Apple pitches its new phones, watches, and AirPods as vehicles for AI

Apple’s phones, watches, and earphones are increasingly judged by how well they enable and support personal AI experiences. Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, opened his company’s hardware event Wednesday by explaining how AI will transform the Apple device experience, and how Apple devices are ideally situated to capture and understand users’ personal and contextual data. Ternus said the new iPhone 18 series, the new Duo foldable phone, AirPods 5, and Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 are “purpose built to serve as your own intelligent personal hub.” Apple has been adding to the power of the chips inside its devices so they can run more AI processes on the device itself, rather than in the cloud. Apple, for example, added a second “neural engine” accelerator to the A20 Pro chips that power the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max phones and the new Duo foldable phone. The new dual 16-core Neural Engine offers twice the compute power for running on-device AI models as previous iPhone chips, Apple says. The centerpiece of the new phones is a new, smarter version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence. It can draw on personal context to help users find what they need across messages, emails, and…