Why Apple’s earnings call gives us hope for more exciting new devices

Next year: 96 27K HPFZ Pro videos, simultaneously.

But based on what Tim Cook said in Apple’s earnings call on Friday morning, we’re hopeful next week’s briefings, expected to be about the iPad Pro, will be a little different. Or, if not next week’s briefing, then the briefings after that.

(Indeed, Apple is touting next week’s launch event as “different”, though I’m sure they don’t mean that word in the same sense. It will be different in the sense it’s all filmed with iPads, or something nifty like that, not in the sense that it will finally be about new capabilities that are meaningful to ordinary people.)

Mr Cook said: “We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create.”

If there’s one thing that’s finally capable of actually taking advantage of the compute power Apple has in its Apple Silicon chips, it’s through on-board generative artificial intelligence. Mr Cook does seem to be suggesting that at least some of Apple’s forthcoming generative AI services will be running locally, on our iPhones and iPads, rather than in the cloud.

Google is doing the same, running Gemini Nano on its Pixel phones. Samsung is doing the same, running Galaxy AI on its high-end phones. It’s almost certain Apple will do the same, if not starting from next week’s expected iPad launch then certainly starting from its Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Generative AI is a massive resource hog that can eat up your device’s entire Neural Processing Unit (NPU), its entire Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and a good chunk of its Central Processing Unit (CPU) if you let it.

It will open up huge new vistas of use cases for Apple to get people excited about, with meaningful improvements from year to year as the NPUs, GPUs and CPUs get better.

Here in the Digital Life Labs, we’d like to see generative AI thrown at developer tools, to accurately autocomplete software code. Others might want generative AI thrown at spreadsheets, to take the grunt work out of creating charts. There’s no end to the use cases Apple could come up with as it tries to sell us hardware upgrades.

But, for the first time in as long as I can remember, these use cases should be different. They should be uses that many of us, maybe even most of us, actually want.