Mark Gurman, leaker extraordinaire, reporting for Bloomberg:

At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, Apple will announce plans to deeply integrate AI into its major apps and features — all while reiterating a commitment to privacy and security.

The company’s new AI system will be called Apple Intelligence, and it will come to new versions of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems, according to people familiar with the plans. There also will be a partnership with OpenAI that powers a ChatGPT-like chatbot.

As John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball, wrote on Threads, I’m keen to see where this artificial intelligence chatbot will be placed within the operating systems. I speculated in May that the partnership might simply consist of a pre-installed ChatGPT app, but the more that I hear about the deal, I think it’ll be more integrated within iOS. I don’t think it’ll be a part of Siri, however — Apple won’t want to destroy its own brand just to replace it with OpenAI’s chatbot. This is a curious aspect of the deal with OpenAI though because there aren’t that many places I’d want an AI chatbot except in an app or on the web, and OpenAI already has both of those cases covered by itself. My final long-shot guess is that it’s built into Spotlight or the URL field in Safari, which already acts as a pseudo-search engine.

“Apple Intelligence,” as off-putting as the name may sound, is quite clever. Apple knows that people will still call it “AI,” so it might as well be a clever play on words. What’s more noteworthy is that Apple will presumably not be renaming Siri entirely — and neither will it use the Siri name for its AI products. Apple Intelligence is separate from Siri, yet Siri uses Apple Intelligence to answer questions. I assume Apple will market the new version of Siri The Information leaked in May as “Siri powered by Apple Intelligence” because it does not want to destroy the fame of Siri — it just wants to improve it. Confusingly, Siri has always been used as a general moniker for Apple’s machine learning technology, like Siri Suggestions, which don’t even involve the voice assistant at all, which makes the situation all the more peculiar. Here’s how I’d draw the chart: Siri is machine learning and Apple Intelligence is generative artificial intelligence — Siri uses Apple Intelligence but Apple Intelligence doesn’t do the converse. Apple Intelligence is the consumer name for Ajax.

The new capabilities will be opt-in, meaning Apple won’t make users adopt them if they don’t want to. The company will also position them as a beta version. The processing requirements of AI will mean that users need an iPhone 15 Pro or one of the models coming out this year. If they’re using iPads or Macs, they’ll need models with an M1 chip at least.

I hope this will calm the inevitable furor from conservative technology users such as those who still willingly use Mastodon as their primary social network. Microsoft’s new Recall feature, available on its new Copilot+ PCs, has sparked anger from the community over how the feature is enabled by default on all compatible machines, so Apple’s choice to label Apple Intelligence as a beta and have it disabled by default is a good choice. (Microsoft said it would make the feature opt-in on Friday.) I would also guess that Apple will advertise the AI features somewhere in the operating system, such as when setting up a new device for the first time, because they’re the new shiny highlights of Monday’s developer conference. Apple doesn’t want to hide them, it just wants to make them easy to ignore.

The processing requirements are also understandable, and I don’t think anyone was seriously holding out hope that Intel Macs from five years ago would be able to run the new AI features. I’m even surprised M1 Macs are supported. I think macOS 15 — the upcoming version — will finally begin to sunset Intel Macs, though I don’t think they’ll lose support entirely until next year. On the iPhone side, I can already see headlines and posts on social media about how Apple is “ripping off” its consumers by requiring the latest-generation iPhones to run the new features, but I truly do think the A17 Pro is required to run large language models — the technology that powers generative AI — on-device due to memory limitations.

Xcode, Apple’s software for developing apps, is getting a big AI infusion too. It will work similarly to Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub Copilot, which can complete code for programmers automatically. Though Apple has already been using this new developer tool internally, it’s unlikely to release it in its full form to third-party developers until next year.

This is extremely exciting, though I also would like some kind of chatbot interface, perhaps developed by OpenAI, that explains and elaborates on Apple’s Swift and SwiftUI developer documentation. Beta versions of Apple’s latest software development kits are often under-documented and a chatbot could prove quite useful.

The Settings app, which has remained generally unchanged since the first version of the iPhone, is getting updated on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS with a focus on improved navigation, better organization, and more reliable search.

The System Settings app on macOS is one of the worst pieces of software Apple has ever produced, and it is shameful that it took the company two years to rectify it. “Better organization” might be helpful, but there are also many interface tweaks that must be made to SwiftUI on the Mac to make the app feel more intuitive. For example, when typing in a text field in System Settings in English, a left-to-right language, the field is aligned to the right. How is that acceptable? The entire app needs a gut-and-redo with a focus on a normal organizational structure, less modality, and customizable window sizes.

Apple is launching a Passwords app for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 that will offer an alternative to the 1Password and LastPass services. This will essentially be an app version of the company’s long-existing iCloud Keychain feature, which is currently hidden in the Settings app.

At this point, I’m desperate to switch away from 1Password, so I’m excited to see what Apple has created here.