The tech world was waiting with baited breath for Apple to outline their vision for Artificial Intelligence, and its fair to say they did not disappoint. Many commentators had inexplicably mistaken this delay for innovative inertia or even imprudence, rather than their typical thoughtful and cautious deployment. What we saw at this years World Wide Developer’s Conference was exactly that; a detailed roadmap for the integration of AI into applications and services that only Apple could achieve.

Many other companies beat Apple out of the gate with regards to AI in the public domain, but like all the best athletes, the Cupertino champion understood their strengths perfectly. Rather than hastily assemble some kind of AI based product to compete (at least with one exception and more on that in a little bit) they have bided their time well and clearly observed the pitfalls that lay in wait for their more eager competitors. Broadly speaking, these traps in AI can be distilled into two distinct camps; applications and privacy. The former concerning itself with how these new technologies can be leveraged either by existing or new processes in a meaningful way, while the latter is all about how one can accomplish this by not surrendering all your users data to some dodgy third party. Both are important, both are tricky.

Apple’s WWDC Key Note presentation addressed these directly, and did so with their characteristic confidence and guile. First we got a glimpe on how Apple Intelligence (as they call it) will work across the different devices, leveraging the personal context inherit to their all-in-one hardware and software ecosystem. In line with Apple's entire operating model, users who are ‘all-in’ on the Apple ecosystem will stand to benefit the most from the integration of Apple Intelligence. So users with their contacts, messaging, emails, photos and bookings will see the most transformative change, as AI integrates seamlessly, they claim, across all Apple’s first-party apps.

Then there is privacy; orders of magnitude more important and more boring. Apple has long positioned privacy as an intrinsic part of its ecosystem, and broadly speaking, has an excellent reputation in that regard. To put it simply, the vast majority of the AI tasks outlined in the keynote will happen on your device, and if it requires additional power then a private cloud service will be available. Functionally I see no distinction between this and say Microsoft leveraging their Azure Cloud service, but it will still be reassuring for users to hear that it would use Apple’s own hardware to ensure consistency of privacy. AI does have the potential to complicate this, and we will deal with that in the next paragraph but Apple’s privacy-first approach will go along way to heading off the most common complaints levelled at AI.

That was Apple Intelligence, and it was mightily impressive if not particulary surprising. Where things did get a bit weird, as I mentioned earlier, was the planned integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT service as an option when Apple’s own AI models don’t want the responsibility of handling it the request. The user will be prompted to proceed with this service, but whether Apple want to own it or not, the responsibility for any AI shenanigans will still lie with them. It won’t go down well if something heinous happens and their refrain is ‘don’t blame us, blame that weirdo Sam Altman’. This is sticky, its new ground, and its a potential PR quagmire that I am surprised Apple didn’t swerve altogether.

There’s another caveat with integrating ChatGPT, which refers back to the point regarding privacy. If the request requires ChatGPT, then that data is officially off Apples servers. Again, that lack of control is very ‘un-Apple’ and their handling of that relationship will be fascinating to see play out.

It is too early to say whether they will deliver in either area, of course, but the strides that Apple will take this year to close the gap on (surpass?) their competition have been planned, and will release to the public in the coming months. What appears to be true at this early stage, is that the AI race will be run with Apple setting the pace.

It finally happened. Apple has been sued by the United States government for alleged customer lock-in and intentionally degrading the experience for users who want to switch between mobile operating systems.

“who the hell cares?”

Good question, imaginary rhetorical device. The answer might be you for reasons you may not realise yet.

On the one hand, most people are aware that Apple engages in some shenanigans when it comes to maximising revenue from their customers. In particular this idea that when a new version of the iPhone is available, all of a sudden older models start to run slow and lose battery more quickly, forcing users to upgrade. Now this has never actually been proven, but the readiness with which people believe it should tell you that Apple are the subject of heightened scrutiny and suspicion. The simple fact is that, as the worlds first trillion-dollar valued company, the eyes of the world are never far aware from the Cupertino-based tech leviathan. And now it appears America’s proud legal institutions have declared enough is enough and are suing Apple in the first major anti-trust action in tech since the 1990s (ask your parents).

Almost by definition, successful companies attract anti-trust scrutiny. For the uninitiated, anti-trust is a catch-all term for laws and regulations designed to promote fairness and even competition in a given market. If one company gains too much control over a market they can prevent other companies from competing, and once there is only one or a handful of companies left, those remaining can set their prices however they choose, leaving the consumer with no choice but to pay. You’re left with a monopoly, which is just as bad as the stupid board game that shares the name.

So what exactly are Apple being sued for? Well this is where it gets interesting, I promise. There are 5 major points to the Department of Justice’s case.

1. Disrupting Super-Apps

2. Blocking Cloud Streaming Apps

3. Making messaging between Android and iOS crap

4. Smart watches don’t work well between mobile operating systems

5. Blocking third-parties from developing an alternative to Apple Pay

Your first question, if you live in the West, is ‘what the hell is a Super App'?’ Well, fellow descendent of Athens, a Super App is one that encompasses multiple services like shopping, travel and communications. Sounds good, right? Hold your horses because that literally would create a whole new monopoly. We’ll wait for the rest of the world to figure that part out and move on.

If any of those other bullet points seem reasonable to you, then great but there’s a chicken-egg dilemma at play here which is worth examining. Apple’s defence against this filing is that it provides a unified, intuitive and, most importantly, secure approach to its digital ecosystem. Meaning that iOS users can go about their daily lives with a reasonable amount of confidence and assuredness that their data is safe, including their money. This led to the proliferation of Apple Pay because if consumers weren’t confident that the system was secure then they wouldn’t have been keen to adopt it. This led to greater flexibility in commerce, more chances for small businesses to thrive without the headache of cash or card management and ultimately paved the way for Google Pay (Android Pay, Google Wallet/whatever its called now) to join an established market. Bingo bongo, competition!

The upshot being that Apple makes good decisions, and understands its market better than anyone else. Users love the products, and buy into the ecosystem in larger and larger numbers every year. This cannot exclude them from anti-trust scrutiny, but the arguments provided so far by the DoJ do not seem sufficiently solid to justify this process. The accusations of monopolistic tendencies within the app store market seemed on much more solid ground and were worth pursuing, but this larger suit relating to the intersection of hardware, software and services seems destined to fall flat.

Consumers do have a choice; Google, Huawei and Samsung all offer access to alternative ecosystems. Its not Apple’s fault that none of them are as compelling. No reasonable person can allege that the Apple Watch working at its most feature complete with an iPhone is somehow harming Samsungs ability to make a decent smartwatch. Or that Google changing it’s messaging strategy 20 times in 10 years is the fault of iMessage. Capitalism is a terrible system, but if we are going to live under its yoke then we have to at least enforce the rules consistently, Apple should not be punished because it plays the game better than anyone else.

The year is 2005. Its been a rough one; the Pope has died, Live8 happened, and George Bush has won a second term as US President. However, amongst the gathered darkness there was a ray of hope; the Xbox 360 was released. The successor to the impactful but not successful original Xbox, the ‘360’ as it would be affectionately known, would go on to dominate that generation of console gaming. In part because it was cheap, readily available and boasted a reliable online gaming platform which Sony’s contender just couldn’t replicate. The Console Forever War had a new champion, and had done so in such a comprehensive manner that it was hard to see Sony rallying. Yet rally they most certainly did, and the PlayStation 4 was a phenomenon while the Xbox One (the 360’s confusingly named follow-up) was totally wiped out. I am here to tell you that Microsoft must never forgot the lesson this taught them.

Sony reigned supreme, but as the years passed we inevitably turned our collective attention to the next would-be competitor. However this generation had been unique, we just hadn’t realised it. In the midst of the usual carnage of game releases, exclusives, hits and flops; the age of the digital storefront had begun and with it, the beginning of the end for consoles.

Digital storefronts were not unique to video games, iTunes had popularised the idea years before. The sheer size of video games files meant that physical media still held sway. as internet infrastructure was developed and deployed to facilitate speedier downloads of larger file sizes. So while discs were still the order of the day, the idea of downloading games direct to your console had taken root, was becoming more and more popular by the year. We should have realised then that building the hardware no longer provided the comparative advantage it once had. It’s a simple enough idea, but let me break it down; in years gone by, video game software was developed in tandem with the hardware engineering teams. This was because, as a developer, you needed to know what the hardware could do and how it would work and the only people who truly understood that were the ones building it. These days, standardised development frameworks and game engines mean that game software development is increasingly divorced from the manufacturing of hardware.

So you have a situation where games are being developed independently of the hardware engineers, the games are designed to standard frameworks and as such are hardware agnostic by definition, and physical media is all but extinct. In this world, being a manufacturer of hardware is an expensive luxury. For Xbox, which has done nothing but lose ground since the ‘360’ era, an important decision is about to be made. In the immortal words of a very different Joshua (who was voiced by a ‘John Wood’, in a spooky coincidence) “the only winning move is not to play”. Microsoft must make the impossible decision to walk away from the hardware fight completely, and live up to their ambition of empowering players to enjoy their games regardless of what piece of plastic, metal and silicon fused components they decide to play on.

Microsoft must make their now impressive library of games available on all platforms; Xboxes and Playstations’, Nintendo Switches’ and Steam Decks, and in the cloud and on phones and VR Goggles and whatever else you can find. Demonstrate leadership by refusing to play by the old rules, and start a new game where consumers win.

Epic Games, developer and publisher of the phenomenally successful video game juggernaut Fortnite, has just won a landmark case against Google, as a jury found that 'Google turned its Play Store app platform and Billing Service into an illegal monopoly’ quoting The Verge. Naturally, Google will appeal the result and we’ll be back here in a few months but its unlikely that the appeal will work. Particularly because Google was up to some shady shit prior the trial, destroying potential evidence which is something of a no-no according to the judge, who knew?

To quickly summarise; Google owns and operates the Android operating system (separate to the rest of the business, in particular the Pixel division, but not really) and the Google Play Store is an integral part of that OS. Google makes money when you spend using the Google Play Store, and as such there was an incentive for them to protect it from competition. The jury found that Google was actively quashing other app stores from running on Android through the targeted application of revenue sharing deals which is BS corporate-talk for paying companies off to give up on their dreams of running a mobile app store. The Argument being that Google was in a special position to be doing these things, and exploited that opportunity. They also absolutely did not play fair with the apps themselves, giving special treatment to big apps like Spotify and Netflix, again to quieten any demands that may exist for different app stores with different revenue sharing terms. Stifling this stuff is what monopolies do, and the jury were not having it.

It took a company the size of Epic Games to say enough was enough and drag Google to court. Epic were not seeking damages, but instead just wanted to make a very loud, very public point about big companies acting like dickheads. And they won. Wahey!

So Google get a very public slap and Sunder Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) could well have to step down but we don’t care about that. What we do care about is whether this establishes any kind of precedent for app stores, and the web in general. Every day its getting harder and harder to be a big tech monopolist; between court cases and a utterly rabid European Union, the walled gardens raised by the early web-marketplace movers like Apple and Google are starting to get torn down. Its even possible we might be heading back to the days of the open web, with all its chaos, uncertainty and excitement. Only time will tell.

Apologies for the very Verge-y headline, but it makes my point succinctly enough. If you have a life, and are therefore unaware, there was a furore prior to the launch of the iPhone 15 and its associated iterations, about the new case that was being sold to accompany them. Specifically, people were upset that the old leather cases were out, and that they’d been replaced by a new sustainable, eco-conscious alternative made from recycled materials.

Because the case was delivered before the phone (a necessity; people cannot be trusted not to immediately launch their new phones off the sides of buildings so they need the case to put it in straight away) they presented an opportunity to fill the pre-launch void with some meaningless guff. And oh boy was that void filled. Hundreds of vlogs and articles emerged slandering the new cases for feeling cheap and tacky compared to their leather predecessors. New=bad, as is so often the case in the world of tech, and because nobody had the phones to actually put in the cases, no-one could comment on how the fit and feel once encompassing their load and fulfilling their destiny.

It turns out that the cases are excellent, and the sustainability element is just a nice added extra. I usually buy a case to go with my phone when I first get it, then immediately jettison it when I start to wonder why I would spend so much money for what is essentially tech-jewellery and immediately stuff it in a box, hiding its beauty from the world. I assumed the same would happen here, but instead I have grown to absolutely love my FineWoven case. Its kept its shape and feel extremely well, the material on the back is soft but clearly hard-wearing, and the rails along the sides are solid, grippy and seamless. Moreover, and this is purely to my taste, the combination of natural titanium phone with the taupe coloured case is my aesthetic dream come true.

In short; do not listen to the haters and do not skip over the FineWoven cases if you shell out for a new iPhone.

David Pierce from The Verge has a weekly newsletter that is very good called Installer. If you’re not already familiar with it, David collates a lot of the best stuff from around the web in one handy Sunday rundown. Its a lot of note-taking apps, productivity planners and odd Japanese films but amongst the nerdy-guff this week was a few alternatives to the stock YouTube web experience.

It got me thinking just how much time I spend on YouTube, both professionally and personally. A recent economy drive led to our household cutting back on streaming subscriptions and it became clear after not much thought that I would be willing to give them all up apart from YouTube Premium. No other platform offers the same range of content to satisfy every mood imaginable, and serves a stream of quality videos at such a ferocious rate.

Taking out the ads with Premium makes the experience seamless and engaging, I thoroughly recommend giving it a whirl if you haven’t already.

I’m jumping ahead of the new year resolutions rush to reformat and repurpose my blog. Gone are the old, lengthy and convoluted posts about something specific, and instead I’ll be focussing on short and sharp posts to entice but ultimately leave you feeling profoundly unsatisfied. Eventually I am hoping some kind of Stockholm syndrome will set in, and you’ll keep coming back for more despite knowing I’m not right for you.

We’ll see.