The Future of Apple's Ecosystem: Trends and Innovations

As we look to the future of Apple's ecosystem, it's clear that the company is constantly evolving and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. With recent updates at WWDC, we saw a number of exciting developments that are set to shape the way we interact with our devices.

One trend that's becoming increasingly important is the use of AI-powered widgets. These small, glanceable displays of information are meant to provide quick access to key data and functionality, but there's still much work to be done in terms of making them truly seamless. As one expert noted, "the smart stack" will play a crucial role in determining which apps get priority, and how the widgets interact with each other. Will this lead to a more streamlined user experience, or will we see a proliferation of competing widget solutions? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, Apple's focus on machine learning is set to continue to drive innovation across its ecosystem. As one expert pointed out, "AI is really just another word for machine learning," and it's clear that Apple is committed to staying at the forefront of this rapidly evolving field. With recent updates to Siri and other AI-powered services, we're seeing more and more examples of how machine learning can be used to improve user experience.

One area where we're already seeing significant improvement is in the realm of app discovery. Apple's new suggestion feature has been a game-changer for many users, allowing them to quickly discover new apps that they'll love. As one expert noted, "the fact that the same code runs between iOS and Mac is also nice" because it reduces friction and makes it easier to develop cross-platform solutions.

Of course, no discussion of Apple's future would be complete without mentioning the company's approach to user interface design. As we've seen in recent years, Apple has a reputation for prioritizing simplicity and elegance over complexity and feature bloat. But as one expert noted, "there are definitely some rough edges" in the latest updates, and it remains to be seen whether these will ultimately be smoothed out by future refinements.

One thing is clear, however: Apple's commitment to innovation and user experience is unwavering. As we look to the future, it's exciting to think about what new features and technologies might emerge, and how they'll shape our relationship with our devices.

Powering all of this is the increasing importance of machine learning. As one expert noted, "machine learning is really just another word for AI," and it's clear that Apple is committed to staying at the forefront of this rapidly evolving field. With recent updates to Siri and other AI-powered services, we're seeing more and more examples of how machine learning can be used to improve user experience.

One fascinating example of machine learning in action comes from the world of neural networks. By wiring up just 50 neurons and using feedback to train them, researchers have been able to build networks that are capable of classifying handwritten digits with remarkable accuracy. As we look to the future, it's clear that this kind of advanced machine learning will play an increasingly important role in shaping our digital world.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- Sponsored by brilliant.So people who may not be familiar with youyou actually started at Apple with OS 10and it's true that youstayed there roughly untilSteve jobs found out that youwere working from Ireland.- Yeah, that's pretty muchexactly what happened,except I stayed one year later than that,because everybody justagreed to tell Stevethat I had moved over to California,when in fact I hadn't.- The last time Appleintroduced widgets for iOS.It was in the today viewand you famously immediately went outand shoved an entire calculator into them.- Which went perfectly and there was nocomplications at all with that.- I mean like technicallyI think Apple just didn't anticipatethat anybody would beable to do that, you knowNot really understanding,not having the maximum respectfor the kind of skill setthat you were bringing to bear on this.- Yeah, I mean there wasa brief conversation,shall we say with theapp review and PCalc,the today widget could live onand it's lived on for six yearsand surely nothing could happen now.- So the reason I'm talkingto you right now though,is that Apple introduced awhole new type of widgetsthis year at WWDC.They took the complicationsfrom the Apple watchand using the might andmystery that is Swift UIhave propagated them across allof their platforms for good,because they are way better looking,they're way more informationally dense,they're way more glanceable,but also maybe a little bit for ill,because they're way less interactive.And I was hoping that maybeyou could walk us through,what you see as themajor differences first.- As you say, they're a lot more similarto watch OS complications,than they are to the old widgets.And the old widgetswe're indeed mini apps.And as everyone was very keento point out in the sessions,these widgets are not mini apps.- Did you feel attacked?Did you feel attacked or see?I don't know which one.- I mean like,I don't think Apple makes any decisionsreally thinking about me, personally.I did take it slightly personally,but I realized thatthat is not aimed at me.I'm just like collateral damage alongside.The way that they work,is that they are basicallyif you can think of them aspictures for the most part,like is a static image thatcan be updated over time,like a complicationand can have in certainlythe larger forms of them,they can have some interactivity.Like when you tap onone you can open a URLwhich will open your appand you can deep link intovarious parts of your app.So say you have, youknow, like you're listinglike the music one has,like a list of the mostrecently listened to albums.And if you tap on the particular oneit could take you to that album.But at what it can't do,is it can't do anything in place.So you can't have a buttonwhich when you click on itsome status changed andthen the widget updates.You know it will always open up the app.And what that discountsis any form of calculator,because you're not allowedto basically have buttonsthat just do something.And the reason for that, Ithink is quite a sensible onein that these things are builtfor energy efficiency andperformance above interactivity.So you can have them like right therewhen you pick up your phoneand you look at the phonelike the comment about, you knowpeople pick up the phoneand look at it 90 timesa day or something.And those little widgetareas will be on display.And you might not want to bespinning up a little processin the background everytime you pick up your phone.And I can understand,and I can respect thatas a design decision for these things.I think it's gonna ruleout a number of widgetsthat people have liked.Not just Pcalc, PCalc Ithink is the extreme examplebecause it's a fullyinteractive little app.But there are some other thingswhere you might want to likecheck off items in a to-do list.- Set multiple timers.- or you might, set timers,those kinds of thingswhere light interactivitywould have been nice,that you could do somethingwithout bouncing out to your main app.But, you know, I think they decidedthat the trade-offs were just...It was too dangerous to open that door,even just an inch,'cause they knew people like mewould be in there in a second.- So for the interactivity that there isthere's small, mediumand large complications.And on the medium and large onesI think you can have multiple deep links.So for example, if it'sa small complicationand you tap it it'll justtake you to your stocks.But if it's a large complicationthat shows you several stockstapping each of those stockscould take you to the page for that stock.- Yes. So what you do isyou basically set a URLwhich will cover the whole widget,and only in the medium and large ones,you can use these linkobjects in Swift UI,and you can assign a specific URLfor each of the different ones.And that, you know, that givesyou most of the functionalityyou would need to likeopen up a specific noteor go to a specific albumor something like that.- Yeah, it's interesting because I've hadthis long philosophicaldebate about the home screen.Apple always treatedit, not as a destinationbut as a portal.And they just never reallywanted you hanging around there.They wanted, you use itto go into and out of appsand widgets have alwayslived off in widget spaceand the today view,which you had to swipe in and out,and there, you couldsort of do your thing.You could do your calculator,you could do your to-dos.But now that they're on the home screen,they're sort of livingmore under that philosophywhere you can look at them,but if you wanna interact with somethingyou're being teleportedstraight back into an app.- I mean, that is certainly one argument.One thing that kind of is a flow in that,is up to now you could pin your widgetson an iPad home screenand they were there all the time- You had a brief year ofjoy with that. (laughs)- Yes. And I mean, it alsolooks like the existing widgetsare probably gonna live onfor maybe a year or something.Like, the underlying APIs allhave big signs on them saying,you know, don't use these anymore.So maybe there'll be another year of themand maybe they will think aboutsort of interactivity or something.If they could do it like iniOS 15 or something like that,it would be nice.- So that was gonna bemy next question to youbecause we've seen several timesthat Apple is willing totear things down completelyand then rebuild them back up.Even if the building process takes time,like, you know, FinalCut Pro, the iWork apps,the iWork apps specifically,they tore down the old,you know, Mac versionsrebuilt them off the iOS engine.They were missing a bunch of features.And over time they'vebeen adding those back.So do you think it's possible, you know,and obviously anything is possible,but do you hope it'spossible that Apple tore downthe old widget structureto bring over everythingthey liked about complicationsand that over time now thatthey have this new core,they'll rebuild some of the layersthat we enjoyed on the more functionaliOS and Mac OS widgets.- The way that they are doneas complications effectivelyand you have these timelinesand you sort of,the idea is if say you're a calendar app,you can sort of work outwhat your widget is gonna looklike throughout the whole dayand just dump all that informationinto the widget architecture.And then, you know, it'llsort of update graduallyas the day goes.And then, I mean, you can also, you can,in your app, you can updatethe timeline and say,Oh, something's changed.Like somebody added a new event,so you can go back and wecan regenerate these things.But the philosophybehind them is very muchthe sort of do as little work as possible.And I'm not sure how they could getfrom that point to thepoint of say a calculator,you know, every everything is possible,- Yeah fair.- And maybe they could introduce a sortof a slightly different wayof doing it or, or something.If I had to take bets onit, I would say they won't.- So you mentioned how the widgets update,and I think that's something that peoplearen't entirely clear.My understanding is itworks off a timeline,and they will update periodicallyto reflect more current information.So if it's a calendar, for exampleit'll show it'll update to showyou what your next event is.But if you have something in the series,in the smart stack, Ikeep calling it series,I think they just call it smart stackand an event is coming up.They can set a priority as well saying,Hey I'm super important.I'm more important than other things.And then depending on howhigh they make that priority,the sort of the things in the smart stackcan fight for what's gonnabe shown to you next door.What's going to be on top of the stack.- Yeah. I think the examplethey gave for that was likeyour stocks might be more importantwhile the stock market is open.So, you know, there's no pointin showing them after hours.So you could decreasethe priority on those.Or, you know, if you know,you have an event coming upat a certain time, maybe you would high,you know, raise thepriority for that thing.It'll be interesting to see, you know,like if everybody just saysmy thing is the mostimportant thing you know,what will the smartstack do at that point.- Waiting for a stack dominance?- I mean, there's some strangethings with the widgets.Like currently you can't mix them inwith the iPad home screen,which to me makes less sense.- When I asked Apple aboutit their answer was thatthe iPad was a fundamentallydifferent experienceespecially now thatthey've given us iPad iOS.But I always get the feelingthat any development workis constrained by money and time.And Apple is not thatconstrained by money,but boy are they stillconstrained by time?- Oh yeah.I mean, given like whatthe conditions that allof this stuff has beenmade in for the last,you know, three or four months,like everybody workingfrom home or whatever,I think it's amazing the amount of stuffthat we did get out of this WWDC.And, you know, if thereare a few rough edgesor things that don'tlook quite finished yet,that's not a surprise, really.- So no spoilers, of course.But do you already have an idea in mindfor what you're goingto do with PCalc widget?- Because these are meant to be a sort ofmore glanceable displayof information though.I think there's a class of appsthat it's not reallygonna work as well for,but there are some that isgonna work very well for.And you know, that's just the, you know,the hand of Craig Federighion your shoulder guiding youin the direction thatApple wishes you to go.- The one thing that I'veliked a lot so far isthe Siri suggestion ones,because when you drop those inthey become indistinguishablefrom your normal home screen apps.And over time, over the last few yearsApple has gotten really goodin actually predicting the kindof apps that I want to use next.And I've got two of themon my main home screen now,which is I thought would beweird because I'm very muchabout spatial awarenessand object permanency.And I want my apps where I want them,but I could just never fit enough apps.And then the folders were two tapsand that's just a tap too much,two taps is a tap too much.And now I've got fourrows of series suggestionsand it does take me a secondto spot the icon that I wantat any given time, but it'salmost always right there.And that to me has been transformationalin a way I didn't expect it wouldwhen I just heard thatApple was updating widgets.- Yeah. I mean, I thinkthat's interesting.I think there's otherstuff where I think peoplewill innovate around the edgesand figure out things that they can do.And, you know, I think there'sgonna be some little holeswhere I can launch a URL, you know,what does that let me do?You know, it might, you know, is there a,I mean I think probablyyou could run a shortcutfrom just that, you know,you could run a shortcutjust by opening a URLand that wouldn't launch your app.So it's that a way to dosomething interesting.I mean, the fact that the same code runsbetween the iOS and Mac is also nice'cause that means you can,you've got one lesscompletely different wayof doing things to target.And that's certainly somethingI'm looking at going forward.It reduces a lot of frictionin doing stuff and yeah,stuff like that, I think is good.- Powering all of this,everything that sci-fi callsartificial intelligence,AI is really machine learning.And to learn more about that,check out brilliant newneural networks course.Here's an example from somethingthat we're just gonna keepseeing more and more of.You can wire up just 50 neuronsand using that type of feedbackbuild a network that'scapable of classifyinghandwritten digits.But really recognizing and classifyingalmost everything eventually.Whether you're a studentlooking to get aheadwhile school's out,a professional who wants tobrush up on cutting edge topics,or someone who just wants to understand,maybe even be part ofhow all this technologyis changing the world.Check out brilliant,go to brilliant.org/reneeritchieand sign up for free.And the first 200 of you can also level upwith 20% off the annualpremium subscription.\n"