Apple lied early on about iPhone’s hardware capabilities, and will probably never catch up to its promises.
It is apparently news that Apple has been offloading its iPhone processing into the so called cloud, i.e into their computers in their data center.
Matthew Green on X: “So Apple has introduced a new system called “Private Cloud Compute” that allows your phone to offload complex (typically AI) tasks to specialized secure devices in the cloud. I’m still trying to work out what I think about this. “
However, I strongly suspect Apple did exactly that already back when they released the first ‘face ID’ iphone, but never told us about it.
The chip wasn’t fast enough, so Apple had to offload the recognizing to the cloud. And that will probably always be the case… as there is no actual AI, you’ll need more and more raw power.
They never told us about it, because they wanted us to pay 1600 USD for the new shiny Face ID phone.
For years, I had to endure a phone that pretended to be able to process my face. Instead I had to enter the 6-digit numeric code every time. Which is a few hundred times per day…
4g network coverage was necessary
A few of us may remember that the first iPhone that featured ‘Face ID’ had problems using the feature outside of 4G network coverage. When I was roaming in the forests outside of Stockholm, every time I tried to unlock my phone using my face, the iphone informed me that “Face ID is not available”.
As soon as I arrived back in civilisation and 4G antenna towers, Apple’s Face ID was again functioning. This was a rather clear tell-tale that the iPhone actually did not feature fast face recognition hardware, and that Apple lied in its marketing material about the phone capabilities.
Exactly the same thing is happening right now, because everybody expects Apple to ship an “AI chip”.
But, there is no artificial intelligence available. There is only machine learning. With hallucinations. That’s not AI, whatever OpenAI or Apple wants to sell.
And, this is not the first time Apple has been keeping mum about its hardware problems. The iPad’s internal memory still can’t process above 1 gb of RAM memory, leading Safari to having to reload pages while you surf around or multitask.
