Obviously I have no idea what your opinion is beyond this comment. But from my own view of lemmy it's so funny to open the thread about windows and people are like:

"I don't care if I can disable it. There's absolutely no reason an operating system should collect that data, except for their own toxic capitalist greed. I want a tool to rip every line of this code out, or I'm installing Arch and never looking back."

To the thread on Apple doing it:

"Apple setting a better example is a good thing to see." 😂

Opt-in should be mandatory for all services and data sharing. I would start my transition to Linux today if this were opt-out, though the way Apple handles this for other services makes me believe opt-in will be temporary.

Currently, when you setup any device as new, even an offline/local user on macOS, the moment you log into iCloud it opts-almost-every-app-and-service-into iCloud, even one's you have never used and always disabled on every device. There's seemingly no way to prevent this behavior on any device, let alone at an account level.

Currently, even though my iPhone and language support offline (on-device) Siri, and I've disabled all analytics sharing options, I must still agree to Apple's data sharing and privacy policy to use Siri. Why would I need to agree to a privacy policy if I only want to use Siri offline, locally on my device, and disable it from accessing Apple's servers or anything external to the content on my phone? Likely because if you enable Siri, it auto-enables (opts in) for every app and service on your device. Again, no way to disable this behavior.

I understand the majority of users do not care about privacy or surveillance capitalism, but for me to trust and use a personal AI assistant baked into my devices OS, I need the ability to make it 100% offline, and fine grained network control for individual apps and processes, including all of the OS's processes. It would not be difficult to add a toggle at login to "enable iCloud/Siri for all apps/services" or "let me choose which apps/services to use with iCloud/Siri, individually". Apple needs stronger and clearer offline controls in all its software, period.

I heard that and thought, “Someone at Apple thought this up and then many other people approved it.”

It takes a very special mind to do this…

First thing I disable

Given that personal sensitive data doesn’t leave a device except when authorised, a bad actor would need to access a target’s device or somehow identify and compromise the specific specially hardened Apple silicon server, which likely does not have any of the target’s data since it isn’t retained after computing a given request.

Accessing someone’s device leads to greater threats than prompt injection. Identifying and accessing a hardened custom server at the exact time data is processed is exceptionally difficult as a request. Outside of novel exploits of a user’s device during remote server usage, I suspect this is a pretty secure system.

The linked announce has a pretty good overview

They mentioned in their overview that independent 3rd parties can review the code, but I haven’t seen anyone go into that further. Pensively waiting for info on that tidbit from the presentation they gave.

Siri? I didn’t think it was live in developer previews yet?

This… this is actually amazing

If I recall correctly, they straight up said that any program that supports their standard text presentation object will support rewrite.

I can see some features being useful.

Removing unwanted people from photos seems table steak but it’s nice to see them catching up.

Siri being screen aware is going to be a lot more helpful than what it currently can do.

I’m at least intrigued at how the integration across different devices will play out with the private cloud thing.

Overall, seems like an acceptable privacy focused entrance into the LLM driven AI world most would expect from Apple.

Shareholders?

Some of it looks maybe useful. Other parts look gimmicky. The image generation stuff could be a powderkeg moment with creatives after the hydraulic press ad.

I’m excited for this. Siri seems like it might actually be useful, finally, and the various ways they are integrating LLMs will make the stuff I already do with ChatGPT much more straightforward.

Google has been pimping it's magic eraser everywhere for the past few years, I'm sure plenty of people would like that.

If you read the announcement, you’ll see they incorporated ai into many features, so lots of us may find something useful. Personally I like these new image search features