Wired’s Look at Apple’s Private Cloud Compute ⇥ wired.com

Lily Hay Newman, of Wired, interviewed Apple’s Craig Federighi about Private Cloud Compute, the company’s custom system for processing Apple Intelligence requests unable to be handled on-device. Federighi explains how it all works in more simplified language, which is helpful, but I am eager to hear from third-parties about the real privacy differences.

There is an interesting two-part media story to this article, too. First, this little error:

Apple says it is still committed to doing as much Apple Intelligence processing as possible on-device, and a brand new iPhone 16 with its A18 chip, for example, will be able to do more AI processing locally than an iPhone 15 with an A16 chip. […]

I would hope so — an iPhone 15 with an A16 chip is not compatible with Apple Intelligence. An iPhone 15 Pro and its A17 Pro chip would be a better comparison. I do not know whether this error is Apple’s or the reporter’s, but it has survived a full day since the article’s publication.

Next, this paragraph:

Those who do get access to Apple Intelligence will have the ability to do far more than they could with past versions of iOS, from taking advantage of writing tools to photo analysis. Federighi says that his family celebrated their dog’s recent birthday with an Apple Intelligence–generated Image Playground creation shared exclusively with WIRED. […]

This paragraph was edited — Wired appended a cheeky note to the article saying it “was updated with clarification on the Apple Intelligence-generated image Federighi created for his dog’s birthday and additional confirmation that she is a very good dog”. The original version read:

Those who do get access to Apple Intelligence will have the ability to do far more than they could with past versions of iOS, from writing tools to photo analysis. Federighi says that his family celebrated their dog’s recent birthday with an Apple Intelligence-generated GenMoji (viewed and confirmed to be very cute by WIRED). […]

“Cute” is subjective; I am less amused. The referenced article was also updated after it was published “to add the name of Federighi’s dog”. Who requested that change, I wonder?