Presumably they want existing iPhone owners to have a compelling reason to upgrade to the newer model.

100%. It is likely that they will. The current on-device stuff is going to (obviously) be gated to the fastest devices presently.

I imagine they will roll out to other languages and devices relatively soon after. This article assumes too much about the future, and seems to be pushing an “Apple wants to sell you more hardware” narrative as if a hardware company wanting sales is somehow scandalous.

Despite that, I don’t think that is what is happening here. I imagine server models will be available across all/most devices not long after they do the initial launch.

I suspect there’s a few factors preventing that - cost of server capacity, the UX of higher latency (it would be for possibly all ML stuff?)

Apple specifically avoids building solutions which put them in the position of being able to do lawful intercepts. I am convinced it is an explicit checkbox in their development process now.

If you’ve built the solution for commercial purposes you obviously don’t have any real moral concerns that can allow you to refuse a lawful request, while “build us a backdoor to unlock this iPhone” or “build us a backdoor to disable advanced data protection mode/e2ee mode” would be compelled speech.

The things they have complied on are fairly minor stuff like making airdrop not work with non-friends for more than 10 minutes at a time.

There are obvious privacy problems with streaming every user interaction to the cloud, which is why they’ve already avoided this for things like photo tagging etc. Maybe you could do anonymized inference similar to the way maps work (let’s say, apple hosts a session for an anonymized user identifier but they don’t know who) but it’s still very intimate information regardless.

On device really is better… not to mention the power concerns. Like I just do not get these objections at all, other than whining because it’s apple, and I think the same people would be whining 100x harder (with good justification) if apple was really steaming every user interaction to the cloud. We’d be hearing about the sham of apple marketing on privacy while sending your sexts to the cloud etc.

same thing for the whining about copilot. Like yeah if it’s on-device it ultimately is going to be a file on disk somewhere (omg SQLite, we hate that!!!). The whole disk is protected by bitlocker, and the file is additionally restricted tightly to the system user (not just admin, the kernel privileged user). The file has to be open during normal operation, so “double encrypting” the file an additional time and then storing the encryption key inside the PC is security theater, because the file has to be opened anyway, and everyone knows this and would immediately spout off if anyone did it in any other circumstance. Yes, if you force your way to system user you can read the file, because the system user needs to read it, but at that point the system user can also just keylog you and screenshot you directly.

The complaints people are raising aren’t technically cogent, but they don’t need to be, because they’re not technically based in the first place. People don’t want the feature and they find reasons to complain. You can 10x it anytime apple is involved.