Apple

When Apple created the Dynamic Island to make the notch on the iPhone 14 Pro display useful, it was largely mocked by Android fans, but I instantly fell in love with Apple’s animation work. Apple’s attention to detail with animations plays a big part in making iOS feel silky smooth to use, and now the new iOS 18 animation for Siri is giving me Dynamic Island vibes.

Riding a valuation pumped up by generative AI and its chips that power many of the tools, Nvidia’s market cap has passed not only Apple but now Microsoft, too, at more than $3.3 trillion, as reported by Bloomberg.

The markets are still open, but the rise has been fast — Nvidia shares are up 160 percent in 2024, passing $2 trillion in February.

Beats just posted a teaser featuring LeBron James and the heavily leaked Beats Pill refresh. More information is coming June 25th, apparently.

RCS isn’t in the current iOS 18 developer beta but that hasn’t stopped one enterprising tinkerer from getting it working. It’s early days so what we’re seeing now likely isn’t final, but file transfers and read receipts appear to be operational. Oh, and those bubbles are definitely still green, but we knew that would be the case.

John Giannandrea, Apple’s AI chief, speaking at John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2024:

The inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. So it’s a combination of bandwidth in the device, it’s the size of the ANE [Apple Neural Engine], it’s the oomph in the device to actually do these models fast enough to be useful.

You could in theory run these models on a very old device. but it would be so slow it would not be useful.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing boss, also pushed back on the idea that Apple Intelligence is a scheme to sell new iPhones. “Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do recent iPads and Macs, too.”

Previously an experimental feature, WebXR support is on by default for Vision Pro beta testers, RoadtoVR wrote last week. The open standard allows for VR and AR experiences on the web, such as those listed on this GitHub page.

However, the outlet writes that AR experiences do not seem to work quite yet, limiting it to fully-VR ones for now.

As seen in MacRumors, iOS 18 beta testers can set a new Siri wake word using Vocal Shortcuts, a new accessibility feature. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Vocal Shortcuts > Set Up Vocal Shortcuts, then find and tap “Siri” to try it.

It won’t work with HomePods. And your iPhone won’t acknowledge it unless you pause after saying the word. That’s good; otherwise, you learn just how frequently you say a word like “computer.”

Apple’s long-included macOS Chess game has a new look in the first macOS Sequoia beta.

Shiny as it is, it’s missing things like the “Grass” board and the style picker for the pieces, 9to5Mac writes. Here’s the current version (using “Fur” pieces on the Grass board, of course) compared to a screenshot posted to Reddit of its coming replacement.

So Jon Stewart said of TV network deals while talking to Matt Belloni on his The Town podcast about his split from Apple TV Plus.

9to5Mac highlighted some of his statements, like that he didn’t view Apple limiting his show’s content as censorship. Head to the link below to hear the whole interview.

The Siri face no longer exists, at least in the watchOS 11 developer beta, according to AppleInsider. If it’s gone in the release version this fall, that may be the first watchface ever retired, the story notes.

The Siri face debuted with the Apple Watch series 3. Its big idea was that it would surface info as you need it, but new Smart Stack features may make it redundant.

EU regulators are preparing to charge Apple over claims it’s stifling competition by charging developers to link users to outside purchases, according to The Financial Times. The decision is expected in the coming weeks and would mark the first time the EU has charged a company under the newly-imposed Digital Markets Act.