“Golden Gate”? That’s the lamest name for a macOS release ever IMO.
Edit: As expected, half the page on Apple’s website talks about AI with only vague things about performance and UI improvements. I’ll be staying on Tahoe for now.
I’ll lift a comment I posted elsewhere on the topic of the name.
From a 9to5mac article on the topic:
Breaking with tradition, Apple didn’t name macOS 27 after a national park, lake, or other natural landmark. Instead, this year’s release is named after San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge.
Typical of 9to5mac “reporting.” The Golden Gate is a natural landmark, it’s the strait between San Francisco and Marin which the famous bridge spans. Nowhere in the OS release even says the word bridge.
Fun fact. While it might seem safe to assume the “gold” in Golden Gate refers to the gold discovery about 100 miles upriver that started the California gold rush, it was in fact named the Golden Gate prior to the gold discovery. John C. Fremont (my favorite early Californian) named it such because of the color of the hillsides when he first arrived.
There is on device AI in the Apple ecosystem. Many of the AI features that they announced will run locally (assuming hardware requirements are met). Things like Spatial Reframing will touch the cloud (via private compute) though. Other than that, Apple has an entire entry point for running AI close to the metal via MLX. It is kind of their entire angle at this point given their inability to create a competitive compelling AI product of their own. They appear to be taking on the role of “platform” once again.
Yeah also Prism - hello? Over 10 years ago we discovered that US can just enter any US based company’s server and read anything they want unless it’s directly encrypted but for these tools to function they have to decrypt data server side so LLMs can read the contents. Which means your data is not private in any way shape or form, not from Apple and not from US and not from anything in-between.
These claims by Apple are absolutely meaningless smoke for the ignorant who just follow tech buzzwords.
Since Private Cloud Compute needs to be able to access the data in the user’s request to allow a large foundation model to fulfill it, complete end-to-end encryption is not an option. Instead, the PCC compute node must have technical enforcement for the privacy of user data during processing, and must be incapable of retaining user data after its duty cycle is complete.
We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about the way it handles user data:
A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to perform the operations requested by the user.
User data stays on the PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request, and no user data is retained in any form after the response is returned.
User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with administrative access to the production service or hardware.
And what is that supposed to guarantee? Who ever owns the hardware of unencrypted data owns it. There’s no way to pass tokens to LLM without unencrypting the content. Whatever path is made to obfuscation is fundamentally incapable of security.
The WWDC presentation yesterday was hilarious. Almost everything they said about the UI could be boiled down to: “We’re undoing some of the incredibly bad decisions we made last year. Not all of them, but some of the big ones!”
They then went on to demo the new improved Siri, and as someone who doesn’t use Siri, all I could think was “wait…Siri couldn’t do this 10 years ago?!”
I’d hope that’s the case, and I hope it’s geared towards base M1s and such as they need it the most. Maybe they’re improving RAM management to improve performance on the Neo.
“Golden Gate”? That’s the lamest name for a macOS release ever IMO.
Edit: As expected, half the page on Apple’s website talks about AI with only vague things about performance and UI improvements. I’ll be staying on Tahoe for now.
I’ll lift a comment I posted elsewhere on the topic of the name.
From a 9to5mac article on the topic:
Typical of 9to5mac “reporting.” The Golden Gate is a natural landmark, it’s the strait between San Francisco and Marin which the famous bridge spans. Nowhere in the OS release even says the word bridge.
Fun fact. While it might seem safe to assume the “gold” in Golden Gate refers to the gold discovery about 100 miles upriver that started the California gold rush, it was in fact named the Golden Gate prior to the gold discovery. John C. Fremont (my favorite early Californian) named it such because of the color of the hillsides when he first arrived.
While I loathe AI bullshit, Apple is at least prioritizing local, on-device AI and end-to-end encryption with their cloud AI services.
I’ll still be passing on any of this bullshit, but I appreciate that they tried to make a less problematic version.
There’s no on device AI in Apple land - what are you talking about?
Also literally everything is end to end encrypted in this niche, that’s what s in https stands for.
There is on device AI in the Apple ecosystem. Many of the AI features that they announced will run locally (assuming hardware requirements are met). Things like Spatial Reframing will touch the cloud (via private compute) though. Other than that, Apple has an entire entry point for running AI close to the metal via MLX. It is kind of their entire angle at this point given their inability to create a competitive compelling AI product of their own. They appear to be taking on the role of “platform” once again.
What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?
Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.
It’s not E2EE that matters most, but Apple’s Private Compute
Thank you, this is exactly true.
Most internet things are E2EE nowadays, but it matters not when the other end is AWS, Google, Cloudflare, or OpenAI.
Supposedly Apple claims to encrypt it at rest and in transit.
But data goes to the mothership anyway.
‘Bad actors’ can’t read your chatgpt conversations either, but OpenAI still does and can sell it.
Apple may better than Google, but I still don’t want my data there.
Yeah also Prism - hello? Over 10 years ago we discovered that US can just enter any US based company’s server and read anything they want unless it’s directly encrypted but for these tools to function they have to decrypt data server side so LLMs can read the contents. Which means your data is not private in any way shape or form, not from Apple and not from US and not from anything in-between.
These claims by Apple are absolutely meaningless smoke for the ignorant who just follow tech buzzwords.
Apple addressed that exact issue:
And what is that supposed to guarantee? Who ever owns the hardware of unencrypted data owns it. There’s no way to pass tokens to LLM without unencrypting the content. Whatever path is made to obfuscation is fundamentally incapable of security.
The WWDC presentation yesterday was hilarious. Almost everything they said about the UI could be boiled down to: “We’re undoing some of the incredibly bad decisions we made last year. Not all of them, but some of the big ones!”
They then went on to demo the new improved Siri, and as someone who doesn’t use Siri, all I could think was “wait…Siri couldn’t do this 10 years ago?!”
What a sad state of affairs.
It was incredibly tonedeaf. AI is not what people want, Tim.
More like ‘golden shower’
It looks to me like the main draw is performance optimization especially on older devices, which is a fantastic thing for them to focus on IMO.
For that reason, I wished they gave it a “Snow Leopard”-esque name. I’d have liked to see Lake Tahoe.
I’d hope that’s the case, and I hope it’s geared towards base M1s and such as they need it the most. Maybe they’re improving RAM management to improve performance on the Neo.