Most of the time, Apple Inc.’s most-anticipated events are its iPhone launches. However, this year, Wall Street will be most interested in the company’s software-focused World Wide Developers Conference.
Apple stock AAPL, -0.73% hasn’t changed much this year, so CEO Tim Cook will have to live up to high expectations in his keynote speech on Monday afternoon. It’s likely to include news about artificial intelligence. Wall Street is looking forward to something flashy from Apple since the company has been pretty quiet about the technology over the past year.
In our opinion, WWDC is the most important event Apple has had in over ten years because of the pressure to bring a generative AI stack of technology to developers and consumers. This was written earlier this week by Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
Apple hasn’t talked about AI as much as some of its competitors have, even though the company uses it all over. This may have hurt its stock. An analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. named Brian White still thinks Apple made the right choice.
“Those who were too eager now have to pay more for [generative AI] than they planned,” he wrote. “Apple went in a different direction.” Apple made the smart decision not to join this campaign to promote gen-AI. We think that this discipline and foresight has been good for the business.
But now it’s time for the show. When the event starts on Monday at 1 p.m. Eastern time, these are some of the most important announcements that people are likely to hear.
A partnership with OpenAI
Apple does a lot of things by itself, like making its own chips, but at Monday’s event, the company is likely to highlight a major partnership.
“We expect the official announcement of a flagship OpenAI partnership will include an OpenAI Chatbot with unique features” that use both Apple’s built-in large language models and ones powered by the cloud, Ives wrote.
Bloomberg News says that Apple will “outsource” its AI chatbot functions. This will give the company some protection in case the AI gives it wrong answers. Apple might not have its own AI chatbot technology ready for prime time yet, but that doesn’t mean it will always work with OpenAI. Along with that, the report said Apple might need more time to build out its own product.
MarketWatch asked Apple for a comment on its OpenAI plans, but the company didn’t answer right away.
A better Siri
Every year, Apple hosts WWDC, an event for developers, where the company usually gives developers a sneak peek at a new software update. This year, Apple is showing off iOS 18 for iPhones and new systems for other Apple devices.
Bloomberg says that this year’s announcements could include improvements to Siri. For now, new features for Siri might not be available right away. However, Apple is said to be planning to improve the voice assistant by letting it control more apps. Bloomberg reports that users could ask Siri to delete an email as an example.
“We see messaging, payments, ride hailing, workouts, photos, car commands, restaurant reservations, music, shortcuts, etc. as possible areas where Siri will likely become more integrated,” Wamsi Mohan, an analyst at BofA, wrote in a recent report.
MacRumors has also talked about the idea of giving Siri “a more natural voice.”
Upgrades to emoji
Updates to Apple software are important for the company because they keep users in its ecosystem. Apple often bets that fun software features will keep people using and buying their products, in part because they’re interested and in part because they don’t want to miss out on what other people are doing.
This year, one interesting feature could be an improvement to the emoji experience on iPhones. According to Bloomberg, the company is working on a tool that could make custom emojis based on what people are saying in conversations.
It is also said on MacRumors that Apple users might be able to add more “reactions” to the messages they send. At the moment, iPhone users can do six things, such as adding a “heart” or “thumbs down” to a message. Soon, you might be able to add emojis to that.
A focus on privacy
Apple has tried to stand out from other tech companies by stressing how important user privacy is to them. When WWDC starts, people will talk about that theme.
For Citi Research analyst Atif Malik, privacy and security have recently become one of the biggest concerns when it comes to generative AI models. “Apple is known for taking privacy more seriously than peers,” Malik wrote. It will be very helpful for the company to have good data security, and we expect them to talk about their privacy efforts at WWDC as well.
Some changes to the home screen
If you want to change how your iPhone home screen looks, get ready for a few more choices.
Bloomberg says that Apple plans to let iPhone users change the colors of apps, even if the developers don’t do that themselves. Other likely improvements to the home screen include giving users more freedom to arrange apps without having to strictly follow the grid system that has been used in Apple’s previous operating systems.
