Apple has been spared from the majority of Trump’s tariffs, mitigating the impact of the US trade war with China. Meanwhile, Tim Cook is prioritising the company’s augmented reality efforts with several key projects in development. We’re also expected to see major changes in iPadOS 19 to bring it more in line with macOS, and there have been big shake-ups in the Siri team. All this and more in this week’s Mission CMD 🚀
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CMD/Start 🏁
Tariff relief for Apple
Apple was put in a difficult position over the past week or so as the trade war between the US and China intensified. Proposed tariffs of 145% were due to come into effect for nearly all goods coming into the US from China. The impact on Apple would have been particularly pronounced since much of the final assembly for its devices takes place in China. At such a high rate, it would have been impossible for Apple to absorb the costs. It would have effectively been selling products at a loss.
Fortunately for Apple, an exemption to these tariffs has been granted for several key products across the tech sector. This includes smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and more. Good news for Apple and good news for customers.
The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump’s 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries.
The exclusions would apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives and computer processors and memory chips. Those popular consumer electronics items generally aren’t made in the US. Setting up domestic manufacturing would take years.
Tim Cook is spending more of his time, focused on AR
According to Bloomberg analyst Mark Gurman, Apple CEO Tim Cook is hell-bent on developing industry-leading AR glasses. Cook is said to be placing heavy focus on it, prioritising the project above all other initiatives.
Allegedly, Apple is developing an interim solution akin to Meta’s Ray-Bans. Essentially smart glasses that can tap into Siri, Visual Intelligence, and capture media. Perhaps providing information on tap to the user to augment their day-to-day life. You can certainly see how such a device could be quite useful if it were able to tap into large language models and be conversational. However, the big dream that Cook is going after is true AR glasses.
Apple has placed heavy focus on AR technology in recent years. First with developer tools and frameworks such as ARkit. And more recently with its first AR hardware product, the Apple Vision Pro. The Apple Vision Pro runs Apple’s dedicated AR operating system, VisionOS. But the Apple Vision Pro, while impressive in many respects, is limited by its pricing. Many people also find it uncomfortable to use for longer stretches.
On the one end of the AR spectrum are the aforementioned ‘smart glasses’, and at the other are high-end, fully immersive AR devices like the Apple Vision Pro. Cook wants these devices to converge. To be able to bring powerful spatial computing experiences to the form factor of a pair of glasses. This is a huge engineering challenge. The primary technologies exist as seen in the Apple Vision Pro, but the issue is reducing their size, weight, and power consumption to be able to fit into regular glasses.
This will clearly be a multi-year effort, but Apple sees AR as being of equal importance in the long term as AI. Perhaps even seeing them as two sides of the same coin. After all, Apple has long been at the intersection of hardware, software, and services. It isn’t hard to imagine how powerful AR and AI could truly be in tandem.
Run / Update ⚙️
The continued evolution of iPadOS
In yet another report from Mark Gurman, he alleges that we can expect to see some significant changes to iPadOS this year. Apple has been making progress towards greater productivity and capability for the iPad now for many years. Perhaps the biggest shift most recently was the introduction of Stage Manager and the ability to run apps in a windowed environment. But it does have limitations.
Gurman claims, Apple is planning to take window management to the next level on iPadOS and bring it more in line with macOS. Furthermore we could see improvements to multitasking and other new productivity features and optimisations.
I’m told that this year’s upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking and app window management — with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac. It’s been a long time coming, with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful.
The report is light on details so should be taken with a pinch of salt. But it’s not secret that there is a sizeable community of iPad users that would love to see iPadOS become even more capable. We’ll have to wait until WWDC to find out for certain.
Internal shake-up in Siri Development
A recent report from The Information details Apple’s internal struggles with Siri, highlighting poor leadership and a relaxed culture within the AI/ML team. The team, nicknamed “AIMLess,” has faced criticism for demoing Siri upgrades without working prototypes. Not to mention the class action lawsuits…
More than half a dozen former Apple employees who worked in the AI and machine-learning group led by Giannandrea—known as AI/ML for short—told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution. They singled out Robby Walker as lacking both ambition and an appetite for taking risks on designing future versions of the voice assistant.
Among engineers inside Apple, the AI group’s relaxed culture and struggles with execution have even earned it an uncharitable nickname, a play on its initials: AIMLess.
Wayne Ma, writing for The Information
However, there is optimism within Apple that Siri is in better hands now under Craig Federighi and his “Intelligent Systems” team, which has been responsible for shipping many of the existing Apple Intelligence features. According to Ma, there is one significant change that Federighi has been willing to make already. That being to allow his engineering team to build features using third-party large language models.
Launch / CTRL 👨🚀
Lighter, cheaper Vision Pro could be on the way
In a follow up to Gurman’s reporting regarding the development of AR glasses, Apple intends to keep chipping away at the Vision Pro. The company allegedly has two new models very much in the works. Previous reporting had claimed that a pretty basic update with a yet to be announced M5 chip was in the works. But apparently Apple’s ambition goes further than this.
The first model will be a lighter weight version of the current Vision Pro. Often users report head and neck strain when using the device for extended periods. Apple hopes to address this with the new model. It’s also going to be less expensive with Apple hoping to better compete with Meta and its much cheaper Meta Quest line.
The second model however is somewhat different. It’s said to be focused on the enterprise and designed to offer next to zero latency. Apparently by being connected to a Mac. Reduced latency may offer benefits in certain applications like for surgeons when augmented procedures with overlays. A situation where accuracy is critical.
I’m skeptical of the latter since the current Apple Vision Pro has a built in M2 chip and R1 co-processor, directly hooked up to the rest of the headsets hardware. It isn’t clear how tethering the device to a Mac would be helpful other than saving weight by offloading the processor to an external unit.
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