The tech press this week is essentially one long throat-clear before Apple's WWDC keynote next Monday, and the consensus rumour is that the big theme will be, of course, AI. Apple has been conspicuously quiet whilst Microsoft and Google spent the spring stuffing generative models into everything that holds still, so the expectation is some sort of on-device, privacy-flavoured answer. We'll see what's real and what's a demo on the 10th.
I've reached the point in this cycle where every keynote slide with a sparkle icon on it makes me tired before the presenter has finished the sentence. Not because the underlying tech is uninteresting, it plainly isn't, but because "we added AI" has become the answer to questions nobody asked.
What I actually want from this round of announcements is boring and specific. I want the on-device story to be genuine, because a feature that ships my notes and photos to someone's cloud to be "summarised" is a feature I'll turn off on day one. I want to know what runs locally, what doesn't, and crucially what I can opt out of without losing the rest of the operating system. The interesting frontier this year isn't a bigger model, it's whether any of this can run on the phone in my pocket without melting the battery or phoning home.
That's the lens I'll be watching through. The summer is going to be a parade of these launches, each one billed as the one that changes everything. Most won't. The handful that do will be the ones that quietly make a thing I already do faster or more private, rather than the ones with the best stage demo.
I've been burnt enough times by the gap between the keynote and the shipping build to keep my enthusiasm in escrow until I've actually run the thing. Ask me again in a couple of weeks, once the dust has settled and the reality has had time to disappoint or, occasionally, delight. The launch dominating the headlines this week hasn't even happened yet, and that tells you most of what you need to know about how this summer is going to go.