better, that's awesome. And I think even the upgrade to writing tools is a really good one. Like it just gets to know you, your tone, you know, your context, all of how you text, all those things better. And now it can like automatically proofread or automatically, you know, just be much more helpful more intuitively. And I think that's, again, what people want or need or even dictation. Like now, how many times have you tried talking to serious attacks and it's like, that's not what I said at all. Now it's supposed to be much better to compete with, of course, apps like Whisperflow and even Google's Ramblur that just came out. But these are the wins, in my opinion. It's these things that people just don't need to actually go out of their way. It's there. It's making my life easier. I don't even know if it's AI or not, but it's cool and great. That's as much as I think is needed.
**[00:05:57] Jason Hiner:** So that's really taking a lot of this is about taking AI to a much broader audience. And Apple has that ability and has done that with other products. We've seen that with smart watches. We've seen that with wireless earbuds. We've seen that with obviously the smartphone itself, when Apple enters the market, more people pay attention, more people are open to it. So that's going to be part of it. But then bringing the features and just make them smart features and not something that has to blare. I'm AI because people do the larger population still has a lot of mistrust about AI. AI is losing the narrative among the broader population. And I think you could tell when a company is just using AI or doing AI for the sake of
**[00:06:38] Sabrina Ortiz:** chiming in, I actually want to say that this rollout of AI features was so thoughtful that I wouldn't be surprised if behind the scenes in these executive rooms where the decisions are being made. It wasn't a matter of like, how do we get AI to a broader audience to your point? I think it might have been just a matter of, hey, these are complaints our users have. Okay, cool. We could use AI to make it better. And I think that's the approach business leaders should have when they're implementing AI solutions into their company. And that's the approach that companies should have when they're deploying solutions or deploying products to people. Because again, nobody wants another, and nobody wants AI for the sake of AI. People just want their lives to be better. And that's always been right, like how products are created and made. I don't know why when it came to AI, people decided actually let's deviate entirely from that and let's just give people something they didn't ask for because it's trendy. So I'm glad that Apple kind of went back to the, I think, original. I love that distinction because actually what it feels like is a lot of companies right
**[00:07:37] Jason Hiner:** now when they deploy AI features or they talk about AI or there's a lot of AI washing, you know, they're really talking to investors. They want investors because most of them are public companies. They want investors to buy in and to buy their stock or if you're a private company, maybe to invest in your company. And in order to, so they're like speaking to investors, whereas the wider population is sort of not clamoring for AI. Most of the people that you and I spend time with who aren't in the tech industry, who aren't in media, they're not clamoring for more AI features. They feel like they're worried that it's encroaching too much on their life. So that's a great insight. I appreciate it. I'm going to go to the one thing that was my first thing. I wrote a story about this, which is that the feature that most people are overlooking when it comes to Apple is personal context. Because what Apple announced on Monday, there was only, there weren't really any, well, there was one and which we'll get to. There was one feature that was really unique, nobody else is doing. All the rest of the features have already been done by either an AI, one of the AI labs or one of the smartphone makers. So it's not that there's any revolutionary new features other than the one we'll talk about spatial reframing, which is pretty amazing. But all the rest is really stuff that's already out there. So what's Apple's play? What does Apple have to offer? We talked about integrating in other places, but the big thing is really personal context. What Apple calls personal context, what Google calls personal intelligence, which is giving access to your messages, your emails, your files, your photos, and all that, and then letting it sort of study, understand you. And when you say things like you said earlier, tell Jason I'm running 15 minutes behind, it knows that you're probably talking to me, it knows you usually text me, and then it's going to sort of just do a text to do it so that you don't have to pull up the app, use your phone. And then hopefully this audio piece is better, that it's more like whisper flow or Google Ramblor, where it understands better and convert it to the message that you want. That personal context of being able to do a lot of things. For me to say, send Sabrina that photo from last year's WWDC so that we can post it for this year and actually give her the most similar photo that we took from this year's so that we can post those on social. Things like that, that's really where the magic of AI and the promise happens. Last thing I'll say is just that Claude Code, this is what opened the thing that also people didn't pay attention to as much with Claude Code. The reason Claude Code was so useful is people gave it to access to their whole computer and had more context. Personal context, and remember how Claude Code went viral like super fast because all of a sudden people can do really useful stuff. Apple personal context has the potential to do the same. Yeah, I'll add to that too. I think the reason the Apple
**[00:10:36] Sabrina Ortiz:** personal context is so much more powerful than any of what competitors are doing is that it is no secret that Apple users are extremely loyal. If you have one Apple product, if you have an iPhone, you are probably embedded in the entire ecosystem, right? Whether it's just like me and you have your iPhone and then your Macs or then if you also have an iPad and then you have your Apple Watch and you have a home kit, but regardless, it's an ecosystem of devices that people are in like a wall garden really and are not leaving. So that gives Apple, I think, a really unique opportunity to take advantage of the fact that, hey, you're trusting only Apple applications essentially with all of your data and that doesn't have to do overcome challenges like Google, where it's Google, it's like, okay, well, if you're an Android user, you might use the native app of whatever the manufacturer is, but you also might use WhatsApp and Telegram. You actually might use all these other things because you actually don't care about blue, green bubble and you actually might use one of the million photo apps that exist and you actually might use Google photos even though you are on a Samsung phone and Apple doesn't have to worry about that. So I think that's why the personal context is even so much more valuable because it's all of users' information is sitting, probably, most likely, for most people within the Apple applications so it can actually take from much more, to collect more information, reference more information and be much more helpful.
**[00:12:03] Jason Hiner:** They have actually said too, they gave developers, this is a developer conference, so they gave developers the ability to tap in to that as well, so potentially WhatsApp or line or other photos of Google photos, you could potentially, if those developers build in the hooks, they could Apple Intelligence, personal context, could take advantage of those things, Siri, as well. We'll see, that's a lot, some of the competitors probably, you know, Meta and Google, probably less likely, but you never know, they've done it before and so they could.
**[00:12:38] Sabrina Ortiz:** But even if they do, I mean, I'm always a fan for giving user choice, I think everybody, you know, that's the whole point of technology and what makes innovation fun is being able to pick whatever interests you the most or fits your needs the best, but I actually don't think there's really that need of Apple users because again, like I said, usually, you're such a loyal user, you like Apple because you like being part of the entire ecosystem, you're probably, if again, if you've owned an iPhone for like, you know, 10 years, you're probably never using a different messaging app, you know, or all of those sorts of examples. I just needed to do my Gmail in addition to my messages, so like, that's what I'm like, come on Google, I hope you're going to play ball on this one. The other thing, if we compare Google, what Google's doing with personal intelligence and
**[00:13:19] Jason Hiner:** what Apple's doing with personal context is, of course, privacy, so Google makes money off of knowing information about you and then marketing to you, right? So all of us, whether we think about it consciously or not, most of us anyway, are a little bit wary about how much information we give Google because we know we're going to get, you know, marketing messages based on that, they're making money off of our data. You know, with Apple with personal context, most of it is either on device saved, so it's not in the cloud, they're also, Apple's, a company is not making money off of our data, so for that reason, we have a little bit more trust. And then there's personal, so there's a Private Cloud Compute, which is Apple's way of saying, yes, if it's in the cloud, we also are walling it off, we can't even read it and all of that. How much is that? You and I sometimes have different, you know, takes on how much sort of that privacy level, you know, matters. What do you think about all of that part, you know, the trust level?
**[00:14:18] Sabrina Ortiz:** Well, I, we were actually just talking about this yesterday, because I looked at Jason, and I was like, so like, we all know and trust that Apple's privacy is top tier, and we all attribute it to Private Cloud Compute. Do we all actually know exactly how Private Cloud Compute works? Probably not exactly, right? Like we've learned about it at one point, we might have forgotten about it, like for us, because we're meeting and we've been briefed, but for people who aren't meeting, I know for a fact that they might even know what Private Cloud Compute is. True. But yet, Apple has built such a good reputation that even like my mom, like I remember her getting her first Mac and like she was like a really loyal like McAfee user before that, you know, for like your, her like regular Chromebooks or whatever. Yeah. And then being like, well now I have an Apple device, I don't have to worry about any of these things, you know, like her anti-virus software, whatever, I'm like, she, she's not tech savvy at all, I love you mom if she's watching, but so I think Apple has done such a great job of building that reputation, that of course I do think it matters for them, and it'll be a huge, really pivotal thing in the competing in this AI race is the fact that they've built this reputation, they've maintained it, and while none of us might exactly know the details, I'll play in their favor for sure. I love the shout out to your mom. No, it's good.
**[00:15:34] Jason Hiner:** So here's the other one that I know that is somewhat related to that, which is the privacy and safety, you know, before Apple even started telling us the new features in the keynote on Monday, they went and they said, here are, here's all of the privacy safety and sort of the child safety, you know, things, so parents, because like this is the most powerful technology we've ever seen. And so before we put this in your hands, before we even tell you all the cool things it's going to do for you, we want to tell you this is why it's safe, this is how we handle it, this is how we prioritize what we're doing, and this is how we make sure you can keep, you know, your kid safe if they're using this and social media and other things as well. That was really interesting. I hope that that creates a level of expectations in the industry for the way privacy and safety is handled, like we're going to think about that first, not afterwards, what was your take on that? Yeah, I think that it works for Apple for like even the reasons it just said, like they have this reputation, so I think they can kick off a keynote saying things like that and people will take it really positively, or at least like, you know, that was a thoughtful way to open a keynote. I wish other companies do take no and prioritize it, but I do think that if we had a company like Meta open up their keynote like that, I think there would be a very different reaction because we would be like, oh, do we really believe it? Right, so I don't, I think Apple could do it because they have a leg to stand on. I'm not quite sure the other major players are there. Ideally they will be, ideally we will move to the point where they could open up a keynote in the same way, but I think this is, that was a game play that I think could only work for Apple right now. Love it. All right, so all of that was personal context, you know, that's a big one. Personal context and Siri. And Siri, anything else you want to talk about, Siri, before we round out like the Siri little section, we move on to Apple Intelligence.
**[00:17:32] Sabrina Ortiz:** A really silly one, the animation, so you can now, you can hold long, press the button. It's not silly, yeah. You can say, hey Siri, you can swipe down from the dynamic island, and it has this little animation that's like so pleasing to do, it's kind of, like I said, it's a little silly, but it's fun, and bringing a little bit of fun to AI, not a bad thing. And also, I think we associate, like, the glow was really fun. I did like the whole, like, that's easier in the glow, that's now, you know, goodbye. But we also associate of Siri not functioning that great, you know? So I think it's a really good move, like, yeah, like, you know, new Siri, new look, like, you know, like, she's out of makeover, and I think that's a great play.
**[00:18:19] Jason Hiner:** And that's a fun one now. I think that's worth mentioning for sure. It is fun. It is fun. All right, what's your next sort of favorite thing that you really enjoy? Yeah, I think if we're moving on to Apple Intelligence, I don't mean to steal your thunder, but of course, spatial reframing was a very, very fun one. So basically, Apple Intelligence is also Apple's suite of AI features, but it goes beyond Siri.
**[00:18:45] Sabrina Ortiz:** Wait, we should actually talk about, as we're setting the foundation here for everything is the fact that the foundational models, we finally got more color, I guess, onto, or we finally got to see what they look like in collaboration with Google. True. To be clear, it's not Gemini models. It's not the fact that we're now Apple's, like, Siri's a Gemini, Siri.
**[00:19:05] Jason Hiner:** It was built in conjunction, but it's still Apple foundation models, so, right? Yeah, that's true. That's important. And we'll get back to spatial reframing. It's a hard feature to explain, but it's a really amazing one. So we should talk about that as maybe the most unique thing, but the foundation models, and Apple spent some time with us talking about the fact of the way that they built them and the way that the architecture works. And so, for the parts of the audience that care about that, the thing is that Apple foundation models are at the core of Apple Intelligence. They have this sort of Private Cloud Compute piece involved. They use sort of the Apple Silicon architecture, which we had an exclusive with Apple before Apple, WWDC, talking about how Apple Silicon is actually keeps notching win after win in AI, and it is under the radar. And so, there are some really interesting things about that. But then Gemini helps to inform and make the Apple models more, Apple foundation models more powerful. But this isn't just Gemini under the hood, you know, with an Apple logo on top. We didn't really understand that before this week. It really helps. I was glad that they were very forthcoming about the way they explained the architecture. And then they also talked about world knowledge, too, that the Apple foundation models now can go out to the web, can pull this in. ChatGPT, the OpenAI folks talk about this a lot, they feel like, and so does perplexity. They do a lot of work to make sure that they can essentially compete with Google search, right, and do that and Apple's doing it, too. Yeah. Again, it was special because we've heard about the partnership. We've kind of all wondered what it's actually going to look like. And now that it's here, it's like, it's also really cool seeing two major powerhouses or tech giants join forces, because obviously competition does spur innovation, but sometimes it could actually be a disadvantage for users, because every company's kind of working on how to keep users in within their mode. So I actually love seeing the collaboration to ultimately give users a better experience, right? So that was a big part. It's good. And Apple has been working on foundation models. They're not a frontier lab. They've not trying to be a frontier lab, but they have worked on some specific models that work well on their hardware, they can do specific things. And then combining that with the strength of Gemini and Google, like the combination of the two, and then Apple's way to bring it to users in a more easier to use way, is like you said, the collaboration of the two, that is pretty, pretty powerful and pretty exciting to see. What we didn't see was Apple, there was some speculation beforehand was that they might bring in other providers as well, and Anthropic and others. We didn't see that, but the partnership between Apple and OpenAI still exists. So ChatGPT inside of Siri and inside of Apple's AI experience remains. From last year or two years ago, the work that they've done on that continues to go forward. Which should be clear, just means like typically Siri would kick off your answer to ChatGPT or OpenAI's models when it wasn't smart enough to answer. Now it's automatically routing even your most complicated questions to Siri. So you really would have to say, "Hey Siri, use ChatGPT to answer this question." Which I don't think many people will do. And I'm actually really happy that OpenAI's, sorry, that Apple's no longer relying on that crutch of sending, because it was never seamless, you know, sending it to a third party provider, it's not a service, it's not going to be seamless. And I actually have no problem with them not integrating the third party models either. Again, I think you should be confident enough that your assistant's going to work well. And if you're not, maybe don't ship it then. If you're going to have to rely again on the crutch of perplexity or anthropic or Claude, then are you really competing in this space? I'm actually not a fan of harnesses in general. We've talked about this. I think a lot of places-- When that's a whole other topic we're going to get to. Exactly. And on Apple, essentially for developing their own AI models that they're confident enough that they could ship out to users. But anyways-- Yes, you do. I've got a follow-up on it. But you do spatial reframing first, because that is the feature, tough to explain, but really cool.
**[00:23:36] Sabrina Ortiz:** Now that we've unpacked the foundation for Apple Intelligence, let's move into some of the features that go beyond Siri. Spatial reframing is one of the features that are coming to the camera app. There's basically three upgrades-- the cleanup feature that we already know and love, or at least if you're me, you love, is now basically smarter. It has two modes, it has the regular mode it had before, and now it has a more advanced mode to tackle even more difficult edits. There's the extend feature, which is just you have a photo, you want it to be a different ratio, let's extend what the background is, and you should have AI to fill it. People that it's coming to Apple Photos, as you mentioned before, every single other, basically, you know, AI lab has had a feature of that sort in the past. But the really cool one is spatial reframing. Essentially, I'm going to do my best to explain it as you take a photo of something, and then you realize later, hey, actually, I wish I would have taken it from a different angle. I wish the composition was different. Maybe I should have gone lower. Maybe I should have gone around the subject a bit more. Now, basically, you could use, select, the feature, tap the subject, or analyze the photo and identify the subject, and then drag and move the photo so that you're at different angles as if you would have been there and moving around the subject, right? So the subject itself isn't moving, the subject itself isn't being edited. It's like as if you were moving different angles around the subject, so that then the background is moving with you, right? The subject is fixed, but the background-- and then AI will generate those pieces that obviously were in there, because you took it from a different angle, and to make a final product that looks like you originally took it that way. Hard to explain. Hopefully, we'll be able to include some clip or, you know, I posted a bunch of it on my
**[00:25:31] Jason Hiner:** personal socials too, and you could look it up too, but it's really neat because this is a feature I haven't seen any other companies yet release, any other competitors release, and also it taps into what they could experiment with because of their Vision Pro leg, so. It's true. I'm glad you brought up Vision Pro. Like, if you've seen spatial photos, and spatial photos came to iPhone as well, and if you use that, I think it's a feature not as many people have used, but if you have used it, and if you've seen some of the demos for Vision Pro, then what you've seen is that you can do some amazing things. You can take a 2D photo and make it three-dimensional, and all of a sudden it comes to life in a really powerful way. And so what this feature does is it takes that, and it's like, oh, not only is it something interesting to look at, but we're going to take it and use it to let you do this really cool thing, which is like, say you have a great photo, say I took a photo of you in front of the big rainbow in the middle, and I just didn't quite get it right. It's like, oh, I wish the rainbow was sort of right over your head, and the way I took it was sort of off, and I was like, I love this photo. It's a great photo. I'd love to send it to Sabrina, but I just didn't quite get it right. With spatial photos, you can go, I could go, I could tap you, and then I could be like, I'm going to move over this way, and now I have placed it perfectly. Right? And I think that's actually the problem we'll really solve. It's like when you ask somebody to take a photo, and it's like, love your vision. That was not my vision. You know, like my boyfriend loves to take, like, Dutch angle photos, and I'm always like, you know, like, let's just straighten it out, or like my mom is like, you know, as a lot. Again, shout out to my mom, part two, wow. She gets like really close to the subject, and I'm like, back up, you know? So now it would be simple, just like, thank you so much for trying, and I appreciate the photo, but now let me just tweak it to my liking. That one's a big one. And it's cool, so it's not a super AI in your face feature. A lot of people going into the app now, I'm sure are going to click on like, oh, what is this reframe? And not even realize like, oh, there's a ton of AI going on behind the scenes, so that's super cool. I'm glad that we got to shout out Apple Vision Pro a little bit. It's such an interesting niche, you know, product. We'll talk about there was something new when we get to some of the platform ones, but I also have used and tried Apple Vision Pro Galaxy XR. As a matter of fact, we've got a story, a Galaxy XR story coming up on the deep view. You can look at that, but these kinds of things are where that, those products, which were not necessarily widely used by, by many users, even in the tech space, right? But the fact that they did that product is now unlocking some other things. I love that. I love that part a lot. Let's move on to some of your favorites from Apple Intelligence, anything else I tackle. I know we both kind of shared spatial reframing, I kind of stole that for me, but any other Apple Intelligence features. Yeah, you know, another one is the fact that the writing tools piece that they bring it into essentially the keyboard, like anywhere you type, you can use it. And to be clear, on the deep view, we don't, we don't use AI to write our stories, like, you know, we are really focused on sort of the human element on, of course, because we're focused on analysis, we're focusing on perspective. But these writing tools are really good when you have some standard ways you make and respond to emails. So we get emails all the time from PR people, we love you, we work with you all the time. But there's certain things where we have a lot to respond to, right? And if writing tools like this can help with the ways that we can respond more quickly, if it can shave off even sometimes 15, 30 seconds when we're responding to 20, 30, 50 emails, you know, at times, like it can make a big difference. And so what writing tools does, it does two things. So it builds in grammar correction or grammar. And the proof reading is what it's really, I think, upsetting to me, yeah. Big builds in proof reading, and then it also builds in knowing that when you respond to somebody via email, here's the tone you use, here's your typical kinds of responses, when you respond to somebody via text, like this is the typical responses, because we all have those things, right? That we do. And so saving just that little bit of time, still being in your voice and being able to do it in whatever app, whatever program, like that's huge, like you don't need to just do this in Apple mail, you don't just need to do it in messages. You can do it anywhere you have a text prompt, right? So Apple Notes, Gmail, Line, WhatsApp, any of those things, anywhere you have a keyboard, you have the opportunity to tap into that. I think that's another one that when people get used to it, they'll start to think like, what did I do before this when I was just handwriting, you know, every single message? Maybe that's a little bit of a journalist problem too, I realize, because we do a lot of messages. But a lot of people we know in tech and in other fields, they just have a lot of messaging to keep up with.
**[00:30:50] Sabrina Ortiz:** Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, we're talking about Siri, but like with writing tools, I think the biggest one there is like, I honestly didn't really use it much because it took a lot of highlighting, it took a lot of clicking, and then you're generating, and sometimes I think it would generate like, not the best, you know, it was just, it was just not very seamless to access, and it's also just not the highest of quality, in my opinion. So I think now those improvements, it's just being more organically and more seamlessly just baked in, again, going back to the point before of Siri, and like, I think that's their biggest win, I think that will be a game-funder. A lot of people may not think about it as an AI tool, it's like, oh, this is just a thing that helps me write stuff, like autocorrect, yeah, like I've been using autocorrect to make stuff forward since like the 90s, like, you know, whatever it may be. Yes, yes.
**[00:31:36] Jason Hiner:** All right, I would love for us to have the chance to ask each other some questions, because one of the things we do is we often bounce off of each other, because we have different perspectives on especially some of these features.
**[00:31:49] Sabrina Ortiz:** Down, but we cannot move on from Apple Intelligence found me talking about Safari. Oh, you do have to talk about Safari. I have to talk about Safari. You have such a, not really a hot take, but you immediately had a reaction to this, and to me I was like, it doesn't, it does nothing for me, but you are all about it. Listen, again, I'm going to sound like a broken record, I think the best AI features are the ones that are actually built into your applications in a way that's seamless and actually solves a problem, and I'm not thinking to myself, is this AI? We all, if we have Apple devices at one point or the other, you're using Safari. It got a ton of new Apple Intelligence features, and they're all killers. One of them, it autogroups your tabs into similar topic categories. I checked my tabs yesterday, because I was like, why am I so passionate about this feature? On my iPhone right now, we have 253 tabs open, so I would love for something to go ahead and group them for me, and it'll do it automatically. That's huge. Notify me. Super cool. You basically get to use natural language until the AI, hey, I want you to notify me whenever XYZ change happens, so the most obvious one I would probably use it for is notify me when this product drops or is on sale, it drops price, I mean, or is on sale, but the example that Apple kept giving during demos is like, hey, notify me when a new ice cream flavor gets added to this menu, I'm sure you could use it for reservations, I'm sure you could use it for a ton of different things, and the most exciting part is I don't have to think about it, I could just ask it, conversationally, and then move on with my life, and then just get a notification. That was the second one, and then the third one, which is pretty cool, was kind of this vibe coding-esque feature, the create an extension feature, and I use extensions all the time in Google Chrome, quite frankly, I've never once in my life used an extension in Safari, so this might be, again, the gateway, but now you get to use natural language and explain what you want the extension to do, and if you don't really use extensions, essentially, they just build on whatever you're doing in your browser and perform an action for you in some way, so I could totally see myself being like, hey, can you build a screenshot extension, that's my favorite extension in Google Chrome, I have to download some extensions somebody else created, and I'm always downloading the extension, like, is this even like real, is this legit? Now I could just ask a code it, vibe code it, I guess, using natural language, tweak it to my liking, and then use it whenever I want, win, it's huge.
**[00:34:22] Jason Hiner:** Those are the three features. You're welcome, one. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Safari, this is good, we needed to get to this one. Because I'm going to be a little bit of a wet blanket on this one. Part of it is that organizing the Chrome, or sorry, the Safari tabs thing, because there's also Chrome tabs as well, right, that's the first place. I don't want that, like, also, I'm sort of an organizational nut, so like, I organize things the way I want it, like, I don't want it reorganizing for me, I have this on Mac. On Spaces, there's this feature on Mac, on Spaces, where it's like, automatically reorganize based on priority, and it's always on by default, and when I get a new Mac, I always have to remember to go to turn it off, because I'm like, why are my spaces out of order? And it's like, oh, it's trying to organize them for me. It's like, no, I don't want that, it's the same thing with Safari, like, I don't want it messing with my tabs. Now, I also have off the tabs. I would say, do you have 234 tabs? I do not, but I do have, like, about 50 open tabs, or 150, something like that on Safari, on Apple, or on iPhone, especially, so maybe I will give it the benefit for the doubt and try it and see what it does for me, but I have my doubts about that one. And then the extensions, make your own extensions thing, vibe code your own extensions thing. I'm also a little skeptical about this one, because one, I'll be interested to see how well the coding models are in this, because, like, you have to have really good coding models. If it let me use other, like, if it let me select a model, maybe I would be more open to it, but we'll see. Also, I'm worried about coding extensions, like, that I might code some, the vibe code something, and create some code that has, like, vulnerabilities in it. That's a challenge with vibe coding, as people are creating a bunch of vulnerabilities, and now these models can find them, and what you access in your web browser can be pretty sensitive, and I typically use Safari to access maybe even my moat, because it is a bit locked down. Safari or Brave, I'll use to access, like, online banking or, you know, things like that. And I'm worried about putting out code in there that basically these really smart coding models like Mythos or GPT 5.5 or something could find, and so that's me being a little bit of a tinfoil hat guy, but, you know, there's that.
**[00:36:32] Sabrina Ortiz:** I don't think, realistically, extensions, like, unless you're vibe coding a banking extension, the extension is going to sit in the tab until you activate it, like, Grammarly, like, you know, like, it's not going to activate, do you feel mistrust using, like, Grammarly or something? I do, actually.
**[00:36:48] Jason Hiner:** I don't do that many extensions, because I just worry that, especially in my most secure thing. Now, I'll use things like that. I'll use different browsers for, like, and I'll activate it there, stuff where I'm just researching, or I'm just doing writing word docs or something like that, but that's also me being, like, a little bit- But you might just not be an extension guy, and that's okay. That's part of it for sure, like, I don't trust extensions, but that's me. Now, the notifications thing I will use, so I'm glad you brought that up. That's a really good one. If you could go to any website, say, like, let me know when there's a new, you know, this that drops whenever, if you're at a favorite restaurant, let me know when there's a new menu that changes on this page. That's pretty cool. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. For sure. Okay.
**[00:37:32] Sabrina Ortiz:** Did you want to hop into the questions Q&A phase now? The questions, yes. The question phase. Actually, I did.
**[00:37:36] Jason Hiner:** There's one more thing before we get to questions. Mac, I brought up the spaces thing, reminded me that there was actually a lot of cool stuff that happened for Mac. Mac doesn't always get as much love because so much of the Apple customer basis comes from the iPhone, right? And the Mac is sort of this, like, niche, nerdy, really awesome group. But so much of the AI ecosystem today is being built on Mac. I did a story about this, you know, a couple weeks ago, and the wild thing is if you walk into any of these AI labs, you know, all of the developers are using Mac. Now, they might be using Linux if they're not using Mac, but they're almost all using Mac. You can tell because every product you're launched, it's like everything always comes first to iOS or Mac OS without a fail. Claude Code came to Mac first, the Gemini desktop app came to Mac first. It's such a wild, perplexity computer came to Mac first. But there was a lot of these features that came to Mac. I was just so glad to see so many of them came to Mac. So many of the things, there's a new shortcut on Mac for you to take a screenshot and then Apple Visual Intelligence will access it. So also the Siri, sort of the accessing Siri from your Mac, much easier. So all of that's great. I was going to say I wanted to give also a shout out to the fact that we talked about other models on Mac, you can use still things like LM Studio. It's funny folks from LM Studio. We're here at WWDC this week with LM Studio. You can download other models. You can download Gemma. You can download GPT-OSS. That's OpenAI's Open model. Kimi, you know, Quinn, some of the Japanese models, DeepSeek, of course, NVIDIA Nematron. You can download those models locally on your Mac now. And you can essentially run them for free, you know, because you don't have to pay for inference on it. This is very nerdy. I was going to say, I feel like this is the nerd segment. Yeah, no, no, not even that. I feel like it's funny because we'll get into it because, oh, actually, I could just, this is a perfect segment. But it really.
**[00:39:59] Sabrina Ortiz:** And to my question for you, it's like, my favorite thing about Apple is that I think Apple understands a broad, the most general population of users and knows how to serve them with what they need and do it well and simply. So I loved that there was no mention of agents at all. I loved that Apple completely said, you know what, this is really trendy buzzword. And we're actually going to take the path less taken, the road less taken. And we're not going to do what every other company is doing to a nauseating point. There's so many of these developer conferences that all of us will look at each other and go, let's take, like, let's play a new game every time they say, you know, agents. Let's count. Or like, if we took a shot, we would die because there's so much mention of agents, right? I loved it. And you had a bit of a different take. And I think, like, and this ties into what you were just saying is like, I wonder, you could answer first why you were, of course, disappointed that agents were mentioned. But also, like, do you find that Apple needs to cater to these, like, to these really invested into the AI space tech people? Because I feel like I actually love that I think Apple doesn't need to. Other people are doing it and tech people want to. They could find it, like, you just said, like, Claude Code users, all these people are still using Apple products in their own way. Yep. But I don't think Apple needs to take charge of that. Do you think they do?
**[00:41:34] Jason Hiner:** Ooh, it's such a good one. You know, and, boy, agents, yeah, so I have a hot take on that one, for sure. So I think Apple does because, and especially at a conference like this, this is developers, right? It's builders. And that is one of the things that is feeding the bigger Apple ecosystem. And the fact that so many of these products, these AI products, are being built on Apple products, you know, the AI revolution is being built on Mac, you know, largely. Claude Code, right? It's running on Mac Minis, perplexity computers, running on Mac Minis, Mac Studios, all of these things. You've written about this. Mac Minis, or there's a shortage, right? Yeah, that's why there's this, you know, it's a four to five month wait to get a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio right now because all the people who are doing these personal AI agents, they want to run their stuff on that. There's some other reasons to you. There's some memory shortages. There's some supply chain problems in the industry right now, all of that. But that feeds into people being more, the people who are building these products being invested in the Apple ecosystem, and so because of that, you know, they're building for Apple ecosystem first, that eventually translates to what you're talking about, which is like people not having to care about AI, but they just want smart features that are going to do cool stuff for them and help them work better and, you know, be able to live life and not be focused on the technology. That's big. So agents, you know, it is funny, like, this whole past two months, you know, it's conferences and tech conferences, and every event is all about agents to your point to it, to a Nazi point. It's all done. Nice week. I'll be at another event in San Francisco and it's all going to be about agents 100%. I do feel that the biggest miss this week was Apple not talking about an agent strategy because I know you have a different, much different take on this because once you can get to where AI is not just, it's again, AI escaping the chat bot. I just don't think people want to be in chat bots all day doing stuff. We agree on that part, but where you can give AI a goal, the thing about agents is, and there was some agent stuff. We've mentioned a little bit about it. We can talk about shortcuts, shortcuts. You can essentially go and just tell it short, shortcuts is the thing that builds automations for you that can work across iPhone, Mac, iPad, other things. You can now go to shortcuts and just tell it, like, make this shortcut, this automation for me. You can now figure out and do it, right? That's much more like agents, but agents are a step further where agents are like, go and do this for me. Go and figure out when Sabrina and I have an opening in two weeks so that we can do a briefing with Apple on Private Cloud Compute because she has that big question about why it's different. Then take this email that was sent to me where they offered us some times and then do all that and then respond back to Apple and give them the times that work with R2 calendars. That kind of thing, I think, is really powerful. When it plays into the personal context really well, it's kind of the next step beyond personal context really taking, creating a win for that, Apple not having that, it feels like it's not keeping up because that, for the rest of 2026, is going to be the biggest topic in the AI industry.
**[00:45:17] Sabrina Ortiz:** You know, you make actually, not actually, of course you did, but you make some really great points about agents and about people wanting to escape a chaplain wanting people to take it a step further. My thing is I truly urge bag and plead companies to stop insulting their users' intelligence, developers' intelligence, anyone in the audience's intelligence by using an overusing terms like "agentic." If you tell me, "Hey, this feature can take action for you with just you saying something and it will figure out how to do the end task." Whether that's to your point, like knowing how to actually schedule the meeting, put the time on your calendar, do the outreach just from me saying, "Hey, let's follow up on that piece that we want to write with Jason." That's great. Tell me that. Tell me that the feature will do that. Tell me that the feature will execute a task that I wanted of just the prompt. Don't need to tell me 3,000 times whether it's agentic or not. You don't need to tell me 3,000 times or not that it is an agent and we especially don't need you to use agentic if it's not actually agentic. That's why I liked Apple's approach because I do think they gave us two agentic features. I do think the extensions one is an agentic feature because you're just saying you're intent and it's figuring out all the different things you need to do. That's ultimately what an agent is. You're not actually saying, "Hey, I want you to go use this model and I want you to go code it using this semantic or whatever. You're just telling it, "Hey, I want this extension. You're going to do it." That's vibe code-y which is agentic in its own way. You mentioned the Shortcuts automation. You say what you want the automation to be and automatically do it. It could be something like, "Hey, check my email, my text, and any other messaging app I use on my Mac and every day give me a digest." I'm not telling exactly how to do it, still figuring it out. It's agentic, absolutely, but Apple didn't have to tell us that. Thank goodness. You trust that I would find the feature compelling and if I want to use it, I will use it. You slapping the agent sticker on it wouldn't make me want to use it anymore or less than if I actually had a use case for it now.
**[00:47:45] Jason Hiner:** I hear you. I think where agents takes it to the next level because maybe you call that calendar automation, maybe you call it something like that, I think the thing with agents is it's about the things that they didn't think of that you could use it for. Give it a goal and let it then figure out something that nobody at Apple thought somebody might be interested in doing. I think that's where agents get powerful and where Apple has the opportunity to play in this is all of that privacy part, you can trust it with more of your data because they're not monetizing your data. They've made the privacy of it and the security of it a feature. I just think Apple can't afford to wait until WWDC 27 to give us an agent strategy.
**[00:48:33] Sabrina Ortiz:** So quick question, again, because you're very much invested in agents in a way that even in my own life, I write about the stuff every day and how many agents do I use every day? Like none, really, but you do. So this makes you an expert in this way. What feature do you have you seen from competitors or a feature that you've seen, you don't have to even name the competitor, a feature that exists out in the ether that you think would have been really valuable. That's agentic for Apple to bring into their ecosystem.
**[00:49:01] Jason Hiner:** Yeah, I would have liked to see Apple do something like cloud co-work, like perplexities, personal computer, like OpenAI Codex.
**[00:49:13] Sabrina Ortiz:** Do you think that their audience would have had a demand for that? Because, for example, I would not touch any of those even if Apple put their wrapper on it.
**[00:49:22] Jason Hiner:** Yeah, I think that if Apple would have called it something like Apple goals where you just type in a goal and say like, here's what I would like to do. Can your AI, can Apple Foundation model, obviously they don't even think about that, but essentially can you just go out and figure out how to do it for me? That would have been killer. I think if they would have done it, whereas I don't know how to do it, I don't know what I want it to go look or what, I don't have any, I just have a goal. I would like to find a way for AI to take, look at Sabrina and I schedule, look at that email that I was sent that offered a briefing, find a time, and just draft me an email, and then all I have to do is hit approve.
**[00:50:07] Sabrina Ortiz:** I like this suggestion because it involves Apple not marketing it at all. As an agent. That's a super agent. They don't have to call it a goal. Right, I think. So, I do like that a lot, my one caveat with that is I appreciate that Apple is at a place where they're not over promising and they're not over committing and they can't actually deliver it. I think, hopefully, I think that when fall comes and we see iOS 27 actually come out, that every feature we've talked about will be shippable and working really well. I don't know if they would have been able to ship that yet.
**[00:50:40] Jason Hiner:** That's the biggest, you're right, that's the biggest argument against doing what I see. Which is like the over promising because you have to do that really well. Some of these ones do it. Also the thing is you have to have some patient with it because it doesn't always work and sometimes it burns up a bunch of your tokens and it doesn't work. Now in Apple's case, it can run it on local models and it would be okay. All right, you got to ask me the big question about agents which you wanted, which is good.
**[00:51:03] Sabrina Ortiz:** I'm so excited. I love your perspective, by the way, so this is great.
**[00:51:06] Jason Hiner:** I've got my big question that I want to ask you, which is this thing that we've talked about. Only 16% of the population, according to research, uses AI regularly today, that's worldwide. Most of the people you and I know, they don't use it. They often don't want to use it. They're either afraid of it. They've heard all the, they're like, if the data centers are driving my power bills up, even if that's not true, it's taking too much water. It's going to take my job, like the broad narrative about AI in the world, the AI industry is losing, right? So I want to ask you, of what you saw this week from Apple, is it going to convince people that you know who aren't in AI, that aren't media, that don't use these things today, is it going to convince any of them to use it? Will they have to think about it as an AI? Will they just think like, oh, this is a cool feature? Will this bring AI to more people that you know personally?
**[00:52:17] Sabrina Ortiz:** I always say that I love my friends because they're all such, my friends, my immediate friend group, it's such a diverse group of people, we have teachers, we have a doctor, we have an insurance guy, so the most normal group of people, and they humble me because they actually don't care about anything that I'm really covering or writing about, or like passionate about nerdy about in the AI space. So I do think that Apple will get to all of them. They're all actually also iPhone users, which happens to be a Gen Z thing, you know, in the US especially, a very big thing. So I do think that they will take advantage of the Apple features, the new ones, the iOS 27, Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features, but I think they will take advantage of them because they won't even know it's AI. I think they're going to be like, oh, look, cool, I took this photo, oh, let me like extend the background and not think twice in a million years, they'll use it the same way they use the crop tool, you know, like, it's not AI, it's just making my photo better. So I think that's how they'll approach that. I think Apple again did really good things we haven't talked about, like the suggestions the improved suggestions in AI message where like if you kind of mentioned like you want to send a photo, it could automatically populate it for you or guide you in that way. That's the way that I think most people or at least the people I know will be taking advantage of features, but will they? Absolutely. I think finally we've reached a point within the Apple ecosystem where they will want to use these features unknowingly but because Apple did such a good job baking them in.
**[00:53:47] Jason Hiner:** Will they use Siri? Will they, you know, have they been trained not to use Siri? Do you think the normal folks in your life will start to use Siri?
**[00:53:55] Sabrina Ortiz:** I love that question because I think the only reason I stopped using Siri was because I'm in this space and I'm like, well, I love ChatGPT voice, you know, like this is so much better. But quite frankly, whenever I have a question, my roommate will always be like, okay, let's talk to Siri and like whip out his phone and just like talk to Siri and I'm like, what? Like what? Because now it's going to be much better. But in the past, you know, like it was lapped by Gemini or by a ChatGPT voice so I was like, why are you doing that? You know? And it would always surprise me. But my friends never stopped using because they didn't know better, you know, than to stop. So I think if anything, they were going to be in for like the upgrade of their life and they're going to be super happy, but they'll absolutely still use it.
**[00:54:35] Jason Hiner:** Okay. All right. Very good. We're just going to turn around on, there were some things, some platform updates that Apple did here that weren't necessarily AI, but there were some interesting, some interesting things. AirDrop, right? We were both like, yes, thank you. Let's make that work. Let's be, let's have AirDrop do a thing. So it's basically faster and more efficient.
**[00:55:00] Sabrina Ortiz:** It should be quicker. It works better. Yeah, quicker for you to see like, okay, Jason's iPhone come up quicker for me to click in for the actual send and a lot of the platform updates were just based on speed and efficiency and things that you wouldn't maybe consciously think that need to be improved. But then once they are improved, you're like, oh, yeah, like AirDrop apps opening. Now the apps are supposed to be opening and running much quicker. There was some other stuff.
**[00:55:25] Jason Hiner:** Quality of life stuff. Yeah. So I actually loved them. So Apple Vision Pro. Shout out. You know, if you've tried Apple Vision Pro or done a demo, you've seen one of the coolest things, actually one of my favorite things is the environments, like you can just Apple Vision Pro on and sit on top of a mountain in Hawaii, like amazing, right? You can sit in the snow in Yosemite. So cool. Well now, but there were only a few. There were only a handful. Now you can take your own panoramas that you shot. So in your favorite places, you go on vacation, you're like, I love this place. Take a panorama, you can turn it into an environment in Apple Vision Pro and essentially go back there to that place that you've been. I think that is so amazing. Not worth you spending $3,500 to get a Vision Pro to be clear, but if you already have one, if you have a friend or family member that has one, you could like shoot it, you could send them that panorama and then you can go and revisit that really cool place.
**[00:56:23] Sabrina Ortiz:** For me, it's almost like motivation to take more panoramas because I don't have a Vision Pro right now, but I do think I'm also like where AI were wearable girly. So I do think at one point, like Vision Pro will converge with the smart glasses space and that's when I will enter the Vision Pro scene, but it's a good reminder for me to start taking this panorama. So if I ever do make the pivot, if I ever do make the move, then I have them all to actually experience it then. Because I do think at one point, it'll become somewhat mainstream, but that's again, conversation for a different day. I'm just a smart glasses nerd. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
**[00:56:55] Jason Hiner:** I loved that one. And then there's some other stuff coming with, we talked about Siri, the new Siri is actually coming to Vision Pro. As a matter of fact, it shows up as a little icon and all you have to do is you look at it with your eyes and it pops up, that's cool. And then it's also coming to watch as well. And so that will be pretty cool. The only challenge with that is it only comes to the last like three generations because it needs more oomph. So keep that in mind. How about the huge feature that's been making waves all over socials?
**[00:57:28] Sabrina Ortiz:** And even in the journey, you know, you heard a lot of people like the AirPods EQ feature.
**[00:57:34] Jason Hiner:** AirPods EQ, you know, you've never been able to do the traditional EQ in AirPods. And yeah, they dropped that one out of nowhere. Now AirPods are getting the opportunity for you to adjust to the EQ, which is pretty cool. A lot of real audio nerds and people who love audio have been wanting this for a long time, for sure. Yeah, there's a ton, like an endless amount of platform updates of this nature.
**[00:58:04] Sabrina Ortiz:** We can link them below if you want to take a look. But of course, our focus was AI and hey, Apple delivered, which in itself is really exciting. You know, we were anticipating and two years in the work, we were covering it and talking about it two years ago, and now we finally get to see it come to fruition. Very solid.
**[00:58:22] Jason Hiner:** We saw a lot of demos this week of the features actually working. So they did live demos on stage in the press briefing afterwards. They did live demos with us in a lot of one-on-ones that we've shared on social media already. Yeah, some you can see there. We'll have more. We'd love to hear from you. What are the things that you were most interested in? What's the things that you want to see? How are they going to work? How are they going to really play out? We've both downloaded the beta. The betas, we're going to be working on them over the summer. Remember that all of these features don't come out until the fall when the new products are released, especially the new iPhone, then the software will drop. But the betas will be going on over the summer. The public betas, we encourage you not to install them on your device, especially iPhone. Don't install them on the betas, the developer betas on your devices. Because they tend to be buggy and crash, because it's just the first beta, so it's cooking. It's fresh out of the oven. Yeah. Like, cook more. Yes. And then the public betas will come in July. Even those, I wouldn't install them on your regular device unless you love sort of bungee jumping and living dangerously, but they will come in the fall. If you have questions about what are the things you'd like us to test? What are the things you'd like to know more about? I guess a chat about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to do it. You can also find, we're very easy to find on social media. You can tag us or respond or ask your questions to this video. You know, on the YouTube version of this video, you can go ahead and drop your questions
**[00:59:57] Sabrina Ortiz:** in there.
**[00:59:58] Jason Hiner:** And otherwise, you know, offer us a like and a subscribe and thanks for the time. And we're happy to talk more about this stuff all summer.
**[01:00:05] Sabrina Ortiz:** Yeah. Thank you all for tuning in. And thank you, Jason, for great combo.
**[01:00:08] Jason Hiner:** Thank you.
**[01:00:09] Sabrina Ortiz:** See you in the next episode. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.