Apple’s Tech Master Class

Apple just delivered a master class in how to explain complex technology to ordinary people. Its presentation on Monday of how it will harness the latest artificial intelligence advances in its software was well done, to say the least. If you’ve been wondering exactly what AI can do—other than overhyped exercises such as designing a menu for a dinner party—you will now know. These are not world-changing advances, to be sure. They include using Siri to check on the status of a flight—the digital assistant can cross-check flight details contained in an email with flight updates from the Web—or to search across apps to find a piece of information stored somewhere you can’t remember. 

Some new features had already been unveiled by rivals—Google, at its developer conference last month, announced a photo search function very similar to one Apple unveiled today. Even so, the presentation was a good reminder of the enormous advantage the iPhone maker enjoys over other tech companies in being able to demonstrate new tech on its own hardware. AI—which Apple, too cutely, calls Apple Intelligence—suddenly becomes real in a way it hasn’t been so far. By comparison, Sundar Pichai’s presentation at Google I/O came across as overly technical and less consumer-friendly.