Not a word on apple intelligence on Apple Watch

[chfilm]

Does anyone else find it peculiar that they didn’t mention the Apple Watch a single time when it came to Apple intelligence?
The watch seems to be the perfect place to start with new awesome Siri conversational features, the watch or AirPod pros.. but..silence.

I can only imagine that a must buy upgrade for the watch is in the works, with a massive upgrade to the neural engine, because the older models are just not capable enough- or at least that’s what they will say.

At least I hope that’ll be the case, same with HomePod.. otherwise it will be really frustrating if the watch stays “dumb” this year.. what are your thoughts?

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Unsurprising. The SOC in the Apple watch isn't fast enough to do AI stuff, so it will have to rely on the iPhone. Time will tell if it is possible to use the latter for it.

 

[dumastudetto]

Unsurprising. The SOC in the Apple watch isn't fast enough to do AI stuff, so it will have to rely on the iPhone. Time will tell if it is possible to use the latter for it.

The RAM requirements of processing on-device Apple Intelligence also make it impossible. At best, we'll have to be a go back to the early days of Apple Watch and handoff to your iPhone to do the heavy lifting and then pass back the response.

 

[Shirasaki]

Likely the restriction is for weaker SOC in Apple Watch.

 

[chfilm]

I’m fully aware of the hardware Limitations- I just wanted to hear your thoughts on your vision on where they could take the whole Apple intelligence on future watches

 

[Jonnod III]

I’m fully aware of the hardware Limitations- I just wanted to hear your thoughts on your vision on where they could take the whole Apple intelligence on future watches

That's a different question entirely to the one you asked.

"Does anyone else find it peculiar that they didn’t mention the Apple Watch a single time when it came to Apple intelligence?"

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

I’m fully aware of the hardware Limitations- I just wanted to hear your thoughts on your vision on where they could take the whole Apple intelligence on future watches

They could take it anywhere they want, but right now physics is the limit. Apple Intelligence requires a beefy NPU and plenty of RAM, and battery to go with it, and the watch has neither. So you either end up with the current watch, or you make it several mm thicker, which is unlikely to happen.

They have to leverage the iPhone, and I assume they will do that for the next Apple Watch model, to make it a huge seller. It would be for me, as my S4 watch has a dying battery, and I got it first and foremost to have Siri on the wrist. A smarter Siri on the wrist will be a big boon for me.

 

[coffeemilktea]

If Apple Intelligence ever makes its way to the Apple Watch, then devices like the Humane Pin, Rabbit R1, and every other "wearable AI" device are pretty much all goners.

...well, they already are, but this would just be Apple dancing on their graves, I suppose.

 

[teh_hunterer]

I was wondering about this. A watch that can do all the Apple Intelligence stuff just as well as the iPhone can would probably be a pretty significant upgrade.

 

[Howard2k]

It's only going to phones with an A17. I can see it "offloading" to a compatible iPhone when it range, that would be cool. We'd have dumb-Siri and smart-Siri though.

 

[HDFan]

Besides the hardware issue most of your information which you want to query is on your phone, not your watch.

 

[chfilm]

My friend who is a tech-fluencer and was in Cupertino at the Event and the following days told me yesterday that no one seemed to have the slightest clue about what will happen with devices like the watch or homepod etc. It's gonna be a bug mess for the first few years with dumb-siri and smart siri all over the place...
I think they completely overslept and now announced a ton of features that are wayyyy not ready yet and are in full on panic mode..

 

[Jackbequickly]

The Apple Watch CPU could not handle it. The phone will provide the improved functions, not the watch hardware.

 

[al0kz]

I would hope that the next generation of Apple Watch would have some of the intelligence capabilities. The main one being audio transcription features. The rest of what Apple announced doesn’t seem like it benefits the Apple Watch‘s usability imo.

 

[BenGoren]

I expect that, so long as the Watch can talk to your iPhone, the Watch will appear to be about as smart as your iPhone.

It might possibly perhaps even be the case if the two are on opposite sides of the planet, similar to how iPhones currently work as SMS relays for Watches. I can’t think of any technical reason why this shouldn’t be so. The Watch just needs to do the same speech-to-text as it currently does, send that text to the iPhone for all the heavy lifting, get the text response back from the iPhone, and speak the response. Text data is so tiny as to be essentially nonexistent, so there’s no real-world restrictions on network speed, bandwidth, and the like.

Of course, you’re not going to be doing any sort of AI-assisted image editing or the like on your Watch. But all the “personal digital assistant” things you actually use your watch for, plus general informational inquiries? Should all “just work.” At least, as well as it does on the iPhone, which of course remains to be seen.

b&

 

[Jackbequickly]

I would hope that the next generation of Apple Watch would have some of the intelligence capabilities. The main one being audio transcription features. The rest of what Apple announced doesn’t seem like it benefits the Apple Watch‘s usability imo.

Transcription takes a lot of CPU power of which the Apple Watch does not have. I think it will always be highly dependent on it's paired phone.