Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 — powers the new AirTag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic, visual, and audio feedback, Precision Finding guides users to their lost items from up to 50 percent farther away than the previous generation.
Solid update – nothing especially new, just better.
Macworld has learned that the company has begun rolling out two new AI-powered apps more broadly to employees in its offices. Both tools are designed for employees to not only test AI capabilities in real-world scenarios, a source said, but also integrate them into their workflow and even help improve Apple Intelligence.
[…]
The first app, called Enchanté, functions as an internal ChatGPT-like assistant for employees. The app can be used to assist employees with ideas, development, proofreading, and even general knowledge answers. The interface looks quite similar to what you see in the ChatGPT app for macOS.
And:
The second internal app, known as Enterprise Assistant, is far more specialized. Built entirely around Apple’s internal large language models (LLMs), Enterprise Assistant acts as a centralized knowledge hub for corporate employees.
Apple Inc. plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company’s first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google.
The chatbot — code-named Campos — will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface, according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now, by speaking the “Siri” command or holding down the side button on their iPhone or iPad.
More details on the upcoming chatbot version of Siri.
From Mark Gurman, quoted by Jason Snell on Six Colors:
The previously promised, non-chatbot update to Siri — retaining the current interface — is planned for iOS 26.4, due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It also will be better at searching the web.
And:
The chatbot capabilities will come later in the year, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The company aims to unveil that technology in June at its Worldwide Developers Conference and release it in September.
Jason speculates on the policy shift from Apple that would need to occur for these to run on Google’s servers too.
“Put in the work. Staying strong this year with Kirsty Godso, whose training philosophy is all about showing up, staying consistent, and moving with purpose.”
Kirsty Godso is a health and workout influencer, who’s known for being a Nike Master Trainer, as well as for training celebrities.
I’ve been using my PowerBeats Pro as my daily drivers and love them (ever since my AirPods Pro 2 randomly stopped charging a few months ago 😕).
All of this time passing means one thing: a lot more people have an Apple Intelligence-capable device.
Everyone who bought any iPhone 16 or iPhone 17 model at all in the past two years (plus anyone who already had an iPhone 15 Pro), will be able to use Apple Intelligence.
*Apple engineer taking this to their boss*: “You see? It’s actually a good thing we were so late.”1
We already knew some of the features we could expect from AI Siri thanks to the announcements at WWDC 2024 and a now-deleted iPhone 16 ad – and the launch of Gemini Personal Intelligence has now effectively provided a working preview […]
Google yesterday launched a beta version of what it calls Personal Intelligence. The headline feature here is Gemini’s ability to use a complex mix of sources to generate responses, including personalized information pulled from a number of the Google apps and services people use.
“Personal Intelligence can retrieve specific details from text, photos, or videos in your Google apps to customize Gemini responses. This includes Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, etc), Google Photos, your YouTube watch history, and of all of the various Google search services you’ve used (Search, Shopping, News, Maps, Google Flights, and Hotels).”
In the study titled MANZANO: A Simple and Scalable Unified Multimodal Model with a Hybrid Vision Tokenizer, a team of nearly 30 Apple researchers details a novel unified approach that enables both image understanding and text-to-image generation in a single multimodal model.
Mendes gives a detailed explanation of the paper’s results – Apple’s image generation is “comparable” to GPT-4o in some tests, for example:
As a result of this approach, “Manzano handles counterintuitive, physics-defying prompts (e.g., ‘The bird is flying below the elephant’) comparably to GPT-4o and Nano Banana,” the researchers say.
We can basically see here that Apple’s models are a year behind where they want to be – but potentially catching up thanks to new research.
Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world.
The apps included with Apple Creator Studio for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity give modern creators the features and capabilities they need to experience the joy of editing and tailoring their content while realizing their artistic vision.
Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.
Since joining Apple in 2018, Giannandrea has played a key role in the company’s AI and machine learning strategy, building a world-class team and leading them to develop and deploy critical AI technologies. This team is currently responsible for Apple Foundation Models, Search and Knowledge, Machine Learning Research, and AI Infrastructure.
Subramanya brings a wealth of experience to Apple, having most recently served as corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft, and previously spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Google’s Gemini Assistant prior to his departure. His deep expertise in both AI and ML research and in integrating that research into products and features will be important to Apple’s ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features.
“We are thankful for the role John played in building and advancing our AI work, helping Apple continue to innovate and enrich the lives of our users,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig’s leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple. In addition to growing his leadership team and AI responsibilities with Amar’s joining, Craig has been instrumental in driving our AI efforts, including overseeing our work to bring a more personalized Siri to users next year.”
These leadership moves will help Apple continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible. With Giannandrea’s contributions as a foundation, Federighi’s expanded oversight and Subramanya’s deep expertise guiding the next generation of AI technologies, Apple is poised to accelerate its work in delivering intelligent, trusted, and profoundly personal experiences. This moment marks an exciting new chapter as Apple strengthens its commitment to shaping the future of AI for users everywhere.
Huge transition for Apple, which has been bleeding AI researchers for months.
“The Home Screen team is responsible for many of the iconic system experiences on Apple devices.
The Team is responsible for the Home Screen, Control Center, Status Bar, Volume HUD and various other components on iOS and iPadOS.
As an engineer on the Home Screen team, your responsibilities will range from prototyping new user interface paradigms and implementing new features to defining API, fixing bugs, and improving performance.
You should have an excellent understanding of software design, good debugging skills and an eagerness to work hard and learn a lot.
You should have an eye for detail and a feel for making user interactions feel fluid and fun.
As our team works cross-functionally with many other groups across Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering and Design, you should have a good understanding of systems and excellent communication and collaboration skills!”
Very intriguing – I’d love to see things evolve for the future.
If this sounds like you and you’re qualified, please join Apple and set us up for the next generation of the Home Screen experience 🙏.
When sharing from my blog, I’ve been having the tiniest problem for ages – for about one out of every ten posts, the images from my blog will simply not show up on Twitter, like the image below:
Thankfully blogger Deepak shared this solution on his site:
I discovered that adding a random query parameter at the end of the URL, that you’re going to share on X, works perfectly. X treats this as a new URL and re-fetches the card image. For example, you can add something like ?test=1 like below example, or whatever random query parameter you like. And then share this URL on X.
But don’t worry, adding the query parameter isn’t going to break the URL or affect the content shown on the page. It’s perfectly safe to use this.
THANK GOD. After a bit of testing, I’m going with ?refresh=true1 at the end of blog post URLs that are being troublesome – makes sense to me, and works well.
I’ve integrated the URL pattern into the shortcut from the header image – coming soon for members (or, you can just build it yourself from the photo). ↩
Naturally, I want to highlight the section on their new Shortcuts actions and Spotlight for Mac support in particular:
App Intents
We revamped our integration with Spotlight and the Shortcuts app. On macOS 26, actions can now be triggered directly from Spotlight. New actions include:
“Find Sheet” and “Find Group”, with configurable filters.
“Import File”, to convert any given text file into a sheet.
“Search in Ulysses”, to open the in-app search with a pre-defined search term.
Also:
Copy for Substack and Basecamp
You can now copy your texts for use on Substack and Basecamp.
Most formatting is supported; some limitations apply (images won’t work).
On Substack, we even support buttons (via raw source) and Spotify previews (via text links).
This will be good for my newsletter, which I don’t want to write within the Substack browser – I prefer a dedicated editor experience like Ulysses.
Today, my standing desk started to make a clicking sound and only showed zeroes on the display. It wouldn’t raise, but it would move down – there was clearly nothing wrong with the motor, but I didn’t want to continue lowering it in case it wouldn’t raise back up. While looking for replacements, I thankfully found this video that explains what to do – reset the motors:
If your desk loses power, it also loses its memory – which means it no longer remembers which position it is in. Therefore, your desk needs to find a reference point – that being the lowest position.
Pretty simple, but something I hadn’t run into before – I was not happy with the idea that I’d have to replace the entire controller for ~$400.
The video also highlights the importance of moving anything out of the way too – standing desk motors are powerful and won’t stop if something is in the way. I’ve had my desk lift itself off the ground because it caught on the drawers nearby, which could have been more serious if my desk was fully automated1.
Stephen Robles has 17 new real-life use cases for putting the Use Model action for Apple Intelligence to work in Shortcuts:
18 NEW Apple Intelligence Shortcuts, with AI-generated packing lists, dynamic birthday texts, smart “remember anything” to Notes, Apple Music automations, and more!
My @interaction Poke shortcut for Apple Watch Ultra’s action button.
Dictate Text + Send Message – nice & simple, and a neat use of the Action Button (on either iPhone or Apple Watch).
For anyone who doesn’t know, Poke is “your proactive AI assistant that turns your emails into action” and is known on X for their AI’s cheeky-but-well-done personality as well as smooth integrations.
There are new Find Conversation and Find Messages actions for Shortcuts that I haven’t seen anyone play with yet – those could be an interesting addition to this workflow.
Also the Messages automation could be fun – you could flash the lights when you get a Poke message, for example.1
It’s the idea that there’s a personal data trove that you have. And then you’re asking the model to query the contents. […] You know about all this stuff, now do stuff with it.
And if you can do that on device, it’s really powerful. [I]t’s hard to do that in the cloud because you would actually need to upload it to Private Cloud Compute. And that’s a lot of data. So what you want is some parsing to happen on device.
But that’s the dream, right? Is that your phone knows about your stuff and then the LLM that’s running can make uh distinctions based on your stuff.
And ideally the model could potentially, and I know this is wild, I don’t think they’ve talked about it, but ideally the model could query your personal context, get a bunch of related data out, and then send that in a query to the private cloud and have it process it, right? You could have a kind of cherry picking your personal data model on device that then kicks it to the more powerful model to process it and intuit things about it.
There’s lots of ways you could do this. It’s a great idea. It was a great idea in 2024 when they showed it, but they got to do it – is the challenge there.
In reply to Jason, cohost Myke Hurley said the following:
So, I’m just going to make a little prediction. These[…] things that I’ve spoken about, we will see iOS 27 before [they] ship.
I believe they will have stuff – like, I believe they will have [releases] in the spring like it has been rumored, but I don’t think all of these things.
I think particularly the Personal Context thing… we may never see that.
For what it’s worth Apple has done this and named it Queries. Shortcuts users might better understand this as the Find actions, which allow actions to find and filter data from apps before using it in their shortcuts.
Introduced for developers alongside the App Intents API in 2022, Queries are how intents/actions retrieve entities/data from apps. In their most recent session “Get to know App Intents” from 2025, they explicitly say the following – a phrase that caught my attention in regards to the “new Siri” we’ve been waiting for:
Queries are the way the system can reason about my entities
Apple has also been building out their ability to index and query these entities through their Spotlight support, as well as now Visual Intelligence.
The 3D Marvel films on the AVP look better than anyone has ever seen them before. The capabilities of the VisionPro are really unique and we remastered all the films for this format.
And:
Our goal was to match the color and brightness of the 2D HDR versions but for 3D. The Vision Pro delivers basically perfect stereo contrast so no ghosting, HDR color, UHD resolution and we did some work on the older titles as well.
With 3D movies, Disney’s storytelling will also leap off the screen like never before with remarkable depth and clarity for an unprecedented in-home 3D experience on Disney+ with Apple Vision Pro.
Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now streaming on Disney+ and watching it in 4K 3D with Spatial Audio on Apple Vision Pro is just awesome 🤩
Feels like sitting in a private cinema with a giant screen and insane clarity. Add AirPods and you’re fully immersed 🍿 pic.twitter.com/s4k7DKbpyb
From the Apple Developer documentation (break added):
With visual intelligence, people can visually search for information and content that matches their surroundings, or an onscreen object.
Integrating your app with visual intelligence allows people to view your matching content quickly and launch your app for more detailed information or additional search results, giving it additional visibility.
And:
To integrate your app with visual intelligence, the Visual Intelligence framework provides information about objects it detects in the visual intelligence camera or a screenshot. To exchange information with your app, the system uses the App Intents framework and its concepts of app intents and app entities.
When a person performs visual search on the visual intelligence camera or a screenshot, the system forwards the information captured to an App Intents query you implement. In your query code, search your app’s content for matching items, and return them to visual intelligence as app entities. Visual intelligence then uses the app entities to display your content in the search results view, right where a person needs it.
To learn more about a displayed item, someone can tap it to open the item in your app and view information and functionality. For example, an app that allows people to view information about landmarks might show detailed information like hours, a map, or community reviews for the item a person taps in visual search.
Use visual intelligence to quickly learn more about what’s in front of you, whether in your physical surroundings or on your iPhone screen.
To learn more about your physical surroundings using your iPhone camera on models that have the Camera Control, just click and hold it to do things like look up details about a restaurant or business; have text translated, summarized, or read aloud; identify plants and animals; search visually for objects around you; ask questions; and more. […You can also] access visual intelligence by customizing the Action button or Lock Screen, or opening Control Center. See Alternate options to using the Camera Control.
To learn more about the content on your iPhone screen across your apps, simply press the same buttons you use to take a screenshot. You can search visually, ask questions, and take action, like turning a flyer or invite into a calendar event.
