Apple packedWWDC 2024to the gills with improvements across its range of devices, from flagship software likeiOS 18, to surprising additions to theAirPods Pro. But despite the typical razzle-dazzle and design polish, there was something that was hard to shake about the best features Apple announced: They’d all been announced before, by Apple’s competitors in the smartwatch, smartphone, and artificial intelligence spaces.
Copying the competition is not new for Apple or any other Silicon Valley company, but when the expectation was that Apple was publicly entering the AI race because it had not just the chops, but therightway to have its billions of users interact with AI, it’s surprisinghow much looks the same. WWDC is all about Apple introducing new ideas for how customers should use its products, and how developers can take advantage of the capabilities Apple is introducing to build better apps. This year, very few of those ideas were actually new.
WWDC 2024: The 7 biggest announcements from Apple’s developers conference
Apple Intelligence, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11 and more – this year’s event was packed with announcements.
iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 look even more like Android
Google introduced Material You, a new design system for even deeper personalization of Android lock screens, home screens, and apps, withAndroid 12. Material You lets you customize the usual elements like widgets, but also the fonts of the lock screen, the color of individual apps, and even intelligently tweaks those settings as your wallpaper. The new personalization options Apple showed off in iOS 18 andiPadOS 18are nearly identical, letting you tint the color of app icons, match them to your wallpaper, and even remove the text underneath them if you want. Apple is also copying Android’s ability to let apps be placed anywhere, so you can make sure the highlights of your wallpaper are always visible.
Apple’s redesign of the Photos app similarly cribs from the automatic sorting, semantic searching, and movie making features Google has added to Google Photos over the years.
Apple’sredesign of the Photos appsimilarly cribs from the automatic sorting, semantic searching, and movie making features Google has added to Google Photos over the years. Both Google and Apple are circling around the idea of memory as key to their photo apps going forward. So far, Google is more ambitious,pairing your Google Photos library with a chatbotthat can answer questions about the things you’ve seen and done, while Apple is more interested in the potential of immersive video and “reliving” your memories. Whichever proves more popular, you will be able to find photos of your driver’s license easily.
watchOS 11 is Garmin by way of Apple
Garmin has been making fitness trackers and smartwatches for a long time, well before “smartwatch” was a term the average person even knew. Along the way, Garmin has gotten pretty good at understanding how a variety of sports and exercises impact your heart rate, energy level, and recovery. Garmin displays those insights in a variety of ways across its watches, butBody Battery, which combines heart rate data, heart rate variability (HRV), and movement to track how much energy you’ve spent throughout the day and how much you might have left, is by far the most recognizable. Garmin even takes into account sleep and rest to let you know how much energy you have for the day or your next workout.
Apple’s inclusion of the Vitals app and Training Load feature inwatchOS 11feels like a pretty good comp for Apple Watch owners. Vitals combines health data like heart rate, body temperature, sleep, activity into a trend you can track along with best guesses from Apple as to why you might be skewing from your current trend (like illness or alcohol consumption). Training Load, takes things like heart rate, pace, and elevation to calculate how much effort you put into your current workout to give you a better understanding if you’re over or under-training. It’s remarkably similar to Garmin’s feature, just with Apple’s taste for clear-eyed visuals.
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Apple made “AI for the rest of us,” by copying everyone else
Apple Intelligence, which makes up the AI-powered improvements Apple is both making toSiriand at the operating system-level across devices with M-series chips or the A17 Pro, are ripped straight from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI’s playbook. “Writing Tools” lets you generate, rewrite, and proofread text anywhere you can find a cursor in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, just like Microsoft is doing withCopilot in Windows 11, Copilot+PCs, and the Edge Browser or Google is doing withGeminiin Chrome, Android, and Google Workspace apps like Google Docs.
Apple’s image generation feature, “Image Playground,” is more deeply integrated, particularly in Messages and Notes, but it produces frankly ugly-looking images that Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT can already create.
Apple’s image generation feature, “Image Playground,” is more deeply integrated, particularly in Messages and Notes, but it produces frankly ugly-looking images that Gemini, Copilot, andChatGPTcan already create. “Genmoji,” which lets users create new emoji characters based on a prompt, is just a more flexible version of Google’s Emoji Kitchen. It’s honestly astonishing how similar all of Apple’s text and image generation features feel to the competition and how tacked on they feel to what are already iterative, but satisfying changes to the company’s core operating systems.
The only standout is the changes Apple has planned to Siri, which make the assistant easier to speak to, and capable of handling more tasks that you’d normally have to do yourself. The new Siri understands context, pulling up reservation details from emails, directions in Maps, and flight information from Messages just based on an initial request. Siri can also take action in apps, sending files, updating contact details, and scheduling events with just a voice request. It’s much closer to Apple’s original pitch for the voice assistant…and it’s, again, very similar to what Google hopes to be able to do with Gemini on Android.
Apple Intelligence is no Gemini, but it sure looks handy
Apple is skipping AI for “Personal Intelligence.” It’s less exciting, but it could turn out to be more useful and even more ethical.
Software updates are more about “flavor” than functionality now
There’s really nothing wrong with anything Apple announced at WWDC 2024 – save those AI-generated images, yikes – but it’s telling how few and far between truly unique ideas were. All the big tech companies are circling around the same concepts for their wearables, tablets, smartphones, laptops, and AI. The main difference between their products is how they go about implementing them.
Apple usually waits to add in new features (so it can do them right) and that makes moments like the introduction of Apple Intelligence, when what Apple is offering is largely the same as everyone else, all the more disappointing. If you’re a devoted Apple device user, there’s even less reason to be jealous of friends on Android or Windows, but there’s also fewer things that make your iPhone, iPad, Watch, or Mac truly unique, and that’s an odd place for Apple to be.
