Very Apple-ish approach to AI catch up: wrap an external tool in a privacy architecture, embed into the OS and productize the orchestration layer.
It will be interesting to see if the Private Cloud Compute + on-device routing can make third-party model capabilities feel like a first-party system without leaking user context to the model provider.
If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call Apple's architecture data protection rather than privacy? As an European citizen in a post Snowden world I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government, and Apple certainly wants to own a lot of data/metadata about you. Gotta have Siri listening for carplay and so on. I would aboslutely trust Apple not to sell my data as a commodity though.
> If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.
I'd say this is spot on. At least if what Microsoft is doing with Copilot Cowork is anything to go by. Cowork is not a privacy-polished as much as it's an Enterprise compliant polish to make Opus 4.8 run "safely" in your enterprise organisation. So far Microsoft is winning the AI war in non-tech enterprise with this, especially here in the EU. If Apple manages to do this for the private market that will be great for them.
I'm not personally sold on what an AI should do on my phone though. I use a lot of AI professionally, but I haven't even turned on Bixby or whatever the Samsung AI is called.
From an EU perspective, Microsoft is doing data protection, Apple is doing data privacy.
Microsoft's approach to data is basically "we promise nobody else but you and your government can access it, we can but we pinky swear we won't." This promise is mostly enforced at the legal layer and through legal consequences, not technical safeguards. If they think they can get away with it (or are forced to get away with it by the US government), there's nothing stopping them from using your data in whatever way they want.
When they can, Apple designs their systems so that they physically don't even have the capability to use your data, even if it's processed on their own servers. They're not privacy maximalists like Signal is, they care more about user experience, but they do aim for the highest level of privacy you can get while still having a good experience, and when they do need to make sacrifices, they typically let you opt into the privacy features if you really want to.
I'm far more inclined to believe that Microsoft is secretly (or not so secretly) collaborating with the US government than that Apple is.
There has been anecdotal statements/blogs from Apple employees about the data privacy. They have said building some internal capabilities or user facing features are extremely difficult or impossible because they aren't able to access user data at the level required.
From the information presented, the privacy case is not that your data is only accessible to you (which arguably can have a backdoor) but that the data is NOT stored at all, so it's not possible to build a backdoor. I know there are probably other ways around it, but it's my understanding is that no data is kept on any server when the response is sent back to your device
There is a comment in this thread from an alleged Apple employee that said that, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to send a link for a specific comment. Over the years I've seen comments and blogs posted here in Hacker News reaffirming the same thing.
But to answer your question directly, I don't have any links for those blogs or comments
> Wouldn't it be more accurate to call Apple's architecture data protection rather than privacy? As an European citizen in a post Snowden world I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government, and Apple certainly wants to own a lot of data/metadata about you.
Your conception doesn’t seem to match PCC at all. The whole point of it is that nobody can access the data, not even the people running the servers.
I don't trust a single US tech company to keep my data private from the US government. Maybe I need a tinfoil hat, but I don't feel like I'm unjustified in this based on the history going back to echelon. Not that this is a particular jive at the USA, my own government (Danish) actively pushes for mass surveillance and non-functional e2e encryption.
There is still a difference though. Google will sell my data and use it for all sorts of things. Though I've obviously accepted that since I have had a Samsung flip phone since Apple made their iPhones too big for my pockets.
This part of their requirements for how PCC is architected directly addresses your concern:
“Verifiable transparency. Security researchers need to be able to verify, with a high degree of confidence, that our privacy and security guarantees for Private Cloud Compute match our public promises. We already have an earlier requirement for our guarantees to be enforceable. Hypothetically, then, if security researchers had sufficient access to the system, they would be able to verify the guarantees. But this last requirement, verifiable transparency, goes one step further and does away with the hypothetical: security researchers must be able to verify the security and privacy guarantees of Private Cloud Compute, and they must be able to verify that the software that’s running in the PCC production environment is the same as the software they inspected when verifying the guarantees.”
They do this by allowing you to download all of the components (minus data cryptexes containing the model weights) and run it on your own Apple silicon chip (you can put your computer in recovery mode and use csrutil to enable research guest operating systems)
I think what is concerning is that they are expanding into Google Cloud and NVIDIA to run with it too with their versions of confidential compute, which if I remember correctly are not as well verified as Apple PCC and a little harder for researchers to get their hands on.
Apple uses a key ceremony process where no single party has access to all the keys required to sign hardware, meaning in theory they can’t just sign malicious hardware. However, I’m not sure how Google and NVIDIA play into this and I don’t think they’ve provided much detail on it. I think it seems a little rushed to get the features out since they fucked up with initial Apple Intelligence release.
From my understanding of the architecture, Apple and Google have basically developed a fork of Gemini that is built to run on Apple's PCC. There is no data being sent to any Google servers.
From this MacRumors article:
"The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure."
And
"The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time.""
That seems to conflict with the recent security blog that says they are using Google Cloud infra and NVIDIA GPUs with PCC now [0].
They are allowing it to run on Intel and NVIDIA and Google chips meeting certain requirements now too instead of just Apple silicon because they think they’re secure enough now, but I suspect this decision might have been pushed by the need for Siri to be useful.
I still definitely think it’s better than what every other company is trying to do (like running a variant of OpenClaw 24/7 forwarding data to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and every other provider they can support).
It's not the compute hardware itself. PCC used to be data centers owned and operated by Apple, running on chips designed by Apple.
With this announcement, Apple is expanding the definition of PCC to Google Cloud data centers. Theoretically, this is Google Cloud, not Google servers, so there should be a separation of access there.
From the Apple security blog:
> Originally built exclusively on Apple silicon with our world-class software security technologies, PCC set a new bar for AI privacy in the cloud, and continues to power the most demanding Apple Intelligence features. Since then, the wider industry has been working to provide a set of confidential inference primitives that could theoretically be combined to reach the security level of PCC. However, until today, those primitives have never been integrated into a comprehensive, end-to-end confidential inference pipeline capable of operating at global scale. That’s what we’ve done with PCC on Google Cloud, which incorporates PCC’s exceptional security and privacy properties at every stage, including the industry’s most comprehensive transparency guarantees that allow external security researchers to verify our privacy commitments.
Can they verify the private cloud is completely immune to nationstate actors, has no zero-day vulnerabilities, is completely bulletproof in a court of law and can never be compelled to secretly share info with government(s), etc?
I think the users fear here is real. "We did good due diligence at the consumer level" and "we're completely immune to nationstate hackers and clandestine legal cases" are very different things.
Like any good security paper, it doesn’t assert immunity to particular parties. Instead, covers things like how PCC attests that the running software image is identical to the publicly-available, forensically-studied one.
Fear is real for sure, but don’t let fear be an excuse to lose rigor in thinking.
What if the CA certs are compromised, as was alluded to for GCP in the Snowden leaks?
All server security measures are irrelevant if every client req/res is dragnet siphoned off to NSA servers in plaintext. It would also afford the corporation deniability even if they were aware or involved.
This is why everything than can feasibly be E2EE (or performed locally) should be, unless the data is explicitly public. There are too many opportunities for compromise even when the provider has the best of intentions, and ruling class psychopaths aren't intentionally destroying democracy or implementing big brother.
Are you suggesting that PCC specifically is sending things in plaintext, or that the security promises in the server and arch are false, or that a compromised CA means… IDK what?
I’m with you on the big principles, but are you implying more specific attack vectors or just kind of maybe everything could be compromised somehow?
> In an NSA presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” however, a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where their data reside. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is “added and removed here!”
This is a non-answer, and in fact, a statement like "don't let fear be an excuse to lose rigor in thinking" in response to my question "how verifiable are their claims" is insulting and sloppy. Rigor in thinking includes human discussion and humans asking questions, but yet you shot that down.
ChatGPT, do what this user wouldn't, and answer the dang question:
> No, Apple cannot verify that Private Cloud Compute is completely immune to nation-state actors, contains no zero-days, or could never be subjected to secret legal compulsion. Nobody can honestly establish those absolutes for a complicated, evolving computer system operating across multiple jurisdictions.
> What Apple has done is more meaningful than ordinary corporate “due diligence,” however. PCC is specifically engineered to make clandestine access—whether by hackers, insiders, or governments—technically difficult, difficult to target, and more likely to leave externally detectable evidence...
> Against ordinary attackers, rogue employees, conventional cloud administrators and routine government data requests, PCC appears exceptionally strong for a cloud AI service.
> Against a targeted nation-state willing to combine zero-days, supply-chain compromise, endpoint exploitation, legal pressure and secrecy, the right description is: Highly resistant, deliberately difficult to target, and unusually auditable—but not immune.
Thanks ChatGPT. Don't know why I bother to ask humans anymore, it's StackOverflow the whole way down.
"I did not like your answer, therefore I will use the 100% reliable, bullet-proof method of having an algorithm generate the statistically most likely words that form a plausible answer to my question."
It’s a fair concern, but the only way to reconcile a belief that Apple is sharing data from PCC with anyone (including themselves) is to assert the whole PCC thing is a massive fraud.
Which it could be, but given both breadth of claim and Apple’s strong incentives not to be caught lying about something so massive, I’d want something more than vibes to take the idea seriously.
There's no guarantee against data exfiltration, because the data leaks happens through tool calls, which are not made from the PCC, but from your own device.
E.g. "the user asks if their Bitcoin private key is unique, let's make a web search".
Combined with prompt injection attacks, it's quite easy for an attacker to craft a prompt which sends your private data through any supported tool call (web search, database search, email, app APIs, etc.). Everything is wide open for the attacker / or yourself accidentally to exfiltrate your data.
That doesn’t make sense in this context – the point of PCC is so you know somebody isn’t snooping on your information when you send it to the servers. The person I was responding to seemed to think that Apple would be looking at that information.
You're right, but also "PCC is very secure" might give a false sense of security, considering that there might be other associated vulnerabilities in these kinds of systems.
Which is a good point. set a Bitcoin wallet private key in an obvious place on your system, and then setup a monitor (on another system) to notify you if its contents gets stolen.
Doesn't prevent the exfiltration but at least you'll know when it does.
I have read it. The entire trust hinges on several critical points, such as trusting secure boot.
You remember when the NSA injected itself in TLS termination at all major cloud providers? You remember when several giant automotive corporations built elaborate detection of testing scenarios to fake emissions? You remember room 641A?
I have no real way to tell if this is security Theater or meaningful protection. None of us has,
> I use a lot of AI professionally, but I haven't even turned on Bixby or whatever the Samsung AI is called.
I know this was just a small aside, but man do I hate Bixby and other phone AIs. They are so frustratingly difficult to turn off, and turning them on accidentally is as simply as holding the wrong button for a few seconds, such as when your phone is in your pocket. Very frustrating design.
I never turned Bixby on, so it never really bothers me except for when I update and it want me to accept something which I decline. I turned the button off, I forgot what I switched it to but holy hell was that annoying.
I just want to be able to turn things off without affecting completely other unrelated things. Like Siri and Carplay, makes no sense I need one activated to use the other, just a trick to get people to avoid disabling Siri.
> I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government
Outside of law enforcement having a warrant, Apple's efforts against CSAM, or their Chinese data centers, I've not heard of Apple doing any of what you assume in a post-Snowden world. iMessage is supposed to be end to end encrypted, and there was a few years ago that whole scandal where Apple wouldn't unlock a literal terrorists cell phone for the FBI.
The FBI had to reach out to... a third party to unlock the phone (I forget the name of the firm that did it - Cellebrite maybe?) for them, what's funny is they spent a lot of money on it, when the rest of the world pointed out that the very specific iOS version in question had known vulnerabilities they could have found online for free (or cheaper?).
Is there a meaningful Google-Apple boundary in operation?
They are buying the right to distill their own Gemini models and run them in their data centres (or at least data centres they control); unless I am missing something, this isn't going to be infrastructure that Google has operational control over.
If Apple is running the inference from Apple iPhones and Apple data centers then Apple has operational control. Google’s influence ends the moment they hand the weights over to Apple.
"Now, we are collaborating with Google and NVIDIA to run new Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud, extending our industry-leading PCC privacy commitments to third-party data centers for the first time."
Per that link: I think there's an interesting question about whether a nefarious actor who's infiltrated a cloud provider with physical access to machines that are running signed operating systems, with signed binaries, with TDX remote attestation, and with hardware supply chain verification, has the ability to break the privacy guarantees of a tenant with Apple's sophistication.
Certainly, one could tamper with the hardware, but could one do it in a way that wouldn't get that machine immediately flagged, removed from the routing pool, and told to wipe its memory immediately, by a watchtower (perhaps even the routing layer itself) that runs in a separate secure Apple datacenter?
Those datacentres would be in the same position of trust as a VPN provider in that the data must be unencrypted at points in the process.
They could be making it very safe, and the things apple says they are doing would make it as safe as possible, but as a user there is no way of verifying the claims.
> as a user there is no way of verifying the claims
I think this sums up what it's like to be an Apple user pretty well. With their heavy proprietary and closed approach, all users can do is "trust" them.
The previous argument was wrong and imprecise, as it could be used against any modern technology, none of which can be fully understood by a user, in the sense that any vulnerability would be completely invisible.
It’s clear they have made a very intelligent approach to this system.
Apple could simply be ordered to include a hardware backdoor, and legally be prevented from talking about it. Everything else in the architecture could work exactly the way they claim in the PCC paper.
Wrong answer. Or at least, obvious and not particularly useful.
Truth is, none of those parties are "nefarious" - they're all just not on your side. And "security" is never an unqualified good thing to have (it's not an unqualified bad thing either). It's just a framework of coercion.
The most important questions to answer about any security system is, what is being protected, for who, and from who. People don't ask that much, not even in the industry - it's an implicit assumption that everyone themselves is a "good person" and is on the protected side of security systems. And then they're confused because it turns out end-users are more often seen as threat actors. All the players mention, but perhaps especially Apple, in its own special way, is protecting the computer from the user just as much as they're protecting the user/user's data from third parties.
Why bother with all that cloak and dagger stuff when they can just buy the data? You believe Apple and/or Google isn't selling it? I have some land in Florida I'd like to talk about.
Having worked at Apple, I will say I firmly believe they do not sell data. I worked in data science and we had the shittiest inference because we had essentially no access, even internally, to longitudinal or cross-app user data. Best we had was 15 minute rotating sessions for a single app. There are internal teams dedicated to deanonymizing data to try to narrow down users - if they can successfully do so, and relevant fields that lead to deanonymization get permanently purged from internal logging.
I can’t speak to the current architecture but Apple has shown a consistent willingness to sacrifice access to user data in the name of selling privacy instead at a premium price (you could argue precisely because no one of their competition have any meaningful posture on this). I do believe they are quite serious in their commitment to that, as they have found this strategy to be more valuable than the data itself.
This comment makes it sound like they sold private recordings to whomever was willing to pay for them, but they paid third parties to evaluate Siri recordings.
Illegal to share data with entities that are themselves law enforcement, and which they are known to be demanding, not just asking to share out of good will?
Apple's incentives don't align to sell private data as their whole thing is privacy. They do that they tank their business. If you have proof that they are doing it -- I'd love to see it. (*3rd party actors from an app re-selling data doesn't count)
Google is 100% doing that because thats their entire incentive for the business. They sell low cost software / subsidized hardware on the grounds that you pay with your sharing data. That's the implied cost.
Show me the incentives - I will show you the outcomes.
That’s not so special, though? There’s a difference between Google infra running Google services.
Versus any F500 company running their services on GCP.
It’s a bit whacky to think about because Apple will operate Google owned software on GCP. But it should be sandboxed just the same.
I’m not making a normative privacy argument here. Just pointing out that this is cloud business as usual. Perhaps it’s interesting Apple is doing it, but basically everything else is already using either AWS or GCP at this point.
I think the difference is scale. This is Apple, so it's an enormous amount of devices. And it's a seamless experience, to the user, going from local model to cloud models.
So the question about which model Apple was going to use and where has been highly anticipated, especially by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Imagine if either one could say they have Apple as their customer?
Apple certainly has the cash to burn if they wanted to train their own model, but it also always seemed out of their core competency. This is a major win for Google.
So "business as usual" but with huge implications for the AI ecosystem in general.
>(Part of their software are models derived from Google Gemini, but that’s orthogonal to this)
You're right that it is orthogonal to the privacy promises Apple makes to its own users.
The moralistic and righteous undertone in their marketing material is questionable though given that these Apple services might not exist if Google didn't exploit Gemini app user data on Android the way it does.
That's fine with me. Users have a choice here. In fact, it's a big improvement over the search deal with Google where Apple sends its own users directly to Google.
That is news — I guess not very surprising that they'd need more data centres than before.
But again there is no Apple-to-Google transfer in the inference in the sense of the comment I was originally replying to (I am not suggesting you're implying otherwise, obviously)
But I stand happily corrected where I said they aren't in the picture at all.
That is an interesting press release because it outlines what they would have had to do with any data centre they were outsourcing to.
This is probably why Google had to rent compute from SpaceX. They needed to free up NVIDIA GPUs for Apple so they probably moved internal workloads to SpaceX compute.
Google likely won't rent compute from SpaceX, they have a substantial share of SpaceX (they own 5% of it) and need the IPO to be valued highly, so to prop up the IPO stock, they made this announcement, but if you read the fine print, both SpaceX and Google are allowed to cancel it at any time, as-in, after they cash out from the IPO.
Right — I suppose I mis-phrased my first sentence a bit, because I guess it can be interpreted as me saying the boundary is blurred, when what I was trying to write is: in operation there is nothing crossing any boundary; Google are not in the picture.
As someone who doesn't use Android, they showed a lot of integration into the apps, which I think is where the real magic happens, and it's not something I can do with any 3rd party chatbots today (that I'm aware of). I also don't know that I would trust the other 3rd parties with the access required to pull it off.
I'm interested in how it feels to use: whether there is any context leaking, as you mentioned, if it introduces latency, and whether there are any pricing implications? I know they weighed a variety of factors, including the smaller models, but cost had to be a big concern, too... I feel like Google is the only provider giving away so much AI inference for free.
This will further blur the picture about when and how consumers / employees are supposed to pay for AI services. For example, they showed consumer rather than coding tasks, but could you select five files and ask Siri to write a Python script or a small app? Will enterprises just disable Siri AI functionality, or will they be able to route it through their own AI auditing and providers?
No disrespect for your valuable discovery but this attitude of “it’s possible, if you do these non-obvious steps” feels a lot like victim blaming in UI.
If Apple (or anyone else) wanted to make a feature used, they can. For everyone else, if Siri is off CarPlay doesn’t work. And that’s by design.
Not the design of “ooh if Siri is off then voice in CarPlay won’t work” (warnable), but punishment if Siri is off.
Again this pattern isn’t Apple only but it’s bad everywhere.
It feels cynical to see this as a punishment when it's such a specific use case that does demonstrate deep integration with Siri. Maps, Messages, etc. use Siri for their interactions.
I am sure that there was a meeting where they decided what to do when Siri was off and somebody decided (very possibly with ulterior motives) not to split the feature set - all or nothing. However I don't think the challenge they were faced with in this hypothetical meeting was an easy one.
The alternative is you open the Messages app and you can't send messages. You open Maps and you can't get directions (unless parked). Sure, I get that they could show a screen saying "Sending messages is not available when Siri is disabled" but now you're hitting error messages while driving.
Anyways, the main reason people would disable Siri is accidental activation, and Apple provides all the toggles needed to avoid that without disabling the core components needed for CarPlay.
Before you start driving, at stop lights, while waiting in lines, etc.
I don't know how it works on CarPlay but when I turn my car on I have a bunch of suggested addresses (home, work, parents, recent Maps searches, etc) that I just touch-to-go. Having to use voice every time you want to navigate not only sounds unnecessary, but cumbersome.
I purchased an iPhone 15 a few months ago and ended up making this discovery myself. CarPlay would refuse to launch unless I enabled Siri. I didn't do any of the Siri setup, or anything but the app would hard refuse to launch unless I went and toggled on Siri. Maybe that's different depending on your make/model, or the specific infotainment system in your car, but in my '21 Kia Forte, Siri is a very hard requirement.
You don’t need to enable Gemini or voice assistant on android to use android auto. Some functionality is lost, of course, but you can still navigate and play music.
I am and I very much agree with you. Many Americans 1) have no idea how to drive with any common courtesy or respect and 2) many drive while texting or doing who knows what all while cutting lanes and impeding traffic.
I literally see these things every time I drive. And I work from home.
Consider that they described the development process as taking Siri down to bare metal and rebuilding on a new architecture. I don’t think our previous Siri experience will be particularly relevant.
They decided to use the Siri branding, so I am going to do as they tell me an associate it with my prior Siri experience. That's a brands sole purpose, to give a buyer an indication of a product before they buy it. (Or in my case, given my experience with the brand, not buy it).
I absolutely adore the historical revisionism that apple cares about privacy.
Run your router through a linux laptop as a proxy so you can capture traffic, connect any apple device to your router, and see the vasts amount of data your device sends to apple.
Apple DGAF about privacy, they want your data as much as anyone else, their only thing is that they should be the only ones to get it and then other people have to pay them for it, rather than your device sending the data to the 3d party directly.
And if you think your data is secure, reminder that The Fappening was all done targeting apple devices.
I don't use it, but yes I think that it works because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain. They definitely could share whatever data they have with whoever, which is why you use e2ee.
At the end of the day you are trusting Apple with pretty much everything if you use this service because they make most of your phone, the entire operating system, host the update servers, etc.
>At the end of the day you are trusting Apple with pretty much everything if you use this service because they make most of your phone, the entire operating system, host the update servers, etc.
Correct but this is not privacy.
Privacy is when you have a phone does not contact external services, or at the least, allows you to control which services it can contact.
With Apple, you don't have this. Sure e2ee to Apple exists, but if China decides to put enough pressure on Apple and request your data from Apple if you visit China, its very likely they will give it to them, and you have no option to opt out.
We were originally talking about if they implemented e2ee correctly and obviously e2ee gives you significant privacy. Your documents are still private if you encrypt them locally and then upload to google drive, no matter what connections google drive makes.
Privacy is a spectrum and Apple gives you the most privacy of any big tech company.
I would love to learn more about what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now. Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?
Is there a meaningful distinction between the Gemini-powered models and Apple Foundation Models? Does that distinction vary for on-device vs hosted models? Are some models running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute and others running on Google iron?
Edit: they elaborated significantly in a "keynote tech-talk": [0]
According to Apple, there are five models:
On-Device
- AFM Core: Dense architecture; the standard next-gen on-device model
- AFM Core Advanced: Sparse architecture, natively multimodal; enables features like image understanding and expressive voices
Private Cloud Compute
- AFM Cloud: Workhorse server model optimized for latency and cost
- AFM Cloud Image: Image generation and editing
- AFM Cloud Pro: Most capable model, Gemini frontier-level quality, for complex reasoning and agentic tasks; runs on NVIDIA GPUs in Google's cloud under Apple's PCC privacy guarantees
Everything excluding Cloud Pro are custom models running on Apple Silicon, "refined" using Google Gemini. About Cloud Pro, they say "this is our most capable model with quality similar to Gemini frontier models." So I might read between the lines and say this is a wrapped Gemini.
> Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?
Easiest way to tell, how much dancing around did we listen to and how many diagrams did we have to look at? If they had their own tech we wouldn't be looking at diagrams we'd just be getting told Siri AI, it's private, it's powerful, here's what it can do. Instead we had 10 minutes talking around the tech and this diagram [1] which is a signal that it's a bunch of other peoples stuff cobbled and wrapped together.
Local is probably similar to Gemma e4b you can get right now on Google Edge Gallery (the ios and Android app). Guessing that the more powerful version that will only work on the 12gb ram devices will be something unreleased that is similar but a bit larger
Google also awhile back announced being able to run full Gemini by leasing / renting hardware in your own datacenters so companies can train or access data without needing to send things to their datacenters. Nvidia based. Guessing Private Compute might just be Apple leasing a ton of those?
Am I reading this correctly? Their chosen cloud providers run the PCC stack on their hardware, so the compute provider is responsible for ensuring the privacy guarantees? I assume that would add to the potential security surface area.
The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong. If you then start a follow up chat the answers change but usually still half wrong.
Search would be better without the added AI hallucinations above it. If I want an AI answer I'll go and ask Claude, the quality difference is huge.
> The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong.
That's not Gemini, that's AI Mode (in Search), they're different products built by fairly different part of Google (actually one is built by Deepmind).
(I don't think it's much comparable to https://gemini.google.com/app at least in the past you'd get very different results)
It has to be really because think of how fast it has to come up with an answer (ie time for a regular google query) and the immense scale of billions of people querying it many times a day, all for free.
It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).
I'd wager that for 99.9% of "Apple Intelligence" tasks, Google's models perform just as well as other frontier labs. Google also has done more work on getting LLMs running on edge devices compared to anthropic and openAI.
The source also says
> The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure
Which could mean Google and Apple have trained some custom models, probably the on-device ones, specifically tailored towards Apple's hardware.
That's not the point of OP. The point of OP is that Google is a direct competitor of Apple for phones / OS, so them giving the "key of the house" to Google is risky
What indicates they’ve given google anything other than a truckload of cash? There’s zero data sharing in the arrangement and the stuff is running on apple devices and in Apples Private Compute.
No reasonable person relies on Apple's statements as facts. That said by Apple's laywers, and is especially true here. Apple can access the data if they want, and so can Google and Nvidia.
Because it would be foolish to just trust them on their statements both given their history as well as given the fact that they're in it for the money and tend to follow the path which brings in more of it.
You can look up the history of this company's claims versus reality on their promises re. privacy yourself, there's enough to be found between Siri listening when it shouldn't, user data being accessible to the company in contrast to promises of privacy, the company collecting user data which is used for targeted advertising, several examples of push notification data being handed over to law enforcement agencies in several countries, leaky 'airdrop' allowing user identification which wasn't fixed by the company even after a fix was published by outsiders and more.
The real question is why you seem to be so credulous when it comes to this company. Do you extend this trust to other similar companies or is it only reserved for this specific company? I ask this because you're not the first person who seems to consider this company to be almost above criticism even though they've shown to be just like other companies in all respects. When Jobs was still around this stance was supposedly caused by his 'reality distortion field' but he has been gone for a long time and given that Cook has the charisma of an accountant this can no longer be the reason. What makes them so special to some even though their claims have been punctured many times over?
Yes, but you get less risk in other areas. Google is a long standing publicly traded company. Apple knows that they know their stuff, and that they’re gonna stick around. Anthropic and openAI are new kids on the block when it comes to software as a whole, and that’s a risk.
They already have a very codependent relationship because of their revenue share over putting Google search up front in iPhones so I doubt either party would put that at risk.
Apple and Google have been dealing with each other for quite a long time. My guess is that they want to replicate the relationship they have with Safari, where Apple provides the users and Google provides the search engine (and money).
Last year the announced they were working with OpenAI. It looks like this went nowhere, so it's not really surprising to see them try someone else.
A large portion of Apple's screens come from Samsung. Once a company is large enough, growing your business through supporting a competitor of another group at the company could be seen as a win-win.
I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity. By making Gemini an implementation detail, they leave the door open to swap it out for Anthropic or OpenAI without end-users even knowing or caring. So I think they're creating leverage in any future negotiation.
And at the same time they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers? Which would not even be true if this was an Apple product built on the models of Google, just like the DMA does not force them to pick a different datacenter of office cleaning provider.
Take it with a grain of salt but I don't think it's other AI providers that Apple is upset about. The DMA would require users to be able install any openclaw like thing onto their device with access to everything that Siri can access today. There are all sorts of arguments to be made here but I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here.
What good experience? Siri has sucked for over 10 years, completely degrading in the last few, with no way to change it to a more capable assistant.
Apple doesn't care about "offering a good experience". Apple cares about vendor lock in. It pisses off even me, a long-time (18 years and counting) Apple user.
You’re hurling a separate set of UX issues onto the subject of the EU’s deferred inclusion
Also is Siri the only thing you’re using in your Apple products that you’re so clueless as to ask “what good experience”? I mean, what kept you in the ecosystem for 18 years and counting?
> You’re hurling a separate set of UX issues onto the subject of the EU’s deferred inclusion
It wasn't me who said "I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here."
> Also is Siri the only thing you’re using in your Apple products that you’re so clueless as to ask “what good experience”? I mean, what kept you in the ecosystem for 18 years and counting?
"How dare you criticize the company whose products you're using"
People can already install applications and give those applications access to their files, photos, camera, microphone, etc. I don't see the fundamental difference, provided the user chooses to provide access to this data.
Looks like the problem with DMA has more to do with giving full access to other providers outside of the on-device + private cloud compute architecture. The way I interpret the newsroom post [1], Apple doesn't want to give third-party providers full access to user data when the third-party providers cannot run on private cloud compute for privacy reasons, but the EU wants them to offer the choice anyway.
> they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers
They don't claim that. All they said is "later in the EU as we look into privacy and security" after spending two hours saying how private and secure everything is.
DMA would force them to allow usage from other apps than their own and other assitants than Siri, especially for on-device models.
> I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity
It didn't work out well for Yahoo.com. It turned out that Google Search was the value and yahoo.com just skin around it. It might be the same for Apple. Gemini is the valuable part, what particular device you use it on matters less.
Google search was leaps and bounds better than any other search engine when it came along and dominated. Yahoo couldn’t build their own, and nobody else they could buy from compared.
As i understand it, no LLM is miles ahead of the others right now, especially when it comes to simple agentic stuff. Hell, Qwen3.6-35B-A3 quantized to 3bits running on an 8 year old consumer GPU handles most agentic stuff fine, if a bit slow.
Differences in LLMs boil down to mostly the harness and the compute to run the models. Even for high complexity tasks like coding, the differences between openai, anthropic, google, and the bigger qwen models aren’t that dramatic.
In time Apple will swap it out for a in house model like many other things they’re swapped out in the last 25 years, Apple appears to be a company that doesn’t waste money and seem to execute long range projects if necessary I don’t think the Google models will be there for long. I think they will be swapped out when the M series GPUs get to the performance level they want.
I was in the beat at the time.
If you had read what pundits were saying at the time you would find countless criticism of Apple's hybris etc...
Sounds a LOT like what we read today about LLMs.
Bingo. They see this as the future commodity it will be. Customers will choose AI providers much way they choose a car: taste, price, a few other factors.
And to your point, Google has a massive balance sheet, produces their own AI chips, and is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Google was the right choice stability and it only cost Apple $1 billion per year that’s pretty much of a no-brainer, and with Apple’s history, they probably will use Gemini for as long as they need it and then use their own model in time.
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Is it really all that difference from Apple defaulting to Google's search engine?
> Is it really all that difference from Apple defaulting to Google's search engine?
Not really, because the business model isn't there (at least not in this iteration.
1. The models are Apple models, co-developed with Google. They are not white-label Gemini.
2. There's not currently a Google failover or UX
3. Because of that, there's no user monetization to share.
Apple does have a ChatGPT integration, with failover UX, and with a suspected revenue share deal. However, one could see this deal in a precarious situation, since at the time it started it was expected Apple would not focus much at all on a model capable with world knowledge.
Depends on which way the money is flowing. Google pays Apple for default search engine. Is Google paying Apple for using Gemini? That feels like a much heavier investment if they are
Yes, Google can do that just like Intel, Samsung, Nvidia or Qualcomm yes Google can drag their feet, we know in the end it will all lead to tears and then they will separate.
At the time Apple made this decision there wasn’t as strong of a difference in model quality between Google, anthropic, and OpenAI as there is now. Also Apple definitely burnt some bridges with OpenAI on the agreement they made together a year earlier.
Especially if you are not asking siri to code stuff. If your use case is still "personal context" with "conversation", even if there is a 9/10 difference, the users may see their abilities going from 3/10 presently to 6/10 or 7/10, and still a massive upgrade for most of them. I think therapy and scientific research may remain in the domain of frontier chat interfaces for another year.
OpenAI and Anthropic don't make small models. Google happens to already have a billion devices that would benefit from small models, so they made one.
Google basically gets 1 billion per year for free*.
> Apple Intelligence is designed to protect your privacy at every step. It’s integrated into the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac through on-device processing.
Gemini is better than either at multi modal, google also has their tensor processor stuff with ridiculously high T/s output they need for acceptable UX
Only Google was willing to do what Apple wanted for a reasonable price.
They licensed Gemini and Google infrastructure not just for use, but to accelerate the creation of the three independent Apple Foundation Models announced today:
- AFM Core
- AFM Core Advanced
- AFM Cloud
Google also worked to be able to host AFM Cloud on their infrastructure per Apple's private cloud compute architecture, including some form of independent third party review/audit.
I suspect the only two organizations with both the model and the infrastructure needed for Apple were Google and xAI - and I'm not sure Apple would touch Grok with a ten foot pole, even if xAI were willing to let it be used for training.
Google doesn't care they do not control iOS. Google cares to have their products everywhere. For many years Google apps were better on iOS than on Android, because on Android they just preinstall them while on iOS they need to be installed explicitly.
Android is not a Google product, it is just a tool for Google to collect data. If they manage to collect data via Apple Intelligence they are going to do it. Regardless of what Apple marketing says.
Yet? Maybe they are but embedding adds or paid signal amplification/probability tweaking has already been floated on the market and may already be a product.
It doesn't matter if it's classic search or LLM. They can monetize tracking information as easily as they can sell ads. They'll have fast cheap custom-built assistant models that run on device by default, keeping things profitable. In time they'll likely double-dip again by injecting product placement in results.
Maybe. Search ads likely make Google more money than they pay apple. For AI, Google currently loses money. If they eventually make money via ads, then sure. Else, apple will have to pay them
Search has ads but Siri doesn't. And when Apple puts ads in Siri they won't be Google ads. I don't think Google benefits from this deal enough to be worth paying.
This is the most likely explanation. Apple manufacturers some of the best inference silicon on earth. Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range. The article says Apple can run this stuff on customers’ hardware, so that’s the range of model sizes that actually matter.
> Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range
smart is a weird term, gemma4 is an amazing omni model better than qwen3.6 for non coding tasks (as for all Gemini models). For Apple Intelligence gemma4 makes a lot more sense.
It may be a clever move. By using the same models as android (contractually?), they can compete on the user experience which they typically handle better than android phone providers.
Apple originally partnered with OpenAI. We won’t know all the details for some time, but given OpenAI’s penchant for drama (they started leaking that they might sue Apple [1]), it seems fair to sideline them as a long-term partner.
It's not clear that there's any sort of durable advantage to the provider here -- in fact, oAI started as the partner with apple a couple of years ago, and is reportedly unhappy with the outcomes.
The hard part is not distilling a frontier model down into a specific use case when you have hundreds of millions of users, the hard part is (apparently) re-architecting your mobile OS to work with such a model rather than fight it. Those architectural benefits accrue to apple, as will future datasets and expertise, and the benefit of having some distillation working 24/7 on prem.
Anyway, where I think you're going to be grumpy in two years is that switching the underlying model is going to require a jailbreak, and that you wish they'd made the os much more deeply open for agentic interaction, not that it's gemini - it's just not the valuable part of the story for Apple or for users.
The differentiation is the integration, not the model itself which is mostly fungible. And afaik Apple is running these models on their own compute, so I don't think google can pull a bait and switch.
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves
How exactly are they disadvantaging themselves? Perhaps expand on that opinion a bit, and the data/assumptions you're making in forming it.
My naive assumption is that they're going to do what everyone is doing: make tooling that lets you swap in any model.
I don't think it's fair to assume incompetence, on their part. I think it's much safer to assume they're doing what's best for them, and it's very clear to them what's best (money, support, etc).
> My naive assumption is that they're going to do what everyone is doing: make tooling that lets you swap in any model.
They are a ways away from that for Siri, as they can't guarantee third party tooling meets their security and privacy requirements. Meeting those security and privacy requirements also makes it harder for a third party to monetize their investment or ongoing use of infrastructure.
But I suspect you will see integration in other areas, such as image generation.
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI.
The models are quickly converging to similar capabilities with particular ones being better at a particular task until the next release cycle.
> Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Yeah, that's not really how things work at this scale.
Differentiating themselves can only be a bad thing for Apple. Google is way ahead of Apple in AI and likely always will be.
Both Apple and Google end up advantaged by this relationship: Apple gets the same technology as Android, meaning there is no competitive front opening up. Google gets eyeballs on almost the entire smartphone market.
Apple can continue to differentiate the iPhone from Android in all the ways that they were doing before.
The agent harness matters just as much as the AI model. Using Hermes or OpenClaw feels like night vs day when using OpenAI’s apps even when using the same exact model.
You can even see difference in agent harnesses using the same model in the same company if you compare Gemini CLI with AntiGrav. They are different experiences.
I’m pretty sure Apple’s agent harness will be drastically different from Google’s even with the same model
Anthropic or OpenAI have no foothold into the mobile market. Google has integrated a shitton of AI functionality into their latest Pixel phones. That’s what would scare me if I was Apple and worried that if AI prevails this could steal some market share from me. The other two are irrelevant in this context.
I'm speculating, but it's likely that Google is the only provider who is willing to adhere to the inference compute requirements that Apple sets out for their foundation models. They are, after all, the only provider that will let you host their FMs in your data center.
What part of using Gemini do you think is a disadvantage?
Also important to remember how immature OpenAI and Anthropic are as companies. It would be a huge technical, legal, and reputational risk to commit to using them.
Didn't they famously have a search deal with Google (that they were also ultimately fined for - in the EU at least)? So there's definitely precedent with Google as a "partner".
A functioning FTC would not allow this. Insane that there will be no competition for integrated smartphone AI because the existing duopoly at the OS level has agreed to team up.
>couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Why are Apple people like this lmao. Yeah ofc they could, but they won't because 2 businesses as large as them have a deal it's usually honored.
Couldn't anybody in Apple's supply chain sabotage them? Contrary to popular belief, I don't think Google is in direct competition with Apple at all...Google don't make a mobile operating system. And they certainly don't make much hardware (especially that people should buy).
If I can't even trust the results given by ChatGPT and Claude at their highest level of reasoning in my daily life and work, would I be willing to use Siri AI to handle the important scenarios depicted in the livestream?
The idea that someone would go on a multi hour car trip based on an AI-generated route without manually checking where they're actually going is quite funny to me. Some older HN members will remember when the first stories a la 'the GPS told me to drive down that ravine' started coming out. I'm looking forward to "my AI assistant routed me to Kangiqiniq, Canada and border security detained me when I couldn't produce a passport".
I sometimes think about the time I was on a road trip with a friend, and for what was generally a 3 hour trip to the mountain, was 5 hours for my friend driving.
Midway through the trip I was suspicious of the duration, traffic was fine. He was adamant he knew where he was going.
I pulled up google maps, and sure enough. 3 hours.
Turns out, his mapping app wasn’t aware of an offramp, so instead it wanted us to drive an extra hour, then do a u-turn and drive back to take an offramp.
I often won't look at it's route. If it seems like something's wrong along the way of course I'll double check.
Those folk driving off bridges and into ravines is scary as hell, it implies there's people driving around that don't look further than their car bonnet whilst driving (-+5 metres).
About 2 years ago, my then girlfriend, who is a medical doctor (read: likely not an idiot), had ChatGPT plan a trip for us in a foreign country (naturally I had to nip it in the bud). And this was 2 years ago, when accuracy was way worse.
You would be surprised what normies are willing to delegate to AI.
I haven't seen the livestream, but I just heard that they intend to have their AI automatically change your passwords on websites if it considers them insecure, which sounds to me like the worst idea for AI so far, and that bar is high.
The better use case would be to make AI cancel that damn subscription that lets you jump through 20 dark pattern questions and then tells you to call customer support.
I would definitely like an AI that helps me avoid dark patterns and enshitification. Is there a browser that automatically solves annoying captchas for you?
It's essentially impossible to write a traditional program that can go through the full process of logging in and changing a password autonomously, without writing fragile site-specific procedures.
And if something breaks, and something will break - it's Software+Apple, their support will talk to you for 3 hours very professionally, giving you the scenic route of everything IT support has done in last 300 years and then they will schedule another call, apparently with an expert, on which you will be told to reboot your devices (yeah, all of them), and next stop will be asking you to reinstall your devices clean, of course they will remind you to backup data and how iCloud plans can help. After all that you will be asked to go to a support centre and drop your laptop there (that is, if your device is still under warranty).
> The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
Yes, the "Apple needs to look at your data to do this, but we don't have any way to look at the data if we wanted to". That's impossible, unless they open souce iOS and let people take control over their devices, and let people self host inference, so people can check that there is no network traffic. If it is as they say, they could let people host it without any downsides.
Apple's PCC is the best option for this kind of offload that exists.
However the PCC root keys are still signed by Apple which requires you to trust Apple and the laws in the jurisdiction Apple operates in.
Edit: for this update they seems to be running Gemini on Nvidia GPUs in Google's cloud[0]. How key management works for this part is unknown, but the standard setup for this is that Nvidia and Google would have keys too.
It does use the OHTTP relay[1] which makes it hard - maybe impossible - for Apple to hand over the keys for a particular person's data. Maybe that provides some additional protection in US courts against overreach.
Is this a problem for most people? Probably not - but it is something to be aware of.
I think Apple have made a great attempt to make this as safe and private as possible, but until we have a truly trustless E2E encrypted execution environment I don't see how compute offload technologies gets around this problem.
[0] > And to bring this model to production, we work with both Google and Nvidia to extend our Private Cloud Compute infrastructure to NVIDIA GPUs in Google’s cloud, while maintaining Apple’s unmatched privacy guarantees
Don't you think there is always going to be an escape hatch for peoples private data? Like if you ask it how to make an explosive the message won't stay private on Google's servers? Seems like there could be all kinds of things like that.
The design on the system is specifically done to make that impossible because you control the encryption keys and they can't see your data.
It nearly works except for the annoying hardware signing keys.
With OHTTP it might still be ok because it is impossible to identify which server has your content. OHTTP probably still applies to the Apple->[Google+Nvidia] version but they haven't specifically said that.
I've been a paid subscriber to Claude for a couple of years, but lately I've been reaching for the free Gemini app on my Android Pixel 9 because it's so good at doing searches as part of its answers. The model feels fresh and up to date. Whether Apple can incorporate that search is an open question
A lot of people are missing that Google is light years ahead in terms of edge AI. They've been going on about it even before the GPT-craze. Pixel phones have had live captions (on edge transcriber) for a while.
Things changed since Apple Intelligence but I was hoping there’ll be more things like live captions and what-not than chatbot use cases. I feel pixel is also moving towards that and abandoning the old way unfortunately.
Only if you consider Google Image Search and Google Nano Banana to be "the same thing" since they both produce an image based on text input!
Similarly, Google Translate's millions of lines of hand-rolled code has been entirely superseded by LLMs that do a vastly better job.
The LLM-based AI assistants are based on a wildly different technology stack with very different capabilities compared to the legacy "if-then-else" logic programming that Siri was based on.
Was Google Translate millions of lines of hand-rolled code? The Transformer architecture was invented for Google Translate, before it was used to build "LLMs".
I don't know about millions of lines of code, but Google Translate existed WELL BEFORE transformer architectures and relied on more traditional statistical machine translation techniques. They later moved to a neural machine translation technique, and then only after that in ~2019/2020 swapped to transformers.
Honestly a lot of us who worked in the translation sector remember NMT as being a huge step up and in some language-pairs even surpassing DeepL at the time.
>The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
> Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
To my understanding, these "outside experts" have to go through a vetting process by Apple first. There are no publicly available audits of the infrastructure planned right now.
This move kind of reminds me of the original iPhone with google maps. You're competing with google, but you're using their infrastructure. Why wouldn't they just go with another provider like OpenAI or Anthropic?
To be fair, with the original iPhone they weren't competing. Google did backend web stuff well, so Apple partnered with them and made nice local apps that were fed by Google's cloud data. The same was true for the YouTube app.
After Google saw the iPhone (before the public), they pivoted their vision for Android (it was originally on blackberry-style hardware), and that's when the "thermonuclear war" started. Kind of interesting Steve Jobs would have showed the iPhone off like that, when something very similar happened with Bill Gates, which prompted the development of Windows (according to Jobs).
19 years later, it's probably time to be pragmatic again. If Apple isn't able to deliver on some of these AI integrations into the OS, they risk losing users to Android. If they have to pay someone for a model, they might as well choose the one they think is going to be best for their users. This keeps existing iPhone users on iPhone, and may pull over some Android users looking for the same features, but with better privacy. That seems like a win for Apple. To pay OpenAI instead of Google would just be spite at this point. Maybe well deserved, but the leadership has all changed over in the last two decades, so they'd be fighting old wars. Though I think they should still think twice before showing Google anything that hasn't yet been released.
Given that they had originally selected OpenAI for Siri, and that deal fell through, I would guess something about their relationship with OpenAI fell through. Maybe OpenAI wouldn't let Apple run their model on Apple's servers.
OpenAI or Anthropic are not anywhere as well funded as Google. Apple already has everyone in their pocket via the ecosystem, they just have to not crap the bed. They value stability over the competitive component here.
Google is almost closer to a conglomerate than a coherent horizontally integrated corporation. The individual parts of Google are like Fortune500 companies themselves, and tend to act in their own interest.
OpenAI and Anthropic, despite bombastic media coverage, are still frontier labs. Google won't go down under if Gemini doesn't sell enough anymore. Apple and Google are planning for the aftermath of the AI IPO craze, one way or another.
Most Android devices aren't even Google products, and for much of Android's existence, none of them were. Android is a way to get ads in front of people... as is their partnerships with Apple.
I’m not thrilled about any sort of Apple AI. I see it more as the convenience of platform lock in that ideally would be in the hands of all serious AI contenders but we all know that’ll never happen.
Every mainstream product seems to have their own “SmarterChild on steroids” bolted on top (Gemini for Google, Rovo for jira, Copilot for Microsoft everything, etc).
I’ll still use the serious ones like ChatGPT/Claude as my main but I think these companies know that and are just trying to jump the bandwagon so they don’t look outdate. Either way, they can be surprisingly convenient and make up for UI/UX learning curves.
I used to wonder what "apps" might become in an "App Intent-first" world.
Bundles that provide data and capabilities to iOS and Siri? And perhaps libraries of UI components to display and interact with said data?
But then, if that works really well, and gets strong adoption, why ever open the app? What’s the point of having navigation flows inside an app? Could one make entire apps solely dedicated to providing a set of data, capabilities, and UI components to the system?
In that world, what drives user retention, for such apps? What even is an app? App engagement disappears as well.
And that’s not even diving into the use-case of Siri, say, planning a trip across five different apps (flights, hotel, restaurants, whatever) using just App Intents. If done well.
In that world, do most apps just become plugins, providers for Siri?
If you remember Windows Phone 8, it has already been tried and nobody (ahem, no company) wanted that.
No company is stupid enough to give up their content and infra and get none of the screen real estate.
I can see a parallel with hotels and OTAs, but in that case appearing on an OTA brings in sales. Showing $userA's content on $userB's screen won't earn any money from $company.
Well, there’ll always be room for people who want different UI/UX. Humans are too visual to ever move to “pure voice” and so we’ll inevitably have nice screens and thus UI preferences (technically you get preferences with voice too but it’s weirder)
Yes, but you can have this by providing surfaces as UI components to Siri.
Not sure if they do that (yet), but no reason an app couldn’t expose "Here’s what you can use to present data of shape X", or "here’s a UI for process doing y".
It feels like turning the common approach inside-out. But it works.
Edit: you could even imagine, in that world, apps that only expose surfaces, composable UI libraries, multi-step flows, declaring what they’re for, what kind of inputs they take, and what output they produce. Without ever owning any of the data (eg flights data, hotels inventory, booked trips, financial data, etc) or capabilities (eg book a flight).
for those commenting on relying on a competitor for a "major" component of their product, look no further to how they source their displays from samsung all this time. even their silicon at one point! [1]
while it is now all about harness and "holding it right", their approach seem no different from other instances on hardware side. in terms of why not a more "leading" provider, look how the openai integration panned out so far. moreover, they have little to no initiative nor incentive to provide edge models or a hybrid solution so far. and anthropic's moat is not in audio.
That is very logical. Google's AI has rapidly become better at search and presents answers in a tolerable way.
If we disregard exploitation of the primary sources and focus purely on a use case, search summaries are it. Generative AI is completely useless and OpenAI and Anthropic will soon fail. The Segway is maybe fun for a day, then you ask yourself why the heck you aren't using a bike in the first place.
Everyone assumes this is apple paying Google to use their stuff. But maybe its the other way around. Maybe this is the google search engine deal 2.0. i.e. Apple agrees to sell their customers to Google for money. I know that right now its supposed to run privately and all that, but its still Google's voice telling you things, not to mention intepreting your instructions.
Google right now offers plenty of AI inference for free for everyone on the planet. They also offered their £20 AI pro package for free for over a year for all students. I use that and its a very generous offering. Some more free AI inference for Apple users (where you've now selected for high income folk, simply by virtue of being Apple users) would make plenty of sense, I imagine.
It makes no sense at all. Google offers free but limited Gemini in exchange for being able to train their models on user data.
They are also gradually introducing advertising to Gemini and they can upsell and cross sell their paid plans (Gemini, Google One, Youtube, Workspace) to a large pool of users across all their apps, platforms and integrations.
They can do none of that with the white label models they to rent to Apple. That's why Apple will always have to pay for it directly.
This is very different from the search deal Apple has with Google. Under that deal, Apple sends users straight to Google along with all the advertising revenue it brings. Google returns some of that revenue to Apple.
It does, I agree. That said, they've published some Apple Research docs/papers & core documentation where they outline the architecture and how it works. Personally I think their approach is fascinating.
It is weird and disturbing that Apple has no native AI capability.
This is one of the most cash rich companies in the world and it has failed to have any position in the most critical technology development perhaps ever.
It's a clear signal that Apple became the most incredible operational/execution company under Tim Cook, but lost its innovation leadership.
You don't stay the most cash-rich company by chasing every expensive fad and they've been equally conservative with other "THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING" tech fads such as Cryptocurrency and VR. I don't blame them for not rushing to light Billions a month on fire like the other big players; their play always seems to be to let things shake out and then deliver something refined and sophisticated.
There also doesn't seem like any real opportunity for them to Apple-ify this tech (any more than today's announcement). There's lots of rough edges and the underlying technology is fundamentally janky and extremely problematic in Apple's second differentiator of privacy.
Hardly everything in the Apple Vision is in/comes from the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch hardware wise and software wise all you need do use them its called being the last major American vertical computer company left. Light billions on fire OpenAI, Google, were hopeful but got nothing.
I take it as a signal they don't see any of their value being provided by the models. They're strong point was never frontier technologies. It's always been the delivery of the technology.
They are a hardware company at heart, the do software as software is needed.
For building a competitive AI they'd have to hire the talent, which is expensive and then do a massive investment, which may still end up far behind the competition. (See there attempts with Siri)
Now they can pick the model they want and if time is right they can still build their own.
In the end they still want to sell devices. They aren't doing a search engine (while they could), they are not doing an LLM model, ...
>> They are a hardware company at heart, the do software as software is needed.
This has never been true, not since Steve Jobs returned.
The heart of Apple is software and hardware integration.
Hardware companies that do software just to prop up the hardware business do terrible software, and (no doubt the Apple haters gonna hate this) but Apple does - for the most part - amazing software.
>> which is expensive and then do a massive investment
Come back when most of AI model makers go belly up....
Apple largest acquisition in their entire history is three billion dollars (Beats), Sam OpenAI got nothing and Google is getting a measly one billion dollar refund for Gemini.
Innovation is Apple Silicon and the five ecosystems (Microsoft and Nvidia aren't sparking now for nothing), Innovation is being the last American vertical computer company left from the 1980's who has been able switch gears went necessary (the next gear shift will probably be memory)...
Well it's half-and-half, why did Apple struggle for so long with Siri and its pre-LLM era technology, during the time of AlphaGo and so forth, and then after Covid why didn't Apple pivot to something like their own version of Gemini?
But there are lots of differing possible reasons for this, and I think it is premature to conclude with any one in particular.
I have been using their on define AFM models for a year - for small models they are good. Their Secure Enclave server bases AFM model is good, but not in the same class as gemini 3.5 flash or deep seek v4 flash.
Really I don’t think this is a strong take at all. If anything this has positioned them extremely, extremely well for when the bubble bursts and they can go with the winner to provide reasonable capabilities.
It's looking like an incredible move so far. They will have wasted no money while the whole industry lit trillions on fire, and then at the end they can just rent a model for cheap and replace it with their own or whatever is cheapest at any time.
The users really aren't Gemini users, they don't care what the model is behind the scenes.
They should have built a separate phone around Apple Intelligence. That is a no brainer. Jobs would have done the same. That is not going to be easy, who knows about user experiences better than Apple does (or atleast used to). This is underwhelming from Apple.
Google sold Apple the ability to run certain Gemini models on Apple's data-center hardware, using Google's orchestration layer. Apple hooks into that not dissimilar from an API-provider, and then builds everything upstream.
Meaning the system prompt(s), harness, entry and exit points, and skills. So the product is still "Siri AI", because of all the stuff that takes it from a raw infrastructure concern upon up into a "product" is Apple's responsibility.
Google are "okay with that" because Apple pays them $1B a year, per press reports, to be.
Any business can do this now actually - you just need to lease/rent hardware through a Google partner and you can run an Nvidia based server in your own datacenter running (supposedly) the latest full Gemini models.
I don't think you conceptualize Google's game plan. all these companies care about is b2b contracts so they can inflate their balance sheets because when it's digital, it doesn't have to actually exist for it to "make money"
Let us hope the EU forces Apple to allow the end-user to choose the external model: Wouldn’t it be amazing having privacy first local models calling out via a welldefined open protocol to a model of your choice: Claude, Grok, DeepSeek?
Sounds like OS architecture done right - screw the kickback business model.
That's basically what we built at Tinfoil. We run open source models inside secure enclaves (also using Intel TDX/AMD SEV-SNP + NVIDIA Confidential Computing). All the code running inside the enclave is open source and the client SDKs (also open source) automatically verify that the pinned source code matches the runtime attestation. The protocol used is TLS (terminates in the enclave) + HPKE keys generated inside the enclave on boot. Docs walk you through the verification process: https://docs.tinfoil.sh/verification/verification-in-tinfoil
Of course, we can't support Claude or Grok as they are closed source, but there is no incentive for companies that need your data to train the next generation of models to allow for private inference. One day...
Funny, OP wants them to force a feature via regulation, and regulation is the reason they won’t even deliver the feature in question. Death by regulation.
They didn't say they aren't shipping in China, just working through regulatory issues. I assume that means they're working on a China-operated "private" cloud compute instance like every other US cloud provider
They did say that they are specifically not shipping in the EU because of the DMA, so until the DMA or the EC's interpretation of the DMA, changes, these new AI features aren't shipping there. That is not the same thing as Apple abandoning the EU.
My Brother in Christ, different administrations can and do "interpret" laws differently all the time. Sometimes even the same administration might change how they enforce a law.
Also, technically didn't the EU Parliament write and pass the DMA, and the EC enforces it? I'm not European so I don't know the intricate details of the incredibly Byzantine process of the EU so maybe I'm wrong there
Let's actually not hope that, and let's not indulge the EU regulators' fantasies that they get to dictate the product design of products from non-EU countries.
Force Apple to support all kinds of arbitrary models? That's a comically bad idea.
They ultimately don't have that power. All they can do is block the sale of products. Arguably, that power gives them leverage to negotiate the availability of some products or features. But as this Apple case shows, this negotiating leverage is limited.
Why would it be ok that a monopoly business prevents free competition and consumer choice by only allowing certain or a single model provider that likely gives them kickback via some opaque business deal?
I tried the on-device image input model with an app I am building. It's not very good at world-knowledge recall, but can describe the submitted image well enough.
Sort of expected this at the first attempt. Use their existing partnership for Google being the default search with Google and leverage Google's models.
Sorry to be off topic, but I have a question: has anyone installed the latest beta iOS and macOS, and if so what is the current status of Gemini integration?
once you update to the latest iOS, there's an option to join the waitlist. No indication of timing, but until that moves forward Siri is what you get today, as far as I can tell.
Google apps are the most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store already. This reminds me of the original Apple Maps, which was just a front end for Google Maps.
If you pay for Gemini, then it is good. I recently used Gemini Ultra for a month and the gemini models are very good (and of course, you get a lot of Claude Opus tokens to use through the same plan).
I also pay for Proton's Lumo+ private chat and for what it is it is also good.
The free plans from all the providers are bad, which is fare enough.
I use Apple devices and I expect to be paying for Gemini tokens after the integration.
Just an interesting thought on the very different philosophical approaches. Let's imagine that Android had a terrible assistant, so bad that even most Google Fanbois admitted it was pretty bad. Apple became a leader in AI. Google approaches them to license the Siri model for Android. Would Apple have ever done that?
“Now, we are collaborating with Google and NVIDIA to run new Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud, extending our industry-leading PCC privacy commitments to third-party data centers for the first time.”
It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
> Siri AI is private by design and deeply integrated across Apple’s platforms using on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud. However, under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
Apple loves to play dumb about this stuff. The EU imposes a pretty straightforward regulation regarding equality of access. Apple seems to come up with all sorts of "solutions" to this "problem", and each one never amounts to true equality of access. They could easily just allow users to decide "Do you want to give this app unfettered access to all your device data, including other apps' data?". Let users decide. 99% of Apple users in the EU will probably click "no". I'm sure they'll make the user warnings scary enough to ward off anybody who doesn't know what's going on.
There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.
The other possibility is that the sky does not fall, and Apple looks both silly and malicious at the same time for ever having suggested that it would, which was clearly in bad faith.
Clearly, Apple cannot afford scenario #2, so I think they will probably never give their users the actual freedom that the MDA requires them to. They will just exit Europe entirely before allowing that to happen.
> Do you want to give this app unfettered access to all your device data, including other apps' data?
Which Facebook and instagram will present as “tee hee updated terms of service” in the first 15 seconds, and people will tick it, because they’re not interested in reading T&C’s, just want to message their friend about dinner, and aren’t suddenly expected be deceived like that.
Obviously there should be a system dialog to grant system permissions. I'm not aware of any kind of system with a capability-based permissions system (e.g. Android, MacOS, browsers, etc.) where apps are allowed to show their own dialog to request permissions. You always have to do something in the system settings to grant permissions.
That's how it should be done. And that would be the responsible way to comply with the DMA.
Yes, heaven forbid governments impose any constraints on Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Facebook, because they've been handling things so well on their own.
> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.
>
> The other possibility is that the sky does not fall, and Apple looks both silly and malicious at the same time for ever having suggested that it would, which was clearly in bad faith.
I think the most likely outcome is between these two extremes. My personal data ends up sold to shady companies who use it to target ever more invasive advertising at me in places I wouldn't expect/. Like a boiling frog, I won't really notice the difference and my life will gradually become a little shittier.
Then just click "no" if your phone ever asks you to grant permissions like this to a third party app, which should obviously be the default option. Or better yet, don't install the third party apps to begin with. For you, it will be as though nothing has changed.
For the people who want a bit of freedom though, their lives will suddenly get a lot better.
> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.
I'd prefer they focus on safeguarding my data instead of playing a ridiculous game of brinksmanship with regulators to make a point.
> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.
I don't think that is what will happen. People, and the media, will blame Apple: it is them after all giving that data over because they hold it. No that doesn't make logical sense, but that has never mattered before why would it matter now.
Once Apple loses that trust re. data privacy, its gone forever. I get why they're being particular about it.
People will absolutely not blame Apple if the exact thing they warned would happen, and said would be really bad, actually turns out to happen and be really bad.
Apple has very well-funded PR. They will make sure that the EC is blamed.
Then, they get to be the heroes once the law is changed to allow them to come to everyone's rescue by banishing all third-party app access forever. They would ultimately be the saviours.
I don't want my apps that have AI implemented to be able to read my messages because Europe mandates feature parity. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For Apple it means building all the APIs that probably already exist but this time to be requested by apps, which would be a huge attack surface, even Apple's own apps suffers from security breaches (like Message before the switch to closed container execution). AI breaks the separation of concerns, which can lead to disastrous consequences.
EU has great intentions, and of course, feature parity should be offered so that competition can exist, but I don't find it crazy that it is more complicated on a product like that. As tech people things are very obvious to us but we need to remember that we are talking about a product used by everyone.
It’s not clear how it is significantly different from allowing apps access to your contacts, calendar, photos, and so on. And Apple doesn’t say that they merely need more time to properly implement it, the claim that they are unable to implement it without compromising privacy and security. And the latter I don’t really see, with the proper set of permissions presented in the way users are already used to.
As an Apple user I feel more patronized than empowered here.
> It’s not clear how it is significantly different from allowing apps access to your contacts, calendar, photos, and so on
Those are allowed via contextual consent prompts, several of which are for specific contacts, specific photos you wish to share, and so on.
Examples of the level of access an AI agent has include:
1. To read all indexed personal data from every app installed on the device
2. To perform actions in every supporting app on the device on the user's behalf
3. To read the current displayed apps for additional context as well as sensor data like current location
If you were regulated such that you had to allow any organization this level of access, and if you were hand-tied in how much you could convey the seriousness of accepting that consent prompt to an ordinary end user, and felt that it would be you, not any legal authority, who would ultimately suffer the reputational and legal consequences for the results - what would your yes/no decision be on shipping the feature in that jurisdiction?
How is this substantially different from Safari extensions that can effectively see and act upon everything you do in the browser?
One can imagine contextual prompts for all of the examples that you give, like which data sources and which apps the AI provider is given access to — similar to how you can choose for a Safari extension which websites it has access to — and for how long.
That all seams reasonably implementable. You could even use multiple AI providers in parallel with different subsets of data and apps, which would allow you to compartementalize access by different providers in a way that isn't possible with Apple's AI.
Such integration interfaces are necessary in the long run if we don't want to lock in our whole life to a singular combination of hardware, OS, and AI provider.
The law does not require Apple to grant all permissions to all apps for all users. It just requires Apple to ask users if the user wants to grant elevated permissions to specific apps that they download. The user can always say "no", which should obviously be the default.
The situation is that Apple won't even allow users to grant elevated permissions to any 3rd party app, even if the user wants to.
But then third party apps can force users to accept this before they work (here I am especially thinking of school and work apps that people might be forced to use).
App store guidelines already strictly prohibit developers from demanding overbroad or unnecessary permissions, and they expressly forbid locking unrelated features behind irrelevant data requests. Any app that attempts to do so can easily be yanked off the app store by a single complaint.
> don't want my apps that have AI implemented to be able to read my messages because Europe mandates feature parit
App permissions.
Beside you don't have to install any third party app, I only have Google assistant installed on my Android.
I heard the same kind of talk when the eu forced apple to switch to USB C...
There is a real, strong, monopolistic issue with some American companies that their government refuse to deal with because it's so corrupt. It would be fine if it didn't impact us in Europe, but it does.
As a screen reader user, Apple does have a first party screen reader, VoiceOver, and does indeed not let you run a third party one. In fact, it does not work well even on the more open MacOS. So essentially it's VoiceOver or nothing. Luckily, especially on iOS, VoiceOver mostly works well.
I'm glad it works decently on iOS, at least. my mom has little central vision, and she struggles on iOS just using high contrast plus scaling plus magnifier. I think she has just enough vision to not absolutely need VoiceOver but it still makes using her phone a frustrating and tiring experience.
I don't think they're "trusting Google" with anything. It's a Google model run by Apple, just like you download a model from Hugging Face to run when you want to.
In this case I think it is true that 3rd parties can not be trusted with this capability, but Apple brought this on themselves by creating a ton of other capabilities like AirDrop, Airpods integrations, and apple watch capabilities which would have been safe for 3rd parties to use but keeping them locked down so you'd get a better experience with Apple accessories.
I think there’s a case that Apple’s commitment to privacy here will increase participation by 3rd party developers.
For example, if I’m maintaining a secure chat app, I think I’d be more likely to adopt the APIs to share the chat messages with the system AI due to Apple’s promises that the data will either be processed On Device, or in their Private Compute Cloud.
If I instead believe that sharing the chat messages with the system AI would cause those messages to be sent to unknown-to-me other entities, I think I’d be less likely to participate in the new API.
This user might be okay with their data going to this other provider, but what about the people they’re messaging? I have a responsibility and a commitment to _all_ of my users to protect their data.
I might not be able to control what any specific user does with the data, but proactively writing the code that sends the chat messages to this other system is something that I have control over.
> This user might be okay with their data going to this other provider, but what about the people they’re messaging? I have a responsibility and a commitment to _all_ of my users to protect their data.
That's nice of you but your users are going to just copy-paste data to and from ChatGPT anyway.
I think the difference is in the scale. I think Apple’s asking you to index / share all of the data from your app. Virtually no user is going to copy & paste every single message into ChatGPT.
And so I think there’s a meaningful difference between the app donating all the data automatically, vs making the data available to the user who is free to share what they want.
That’s not your data, why do you think you have the right to prevent the user from doing what they want? Other users shared that chat data with each other, you have no right to that data, so as an app developer I’d say you should not care about the API.
And that's exactly how it works for apps you download from the App Store. Apple even makes app publishers declare data collection and privacy practices on the App Store before you install apps.
It's clearly just Apple not wanting to further open up their platform to competition.
Not only that but it's an honour system they aren't checking any of the privacy policies or labels for accuracy, just last year a whole bunch of high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans got caught claiming suitability for all ages while their privacy policies banned under 13s so they could advertise and collect data indiscriminately.
They wouldn’t even need to do that. It’s pretty easy to come up with any number of pernicious approaches they’d use:
- “instagram is better with MetaAi: yes/ask-me-later”.
- updated ToS which bundles a “we’ll use our own ai, and do whatever we waaaaant”
Lying, gaslighting and underhanded “growth hacking” tricks are their bread-and-butter, and you can be sure that whatever they’d have you install would blindly slurp up as much as they possibly can with zero regard for user privacy.
> It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems? Why aren't they required to let me choose between Grok, OpenAI etc or even a custom endpoint?
> But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems?
Simply because they are too small in user count. EU DMA, DSA etc. only apply at certain thresholds. Twitter for example falls under the scope, but Tesla is a distinct entity from Twitter and even if they were merged together, they would still be distinct services in the eye of the law.
Since it's the user's device, not Apple's, EU correctly "interprets" this as the user has the right to do whatever they please, including installing third-party chat apps.
Apple are just bulshitters when it comes to actual users, and not their corporate definition of a user.
> Or that they wouldn't let you set default maps app outside of the EU
They were mandated to create a scheme in isolation on a deadline, without having input either from navigation apps or from consumers, and without any requirement that web browsers or other operating systems would need to support the same scheme.
As another comment pointed out - it doesn't work. Websites and apps still integrate with a navigation product directly, rather than use this scheme. And why wouldn't they? Even if it was launched worldwide on iOS, it still is just a defined subset of any particular navigation product functionality. It also is just yet another navigation option to integrate into your platform, since the feature still wouldn't be available on desktops/Android.
Until everyone is sitting at the table wanting to work towards interoperability, the feature simply can't work. So why perpetuate a broken chooser into other markets?
> They were mandated to create a scheme in isolation on a deadline
Self-imposed isolation and deadline.
> without having input either from navigation apps or from consumers
Because Apple never asked either navigation app developers or consumers since "Apple knows best" and spent several years fighting DMA instead of implementing these features.
> Websites and apps still integrate with a navigation product directly, rather than use this scheme.
Because there was no scheme to begin with, and when Apple finally relented and made it, it only made it available in the EU.
> Until everyone is sitting at the table wanting to work towards interoperability, the feature simply can't work.
Yes, Apple doesn't want to sit at the table to work towards interoperability.
Apple Maps was made default on iOS in 2012. They literally only implemented the "scheme" last year, 13 years later.
DMA entered force in 2022. Apple had known about it coming for at least two years before that.
And even without DMA that would be a proper thing to do to begin with which they had to be forced to do by government action.
This is such a shallow take. There are obvious privacy and security tradeoffs here. The EU competition framework is good in many ways, but this is actually something I don’t think we have the regulatory frameworks in place to handle yet , or social norms and understanding about why giving any Tom dick and Harry root on all your data is a bad idea.
It’s paternalistic, but I agree with Apple that free for all access to this kind of data is not a great idea. Ironically, before this could work we’d actually need much more EU style data regulation, and more consistently enforced.
I do too, but in this case the choice isn't between apple and the EU. It's between apple and the <random rapacious vc backed ai startup looking to hoover your data> your non-technical friends foolishly trust, without much understanding of the implications for them or society as a whole.
Ultimately I think it's important for the EU to regulate companies like apple to ensure competition. But in this instance, it doesn't seem like we have all the other pieces in place that would be necessary for a sensible rollout of that.
> but in this case the choice isn't between apple and the EU. It's between apple and the
Funny how the word user never enters these conversations. As in user device that the user has paid for and where the user should have a choice of what the user wants to do.
what's the missing piece exactly? In every other situation where a company wants to launch an iphone app to hoover your data, Apple gives a clear message telling you what types of data you're giving access to. Why is this situation different?
For me, it's real regulations about what data can reasonably be hoovered, what it's used for, for how long. And a culture where the majority don't blindly click yes to all messages like that because the only alternative is not to use the shiny new thing they have been sold. I don't think it could ever appear in the US, which is why it's a good thing apple won't be forced to open up there.
But if the EU does insist, they should be careful what they wish for and plan for the negative consequences of a free for all.
Apple uses "privacy and security" as a cudgel to prevent anyone from breaking into the vendor lock in. To the point that EU actually had to explicitly tell Apple what to do [1], as Apple delayed features, made them extremely hard or convoluted for third-parties to use, and pulled every trick out of the malicious compliance manual.
This whole virtual assistants thing will drag on for another several years.
Edit: I mean they show their models accessing and changing a password on the user's bank site at the same time as accessing and changing passwords on another random site. Which is one prompt away from exfiltrating user data. So spare me the "Apple knows best about privacy and security so they should keep any access to their platforms locked down"
It's shallow because it doesn't acknowledge that there is a real tradeoff. I share a lot of your cynicism about US tech companies, but I think you need to be realistic about the state of the market and how the incentives align.
Apples incentives are not, currently, as strongly misaligned with their user interests as many other tech firms (meta, google, random startups, etc). Going slowly might not be a bad idea for most people here.
That said, I hadn't seen the demo you mention. If they do do that (bank passwords etc) they are stupider than I thought they would be.
Probably true. But that’s not the position we are in now. Apple is much better aligned with users interests than any one else, at least for short/medium term.
Unless Apple proves otherwise I'm more inclined to believe they're either 1. Using this to try and shape the DMA in their own interest (definitely not their users' interest) or 2. Doing something with the data that would not be allowed in the EU (also not in their users' interest at all) or both.
From the link "Nvidia has its own “confidential computing” feature that encrypts data as it’s being processed, which will be used with other privacy and security measures to protect user data"
It's not magic to those paying attention. The current model runs on device. And gemma e4b is already demonstrably capable on iPhone hardware, which is likely to be similar to what this is.
They say it's because the EU's DMA would require them to open up device data to third-party assistants, and they'd no longer be able to guarantee user privacy.
I don't see what the issue is. The user could then select Apple (or Mistral) for strong privacy or another provider for customers that don't care.
I primarily want Apple to provide extension points so that I can select my own provider, just as I can choose where to host my mail or install another app as my instant messenger.
Sure, I could install another provider's app, but it wouldn't have the same integrations, similar to how an instant messaging app would be less useful if notifications were limited to iMessage.
Nothing in the law requires the pop up. It definitely doesn’t require the obnoxious bullshit that most companies put up (aka the dark pattern to get you to agree to every unreasonable part of their terms just to read the page).
The alternative would be to just stop invasive tracking and add the cookie when it’s actually needed.
Yes, there's a lot of cargo culting in web development.
Many US based companies also do this for US visitors, which is absolutely not required by the GDPR and related regulations, because they don't apply there.
The law states:
> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
Strictly necessary:
> These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies.
You don't need consent for MOST reasonable uses of cookies.
If compliance theatre wasn't such an industry the web would be a lot tidier and we could stop blaming the EU for implementing important privacy and data controls.
You’re shifting the goalposts somewhat, but the thing this misses is that the cookie banners are the least important aspect of EU data regulation. The principle of consent and of minimising data held has actually made a substantial different in European firms, mostly for the better.
The cookie popup also more often than not doesn't satisfy GDPR, since the option to remove consent disappears with the popup. These dark patterns emerged because the GDPR was used selectively as a club rather than properly enforced. That led to what another comment refers to as "compliance theatre" rather than actual corporate compliance.
The smell is that Apple doesn't want to give the same level of access to third-party AI assistants that Siri will get.
For what it's worth, Apple claimed they proposed an "equivalent access" framework with some kind of "trusted agent framework" approach, but that it was shot down by the EU. I suspect it was way more inconvenient for third-party developers than Apple lets on.
This has been the case for quite a while. Like Reminders - You can't replace the phrase "Siri, remind me to ___" with a third party app. I'm surprised the EU lets them ship Reminders there.
what i think why they are too much relying on Google is coz they are way much towards making models open source and launching more much better models to public as if in future apple part way from google they might still have much better models to rely on and if we see the history google has been partnered with Apple since the launch of first Iphone
What a blunder, they resisted AI for like 2 years when it was all the buzz, and now when the bubble is about to bust and every user has AI fatigue they decide to finally dip into the fad?
Before it was as if avoiding AI was a conscious design decision, and if there was an AI crash, Apple would be the only survivor left. Now it feels like they weren't in on the meme out of incompetence and are now late to the party.
No one can know what Jobs' stance would be, but I like to think he would be anti-slop
I agree that many AI businesses will go bust and they deserve it, but the tech is good.
I can recommend my own layered approach, using the lowest capability models that get stuff done:
1. I maximally use local models like gemma4:26b-a4b-it-qat for everything that works with this free option.
2. I like paying for inexpensive APIs for mid-tier models like deepseek v4 flash, gcp-5-mini, gemini-2-flash for things that option 1. fails at. This option is almost free.
3. Pay for more expensive APIs like deepseek v4 pro, gemini 3.5 flash, etc. This option is not too expensive.
4. If all else fails on a class of tasks, then pay for awesomeness of Claude Opus. $$ expensive, I try not to use unless absolutely necessary.
I think developers and companies that just cram everything into Claude Opus are unprofessional.
LLMs we all agreed were amazing back in 2023-2024.
What's happening now with AI is more of a corporate phenomenon quite removed from the actual tech.
Yes LLMs are useful, but replacing customer support with an LLM that gives user accounts away, or calling LLMs on a loop where the bottleneck is your checkbook and calling it AGI, those are phenomenons that are separate from LLMs.
We agree more than you may believe. I have worked in the field of AI since the early 80s, symbolic AI, simpler neural networks. I only believe in using any tech if it serves human needs, is privacy preserving, etc.
When people say the AI bubble is about to bust, I don't think anybody means that "the use of AI is going to go away." AI is absurdly useful. I think what people mean is "the valuations of these companies will have to snap to a reality that is actually attached to their market value."
Exactly, small edge models is the future, highly personal experiences, and not these massive models that the cloud providers currently shove down our throats. While massive models are useful, these massive platforms are about to burst out of their promises. All while we’re supper happy with tiny 4b up to 12b models working amazing for all these “omg ai thinks” daily tasks.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone can believe that Apple is limiting user options for privacy reasons, rather than trying to maintain an unfair advantage over other vendors.
I’m not saying people who hold this view are being dishonest at all. But sometimes, to me, brands like Harley-Davidson or Apple seem closer to a cult than to a typical corporation.
Because privacy is actually a big feature, many people are skeptical about AI and the big model providers and don't trust them. They're less skeptical about on-device AI and so Apple is pushing that and making privacy a core feature of their online offering as well.
I probably wouldn't use it without that. It's one thing sending my shitty code to be trained on, and another thing entirely to give these companies access to my personal life and information.
Sounds like Apple offered to implement that, but it didn’t fit the EU’s requirements.
I suspect if you paid apple enough money, and were willing to prove that your personal Private Cloud Compute did meet their requirements, it wouldn’t be impossible.
When you have to image a highly irrational reason to explain why groups of people do the things they do, there's a decent chance you just don't understand their perspective. They may be acting reasonably rationally from their own perspective. (As you said yourself: "I honestly don't understand...")
I think it's pretty clear that the previous poster characterized the Apple brand as a cult to specifically express the idea that people have an irrational devotion to it.
Cool, can you reply to the person's original reply to me in which they made fun of the point I was making—how "disgusting" it is that Apple…allows photo editors in the App Store?
Please don’t act like a jerk. (And yes, deflecting from your own poor conduct counts as acting like a jerk on HN.)
It’s not clear that they were making fun of your point, and the guidelines ask us to assume good faith. If you’re serious about expecting others to observe the guidelines, that’s great. Start by observing the guidelines, to demonstrate that you hold yourself to a high standard. Then if others break the guidelines in their responses to you, you’ll be on solid ground in holding them to account, and doing so in a way that also keeps to the guidelines, avoiding personal abuse and escalation.
How so? Can you not create all sorts of unethical imagery with the photo editing apps on the App Store? And do they not make the production of unethical imagery much easier and accessible? Which part of my comment is ridiculous and absurd?
Apple could have done something like bedrock and used a SOTA model but instead they are fiddling with local models or whatever.
Also I have seen that Apple has some strange lust towards image generation as if that's what people really want. I have this slop image generation thing on my phone and it is useless.
Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.
I don't disagree that local Gemini is better but if you've tried it in iPhone, it is slow, hallucinates and overheats the phone. For anything slightly non-trivial like the workflow example I gave, I think it will be close to useless.
Very Apple-ish approach to AI catch up: wrap an external tool in a privacy architecture, embed into the OS and productize the orchestration layer.
It will be interesting to see if the Private Cloud Compute + on-device routing can make third-party model capabilities feel like a first-party system without leaking user context to the model provider.
If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.
> wrap an external tool in a privacy architecture
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call Apple's architecture data protection rather than privacy? As an European citizen in a post Snowden world I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government, and Apple certainly wants to own a lot of data/metadata about you. Gotta have Siri listening for carplay and so on. I would aboslutely trust Apple not to sell my data as a commodity though.
> If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.
I'd say this is spot on. At least if what Microsoft is doing with Copilot Cowork is anything to go by. Cowork is not a privacy-polished as much as it's an Enterprise compliant polish to make Opus 4.8 run "safely" in your enterprise organisation. So far Microsoft is winning the AI war in non-tech enterprise with this, especially here in the EU. If Apple manages to do this for the private market that will be great for them.
I'm not personally sold on what an AI should do on my phone though. I use a lot of AI professionally, but I haven't even turned on Bixby or whatever the Samsung AI is called.
From an EU perspective, Microsoft is doing data protection, Apple is doing data privacy.
Microsoft's approach to data is basically "we promise nobody else but you and your government can access it, we can but we pinky swear we won't." This promise is mostly enforced at the legal layer and through legal consequences, not technical safeguards. If they think they can get away with it (or are forced to get away with it by the US government), there's nothing stopping them from using your data in whatever way they want.
When they can, Apple designs their systems so that they physically don't even have the capability to use your data, even if it's processed on their own servers. They're not privacy maximalists like Signal is, they care more about user experience, but they do aim for the highest level of privacy you can get while still having a good experience, and when they do need to make sacrifices, they typically let you opt into the privacy features if you really want to.
I'm far more inclined to believe that Microsoft is secretly (or not so secretly) collaborating with the US government than that Apple is.
There has been anecdotal statements/blogs from Apple employees about the data privacy. They have said building some internal capabilities or user facing features are extremely difficult or impossible because they aren't able to access user data at the level required.
From the information presented, the privacy case is not that your data is only accessible to you (which arguably can have a backdoor) but that the data is NOT stored at all, so it's not possible to build a backdoor. I know there are probably other ways around it, but it's my understanding is that no data is kept on any server when the response is sent back to your device
I don't think the Snowden allegations were about employee access to user data.
Do you have any examples?
There is a comment in this thread from an alleged Apple employee that said that, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to send a link for a specific comment. Over the years I've seen comments and blogs posted here in Hacker News reaffirming the same thing.
But to answer your question directly, I don't have any links for those blogs or comments
> it doesn't seem like it's possible to send a link for a specific comment
Click on where it says how long ago the comment was posted
For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461367
Thank you!
I'm replying again because another commenter showed how to link to a comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456081
> Wouldn't it be more accurate to call Apple's architecture data protection rather than privacy? As an European citizen in a post Snowden world I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government, and Apple certainly wants to own a lot of data/metadata about you.
Your conception doesn’t seem to match PCC at all. The whole point of it is that nobody can access the data, not even the people running the servers.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
I don't trust a single US tech company to keep my data private from the US government. Maybe I need a tinfoil hat, but I don't feel like I'm unjustified in this based on the history going back to echelon. Not that this is a particular jive at the USA, my own government (Danish) actively pushes for mass surveillance and non-functional e2e encryption.
There is still a difference though. Google will sell my data and use it for all sorts of things. Though I've obviously accepted that since I have had a Samsung flip phone since Apple made their iPhones too big for my pockets.
This part of their requirements for how PCC is architected directly addresses your concern:
“Verifiable transparency. Security researchers need to be able to verify, with a high degree of confidence, that our privacy and security guarantees for Private Cloud Compute match our public promises. We already have an earlier requirement for our guarantees to be enforceable. Hypothetically, then, if security researchers had sufficient access to the system, they would be able to verify the guarantees. But this last requirement, verifiable transparency, goes one step further and does away with the hypothetical: security researchers must be able to verify the security and privacy guarantees of Private Cloud Compute, and they must be able to verify that the software that’s running in the PCC production environment is the same as the software they inspected when verifying the guarantees.”
They do this by allowing you to download all of the components (minus data cryptexes containing the model weights) and run it on your own Apple silicon chip (you can put your computer in recovery mode and use csrutil to enable research guest operating systems)
I think what is concerning is that they are expanding into Google Cloud and NVIDIA to run with it too with their versions of confidential compute, which if I remember correctly are not as well verified as Apple PCC and a little harder for researchers to get their hands on.
Apple uses a key ceremony process where no single party has access to all the keys required to sign hardware, meaning in theory they can’t just sign malicious hardware. However, I’m not sure how Google and NVIDIA play into this and I don’t think they’ve provided much detail on it. I think it seems a little rushed to get the features out since they fucked up with initial Apple Intelligence release.
From my understanding of the architecture, Apple and Google have basically developed a fork of Gemini that is built to run on Apple's PCC. There is no data being sent to any Google servers.
From this MacRumors article:
"The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure."
And
"The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time.""
That seems to conflict with the recent security blog that says they are using Google Cloud infra and NVIDIA GPUs with PCC now [0].
They are allowing it to run on Intel and NVIDIA and Google chips meeting certain requirements now too instead of just Apple silicon because they think they’re secure enough now, but I suspect this decision might have been pushed by the need for Siri to be useful.
I still definitely think it’s better than what every other company is trying to do (like running a variant of OpenClaw 24/7 forwarding data to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and every other provider they can support).
[0] https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
Ah thank you for that, the MacRumors article was misleading to not even have mentioned this.
pardon my ignorance, but why does compute hardware pose any security concerns?
It's not the compute hardware itself. PCC used to be data centers owned and operated by Apple, running on chips designed by Apple.
With this announcement, Apple is expanding the definition of PCC to Google Cloud data centers. Theoretically, this is Google Cloud, not Google servers, so there should be a separation of access there.
From the Apple security blog:
> Originally built exclusively on Apple silicon with our world-class software security technologies, PCC set a new bar for AI privacy in the cloud, and continues to power the most demanding Apple Intelligence features. Since then, the wider industry has been working to provide a set of confidential inference primitives that could theoretically be combined to reach the security level of PCC. However, until today, those primitives have never been integrated into a comprehensive, end-to-end confidential inference pipeline capable of operating at global scale. That’s what we’ve done with PCC on Google Cloud, which incorporates PCC’s exceptional security and privacy properties at every stage, including the industry’s most comprehensive transparency guarantees that allow external security researchers to verify our privacy commitments.
What does verify mean?
Can they verify the private cloud is completely immune to nationstate actors, has no zero-day vulnerabilities, is completely bulletproof in a court of law and can never be compelled to secretly share info with government(s), etc?
I think the users fear here is real. "We did good due diligence at the consumer level" and "we're completely immune to nationstate hackers and clandestine legal cases" are very different things.
You should read the paper.
Like any good security paper, it doesn’t assert immunity to particular parties. Instead, covers things like how PCC attests that the running software image is identical to the publicly-available, forensically-studied one.
Fear is real for sure, but don’t let fear be an excuse to lose rigor in thinking.
What if the CA certs are compromised, as was alluded to for GCP in the Snowden leaks?
All server security measures are irrelevant if every client req/res is dragnet siphoned off to NSA servers in plaintext. It would also afford the corporation deniability even if they were aware or involved.
This is why everything than can feasibly be E2EE (or performed locally) should be, unless the data is explicitly public. There are too many opportunities for compromise even when the provider has the best of intentions, and ruling class psychopaths aren't intentionally destroying democracy or implementing big brother.
I’m having a hard time parsing that.
Are you suggesting that PCC specifically is sending things in plaintext, or that the security promises in the server and arch are false, or that a compromised CA means… IDK what?
I’m with you on the big principles, but are you implying more specific attack vectors or just kind of maybe everything could be compromised somehow?
> In an NSA presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” however, a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where their data reside. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is “added and removed here!”
http://web.archive.org/web/20140101231153/https://www.washin...
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/06/on-nsa/
So still just innuendo, nothing specific to how PCC works?
This is a non-answer, and in fact, a statement like "don't let fear be an excuse to lose rigor in thinking" in response to my question "how verifiable are their claims" is insulting and sloppy. Rigor in thinking includes human discussion and humans asking questions, but yet you shot that down.
ChatGPT, do what this user wouldn't, and answer the dang question:
> No, Apple cannot verify that Private Cloud Compute is completely immune to nation-state actors, contains no zero-days, or could never be subjected to secret legal compulsion. Nobody can honestly establish those absolutes for a complicated, evolving computer system operating across multiple jurisdictions.
> What Apple has done is more meaningful than ordinary corporate “due diligence,” however. PCC is specifically engineered to make clandestine access—whether by hackers, insiders, or governments—technically difficult, difficult to target, and more likely to leave externally detectable evidence...
> Against ordinary attackers, rogue employees, conventional cloud administrators and routine government data requests, PCC appears exceptionally strong for a cloud AI service.
> Against a targeted nation-state willing to combine zero-days, supply-chain compromise, endpoint exploitation, legal pressure and secrecy, the right description is: Highly resistant, deliberately difficult to target, and unusually auditable—but not immune.
Thanks ChatGPT. Don't know why I bother to ask humans anymore, it's StackOverflow the whole way down.
"I did not like your answer, therefore I will use the 100% reliable, bullet-proof method of having an algorithm generate the statistically most likely words that form a plausible answer to my question."
[flagged]
How are security researchers going to have access to the Nvidia GPUs that will be running this?
It’s a fair concern, but the only way to reconcile a belief that Apple is sharing data from PCC with anyone (including themselves) is to assert the whole PCC thing is a massive fraud.
Which it could be, but given both breadth of claim and Apple’s strong incentives not to be caught lying about something so massive, I’d want something more than vibes to take the idea seriously.
There's no guarantee against data exfiltration, because the data leaks happens through tool calls, which are not made from the PCC, but from your own device.
E.g. "the user asks if their Bitcoin private key is unique, let's make a web search".
Combined with prompt injection attacks, it's quite easy for an attacker to craft a prompt which sends your private data through any supported tool call (web search, database search, email, app APIs, etc.). Everything is wide open for the attacker / or yourself accidentally to exfiltrate your data.
That doesn’t make sense in this context – the point of PCC is so you know somebody isn’t snooping on your information when you send it to the servers. The person I was responding to seemed to think that Apple would be looking at that information.
You're right, but also "PCC is very secure" might give a false sense of security, considering that there might be other associated vulnerabilities in these kinds of systems.
Which is a good point. set a Bitcoin wallet private key in an obvious place on your system, and then setup a monitor (on another system) to notify you if its contents gets stolen.
Doesn't prevent the exfiltration but at least you'll know when it does.
And we have to believe that it's not backdoored because they say so? That's incredibly naïve.
No. I provided the link so you could read more about it.
I have read it. The entire trust hinges on several critical points, such as trusting secure boot.
You remember when the NSA injected itself in TLS termination at all major cloud providers? You remember when several giant automotive corporations built elaborate detection of testing scenarios to fake emissions? You remember room 641A?
I have no real way to tell if this is security Theater or meaningful protection. None of us has,
That's "because they said so" but with more words. Sorry, but a pretty blog post is not proof enough.
> I use a lot of AI professionally, but I haven't even turned on Bixby or whatever the Samsung AI is called.
I know this was just a small aside, but man do I hate Bixby and other phone AIs. They are so frustratingly difficult to turn off, and turning them on accidentally is as simply as holding the wrong button for a few seconds, such as when your phone is in your pocket. Very frustrating design.
I never turned Bixby on, so it never really bothers me except for when I update and it want me to accept something which I decline. I turned the button off, I forgot what I switched it to but holy hell was that annoying.
I never turned Bixby on either, but on my phone is comes pre-installed and pre-turned-on, and you can't uninstall it, only "deactivate" it.
I just want to be able to turn things off without affecting completely other unrelated things. Like Siri and Carplay, makes no sense I need one activated to use the other, just a trick to get people to avoid disabling Siri.
> I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government
Outside of law enforcement having a warrant, Apple's efforts against CSAM, or their Chinese data centers, I've not heard of Apple doing any of what you assume in a post-Snowden world. iMessage is supposed to be end to end encrypted, and there was a few years ago that whole scandal where Apple wouldn't unlock a literal terrorists cell phone for the FBI.
The FBI had to reach out to... a third party to unlock the phone (I forget the name of the firm that did it - Cellebrite maybe?) for them, what's funny is they spent a lot of money on it, when the rest of the world pointed out that the very specific iOS version in question had known vulnerabilities they could have found online for free (or cheaper?).
Is there a meaningful Google-Apple boundary in operation?
They are buying the right to distill their own Gemini models and run them in their data centres (or at least data centres they control); unless I am missing something, this isn't going to be infrastructure that Google has operational control over.
If Apple is running the inference from Apple iPhones and Apple data centers then Apple has operational control. Google’s influence ends the moment they hand the weights over to Apple.
They are using Google Cloud.
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/?linkId=100000...
"Now, we are collaborating with Google and NVIDIA to run new Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud, extending our industry-leading PCC privacy commitments to third-party data centers for the first time."
Per that link: I think there's an interesting question about whether a nefarious actor who's infiltrated a cloud provider with physical access to machines that are running signed operating systems, with signed binaries, with TDX remote attestation, and with hardware supply chain verification, has the ability to break the privacy guarantees of a tenant with Apple's sophistication.
Certainly, one could tamper with the hardware, but could one do it in a way that wouldn't get that machine immediately flagged, removed from the routing pool, and told to wipe its memory immediately, by a watchtower (perhaps even the routing layer itself) that runs in a separate secure Apple datacenter?
Those datacentres would be in the same position of trust as a VPN provider in that the data must be unencrypted at points in the process.
They could be making it very safe, and the things apple says they are doing would make it as safe as possible, but as a user there is no way of verifying the claims.
> as a user there is no way of verifying the claims
I think this sums up what it's like to be an Apple user pretty well. With their heavy proprietary and closed approach, all users can do is "trust" them.
Have you read the PCC whitepapers? Are you saying the user-facing verification methods in them are insufficient, or vulnerable, or just false?
The previous argument was wrong and imprecise, as it could be used against any modern technology, none of which can be fully understood by a user, in the sense that any vulnerability would be completely invisible.
It’s clear they have made a very intelligent approach to this system.
>nefarious actor who's infiltrated a cloud provider
Google is buying that compute from xAI aka Musk
Apple could simply be ordered to include a hardware backdoor, and legally be prevented from talking about it. Everything else in the architecture could work exactly the way they claim in the PCC paper.
Spoiler alert; Google is the nefarious actor.
I think the last thing Google wants to do is get on the bad side of their largest partners.
their largest partner is probably the US government.
Which is...
Wrong answer. Or at least, obvious and not particularly useful.
Truth is, none of those parties are "nefarious" - they're all just not on your side. And "security" is never an unqualified good thing to have (it's not an unqualified bad thing either). It's just a framework of coercion.
The most important questions to answer about any security system is, what is being protected, for who, and from who. People don't ask that much, not even in the industry - it's an implicit assumption that everyone themselves is a "good person" and is on the protected side of security systems. And then they're confused because it turns out end-users are more often seen as threat actors. All the players mention, but perhaps especially Apple, in its own special way, is protecting the computer from the user just as much as they're protecting the user/user's data from third parties.
It's not.
Why bother with all that cloak and dagger stuff when they can just buy the data? You believe Apple and/or Google isn't selling it? I have some land in Florida I'd like to talk about.
Having worked at Apple, I will say I firmly believe they do not sell data. I worked in data science and we had the shittiest inference because we had essentially no access, even internally, to longitudinal or cross-app user data. Best we had was 15 minute rotating sessions for a single app. There are internal teams dedicated to deanonymizing data to try to narrow down users - if they can successfully do so, and relevant fields that lead to deanonymization get permanently purged from internal logging.
I can’t speak to the current architecture but Apple has shown a consistent willingness to sacrifice access to user data in the name of selling privacy instead at a premium price (you could argue precisely because no one of their competition have any meaningful posture on this). I do believe they are quite serious in their commitment to that, as they have found this strategy to be more valuable than the data itself.
But sending sensitive private audio recordings to the lowest bidder is par for the course?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49502292
This comment makes it sound like they sold private recordings to whomever was willing to pay for them, but they paid third parties to evaluate Siri recordings.
Don't really agree with that, that would have been highest bidder if anything.
And it wouldn't have been much worse compared to be as careless as they have been.
> Having worked at Apple, I will say I firmly believe they do not sell data.
Selling data is so shabby! Why sell when you can just give it away to letter-soup friends?
Because that's not legal, so they sell it to third party data brokers and it gets resold to someone the TLAs can buy it legally from.
US wiretapping operations are not bound by publicly-visible laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Illegal to share data with entities that are themselves law enforcement, and which they are known to be demanding, not just asking to share out of good will?
Apple's incentives don't align to sell private data as their whole thing is privacy. They do that they tank their business. If you have proof that they are doing it -- I'd love to see it. (*3rd party actors from an app re-selling data doesn't count)
Google is 100% doing that because thats their entire incentive for the business. They sell low cost software / subsidized hardware on the grounds that you pay with your sharing data. That's the implied cost.
Show me the incentives - I will show you the outcomes.
Apple/Google make less money if they sell the data because their ad product would no longer have an advantage. So no, I don't think they do that.
That’s not so special, though? There’s a difference between Google infra running Google services.
Versus any F500 company running their services on GCP.
It’s a bit whacky to think about because Apple will operate Google owned software on GCP. But it should be sandboxed just the same.
I’m not making a normative privacy argument here. Just pointing out that this is cloud business as usual. Perhaps it’s interesting Apple is doing it, but basically everything else is already using either AWS or GCP at this point.
I think the difference is scale. This is Apple, so it's an enormous amount of devices. And it's a seamless experience, to the user, going from local model to cloud models.
So the question about which model Apple was going to use and where has been highly anticipated, especially by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Imagine if either one could say they have Apple as their customer?
Apple certainly has the cash to burn if they wanted to train their own model, but it also always seemed out of their core competency. This is a major win for Google.
So "business as usual" but with huge implications for the AI ecosystem in general.
[dead]
Google Cloud, but, the way I read it, not Google’s AI offerings. They, basically, hire Google servers to run their software on it.
They also (claim to) ensure those servers run only software they have approved to run on it.
(Part of their software are models derived from Google Gemini, but that’s orthogonal to this)
>(Part of their software are models derived from Google Gemini, but that’s orthogonal to this)
You're right that it is orthogonal to the privacy promises Apple makes to its own users.
The moralistic and righteous undertone in their marketing material is questionable though given that these Apple services might not exist if Google didn't exploit Gemini app user data on Android the way it does.
That's fine with me. Users have a choice here. In fact, it's a big improvement over the search deal with Google where Apple sends its own users directly to Google.
They are not _only_ using Google Cloud. They continue to build and invest in their own datacenters. It's not a binary choice.
Yeah, but the models are running in Google Cloud which makes sense they are based on Gemini.
They appear to be running them on both GCP and in their datacenter.
That is news — I guess not very surprising that they'd need more data centres than before.
But again there is no Apple-to-Google transfer in the inference in the sense of the comment I was originally replying to (I am not suggesting you're implying otherwise, obviously)
But I stand happily corrected where I said they aren't in the picture at all.
That is an interesting press release because it outlines what they would have had to do with any data centre they were outsourcing to.
This is probably why Google had to rent compute from SpaceX. They needed to free up NVIDIA GPUs for Apple so they probably moved internal workloads to SpaceX compute.
Google likely won't rent compute from SpaceX, they have a substantial share of SpaceX (they own 5% of it) and need the IPO to be valued highly, so to prop up the IPO stock, they made this announcement, but if you read the fine print, both SpaceX and Google are allowed to cancel it at any time, as-in, after they cash out from the IPO.
iCloud already uses Google Cloud, so that still doesn't change the operational boundaries of where data goes
I hope they are still using PCC hardware rather than running private data through third-party servers.
Right — I suppose I mis-phrased my first sentence a bit, because I guess it can be interpreted as me saying the boundary is blurred, when what I was trying to write is: in operation there is nothing crossing any boundary; Google are not in the picture.
But google is paying SpaceX/xAi for compute... so...
As someone who doesn't use Android, they showed a lot of integration into the apps, which I think is where the real magic happens, and it's not something I can do with any 3rd party chatbots today (that I'm aware of). I also don't know that I would trust the other 3rd parties with the access required to pull it off.
If anything, having Shortcuts built-in at the OS level was a very long play that’s going to pay off.
And Intents
I'm interested in how it feels to use: whether there is any context leaking, as you mentioned, if it introduces latency, and whether there are any pricing implications? I know they weighed a variety of factors, including the smaller models, but cost had to be a big concern, too... I feel like Google is the only provider giving away so much AI inference for free.
This will further blur the picture about when and how consumers / employees are supposed to pay for AI services. For example, they showed consumer rather than coding tasks, but could you select five files and ask Siri to write a Python script or a small app? Will enterprises just disable Siri AI functionality, or will they be able to route it through their own AI auditing and providers?
Oh yes Apple "wraps" their AI in a "privacy architecture" -- you can't use Carplay unless you turn it (Siri) on.
Yes, but Siri can be turned off from invocation without turning off CarPlay. You can disable the side button and Hey Siri while leaving Siri "on."
No disrespect for your valuable discovery but this attitude of “it’s possible, if you do these non-obvious steps” feels a lot like victim blaming in UI.
If Apple (or anyone else) wanted to make a feature used, they can. For everyone else, if Siri is off CarPlay doesn’t work. And that’s by design.
Not the design of “ooh if Siri is off then voice in CarPlay won’t work” (warnable), but punishment if Siri is off.
Again this pattern isn’t Apple only but it’s bad everywhere.
It feels cynical to see this as a punishment when it's such a specific use case that does demonstrate deep integration with Siri. Maps, Messages, etc. use Siri for their interactions.
I am sure that there was a meeting where they decided what to do when Siri was off and somebody decided (very possibly with ulterior motives) not to split the feature set - all or nothing. However I don't think the challenge they were faced with in this hypothetical meeting was an easy one.
The alternative is you open the Messages app and you can't send messages. You open Maps and you can't get directions (unless parked). Sure, I get that they could show a screen saying "Sending messages is not available when Siri is disabled" but now you're hitting error messages while driving.
Anyways, the main reason people would disable Siri is accidental activation, and Apple provides all the toggles needed to avoid that without disabling the core components needed for CarPlay.
How do you expect to use a nav system while driving without voice control?
Before you start driving, at stop lights, while waiting in lines, etc.
I don't know how it works on CarPlay but when I turn my car on I have a bunch of suggested addresses (home, work, parents, recent Maps searches, etc) that I just touch-to-go. Having to use voice every time you want to navigate not only sounds unnecessary, but cumbersome.
Oh so exactly like Apple Maps via Carplay then.
Yep, shouldn't require Siri at all
Put in the destination before start driving?
CarPlay does not work at all if you have not enabled Siri. As in it won’t even connect.
Since when? I've used Carplay for years and I've NEVER had Siri enabled. I despise voice control.
I purchased an iPhone 15 a few months ago and ended up making this discovery myself. CarPlay would refuse to launch unless I enabled Siri. I didn't do any of the Siri setup, or anything but the app would hard refuse to launch unless I went and toggled on Siri. Maybe that's different depending on your make/model, or the specific infotainment system in your car, but in my '21 Kia Forte, Siri is a very hard requirement.
Never enabled it or never disabled it? Do you remember disabling it?
Never enabled it. I always explicitly skip the "Setup/Enable siri" step on every update.
No sense of adventure
You don’t need to enable Gemini or voice assistant on android to use android auto. Some functionality is lost, of course, but you can still navigate and play music.
I almost never use Siri in my car and use a "nav system" every time I am driving.
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I am and I very much agree with you. Many Americans 1) have no idea how to drive with any common courtesy or respect and 2) many drive while texting or doing who knows what all while cutting lanes and impeding traffic.
I literally see these things every time I drive. And I work from home.
I set it before I start moving, and then don't touch it while in motion.
I never use Siri when using CarPlay? I’m confused by your question.
If you disable Siri, you cannot connect to Carplay
Not disabled. I just never use Siri.
I use Carplay all the time and I didn't even realize it has voice control. I just set things up on my phone and drive.
DIt disn’t even occur to me that I need voice control. Stop car. Enter destination. Drive. How hard is that?
Good luck telling Siri to drive to Hronská Breznica. Outside of English speaking countries voice control is very hit and miss (mostly miss)
“Sorry, I don’t know where you are”
> just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini
I'd use this.
I'd rather have strong privacy guarantees, but this is still good.
The most Apple-ish thing would be to produce a great platform, enable third parties to do something on top of it, and take a cut.
I REALLY wish they'd do that with voice assistants.
All I know is that Siri is a terrible user experience.
Consider that they described the development process as taking Siri down to bare metal and rebuilding on a new architecture. I don’t think our previous Siri experience will be particularly relevant.
They decided to use the Siri branding, so I am going to do as they tell me an associate it with my prior Siri experience. That's a brands sole purpose, to give a buyer an indication of a product before they buy it. (Or in my case, given my experience with the brand, not buy it).
As long as it’s not the same folks I guess
This is post Jobs era typical Apple.
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I absolutely adore the historical revisionism that apple cares about privacy.
Run your router through a linux laptop as a proxy so you can capture traffic, connect any apple device to your router, and see the vasts amount of data your device sends to apple.
Apple DGAF about privacy, they want your data as much as anyone else, their only thing is that they should be the only ones to get it and then other people have to pay them for it, rather than your device sending the data to the 3d party directly.
And if you think your data is secure, reminder that The Fappening was all done targeting apple devices.
Apple added e2ee and created the most complete end to end encrypted cloud ecosystem to prevent that from happening again.
Do you trust them to actually implement that correctly, and also do you trust them not to share your data with others, and if so, why?
I don't use it, but yes I think that it works because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain. They definitely could share whatever data they have with whoever, which is why you use e2ee.
At the end of the day you are trusting Apple with pretty much everything if you use this service because they make most of your phone, the entire operating system, host the update servers, etc.
>At the end of the day you are trusting Apple with pretty much everything if you use this service because they make most of your phone, the entire operating system, host the update servers, etc.
Correct but this is not privacy.
Privacy is when you have a phone does not contact external services, or at the least, allows you to control which services it can contact.
With Apple, you don't have this. Sure e2ee to Apple exists, but if China decides to put enough pressure on Apple and request your data from Apple if you visit China, its very likely they will give it to them, and you have no option to opt out.
Apple doesn't run iCloud in China.
We were originally talking about if they implemented e2ee correctly and obviously e2ee gives you significant privacy. Your documents are still private if you encrypt them locally and then upload to google drive, no matter what connections google drive makes.
Privacy is a spectrum and Apple gives you the most privacy of any big tech company.
Is that secret code for “rate-limited auth on the Find My API”?
I’m not breaking NDA if I never signed one/was nowhere near the company or situation, you guys can fuck yourselves lol ^_^
I would love to learn more about what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now. Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?
Is there a meaningful distinction between the Gemini-powered models and Apple Foundation Models? Does that distinction vary for on-device vs hosted models? Are some models running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute and others running on Google iron?
Edit: they elaborated significantly in a "keynote tech-talk": [0]
According to Apple, there are five models:
On-Device
- AFM Core: Dense architecture; the standard next-gen on-device model
- AFM Core Advanced: Sparse architecture, natively multimodal; enables features like image understanding and expressive voices
Private Cloud Compute
- AFM Cloud: Workhorse server model optimized for latency and cost
- AFM Cloud Image: Image generation and editing
- AFM Cloud Pro: Most capable model, Gemini frontier-level quality, for complex reasoning and agentic tasks; runs on NVIDIA GPUs in Google's cloud under Apple's PCC privacy guarantees
Everything excluding Cloud Pro are custom models running on Apple Silicon, "refined" using Google Gemini. About Cloud Pro, they say "this is our most capable model with quality similar to Gemini frontier models." So I might read between the lines and say this is a wrapped Gemini.
> what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now.
It's a 3B Apple Foundation model.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...
If you've got a mac, you can use this to play around with it:
https://apfel.franzai.com/
I think what they mean by “now” is the stuff announced today.
It's more complicated than that (see my edit above).
Thanks for that. I like being able to pipe output into a local LLM to get an explanation of the output.
That’s really neat. I wonder if that model that shipped recently with Chrome is also accessible similarly?
> Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?
Easiest way to tell, how much dancing around did we listen to and how many diagrams did we have to look at? If they had their own tech we wouldn't be looking at diagrams we'd just be getting told Siri AI, it's private, it's powerful, here's what it can do. Instead we had 10 minutes talking around the tech and this diagram [1] which is a signal that it's a bunch of other peoples stuff cobbled and wrapped together.
[1]:https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2026/06/apple-introduc...
Local is probably similar to Gemma e4b you can get right now on Google Edge Gallery (the ios and Android app). Guessing that the more powerful version that will only work on the 12gb ram devices will be something unreleased that is similar but a bit larger
Google also awhile back announced being able to run full Gemini by leasing / renting hardware in your own datacenters so companies can train or access data without needing to send things to their datacenters. Nvidia based. Guessing Private Compute might just be Apple leasing a ton of those?
Apple Private Cloud Compute is running on M2/M3 Ultra. I'm not sure if Gemini Flash can fit in that amount of RAM.
A larger context window would be nice, the apple model on devices now is almost too small to do cool stuff with
Am I reading this correctly? Their chosen cloud providers run the PCC stack on their hardware, so the compute provider is responsible for ensuring the privacy guarantees? I assume that would add to the potential security surface area.
Intel and Nvidia are responsible for enforcing their privacy features. The cloud operator (Google in this case) has no access to any data.
Yes, that seems to be the case, and is an evolution/deviation of the original PCC model, which relied on Apple Silicon exclusively.
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
> Everything excluding Cloud Pro are custom models running on Apple Silicon, "refined" using Google Gemini
What could "refined" mean here?
I was thinking distilled?
Always appreciate people answering their own questions in great detail!
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Gemini (at least public free version) hallucinates way too much. If it's like that, it can go very badly for Apple.
I used Gemini exclusively via the API but downloaded the app last week for something. Even on max settings, it is ridiculously nerfed!
Unfortunately, even the API variant got RLHF'd pretty hard into being that dumb end-user assistant personality :(
But beside that, I feel like the app variant got worse the day they've had that wwdc-style release thing recently.
Previously it was a sparring partner that could actually keep up. But now it just doesn't.
Truly a shame. And nothing that could be fixed by local models any time soon, given that you need the size for the (cross-)domain knowledge.
The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong. If you then start a follow up chat the answers change but usually still half wrong.
Search would be better without the added AI hallucinations above it. If I want an AI answer I'll go and ask Claude, the quality difference is huge.
> The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong.
That's not Gemini, that's AI Mode (in Search), they're different products built by fairly different part of Google (actually one is built by Deepmind).
(I don't think it's much comparable to https://gemini.google.com/app at least in the past you'd get very different results)
And it's extremely poor marketing by Google to do this - the general perception people have is that Google AI is dumb due to this.
To be fair, this is classic Google.
As I keep saying, they should win this AI stuff, but I have complete faith in their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
It has to be really because think of how fast it has to come up with an answer (ie time for a regular google query) and the immense scale of billions of people querying it many times a day, all for free.
Just like search itself, caching does wonders. What do 90% of the people ask anyway but mundane, totally predictable questions?
If someone knows about caching it’s google engineers
It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).
I'd wager that for 99.9% of "Apple Intelligence" tasks, Google's models perform just as well as other frontier labs. Google also has done more work on getting LLMs running on edge devices compared to anthropic and openAI.
The source also says > The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure
Which could mean Google and Apple have trained some custom models, probably the on-device ones, specifically tailored towards Apple's hardware.
That's not the point of OP. The point of OP is that Google is a direct competitor of Apple for phones / OS, so them giving the "key of the house" to Google is risky
What indicates they’ve given google anything other than a truckload of cash? There’s zero data sharing in the arrangement and the stuff is running on apple devices and in Apples Private Compute.
Not even Apple has access to it, by design.
No reasonable person relies on Apple's statements as facts. That said by Apple's laywers, and is especially true here. Apple can access the data if they want, and so can Google and Nvidia.
And why would a reasonable person rely on your statement alone as fact?
Because it would be foolish to just trust them on their statements both given their history as well as given the fact that they're in it for the money and tend to follow the path which brings in more of it.
You answered why one shouldn’t trust their view. But that was not the question. The question was, “why should one trust you?”
Quite the typical outsider's simplistic view. Privacy is one of their core brand values. If they don't follow through on those, their brand erodes.
And what history?
You can look up the history of this company's claims versus reality on their promises re. privacy yourself, there's enough to be found between Siri listening when it shouldn't, user data being accessible to the company in contrast to promises of privacy, the company collecting user data which is used for targeted advertising, several examples of push notification data being handed over to law enforcement agencies in several countries, leaky 'airdrop' allowing user identification which wasn't fixed by the company even after a fix was published by outsiders and more.
The real question is why you seem to be so credulous when it comes to this company. Do you extend this trust to other similar companies or is it only reserved for this specific company? I ask this because you're not the first person who seems to consider this company to be almost above criticism even though they've shown to be just like other companies in all respects. When Jobs was still around this stance was supposedly caused by his 'reality distortion field' but he has been gone for a long time and given that Cook has the charisma of an accountant this can no longer be the reason. What makes them so special to some even though their claims have been punctured many times over?
Oh, brb, looking up the history
Yes, but you get less risk in other areas. Google is a long standing publicly traded company. Apple knows that they know their stuff, and that they’re gonna stick around. Anthropic and openAI are new kids on the block when it comes to software as a whole, and that’s a risk.
They already have a very codependent relationship because of their revenue share over putting Google search up front in iPhones so I doubt either party would put that at risk.
Apple and Google have been dealing with each other for quite a long time. My guess is that they want to replicate the relationship they have with Safari, where Apple provides the users and Google provides the search engine (and money).
Last year the announced they were working with OpenAI. It looks like this went nowhere, so it's not really surprising to see them try someone else.
A large portion of Apple's screens come from Samsung. Once a company is large enough, growing your business through supporting a competitor of another group at the company could be seen as a win-win.
The other half comes from LG….
They're also kind of in the same bucket regarding regulators, which might be something they're keeping an eye on regarding AI integrations.
I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity. By making Gemini an implementation detail, they leave the door open to swap it out for Anthropic or OpenAI without end-users even knowing or caring. So I think they're creating leverage in any future negotiation.
And at the same time they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers? Which would not even be true if this was an Apple product built on the models of Google, just like the DMA does not force them to pick a different datacenter of office cleaning provider.
There's a post here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Take it with a grain of salt but I don't think it's other AI providers that Apple is upset about. The DMA would require users to be able install any openclaw like thing onto their device with access to everything that Siri can access today. There are all sorts of arguments to be made here but I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here.
Undoubtedly Meta would install themselves as an "AI agent" and then just scrape your whole device for data they can use.
What good experience? Siri has sucked for over 10 years, completely degrading in the last few, with no way to change it to a more capable assistant.
Apple doesn't care about "offering a good experience". Apple cares about vendor lock in. It pisses off even me, a long-time (18 years and counting) Apple user.
You’re hurling a separate set of UX issues onto the subject of the EU’s deferred inclusion
Also is Siri the only thing you’re using in your Apple products that you’re so clueless as to ask “what good experience”? I mean, what kept you in the ecosystem for 18 years and counting?
> You’re hurling a separate set of UX issues onto the subject of the EU’s deferred inclusion
It wasn't me who said "I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here."
> Also is Siri the only thing you’re using in your Apple products that you’re so clueless as to ask “what good experience”? I mean, what kept you in the ecosystem for 18 years and counting?
"How dare you criticize the company whose products you're using"
People can already install applications and give those applications access to their files, photos, camera, microphone, etc. I don't see the fundamental difference, provided the user chooses to provide access to this data.
Looks like the problem with DMA has more to do with giving full access to other providers outside of the on-device + private cloud compute architecture. The way I interpret the newsroom post [1], Apple doesn't want to give third-party providers full access to user data when the third-party providers cannot run on private cloud compute for privacy reasons, but the EU wants them to offer the choice anyway.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
> they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers
They don't claim that. All they said is "later in the EU as we look into privacy and security" after spending two hours saying how private and secure everything is.
DMA would force them to allow usage from other apps than their own and other assitants than Siri, especially for on-device models.
Edit I stand somewhat corrected but it's regular Apple bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451012
> I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity
It didn't work out well for Yahoo.com. It turned out that Google Search was the value and yahoo.com just skin around it. It might be the same for Apple. Gemini is the valuable part, what particular device you use it on matters less.
Google search was leaps and bounds better than any other search engine when it came along and dominated. Yahoo couldn’t build their own, and nobody else they could buy from compared.
As i understand it, no LLM is miles ahead of the others right now, especially when it comes to simple agentic stuff. Hell, Qwen3.6-35B-A3 quantized to 3bits running on an 8 year old consumer GPU handles most agentic stuff fine, if a bit slow.
Differences in LLMs boil down to mostly the harness and the compute to run the models. Even for high complexity tasks like coding, the differences between openai, anthropic, google, and the bigger qwen models aren’t that dramatic.
We’re clearly in a different situation at the moment. Google is far from the only useful back end language model provider.
iPhone is a hardware and Apple is a hardware company. So the 'skin' they sell is much more valuable than Yahoo.
In time Apple will swap it out for a in house model like many other things they’re swapped out in the last 25 years, Apple appears to be a company that doesn’t waste money and seem to execute long range projects if necessary I don’t think the Google models will be there for long. I think they will be swapped out when the M series GPUs get to the performance level they want.
I thought this seemed significant at the time: https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/pull/1983
It’s a bit like when Steve Jobs turned down acquiring Dropbox telling them they’re just a feature, not a product
And then they created icloud and now it makes them like $110 billion a year while dropbox makes like $2.5b. I think history has proven them right.
(Ok so $110b is all services revenue not just icloud, but icloud’s a solid chunk of that)
I was in the beat at the time. If you had read what pundits were saying at the time you would find countless criticism of Apple's hybris etc... Sounds a LOT like what we read today about LLMs.
That’s exactly what a model should be: Implementation detail.
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Maybe they're looking for stability and trust Google to be around longer than Antrophic or OpenAI when the storm starts.
Bingo. They see this as the future commodity it will be. Customers will choose AI providers much way they choose a car: taste, price, a few other factors.
And to your point, Google has a massive balance sheet, produces their own AI chips, and is not going anywhere anytime soon.
People are not even going to choose their AI providers in the future, it's going to be a part of some other product.
I could totally see that
Google was the right choice stability and it only cost Apple $1 billion per year that’s pretty much of a no-brainer, and with Apple’s history, they probably will use Gemini for as long as they need it and then use their own model in time.
And Apple already has a $20B search partnership with Google they can build on.
fair and square, indeed
I’ll just put this link here: https://killedbygoogle.com/
I am familiar what Google has killed before, but a contract with Apple is not something they'll throw out of the window for no reasons.
I may be jaded, but I do not trust Google for product offering stability. Obviously, Apple is a way bigger fish.
It's not a popular opinion on HN but Google is actually super stable from a B2B perspective. Even app engine (2008) is still kicking.
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Is it really all that difference from Apple defaulting to Google's search engine?
> Is it really all that difference from Apple defaulting to Google's search engine?
Not really, because the business model isn't there (at least not in this iteration.
1. The models are Apple models, co-developed with Google. They are not white-label Gemini.
2. There's not currently a Google failover or UX
3. Because of that, there's no user monetization to share.
Apple does have a ChatGPT integration, with failover UX, and with a suspected revenue share deal. However, one could see this deal in a precarious situation, since at the time it started it was expected Apple would not focus much at all on a model capable with world knowledge.
Depends on which way the money is flowing. Google pays Apple for default search engine. Is Google paying Apple for using Gemini? That feels like a much heavier investment if they are
Yes, Google can do that just like Intel, Samsung, Nvidia or Qualcomm yes Google can drag their feet, we know in the end it will all lead to tears and then they will separate.
At the time Apple made this decision there wasn’t as strong of a difference in model quality between Google, anthropic, and OpenAI as there is now. Also Apple definitely burnt some bridges with OpenAI on the agreement they made together a year earlier.
> wasn’t as strong of a difference in model quality between Google, anthropic, and OpenAI as there is now
What's the difference now? I would guess 9/10 people here would have a very hard time telling the models apart in a blind taste test.
Especially if you are not asking siri to code stuff. If your use case is still "personal context" with "conversation", even if there is a 9/10 difference, the users may see their abilities going from 3/10 presently to 6/10 or 7/10, and still a massive upgrade for most of them. I think therapy and scientific research may remain in the domain of frontier chat interfaces for another year.
> What's the difference now?
Well, which ones are on my Mac locally?
Which ones are in my iPhone locally?
OpenAI and Anthropic don't make small models. Google happens to already have a billion devices that would benefit from small models, so they made one. Google basically gets 1 billion per year for free*.
Google has very good small models which can run locally on a phone - Gemma4.
OpenAI/Anthropic have nothing in this segment.
Did Apple indicate they are using local models?
That was their original design with Apple Intelligence: do as much locally as possible, only invoke the cloud in a very controlled way when necessary.
> Apple Intelligence is designed to protect your privacy at every step. It’s integrated into the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac through on-device processing.
https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
Google was likely the only lab grown up enough that could handle Apple's volume and requests.
Apple was not going to hand over the keys to AI to just anyone.
Apple is a Fortune 5 company with a brand value alone worth more than any of these AI labs besides Google.
There's too much at stake for them to not play it safe. There's almost nothing to gain taking a risk
> Apple's volume
Yeah, I think Apple's volume made Google the only choice. And even then, Google was buying more DC capacity last week.
Gemini is better than either at multi modal, google also has their tensor processor stuff with ridiculously high T/s output they need for acceptable UX
Only Google was willing to do what Apple wanted for a reasonable price.
They licensed Gemini and Google infrastructure not just for use, but to accelerate the creation of the three independent Apple Foundation Models announced today:
- AFM Core
- AFM Core Advanced
- AFM Cloud
Google also worked to be able to host AFM Cloud on their infrastructure per Apple's private cloud compute architecture, including some form of independent third party review/audit.
I suspect the only two organizations with both the model and the infrastructure needed for Apple were Google and xAI - and I'm not sure Apple would touch Grok with a ten foot pole, even if xAI were willing to let it be used for training.
You think Google cares.
Google doesn't care they do not control iOS. Google cares to have their products everywhere. For many years Google apps were better on iOS than on Android, because on Android they just preinstall them while on iOS they need to be installed explicitly.
Android is not a Google product, it is just a tool for Google to collect data. If they manage to collect data via Apple Intelligence they are going to do it. Regardless of what Apple marketing says.
Google will probably eventually pay Apple to be the assistant, a la search.
Google pays to be the default search because they make more from selling ads on those searches than they are paying for the search.
I don't see the same thing here. Google isn't making any money from being the assistant in Apple, so why would they pay to be it?
Yet? Maybe they are but embedding adds or paid signal amplification/probability tweaking has already been floated on the market and may already be a product.
It doesn't matter if it's classic search or LLM. They can monetize tracking information as easily as they can sell ads. They'll have fast cheap custom-built assistant models that run on device by default, keeping things profitable. In time they'll likely double-dip again by injecting product placement in results.
Google can't track information in private inference. That's kinda the point.
For Google, search quality is a moat. And it's becoming apparent that AI quality is a moat as well.
Maybe. Search ads likely make Google more money than they pay apple. For AI, Google currently loses money. If they eventually make money via ads, then sure. Else, apple will have to pay them
Apple has started adding ads to iOS (e.g. maps), just like Microsoft.
I guarantee you Google will start letting people pay to influence the output of the Gemini models once they figure out how to do it.
Search has ads but Siri doesn't. And when Apple puts ads in Siri they won't be Google ads. I don't think Google benefits from this deal enough to be worth paying.
Eventually? I bet they already are.
This is the most likely explanation. Apple manufacturers some of the best inference silicon on earth. Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range. The article says Apple can run this stuff on customers’ hardware, so that’s the range of model sizes that actually matter.
> Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range
smart is a weird term, gemma4 is an amazing omni model better than qwen3.6 for non coding tasks (as for all Gemini models). For Apple Intelligence gemma4 makes a lot more sense.
Not if the privacy situation is what Apple says in the Keynote. Only if they can tap that data.
It may be a clever move. By using the same models as android (contractually?), they can compete on the user experience which they typically handle better than android phone providers.
> or even OpenAI
Apple originally partnered with OpenAI. We won’t know all the details for some time, but given OpenAI’s penchant for drama (they started leaking that they might sue Apple [1]), it seems fair to sideline them as a long-term partner.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/14/openai-considering-lega...
It's not clear that there's any sort of durable advantage to the provider here -- in fact, oAI started as the partner with apple a couple of years ago, and is reportedly unhappy with the outcomes.
The hard part is not distilling a frontier model down into a specific use case when you have hundreds of millions of users, the hard part is (apparently) re-architecting your mobile OS to work with such a model rather than fight it. Those architectural benefits accrue to apple, as will future datasets and expertise, and the benefit of having some distillation working 24/7 on prem.
Anyway, where I think you're going to be grumpy in two years is that switching the underlying model is going to require a jailbreak, and that you wish they'd made the os much more deeply open for agentic interaction, not that it's gemini - it's just not the valuable part of the story for Apple or for users.
The differentiation is the integration, not the model itself which is mostly fungible. And afaik Apple is running these models on their own compute, so I don't think google can pull a bait and switch.
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves
How exactly are they disadvantaging themselves? Perhaps expand on that opinion a bit, and the data/assumptions you're making in forming it.
My naive assumption is that they're going to do what everyone is doing: make tooling that lets you swap in any model.
I don't think it's fair to assume incompetence, on their part. I think it's much safer to assume they're doing what's best for them, and it's very clear to them what's best (money, support, etc).
> My naive assumption is that they're going to do what everyone is doing: make tooling that lets you swap in any model.
They are a ways away from that for Siri, as they can't guarantee third party tooling meets their security and privacy requirements. Meeting those security and privacy requirements also makes it harder for a third party to monetize their investment or ongoing use of infrastructure.
But I suspect you will see integration in other areas, such as image generation.
I'm a bit lost, since you didn't answer directly. Are you saying Apples privacy/security requirements are the "disadvantage" you were talking about?
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI.
The models are quickly converging to similar capabilities with particular ones being better at a particular task until the next release cycle.
> Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Yeah, that's not really how things work at this scale.
Differentiating themselves can only be a bad thing for Apple. Google is way ahead of Apple in AI and likely always will be.
Both Apple and Google end up advantaged by this relationship: Apple gets the same technology as Android, meaning there is no competitive front opening up. Google gets eyeballs on almost the entire smartphone market.
Apple can continue to differentiate the iPhone from Android in all the ways that they were doing before.
The agent harness matters just as much as the AI model. Using Hermes or OpenClaw feels like night vs day when using OpenAI’s apps even when using the same exact model.
You can even see difference in agent harnesses using the same model in the same company if you compare Gemini CLI with AntiGrav. They are different experiences.
I’m pretty sure Apple’s agent harness will be drastically different from Google’s even with the same model
Maybe openai wasn’t up to the level of customization and privacy they needed
Also openai and Jonny Ive (love from) are cooking some device — may be personal
Anthropic or OpenAI have no foothold into the mobile market. Google has integrated a shitton of AI functionality into their latest Pixel phones. That’s what would scare me if I was Apple and worried that if AI prevails this could steal some market share from me. The other two are irrelevant in this context.
> Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones
Realistically, does it matter? Most people aren't going to switch phone ecosystems over the assistant available on their phone's OS.
I'm speculating, but it's likely that Google is the only provider who is willing to adhere to the inference compute requirements that Apple sets out for their foundation models. They are, after all, the only provider that will let you host their FMs in your data center.
They tried with OpenAI and that deal fell apart. My hunch is that they're considering their own device play given they brought Jony Ive on board.
Anthropic doesn't have the spare compute laying around to do this deal. Even they're buying compute from Google.
What part of using Gemini do you think is a disadvantage?
Also important to remember how immature OpenAI and Anthropic are as companies. It would be a huge technical, legal, and reputational risk to commit to using them.
Didn't they famously have a search deal with Google (that they were also ultimately fined for - in the EU at least)? So there's definitely precedent with Google as a "partner".
A functioning FTC would not allow this. Insane that there will be no competition for integrated smartphone AI because the existing duopoly at the OS level has agreed to team up.
Or... because the existing duopoly of frontier/SOTA models (Anthropic and OpenAI) agreed to team up and not licence their weights.
Anthropic would never provide weight to anyone for local hosting
Google are the only one of the big three who can tick the boxes on being multimodal, price / performance and having Apple-level of compute available
Didn’t Apple talked to Anthropic as their first choice, but they couldn’t agree on an amount, almost similar to BeOS and Next remember them?
We don't really know, we just saw a leak when the deal fell through. I suspect Apple wouldn't reach out to just one AI company at a time.
You can be pretty sure that Google will be around us in a two year timeframe. Can't say the same neither about Anthropic or OpenAI.
They probably started working with gooogle before claude started moving ahead or was on the radar
Anthropic and OpenAI are stuck on slower and more expensive nvidia hardware. It doesn’t scale like googles TPUs.
Google's TPU and Groq's LPU are the only real, commercially viable ways to provide all the compute required for the inference people want.
Just having an ungodly amount of capex by blanketing the Midwest with datacenters full of GPUs is a disaster in slow motion.
I’m pretty sure both Anthropic and OpenAI don’t have the compute capacity for Apple users
>couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Why are Apple people like this lmao. Yeah ofc they could, but they won't because 2 businesses as large as them have a deal it's usually honored.
Couldn't anybody in Apple's supply chain sabotage them? Contrary to popular belief, I don't think Google is in direct competition with Apple at all...Google don't make a mobile operating system. And they certainly don't make much hardware (especially that people should buy).
TPUs
If I can't even trust the results given by ChatGPT and Claude at their highest level of reasoning in my daily life and work, would I be willing to use Siri AI to handle the important scenarios depicted in the livestream?
The idea that someone would go on a multi hour car trip based on an AI-generated route without manually checking where they're actually going is quite funny to me. Some older HN members will remember when the first stories a la 'the GPS told me to drive down that ravine' started coming out. I'm looking forward to "my AI assistant routed me to Kangiqiniq, Canada and border security detained me when I couldn't produce a passport".
I sometimes think about the time I was on a road trip with a friend, and for what was generally a 3 hour trip to the mountain, was 5 hours for my friend driving.
Midway through the trip I was suspicious of the duration, traffic was fine. He was adamant he knew where he was going.
I pulled up google maps, and sure enough. 3 hours.
Turns out, his mapping app wasn’t aware of an offramp, so instead it wanted us to drive an extra hour, then do a u-turn and drive back to take an offramp.
He was blindly using Apple Maps
In defence of Apple Maps, I find it a lot better in terms of routing and traffic than Google now (especially in the UK).
I had a similar experience with Apple Maps. I swore it off forever that day.
I often won't look at it's route. If it seems like something's wrong along the way of course I'll double check.
Those folk driving off bridges and into ravines is scary as hell, it implies there's people driving around that don't look further than their car bonnet whilst driving (-+5 metres).
About 2 years ago, my then girlfriend, who is a medical doctor (read: likely not an idiot), had ChatGPT plan a trip for us in a foreign country (naturally I had to nip it in the bud). And this was 2 years ago, when accuracy was way worse.
You would be surprised what normies are willing to delegate to AI.
I've used AI to plan entire 5 country itineraries multiple times and it's done better than I or any agent has
I haven't seen the livestream, but I just heard that they intend to have their AI automatically change your passwords on websites if it considers them insecure, which sounds to me like the worst idea for AI so far, and that bar is high.
The better use case would be to make AI cancel that damn subscription that lets you jump through 20 dark pattern questions and then tells you to call customer support.
And you end up with a new subscription the LLM was tricked into accepting
Great news: I was able to score you 10% off the next 12 months on your subscription!
I would definitely like an AI that helps me avoid dark patterns and enshitification. Is there a browser that automatically solves annoying captchas for you?
You have to manually start the change, it doesn't do it continuously.
For the vast majority of services, even if this action fails and the wrong password is saved (!?) you're still just a "forgot password" click away.
If it’s so easy, why use AI to do it?
Because it’s easy, but not enjoyable.
We used to just write programs to do those things.
It's essentially impossible to write a traditional program that can go through the full process of logging in and changing a password autonomously, without writing fragile site-specific procedures.
By contrast, an LLM can do it easily.
And if something breaks, and something will break - it's Software+Apple, their support will talk to you for 3 hours very professionally, giving you the scenic route of everything IT support has done in last 300 years and then they will schedule another call, apparently with an expert, on which you will be told to reboot your devices (yeah, all of them), and next stop will be asking you to reinstall your devices clean, of course they will remind you to backup data and how iCloud plans can help. After all that you will be asked to go to a support centre and drop your laptop there (that is, if your device is still under warranty).
> if it considers them insecure
But that's all of them though?
Why do you assume Gemini is worse than those two? Especially not for code generation.
IMO if it is not absolutely net positive, it is very close to being that
> The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
Yes, the "Apple needs to look at your data to do this, but we don't have any way to look at the data if we wanted to". That's impossible, unless they open souce iOS and let people take control over their devices, and let people self host inference, so people can check that there is no network traffic. If it is as they say, they could let people host it without any downsides.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Apple's PCC is the best option for this kind of offload that exists.
However the PCC root keys are still signed by Apple which requires you to trust Apple and the laws in the jurisdiction Apple operates in.
Edit: for this update they seems to be running Gemini on Nvidia GPUs in Google's cloud[0]. How key management works for this part is unknown, but the standard setup for this is that Nvidia and Google would have keys too.
It does use the OHTTP relay[1] which makes it hard - maybe impossible - for Apple to hand over the keys for a particular person's data. Maybe that provides some additional protection in US courts against overreach.
Is this a problem for most people? Probably not - but it is something to be aware of.
I think Apple have made a great attempt to make this as safe and private as possible, but until we have a truly trustless E2E encrypted execution environment I don't see how compute offload technologies gets around this problem.
[0] > And to bring this model to production, we work with both Google and Nvidia to extend our Private Cloud Compute infrastructure to NVIDIA GPUs in Google’s cloud, while maintaining Apple’s unmatched privacy guarantees
https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/08/craig-federighi-details-apple...
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9458
Don't you think there is always going to be an escape hatch for peoples private data? Like if you ask it how to make an explosive the message won't stay private on Google's servers? Seems like there could be all kinds of things like that.
The design on the system is specifically done to make that impossible because you control the encryption keys and they can't see your data.
It nearly works except for the annoying hardware signing keys.
With OHTTP it might still be ok because it is impossible to identify which server has your content. OHTTP probably still applies to the Apple->[Google+Nvidia] version but they haven't specifically said that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
Exactly. That page objectively proves that Apple can't be trusted and breaks their promises.
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
I've been a paid subscriber to Claude for a couple of years, but lately I've been reaching for the free Gemini app on my Android Pixel 9 because it's so good at doing searches as part of its answers. The model feels fresh and up to date. Whether Apple can incorporate that search is an open question
A lot of people are missing that Google is light years ahead in terms of edge AI. They've been going on about it even before the GPT-craze. Pixel phones have had live captions (on edge transcriber) for a while.
Apple ships iPhones with their neural engine since 2017.
Yet they’re lacking in the model spaces.
Things changed since Apple Intelligence but I was hoping there’ll be more things like live captions and what-not than chatbot use cases. I feel pixel is also moving towards that and abandoning the old way unfortunately.
How good is their offline (on-device) ai offering?
Very good. Just look at Gemma 4.
At its core, it’s still doing what Google Assistant and Siri were doing since many years
Not sure what extra are we achieving here
Only if you consider Google Image Search and Google Nano Banana to be "the same thing" since they both produce an image based on text input!
Similarly, Google Translate's millions of lines of hand-rolled code has been entirely superseded by LLMs that do a vastly better job.
The LLM-based AI assistants are based on a wildly different technology stack with very different capabilities compared to the legacy "if-then-else" logic programming that Siri was based on.
Was Google Translate millions of lines of hand-rolled code? The Transformer architecture was invented for Google Translate, before it was used to build "LLMs".
I don't know about millions of lines of code, but Google Translate existed WELL BEFORE transformer architectures and relied on more traditional statistical machine translation techniques. They later moved to a neural machine translation technique, and then only after that in ~2019/2020 swapped to transformers.
Honestly a lot of us who worked in the translation sector remember NMT as being a huge step up and in some language-pairs even surpassing DeepL at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translat...
Better surveillance.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems to strongly undercut Apple's claims about privacy.
>The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
If you want to independently audit it from the outside, then you might not be an expert for Apple
> Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
To my understanding, these "outside experts" have to go through a vetting process by Apple first. There are no publicly available audits of the infrastructure planned right now.
I don't think so. They will be running on their servers, or running in the future on Google's servers with privacy guarantees.
Do you think Google doesn't protect privacy for large paying customers?
For years I have enjoyed using Google products that I pay for, and they are clear about privacy guarantees.
This move kind of reminds me of the original iPhone with google maps. You're competing with google, but you're using their infrastructure. Why wouldn't they just go with another provider like OpenAI or Anthropic?
To be fair, with the original iPhone they weren't competing. Google did backend web stuff well, so Apple partnered with them and made nice local apps that were fed by Google's cloud data. The same was true for the YouTube app.
After Google saw the iPhone (before the public), they pivoted their vision for Android (it was originally on blackberry-style hardware), and that's when the "thermonuclear war" started. Kind of interesting Steve Jobs would have showed the iPhone off like that, when something very similar happened with Bill Gates, which prompted the development of Windows (according to Jobs).
19 years later, it's probably time to be pragmatic again. If Apple isn't able to deliver on some of these AI integrations into the OS, they risk losing users to Android. If they have to pay someone for a model, they might as well choose the one they think is going to be best for their users. This keeps existing iPhone users on iPhone, and may pull over some Android users looking for the same features, but with better privacy. That seems like a win for Apple. To pay OpenAI instead of Google would just be spite at this point. Maybe well deserved, but the leadership has all changed over in the last two decades, so they'd be fighting old wars. Though I think they should still think twice before showing Google anything that hasn't yet been released.
> 19 years later, it's probably time to be pragmatic again
These 2 have always been very pragmatic. They compete in an area or two but there is also a lot of money flowing both ways.
Given that they had originally selected OpenAI for Siri, and that deal fell through, I would guess something about their relationship with OpenAI fell through. Maybe OpenAI wouldn't let Apple run their model on Apple's servers.
OpenAI or Anthropic are not anywhere as well funded as Google. Apple already has everyone in their pocket via the ecosystem, they just have to not crap the bed. They value stability over the competitive component here.
Google is almost closer to a conglomerate than a coherent horizontally integrated corporation. The individual parts of Google are like Fortune500 companies themselves, and tend to act in their own interest.
OpenAI and Anthropic, despite bombastic media coverage, are still frontier labs. Google won't go down under if Gemini doesn't sell enough anymore. Apple and Google are planning for the aftermath of the AI IPO craze, one way or another.
Pretty much all of big tech compete with each other in some areas and partner in others.
Google probably gave them the best deal. When you're the #3 player you'll sacrifice margins to drive volume.
not just google maps but google search itself has been on the iphone since it launched
Are they competing with Google?
What do you consider Android to be, if not a competitor of iOS?
Most Android devices aren't even Google products, and for much of Android's existence, none of them were. Android is a way to get ads in front of people... as is their partnerships with Apple.
That describes Google's business. For Apple, Google is a competitor. An Android user is one less iOS user.
Then it's in their best interest to enable many Google products in iOS to give people less of a reason to buy an Android phone.
yeah or Magento teaming up with the X-Men to defeat the military in X2. XD
I’m not thrilled about any sort of Apple AI. I see it more as the convenience of platform lock in that ideally would be in the hands of all serious AI contenders but we all know that’ll never happen.
Every mainstream product seems to have their own “SmarterChild on steroids” bolted on top (Gemini for Google, Rovo for jira, Copilot for Microsoft everything, etc).
I’ll still use the serious ones like ChatGPT/Claude as my main but I think these companies know that and are just trying to jump the bandwagon so they don’t look outdate. Either way, they can be surprisingly convenient and make up for UI/UX learning curves.
I sniff iPhone prompts ending up in Musk's xAI servers...
Apple -> Google -> xAI datacenter
see: Google to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/google-to-pay-spacex-920-mil...
They're using Google compute, that doesn't mean Google can access the data, especially given the E2EE setup Apple are going with.
> especially given the E2EE setup Apple are going with.
I'm endlessly amused by so-called hackers that insist "E2EE is secure" but forgot about "SSL added and removed here :)"
You really trust Google to protect your privacy in 2026? Because E2EE keeps you "safe"? Yeah, good luck with that: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/NSA_Musc...
This must be a huge win for Google's cloud business. Getting Apple as a customer for Gemini is massive.
I used to wonder what "apps" might become in an "App Intent-first" world.
Bundles that provide data and capabilities to iOS and Siri? And perhaps libraries of UI components to display and interact with said data?
But then, if that works really well, and gets strong adoption, why ever open the app? What’s the point of having navigation flows inside an app? Could one make entire apps solely dedicated to providing a set of data, capabilities, and UI components to the system?
In that world, what drives user retention, for such apps? What even is an app? App engagement disappears as well.
And that’s not even diving into the use-case of Siri, say, planning a trip across five different apps (flights, hotel, restaurants, whatever) using just App Intents. If done well.
In that world, do most apps just become plugins, providers for Siri?
If you remember Windows Phone 8, it has already been tried and nobody (ahem, no company) wanted that.
No company is stupid enough to give up their content and infra and get none of the screen real estate.
I can see a parallel with hotels and OTAs, but in that case appearing on an OTA brings in sales. Showing $userA's content on $userB's screen won't earn any money from $company.
I remember Windows Phone 8 existed, but that’s pretty much it. And yes, that’s the big question: what’s in it for the app publishers?
:/
Well, there’ll always be room for people who want different UI/UX. Humans are too visual to ever move to “pure voice” and so we’ll inevitably have nice screens and thus UI preferences (technically you get preferences with voice too but it’s weirder)
Yes, but you can have this by providing surfaces as UI components to Siri.
Not sure if they do that (yet), but no reason an app couldn’t expose "Here’s what you can use to present data of shape X", or "here’s a UI for process doing y".
It feels like turning the common approach inside-out. But it works.
Edit: you could even imagine, in that world, apps that only expose surfaces, composable UI libraries, multi-step flows, declaring what they’re for, what kind of inputs they take, and what output they produce. Without ever owning any of the data (eg flights data, hotels inventory, booked trips, financial data, etc) or capabilities (eg book a flight).
The whole idea of an app becomes a much more fluid and transient thing
Everyone can have their own “view” into the data
I'm happy with this so long as the cloud side of things can be entirely disabled.
not much info to personally go with tbh.
for those commenting on relying on a competitor for a "major" component of their product, look no further to how they source their displays from samsung all this time. even their silicon at one point! [1]
while it is now all about harness and "holding it right", their approach seem no different from other instances on hardware side. in terms of why not a more "leading" provider, look how the openai integration panned out so far. moreover, they have little to no initiative nor incentive to provide edge models or a hybrid solution so far. and anthropic's moat is not in audio.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419506
That is very logical. Google's AI has rapidly become better at search and presents answers in a tolerable way.
If we disregard exploitation of the primary sources and focus purely on a use case, search summaries are it. Generative AI is completely useless and OpenAI and Anthropic will soon fail. The Segway is maybe fun for a day, then you ask yourself why the heck you aren't using a bike in the first place.
I must use Google's AI responses on its web search about 40% of the time now.
It's just far easier to get a direct answer to what I'm looking for than going through mountains of SEO spam.
I congratulate SEO optimization companies on doing the very opposite of what they intended to do.
Privacy angle is the real story here. How much user data gets shipped to Google's servers vs kept on device? That's what I wanna know.
Everyone assumes this is apple paying Google to use their stuff. But maybe its the other way around. Maybe this is the google search engine deal 2.0. i.e. Apple agrees to sell their customers to Google for money. I know that right now its supposed to run privately and all that, but its still Google's voice telling you things, not to mention intepreting your instructions.
Lmao there is no way. Think about the economics of AI inference vs. Google search.
The latter was cheap and easily offset by ad views. The former is expensive, not to mention Apple has no internal prowess in this area atm.
And honestly? That's fine. One company shouldn't be "doing everything" no matter how desperately Apple wants that to be the case for itself.
Google right now offers plenty of AI inference for free for everyone on the planet. They also offered their £20 AI pro package for free for over a year for all students. I use that and its a very generous offering. Some more free AI inference for Apple users (where you've now selected for high income folk, simply by virtue of being Apple users) would make plenty of sense, I imagine.
It makes no sense at all. Google offers free but limited Gemini in exchange for being able to train their models on user data.
They are also gradually introducing advertising to Gemini and they can upsell and cross sell their paid plans (Gemini, Google One, Youtube, Workspace) to a large pool of users across all their apps, platforms and integrations.
They can do none of that with the white label models they to rent to Apple. That's why Apple will always have to pay for it directly.
This is very different from the search deal Apple has with Google. Under that deal, Apple sends users straight to Google along with all the advertising revenue it brings. Google returns some of that revenue to Apple.
Any word on pricing for Private Cloud model usage? (It's only free if your app has had <2 million downloads, and it has rate limits.)
Answer: once you hit 2 million downloads on any app, you fuck off
Runs on Apple's private cloud compute, but is not available to Apple... That seems like a contradiction.
It does, I agree. That said, they've published some Apple Research docs/papers & core documentation where they outline the architecture and how it works. Personally I think their approach is fascinating.
https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu... https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
It is weird and disturbing that Apple has no native AI capability.
This is one of the most cash rich companies in the world and it has failed to have any position in the most critical technology development perhaps ever.
It's a clear signal that Apple became the most incredible operational/execution company under Tim Cook, but lost its innovation leadership.
You don't stay the most cash-rich company by chasing every expensive fad and they've been equally conservative with other "THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING" tech fads such as Cryptocurrency and VR. I don't blame them for not rushing to light Billions a month on fire like the other big players; their play always seems to be to let things shake out and then deliver something refined and sophisticated.
There also doesn't seem like any real opportunity for them to Apple-ify this tech (any more than today's announcement). There's lots of rough edges and the underlying technology is fundamentally janky and extremely problematic in Apple's second differentiator of privacy.
They did light billions on fire for VR, just not as publicly
Hardly everything in the Apple Vision is in/comes from the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch hardware wise and software wise all you need do use them its called being the last major American vertical computer company left. Light billions on fire OpenAI, Google, were hopeful but got nothing.
I take it as a signal they don't see any of their value being provided by the models. They're strong point was never frontier technologies. It's always been the delivery of the technology.
They are a hardware company at heart, the do software as software is needed.
For building a competitive AI they'd have to hire the talent, which is expensive and then do a massive investment, which may still end up far behind the competition. (See there attempts with Siri)
Now they can pick the model they want and if time is right they can still build their own.
In the end they still want to sell devices. They aren't doing a search engine (while they could), they are not doing an LLM model, ...
>> They are a hardware company at heart, the do software as software is needed.
This has never been true, not since Steve Jobs returned.
The heart of Apple is software and hardware integration.
Hardware companies that do software just to prop up the hardware business do terrible software, and (no doubt the Apple haters gonna hate this) but Apple does - for the most part - amazing software.
>> which is expensive and then do a massive investment
Apple has $145 billion in cash.
>This has never been true, not since Steve Jobs returned.
This is true now more than ever, since their hardware is now much better than the competition and the software pretty abysmal.
>The heart of Apple is software and hardware integration.
The heart of Apple is integrating their excellent hardware with their subpar software in order to force users to adopt it.
> Apple has $145 billion in cash.
This doesn't mean they want to throw it out of the window in a way which reduces their overall margin.
Come back when most of AI model makers go belly up....
Apple largest acquisition in their entire history is three billion dollars (Beats), Sam OpenAI got nothing and Google is getting a measly one billion dollar refund for Gemini.
Innovation is Apple Silicon and the five ecosystems (Microsoft and Nvidia aren't sparking now for nothing), Innovation is being the last American vertical computer company left from the 1980's who has been able switch gears went necessary (the next gear shift will probably be memory)...
Well it's half-and-half, why did Apple struggle for so long with Siri and its pre-LLM era technology, during the time of AlphaGo and so forth, and then after Covid why didn't Apple pivot to something like their own version of Gemini?
But there are lots of differing possible reasons for this, and I think it is premature to conclude with any one in particular.
I have been using their on define AFM models for a year - for small models they are good. Their Secure Enclave server bases AFM model is good, but not in the same class as gemini 3.5 flash or deep seek v4 flash.
Really I don’t think this is a strong take at all. If anything this has positioned them extremely, extremely well for when the bubble bursts and they can go with the winner to provide reasonable capabilities.
It's looking like an incredible move so far. They will have wasted no money while the whole industry lit trillions on fire, and then at the end they can just rent a model for cheap and replace it with their own or whatever is cheapest at any time.
The users really aren't Gemini users, they don't care what the model is behind the scenes.
They should have built a separate phone around Apple Intelligence. That is a no brainer. Jobs would have done the same. That is not going to be easy, who knows about user experiences better than Apple does (or atleast used to). This is underwhelming from Apple.
Remove all the apps and icons. All apps must just become skills in the background. Everything operated through voice or chat.
If Apple could crack chat intent to app action with 100% success rate. They have a product line unmatched and uncontested, for a decade.
Maybe Jony Ive & Sam Altman will crack it.
Wait, if it's Gemini why do they call it "Apple Intelligence"? Is Google okay with that?
Google sold Apple the ability to run certain Gemini models on Apple's data-center hardware, using Google's orchestration layer. Apple hooks into that not dissimilar from an API-provider, and then builds everything upstream.
Meaning the system prompt(s), harness, entry and exit points, and skills. So the product is still "Siri AI", because of all the stuff that takes it from a raw infrastructure concern upon up into a "product" is Apple's responsibility.
Google are "okay with that" because Apple pays them $1B a year, per press reports, to be.
Any business can do this now actually - you just need to lease/rent hardware through a Google partner and you can run an Nvidia based server in your own datacenter running (supposedly) the latest full Gemini models.
Yap it’s called GDC and I’ve set it up for customer that requires it because of regulatory compliance.
It’s very expensive but you got the box ready in your data center and is managed by both Google and partner.
How hard was it to setup ? Any tips ?
I don't think you conceptualize Google's game plan. all these companies care about is b2b contracts so they can inflate their balance sheets because when it's digital, it doesn't have to actually exist for it to "make money"
If iCloud is implemented on Google Cloud Storage, why do they call it iCloud?
I'm sure they're getting a sufficiently big paycheque to white label their models for the biggest consumer computer seller on the planet.
There's loads of AI features out there that are powered by a model provider, yet are not branded by them. Why would this be different?
People keep saying Gemini but it's not clear that the models are Gemini. They might be separate models.
Let us hope the EU forces Apple to allow the end-user to choose the external model: Wouldn’t it be amazing having privacy first local models calling out via a welldefined open protocol to a model of your choice: Claude, Grok, DeepSeek?
Sounds like OS architecture done right - screw the kickback business model.
That's basically what we built at Tinfoil. We run open source models inside secure enclaves (also using Intel TDX/AMD SEV-SNP + NVIDIA Confidential Computing). All the code running inside the enclave is open source and the client SDKs (also open source) automatically verify that the pinned source code matches the runtime attestation. The protocol used is TLS (terminates in the enclave) + HPKE keys generated inside the enclave on boot. Docs walk you through the verification process: https://docs.tinfoil.sh/verification/verification-in-tinfoil
Of course, we can't support Claude or Grok as they are closed source, but there is no incentive for companies that need your data to train the next generation of models to allow for private inference. One day...
Apple isn't shipping this in the EU
Funny, OP wants them to force a feature via regulation, and regulation is the reason they won’t even deliver the feature in question. Death by regulation.
The business model is the reason they won’t deliver the feature (allowing the end-user to choose the backend model).
This just means the feature has little ROI or market value
Yes, it doesn’t have enough ROI potential with the given regulation.
Apple isn’t giving up the market of neither the EU nor China.
They didn't say they aren't shipping in China, just working through regulatory issues. I assume that means they're working on a China-operated "private" cloud compute instance like every other US cloud provider
They did say that they are specifically not shipping in the EU because of the DMA, so until the DMA or the EC's interpretation of the DMA, changes, these new AI features aren't shipping there. That is not the same thing as Apple abandoning the EU.
The EC wrote the DMA. There is nothing to "interpret" for them.
My Brother in Christ, different administrations can and do "interpret" laws differently all the time. Sometimes even the same administration might change how they enforce a law.
Also, technically didn't the EU Parliament write and pass the DMA, and the EC enforces it? I'm not European so I don't know the intricate details of the incredibly Byzantine process of the EU so maybe I'm wrong there
Let's actually not hope that, and let's not indulge the EU regulators' fantasies that they get to dictate the product design of products from non-EU countries.
Force Apple to support all kinds of arbitrary models? That's a comically bad idea.
“Let’s not indulge US regulators fantasies that they get to dictate the product design of cars from non-US countries.”
Of course governments have the ability to decide what products are sold in their countries and how.
They ultimately don't have that power. All they can do is block the sale of products. Arguably, that power gives them leverage to negotiate the availability of some products or features. But as this Apple case shows, this negotiating leverage is limited.
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Why would it be ok that a monopoly business prevents free competition and consumer choice by only allowing certain or a single model provider that likely gives them kickback via some opaque business deal?
> EU regulators' fantasies that they get to dictate the product design of products from non-EU countries.
They should get to regulate the design of products from non-EU countries only those that are sold inside EU.
The fact that it is not cost effective for Apple to design two separate products(software or hardware) for EU and non-EU is an Apple problem.
I tried the on-device image input model with an app I am building. It's not very good at world-knowledge recall, but can describe the submitted image well enough.
Sort of expected this at the first attempt. Use their existing partnership for Google being the default search with Google and leverage Google's models.
Oh nice, maybe they'll finally make Siri learn foreign languages?
they can hardly imagine a world outside SV, let alone the US. I'm not holding my breath
Sorry to be off topic, but I have a question: has anyone installed the latest beta iOS and macOS, and if so what is the current status of Gemini integration?
once you update to the latest iOS, there's an option to join the waitlist. No indication of timing, but until that moves forward Siri is what you get today, as far as I can tell.
Built around=Front end?
Google apps are the most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store already. This reminds me of the original Apple Maps, which was just a front end for Google Maps.
I'm wondering who's paying for this. Is it becoming a part of the iCloud subscription? A separate billed product?
It's a little interesting our duopoly of mobile phone OS controllers are so closely integrated with each other.
I'm really not looking forward to Gemini models on my devices.
Gemini models clearly gaslight the user and hallucinate, they're also SUPER verbose, as shown in the demos from the keynote.
Plus, if they're not charging a subscription for this, you know we're getting the dumbest models...
If you pay for Gemini, then it is good. I recently used Gemini Ultra for a month and the gemini models are very good (and of course, you get a lot of Claude Opus tokens to use through the same plan).
I also pay for Proton's Lumo+ private chat and for what it is it is also good.
The free plans from all the providers are bad, which is fare enough.
I use Apple devices and I expect to be paying for Gemini tokens after the integration.
The full Apple prompt has leaked online. It's on github and reddit. From ios logs.
Just as long as you speak a major language
I expected a beter infrastructure for this new AI. I hope they build it to be more robust slowly
Will it be possible to disable, or better yet, wipe the whole feature off?
Last mover advantage.
Just an interesting thought on the very different philosophical approaches. Let's imagine that Android had a terrible assistant, so bad that even most Google Fanbois admitted it was pretty bad. Apple became a leader in AI. Google approaches them to license the Siri model for Android. Would Apple have ever done that?
Looks like AI reached it's peak already. Every new architecture is just a new wrapper that has nothing to do with ml.
So they run on TPUs and not Nvidia chips?
The heaviest models run on Nvidia
No, Siri runs on Apple Silicon.
“Now, we are collaborating with Google and NVIDIA to run new Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud, extending our industry-leading PCC privacy commitments to third-party data centers for the first time.”
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
https://x.com/nvidia/status/2064100362752294992
Thanks. That's still very interesting that they don't need Nvidia to do any of this. Nvidia stock has been priced like AI isn't possible without them.
Nvidia's moat is just around high-performance frontier models and CUDA.
You can run smaller models on cheap commodity hardware.
Your phone can probably run one of these:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ai....
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-ai-edge-gallery/id67496...
They are using NVIDIA too:
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
https://x.com/nvidia/status/2064100362752294992
Not launching in EU feels like a smell. It does look interesting enough for me to try it out before disabling Apple Intelligence again.
It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
> Siri AI is private by design and deeply integrated across Apple’s platforms using on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud. However, under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Apple loves to play dumb about this stuff. The EU imposes a pretty straightforward regulation regarding equality of access. Apple seems to come up with all sorts of "solutions" to this "problem", and each one never amounts to true equality of access. They could easily just allow users to decide "Do you want to give this app unfettered access to all your device data, including other apps' data?". Let users decide. 99% of Apple users in the EU will probably click "no". I'm sure they'll make the user warnings scary enough to ward off anybody who doesn't know what's going on.
There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.
The other possibility is that the sky does not fall, and Apple looks both silly and malicious at the same time for ever having suggested that it would, which was clearly in bad faith.
Clearly, Apple cannot afford scenario #2, so I think they will probably never give their users the actual freedom that the MDA requires them to. They will just exit Europe entirely before allowing that to happen.
> Do you want to give this app unfettered access to all your device data, including other apps' data?
Which Facebook and instagram will present as “tee hee updated terms of service” in the first 15 seconds, and people will tick it, because they’re not interested in reading T&C’s, just want to message their friend about dinner, and aren’t suddenly expected be deceived like that.
Obviously there should be a system dialog to grant system permissions. I'm not aware of any kind of system with a capability-based permissions system (e.g. Android, MacOS, browsers, etc.) where apps are allowed to show their own dialog to request permissions. You always have to do something in the system settings to grant permissions.
That's how it should be done. And that would be the responsible way to comply with the DMA.
Did they really circumvent this exact restriction which was imposed on them on OS level by Apple?
Ah yes something a trillion dollar tech company definitely is too inept to solve!
Why bother when some round-rimmed glasses wearing suit in Brussels named Klaus will immediately begin working on the next set of demands?
Yes, heaven forbid governments impose any constraints on Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Facebook, because they've been handling things so well on their own.
Sounds more thoughtful than the political theater that happened around banning / controlling Tiktok.
> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for. > > The other possibility is that the sky does not fall, and Apple looks both silly and malicious at the same time for ever having suggested that it would, which was clearly in bad faith.
I think the most likely outcome is between these two extremes. My personal data ends up sold to shady companies who use it to target ever more invasive advertising at me in places I wouldn't expect/. Like a boiling frog, I won't really notice the difference and my life will gradually become a little shittier.
Then just click "no" if your phone ever asks you to grant permissions like this to a third party app, which should obviously be the default option. Or better yet, don't install the third party apps to begin with. For you, it will be as though nothing has changed.
For the people who want a bit of freedom though, their lives will suddenly get a lot better.
> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.
I'd prefer they focus on safeguarding my data instead of playing a ridiculous game of brinksmanship with regulators to make a point.
I agree. Safeguarding data and user freedom are 100% compatible, no brinkmanship required.
> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.
I don't think that is what will happen. People, and the media, will blame Apple: it is them after all giving that data over because they hold it. No that doesn't make logical sense, but that has never mattered before why would it matter now.
Once Apple loses that trust re. data privacy, its gone forever. I get why they're being particular about it.
People will absolutely not blame Apple if the exact thing they warned would happen, and said would be really bad, actually turns out to happen and be really bad.
Apple has very well-funded PR. They will make sure that the EC is blamed.
Then, they get to be the heroes once the law is changed to allow them to come to everyone's rescue by banishing all third-party app access forever. They would ultimately be the saviours.
Yes they will. People are blaming Apple already for not being separate enough from Google.
Yeah and we've already seen this with Facebook getting blamed for Cambridge Analytica.
> EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA
It's not extreme interpretation, it's the intent.
Just say it would break your vendor lock-in.
I don't want my apps that have AI implemented to be able to read my messages because Europe mandates feature parity. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For Apple it means building all the APIs that probably already exist but this time to be requested by apps, which would be a huge attack surface, even Apple's own apps suffers from security breaches (like Message before the switch to closed container execution). AI breaks the separation of concerns, which can lead to disastrous consequences.
EU has great intentions, and of course, feature parity should be offered so that competition can exist, but I don't find it crazy that it is more complicated on a product like that. As tech people things are very obvious to us but we need to remember that we are talking about a product used by everyone.
It’s not clear how it is significantly different from allowing apps access to your contacts, calendar, photos, and so on. And Apple doesn’t say that they merely need more time to properly implement it, the claim that they are unable to implement it without compromising privacy and security. And the latter I don’t really see, with the proper set of permissions presented in the way users are already used to.
As an Apple user I feel more patronized than empowered here.
> It’s not clear how it is significantly different from allowing apps access to your contacts, calendar, photos, and so on
Those are allowed via contextual consent prompts, several of which are for specific contacts, specific photos you wish to share, and so on.
Examples of the level of access an AI agent has include:
1. To read all indexed personal data from every app installed on the device
2. To perform actions in every supporting app on the device on the user's behalf
3. To read the current displayed apps for additional context as well as sensor data like current location
If you were regulated such that you had to allow any organization this level of access, and if you were hand-tied in how much you could convey the seriousness of accepting that consent prompt to an ordinary end user, and felt that it would be you, not any legal authority, who would ultimately suffer the reputational and legal consequences for the results - what would your yes/no decision be on shipping the feature in that jurisdiction?
How is this substantially different from Safari extensions that can effectively see and act upon everything you do in the browser?
One can imagine contextual prompts for all of the examples that you give, like which data sources and which apps the AI provider is given access to — similar to how you can choose for a Safari extension which websites it has access to — and for how long.
That all seams reasonably implementable. You could even use multiple AI providers in parallel with different subsets of data and apps, which would allow you to compartementalize access by different providers in a way that isn't possible with Apple's AI.
Such integration interfaces are necessary in the long run if we don't want to lock in our whole life to a singular combination of hardware, OS, and AI provider.
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The law does not require Apple to grant all permissions to all apps for all users. It just requires Apple to ask users if the user wants to grant elevated permissions to specific apps that they download. The user can always say "no", which should obviously be the default.
The situation is that Apple won't even allow users to grant elevated permissions to any 3rd party app, even if the user wants to.
But then third party apps can force users to accept this before they work (here I am especially thinking of school and work apps that people might be forced to use).
App store guidelines already strictly prohibit developers from demanding overbroad or unnecessary permissions, and they expressly forbid locking unrelated features behind irrelevant data requests. Any app that attempts to do so can easily be yanked off the app store by a single complaint.
> don't want my apps that have AI implemented to be able to read my messages because Europe mandates feature parit
App permissions.
Beside you don't have to install any third party app, I only have Google assistant installed on my Android.
I heard the same kind of talk when the eu forced apple to switch to USB C...
There is a real, strong, monopolistic issue with some American companies that their government refuse to deal with because it's so corrupt. It would be fine if it didn't impact us in Europe, but it does.
> I don't want my apps that have AI implemented to be able to read my messages because Europe mandates feature parity.
The AI provider would still be YOUR choice. You could stick with Apple's if you don't trust the other ones.
so to translate:
- Apple has powerful capabilities in iOS to enable Siri AI.
- EU's DMA requires them to allow users to install third-party AI backends.
- Apple doesn't think parties other than themselves should be trusted with those iOS permissions.
I guess it'd be like if Apple allowed a first-party screen reader for iOS, so they refused to allow third-party screen readers.
As a screen reader user, Apple does have a first party screen reader, VoiceOver, and does indeed not let you run a third party one. In fact, it does not work well even on the more open MacOS. So essentially it's VoiceOver or nothing. Luckily, especially on iOS, VoiceOver mostly works well.
I'm glad it works decently on iOS, at least. my mom has little central vision, and she struggles on iOS just using high contrast plus scaling plus magnifier. I think she has just enough vision to not absolutely need VoiceOver but it still makes using her phone a frustrating and tiring experience.
Try https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/assistive-access-iphon... ?
I don't think they're "trusting Google" with anything. It's a Google model run by Apple, just like you download a model from Hugging Face to run when you want to.
> It's a Google model run by Apple
Run by Apple where? Do they really have enough hardware to run it in-house?
Reportedly it's running in Google Cloud, but Apple already uses Google Cloud for iCloud
Yes, and if they don't, they can lease datacentre capacity like anyone else can. SpaceX seems to have plenty for rent.
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Apparently it's now a Google model run by Apple on GPUs rented from Google.
updated my post to reflect this, thanks.
You bet! Also I appreciate your edit, a lot of people don't understand how much benefit they can bring to this community by doing that!
> Apple doesn't think parties other than themselves should be trusted with those iOS permissions.
I think we have ample evidence that regardless of whether Apple in particular is to be trusted, tech companies by default are certainly not.
Opening up access to users’ private data requires not just any given app to be trustworthy, but all of them.
In this case I think it is true that 3rd parties can not be trusted with this capability, but Apple brought this on themselves by creating a ton of other capabilities like AirDrop, Airpods integrations, and apple watch capabilities which would have been safe for 3rd parties to use but keeping them locked down so you'd get a better experience with Apple accessories.
I don't think they trust Gemini as they run that on-device or on-site, on Apple's own servers.
See also https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Newer one:
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
> Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
It's the user's data. Not Apple's. And it should be the user's right to send it to whoever for whatever results, imo
I think there’s a case that Apple’s commitment to privacy here will increase participation by 3rd party developers.
For example, if I’m maintaining a secure chat app, I think I’d be more likely to adopt the APIs to share the chat messages with the system AI due to Apple’s promises that the data will either be processed On Device, or in their Private Compute Cloud.
If I instead believe that sharing the chat messages with the system AI would cause those messages to be sent to unknown-to-me other entities, I think I’d be less likely to participate in the new API.
This user might be okay with their data going to this other provider, but what about the people they’re messaging? I have a responsibility and a commitment to _all_ of my users to protect their data.
I might not be able to control what any specific user does with the data, but proactively writing the code that sends the chat messages to this other system is something that I have control over.
> This user might be okay with their data going to this other provider, but what about the people they’re messaging? I have a responsibility and a commitment to _all_ of my users to protect their data.
That's nice of you but your users are going to just copy-paste data to and from ChatGPT anyway.
I think the difference is in the scale. I think Apple’s asking you to index / share all of the data from your app. Virtually no user is going to copy & paste every single message into ChatGPT.
And so I think there’s a meaningful difference between the app donating all the data automatically, vs making the data available to the user who is free to share what they want.
That’s not your data, why do you think you have the right to prevent the user from doing what they want? Other users shared that chat data with each other, you have no right to that data, so as an app developer I’d say you should not care about the API.
And that's exactly how it works for apps you download from the App Store. Apple even makes app publishers declare data collection and privacy practices on the App Store before you install apps.
It's clearly just Apple not wanting to further open up their platform to competition.
Not only that but it's an honour system they aren't checking any of the privacy policies or labels for accuracy, just last year a whole bunch of high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans got caught claiming suitability for all ages while their privacy policies banned under 13s so they could advertise and collect data indiscriminately.
They should be checking things like that. It's something that you'd expect to be covered by Apple's 30% cut.
Meta would probably start a massive ad campain to pay people money to install Meta iPhone AI.
Meta already did that, right under Apple's nose for three years!
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
They wouldn’t even need to do that. It’s pretty easy to come up with any number of pernicious approaches they’d use:
- “instagram is better with MetaAi: yes/ask-me-later”.
- updated ToS which bundles a “we’ll use our own ai, and do whatever we waaaaant”
Lying, gaslighting and underhanded “growth hacking” tricks are their bread-and-butter, and you can be sure that whatever they’d have you install would blindly slurp up as much as they possibly can with zero regard for user privacy.
> Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
Yeah, that's the whole fucking point.
> It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems? Why aren't they required to let me choose between Grok, OpenAI etc or even a custom endpoint?
The are not a "gatekeeper" under DMA (not enough users). Same as macOS.
> But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems?
Simply because they are too small in user count. EU DMA, DSA etc. only apply at certain thresholds. Twitter for example falls under the scope, but Tesla is a distinct entity from Twitter and even if they were merged together, they would still be distinct services in the eye of the law.
Because Tesla hasn't been classified as a gate-keeper in the DMA.
Tesla is not marked as a gatekeeper by the EU and thus the law does not apply.
Translation:
Since it's the user's device, not Apple's, EU correctly "interprets" this as the user has the right to do whatever they please, including installing third-party chat apps.
Apple are just bulshitters when it comes to actual users, and not their corporate definition of a user.
BTW, did you know that in Japan, and in Japan only, you can change the Siri shortcut button to start other voice assistants? https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/18/ios-26-2-third-party-voic...
Or that they wouldn't let you set default maps app outside of the EU: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-ma...
> Or that they wouldn't let you set default maps app outside of the EU
They were mandated to create a scheme in isolation on a deadline, without having input either from navigation apps or from consumers, and without any requirement that web browsers or other operating systems would need to support the same scheme.
As another comment pointed out - it doesn't work. Websites and apps still integrate with a navigation product directly, rather than use this scheme. And why wouldn't they? Even if it was launched worldwide on iOS, it still is just a defined subset of any particular navigation product functionality. It also is just yet another navigation option to integrate into your platform, since the feature still wouldn't be available on desktops/Android.
Until everyone is sitting at the table wanting to work towards interoperability, the feature simply can't work. So why perpetuate a broken chooser into other markets?
> They were mandated to create a scheme in isolation on a deadline
Self-imposed isolation and deadline.
> without having input either from navigation apps or from consumers
Because Apple never asked either navigation app developers or consumers since "Apple knows best" and spent several years fighting DMA instead of implementing these features.
> Websites and apps still integrate with a navigation product directly, rather than use this scheme.
Because there was no scheme to begin with, and when Apple finally relented and made it, it only made it available in the EU.
> Until everyone is sitting at the table wanting to work towards interoperability, the feature simply can't work.
Yes, Apple doesn't want to sit at the table to work towards interoperability.
Apple Maps was made default on iOS in 2012. They literally only implemented the "scheme" last year, 13 years later.
DMA entered force in 2022. Apple had known about it coming for at least two years before that.
And even without DMA that would be a proper thing to do to begin with which they had to be forced to do by government action.
This is such a shallow take. There are obvious privacy and security tradeoffs here. The EU competition framework is good in many ways, but this is actually something I don’t think we have the regulatory frameworks in place to handle yet , or social norms and understanding about why giving any Tom dick and Harry root on all your data is a bad idea.
It’s paternalistic, but I agree with Apple that free for all access to this kind of data is not a great idea. Ironically, before this could work we’d actually need much more EU style data regulation, and more consistently enforced.
I dunno, I trust the EU regulators more than I'd trust any US based company.
I do too, but in this case the choice isn't between apple and the EU. It's between apple and the <random rapacious vc backed ai startup looking to hoover your data> your non-technical friends foolishly trust, without much understanding of the implications for them or society as a whole.
Ultimately I think it's important for the EU to regulate companies like apple to ensure competition. But in this instance, it doesn't seem like we have all the other pieces in place that would be necessary for a sensible rollout of that.
> but in this case the choice isn't between apple and the EU. It's between apple and the
Funny how the word user never enters these conversations. As in user device that the user has paid for and where the user should have a choice of what the user wants to do.
And we know why. E.g. Apple literally argues that giving users more choice forces Apple to give users less choice: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/the-digital-markets-a...
what's the missing piece exactly? In every other situation where a company wants to launch an iphone app to hoover your data, Apple gives a clear message telling you what types of data you're giving access to. Why is this situation different?
For me, it's real regulations about what data can reasonably be hoovered, what it's used for, for how long. And a culture where the majority don't blindly click yes to all messages like that because the only alternative is not to use the shiny new thing they have been sold. I don't think it could ever appear in the US, which is why it's a good thing apple won't be forced to open up there. But if the EU does insist, they should be careful what they wish for and plan for the negative consequences of a free for all.
There's nothing shallow about my take.
Apple uses "privacy and security" as a cudgel to prevent anyone from breaking into the vendor lock in. To the point that EU actually had to explicitly tell Apple what to do [1], as Apple delayed features, made them extremely hard or convoluted for third-parties to use, and pulled every trick out of the malicious compliance manual.
This whole virtual assistants thing will drag on for another several years.
Edit: I mean they show their models accessing and changing a password on the user's bank site at the same time as accessing and changing passwords on another random site. Which is one prompt away from exfiltrating user data. So spare me the "Apple knows best about privacy and security so they should keep any access to their platforms locked down"
[1] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/in...
It's shallow because it doesn't acknowledge that there is a real tradeoff. I share a lot of your cynicism about US tech companies, but I think you need to be realistic about the state of the market and how the incentives align.
Apples incentives are not, currently, as strongly misaligned with their user interests as many other tech firms (meta, google, random startups, etc). Going slowly might not be a bad idea for most people here.
That said, I hadn't seen the demo you mention. If they do do that (bank passwords etc) they are stupider than I thought they would be.
Apple’s incentives will grow misaligned as their revenue from ads grows. (and that revenue is skyrocketing)
Probably true. But that’s not the position we are in now. Apple is much better aligned with users interests than any one else, at least for short/medium term.
Sounds like Apple PR bullshit.
Unless Apple proves otherwise I'm more inclined to believe they're either 1. Using this to try and shape the DMA in their own interest (definitely not their users' interest) or 2. Doing something with the data that would not be allowed in the EU (also not in their users' interest at all) or both.
Because outsourcing to Google is so much trustworthy...
I believe Google provides the weights, compute is apple owned
> Apple to use Google servers with Nvidia hardware for the new Siri
https://www.macworld.com/article/3156959/apple-to-use-google...
People have to stop thinking Apple is somehow different.
From the link "Nvidia has its own “confidential computing” feature that encrypts data as it’s being processed, which will be used with other privacy and security measures to protect user data"
Do you know if it end to end encrypted or the keys are managed by Google?
I think the keys are directly from Nvidia and Intel.
Yes, and how does the data get there?
Over TLS?
To Google servers....
No, it's TLS to a "sealed" confidential VM that Google has no access to.
So they say.
From your link:
> Apple’s going to try to run as much of the new Siri as possible on-device
Anthropic and OpenAI don't have edge models.
Try is a magic word.
It's not magic to those paying attention. The current model runs on device. And gemma e4b is already demonstrably capable on iPhone hardware, which is likely to be similar to what this is.
The new model only runs on device on iPhone 17 Pro or M3 Macs or newer. Anyone else is getting server compute.
They say it's because the EU's DMA would require them to open up device data to third-party assistants, and they'd no longer be able to guarantee user privacy.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
I don't see what the issue is. The user could then select Apple (or Mistral) for strong privacy or another provider for customers that don't care.
I primarily want Apple to provide extension points so that I can select my own provider, just as I can choose where to host my mail or install another app as my instant messenger.
Sure, I could install another provider's app, but it wouldn't have the same integrations, similar to how an instant messaging app would be less useful if notifications were limited to iMessage.
I'd love to select Mistral over Google Gemini.
> I'd love to select Mistral over Google Gemini
Apple doesn’t want to configure its private cloud to run every model. This seems fine.
This is moving goal posts, DMA is not requiring Apple to run anything on their cloud but merely provide third parties with same device API access.
Sure.
It is a smell. But it's the EU that smells bad, when it comes to tech regulation. It's the smell of cookie popup warnings.
Nothing in the law requires the pop up. It definitely doesn’t require the obnoxious bullshit that most companies put up (aka the dark pattern to get you to agree to every unreasonable part of their terms just to read the page).
The alternative would be to just stop invasive tracking and add the cookie when it’s actually needed.
Yet somehow all the government/EU-institution pages I visit also choose to track and throw the popup.
Yes, there's a lot of cargo culting in web development.
Many US based companies also do this for US visitors, which is absolutely not required by the GDPR and related regulations, because they don't apply there.
The law states:
> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
Strictly necessary:
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https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
You don't need consent for MOST reasonable uses of cookies. If compliance theatre wasn't such an industry the web would be a lot tidier and we could stop blaming the EU for implementing important privacy and data controls.
You're just acknowledging that intent!=effect, which is a primary criticism of these laws.
You’re shifting the goalposts somewhat, but the thing this misses is that the cookie banners are the least important aspect of EU data regulation. The principle of consent and of minimising data held has actually made a substantial different in European firms, mostly for the better.
I didn't have any initial goalposts. Maybe you are assuming I'm someone else.
I agree with you that cookies banners are used more than legally necessary. They are a consequence of the law nonetheless.
The cookie popup also more often than not doesn't satisfy GDPR, since the option to remove consent disappears with the popup. These dark patterns emerged because the GDPR was used selectively as a club rather than properly enforced. That led to what another comment refers to as "compliance theatre" rather than actual corporate compliance.
The smell is that Apple doesn't want to give the same level of access to third-party AI assistants that Siri will get.
For what it's worth, Apple claimed they proposed an "equivalent access" framework with some kind of "trusted agent framework" approach, but that it was shot down by the EU. I suspect it was way more inconvenient for third-party developers than Apple lets on.
This has been the case for quite a while. Like Reminders - You can't replace the phrase "Siri, remind me to ___" with a third party app. I'm surprised the EU lets them ship Reminders there.
That’s changing this year. They specifically demoed “send a message” and it went through their sample app, but there’s a schema for Reminders.
“Make your reminder app’s actions available to Apple Intelligence and Siri by adopting schemas for common reminder actions.”
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/app-sch...
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/240
Oh wow. That's a big deal. Thank you for the heads up!
Nothing obligates companies to face steep EU regulation and fines and launch there from the get go.
If anything it should concern fellow Europeans that consumers are paying more for less and later.
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what i think why they are too much relying on Google is coz they are way much towards making models open source and launching more much better models to public as if in future apple part way from google they might still have much better models to rely on and if we see the history google has been partnered with Apple since the launch of first Iphone
Another one bites the dust
What a blunder, they resisted AI for like 2 years when it was all the buzz, and now when the bubble is about to bust and every user has AI fatigue they decide to finally dip into the fad?
Before it was as if avoiding AI was a conscious design decision, and if there was an AI crash, Apple would be the only survivor left. Now it feels like they weren't in on the meme out of incompetence and are now late to the party.
No one can know what Jobs' stance would be, but I like to think he would be anti-slop
I agree that many AI businesses will go bust and they deserve it, but the tech is good.
I can recommend my own layered approach, using the lowest capability models that get stuff done:
1. I maximally use local models like gemma4:26b-a4b-it-qat for everything that works with this free option.
2. I like paying for inexpensive APIs for mid-tier models like deepseek v4 flash, gcp-5-mini, gemini-2-flash for things that option 1. fails at. This option is almost free.
3. Pay for more expensive APIs like deepseek v4 pro, gemini 3.5 flash, etc. This option is not too expensive.
4. If all else fails on a class of tasks, then pay for awesomeness of Claude Opus. $$ expensive, I try not to use unless absolutely necessary.
I think developers and companies that just cram everything into Claude Opus are unprofessional.
I think you are conflating LLMs with AI.
LLMs we all agreed were amazing back in 2023-2024.
What's happening now with AI is more of a corporate phenomenon quite removed from the actual tech.
Yes LLMs are useful, but replacing customer support with an LLM that gives user accounts away, or calling LLMs on a loop where the bottleneck is your checkbook and calling it AGI, those are phenomenons that are separate from LLMs.
We agree more than you may believe. I have worked in the field of AI since the early 80s, symbolic AI, simpler neural networks. I only believe in using any tech if it serves human needs, is privacy preserving, etc.
When people say the AI bubble is about to bust, I don't think anybody means that "the use of AI is going to go away." AI is absurdly useful. I think what people mean is "the valuations of these companies will have to snap to a reality that is actually attached to their market value."
Exactly, small edge models is the future, highly personal experiences, and not these massive models that the cloud providers currently shove down our throats. While massive models are useful, these massive platforms are about to burst out of their promises. All while we’re supper happy with tiny 4b up to 12b models working amazing for all these “omg ai thinks” daily tasks.
Go Genmoji!
ok i will try thanks
Spy phone
Guggupple
Maybe now we'll get a good voice prompt experience with Gemini on iPhone out of this deal.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone can believe that Apple is limiting user options for privacy reasons, rather than trying to maintain an unfair advantage over other vendors.
I’m not saying people who hold this view are being dishonest at all. But sometimes, to me, brands like Harley-Davidson or Apple seem closer to a cult than to a typical corporation.
Because privacy is actually a big feature, many people are skeptical about AI and the big model providers and don't trust them. They're less skeptical about on-device AI and so Apple is pushing that and making privacy a core feature of their online offering as well.
I probably wouldn't use it without that. It's one thing sending my shitty code to be trained on, and another thing entirely to give these companies access to my personal life and information.
That still doesn't explain why my data can only be sent to Apple and not to another vendor of my choice.
Oh by the way, who decides if the data stays on device or gets sent to Apple?
I bet it's Apple and not the user.
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Because Apple has Private Cloud Compute tech that other vendors do not have.
If they let me use my own server, they won't even know my usage patterns, which is even better for privacy.
Even if other vendors had Apple's hardware, it's doubtful that Apple would give competing services equal footing. See: The App Store.
The hardware isn't a real justification, just a convenient fig leaf.
I have created a more private cloud compute that is superior to Apple's implementation. Why can't Apple users choose my better service?
Sounds like Apple offered to implement that, but it didn’t fit the EU’s requirements.
I suspect if you paid apple enough money, and were willing to prove that your personal Private Cloud Compute did meet their requirements, it wouldn’t be impossible.
That would be a good argument to take to the EU.
> ...closer to a cult...
When you have to image a highly irrational reason to explain why groups of people do the things they do, there's a decent chance you just don't understand their perspective. They may be acting reasonably rationally from their own perspective. (As you said yourself: "I honestly don't understand...")
One can be rational but still be in a bubble or cult.
I think it's pretty clear that the previous poster characterized the Apple brand as a cult to specifically express the idea that people have an irrational devotion to it.
Well, they do have an irrational devotion to it. But even if it were rational, that again doesn't mean they're not in a cult.
Uh oh What is Google getting from this?
There was a meme the other day that said: the US economy right now is 7 companies giving each other trillions. I think this that that pattern.
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Nah, they crossed the line when they allowed photo editing apps on the AppStore which can do all the things you listed and more. It’s disgusting.
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Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cool, can you reply to the person's original reply to me in which they made fun of the point I was making—how "disgusting" it is that Apple…allows photo editors in the App Store?
After all, don't be snarky!
Please don’t act like a jerk. (And yes, deflecting from your own poor conduct counts as acting like a jerk on HN.)
It’s not clear that they were making fun of your point, and the guidelines ask us to assume good faith. If you’re serious about expecting others to observe the guidelines, that’s great. Start by observing the guidelines, to demonstrate that you hold yourself to a high standard. Then if others break the guidelines in their responses to you, you’ll be on solid ground in holding them to account, and doing so in a way that also keeps to the guidelines, avoiding personal abuse and escalation.
How so? Can you not create all sorts of unethical imagery with the photo editing apps on the App Store? And do they not make the production of unethical imagery much easier and accessible? Which part of my comment is ridiculous and absurd?
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Apple could have done something like bedrock and used a SOTA model but instead they are fiddling with local models or whatever.
Also I have seen that Apple has some strange lust towards image generation as if that's what people really want. I have this slop image generation thing on my phone and it is useless.
Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.
Local Gemini is a light year ahead of whatever Siri is so this is a big improvement already.
If they don’t like this in the future they can just change to the less convenient, less secure, and likely more expensive bedrock + SOTA.
I don't disagree that local Gemini is better but if you've tried it in iPhone, it is slow, hallucinates and overheats the phone. For anything slightly non-trivial like the workflow example I gave, I think it will be close to useless.
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This is coming very close to a personal attack, which is against the site rules.
Even if it's a bad take, call out what's wrong with the take, rather than attack the author.