The iPhone just became the center of Apple’s new AI hub
Macworld ·
Macworld The new Siri AI architecture is about more than just answering more questions or having a back-and-forth conversation. It’s about being able to move data between Apple devices, securely and privately, to perform AI tasks elsewhere. In much the same way as your iPhone can send an AI task that’s too big for it (along with the data needed to complete it) to a Private Cloud Compute server, so too can Apple accessories and products send requests to your iPhone. It’s how the HomeView works with everyone in the house, how the Apple Watch Series 12 will provide its “audio intelligence” features, and how existing Apple TV 4K boxes will get Siri AI support. It tells us a lot about how Apple’s future products, from AirPods with cameras to smart glasses , are going to work. It’s all about your iPhone At first, we thought perhaps you would need the new $299 Apple TV 4K to get access to Siri AI. Then we found out that the 2nd-gen and 3rd-gen Apple TV 4K boxes will get it as well . It’s going to do this by sending Siri AI requests to your iPhone, as long as it’s nearby, logged in to the same account, and has been unlocked recently. That sounds a lot like how HomeView is going to work. Ask Siri to turn on lights, and it just does it. Ask it anything that has to do with your messages, calendar, or any other personal info, and it sends that along to your (nearby, logged in, recently unlocked) iPhone. Apple did its best not to show the iPhone in any of its HomeView marketing material, but make no mistake—an iPhone is a critical part of the experience. Not pictured: The nearby iPhone all this calendar info comes from. Foundry HomeView even goes a step further and uses your iPhone as a hub for audio and video apps that aren’t installed on it, running them via CarPlay directly from your iPhone. When the Apple Watch Series 12 was released last month, it shipped without a key feature: Audio Intelligence. This ability to summarize conversations and “rewind” the last 15 seconds of speech doesn’t even really use the watch. It uses your iPhone. The Series 12 and Ultra 4 create a secure and private wireless link with your iPhone, which does all the AI stuff , pulling in Private Cloud Compute where necessary, and then returning the info to your Apple Watch via that link again. When Live Rewind and Siri Recap come to the new Apple Watches, they’ll run on your iPhone. Apple So by the end of this year, Apple will have four products on the market: existing Apple TV 4K (2nd and 3rd gen) boxes, HomeView, and the new Apple Watches, that all rely on a link to your iPhone to process any Siri AI request more complicated than starting a timer or turning off a light. Future products as iPhone extensions Back in 2001, Steve Jobs introduced the concept of the Digital Hub, with a central device (the Mac) that “added value” to the other gadgets in our lives, including CD players, MP3 players, and cellphones. Now it’s Apple’s cellphone that is at the center of the new digital hub. It now seems obvious that future AI-powered products from Apple are going to need an iPhone to work. Whether it’s AirPods with cameras, smart glasses, or a more powerful robotic HomeView , the device itself will do minimal processing to figure out what the request is. Very basic requests will be handled on-device. Requests that need to know anything about you or access your data will get routed to your iPhone, where all that info can be handled securely and privately. If the task is too big for your iPhone, it will send it to a Private Cloud Compute server along with the relevant data, where a much bigger processor and AI model can take care of it and then immediately delete everything associated with it. Apple has been speaking about the benefits of local AI processing for quite some time now, but no phone or laptop is powerful enough for today’s best AI models, so it built a scheme to send AI requests from your iPhone or Mac to the cloud. Now, the same principle is being extended in the other direction: Building “edge” accessories that do even less AI processing than your iPhone, but connect to it when they need to. This allows Apple to build smaller, lighter, and relatively cheaper devices that can still access the company’s latest AI features. And it helps future-proof those devices as Siri AI evolves. It means your HomeView or AI-powered AirPods should get smarter as your iPhone gets smarter instead of being stuck with the limited AI processing available in a $299 smart display circa 2026. Apple doesn’t directly tell us exactly how its products work, most of the time. But it’s a nice idea to think that you might update your iPhone in a few years, providing access to all new AI capabilities, and that your Apple Watch, HomeView, smart glasses, or other products will gain new capabilities in the process.