Apple is also adding the ability to subscribe to Apple TV+ through both the Android and Google TV apps using Google’s payment system, whereas the old Google TV app required subscribing on another device.
Apple TV+ is available for $9.99 a month, or $19.95 a month as part of an Apple One subscription that bundles 2TB of iCloud storage, Apple Music, and Apple Arcade support (a seven-day free trial of Apple TV+ is also available). MLS Season Pass is available as a totally separate $14.99 a month or $99 per season subscription, but people who subscribe to both Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass can save $2 a month or $20 a year on the MLS subscription.
Apple TV+ has had a handful of critically acclaimed shows, including Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, and Severance. But so far, that hasn’t translated to huge subscriber numbers; as of last year, Apple had spent about $20 billion making original TV shows and movies for Apple TV+, but the service has only about 10 percent as many subscribers as Netflix. As Bloomberg put it last July, “Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.”
Whether an Android app can help turn that around is anyone’s guess, but offering an Android app brings Apple closer to parity with other streaming services, which have all supported Apple’s devices and Android devices for many years now.
The following story contains light spoilers for season one of Severence but none for season 2.
The first season of Severance walked the line between science-fiction thriller and Office Space-like satire, using a clever conceit (characters can’t remember what happens at work while at home, and vice versa) to open up new storytelling possibilities.
It hinted at additional depths, but it’s really season 2’s expanded worldbuilding that begins to uncover additional themes and ideas.
After watching the first six episodes of season two and speaking with the series’ showrunner and lead writer, Dan Erickson, as well as a couple of members of the cast (Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette), I see a show that’s about more than critiquing corporate life. It’s about all sorts of social mechanisms of control. It’s also a show with a tremendous sense of style and deep influences in science fiction.
Corporation or cult?
When I started watching season 2, I had just finished watching two documentaries about cults—The Vow, about a multi-level marketing and training company that turned out to be a sex cult, and Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, about a small, Internet-based religious movement that believed its founder was the latest human form of God.
There were hints of cult influences in the Lumon corporate structure in season 1, but without spoiling anything, season 2 goes much deeper into them. As someone who has worked at a couple of very large media corporations, I enjoyed Severance’s send-up of corporate culture. And as someone who has worked in tech startups—both good and dysfunctional ones—and who grew up in a radical religious environment, I now enjoy its send-up of cult social dynamics and power plays.
Lumon controls what information is presented to its employees to keep them in line. Credit: Apple
When I spoke with showrunner Dan Erickson and actor Patricia Arquette, I wasn’t surprised to learn that it wasn’t just me—the influence of stories about cults on season 2 was intentional.
Erickson explained:
I watched all the cult documentaries that I could find, as did the other writers, as did Ben, as did the actors. What we found as we were developing it is that there’s this weird crossover. There’s this weird gray zone between a cult and a company, or any system of power, especially one where there is sort of a charismatic personality at the top of it like Kier Eagan. You see that in companies that have sort of a reverence for their founder.
Arquette also did some research on cults. “Very early on when I got the pilot, I was pretty fascinated at that time with a lot of cult documentaries—Wild Wild Country, and I don’t know if you could call it a cult, but watching things about Scientology, but also different military schools—all kinds of things like that with that kind of structure, even certain religions,” she recalled.
Netflix started blocking VPN and proxy providers as early as 2015, then stepped up its efforts in 2021. VPN providers aiming to keep up geofence-avoiding services to customers would sometimes lease IP addresses generally associated with residential IP subnets. This resulted in Netflix banning larger swaths of IP addresses that VPNs were using as exit proxies.
Amazon’s Prime Video, Parmount+, and other services, including the BBC, have similarly ramped up efforts to block anything resembling tunneled traffic. Proton has, for example, a guide to “unblock Amazon Prime Video with Proton VPN“; Proton also writes on that page that it “does not condone the use of our VPN service to bypass copyright regulations.”
You can search the web and find freshly updated lists of the best VPNs for getting around various services’ geo-filtering blocks, but the fact that so many are dated by the year, or even month, gives you some clue as to how effective any one solution may be.
For the purposes of getting back to the content you’re entitled to view, or maybe keeping your viewing habits private on an Apple TV you’re using outside your home, Proton VPN is likely more useful. As for the other stuff, hey, it might be worth a shot. Using the Apple TV app requires a paid Proton VPN plan.
The film is in early development, having just been pitched to Apple and approved. Will Speck and Josh Gordon (Blades of Glory, Office Christmas Party) will direct and produce. Given that pedigree (zany comedies), it’s clear this film won’t be a serious historical drama about the struggles of those who traveled the American West.
In fact, the report not only notes that it will be a comedy—it says it will be a musical, too. “The movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie,” according to THR’s sources. EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will be responsible for the original music in the film.
Of course, with a comedy, the writers are at least as important as the director. The film will be written by Kenneth and Keith Lucas—but they’re most recently best known for the 2021 drama Judas and the Black Messiah, for which they received an Oscar nomination.
That’s all we know about the film so far. As for the game, well, it needs no introduction—especially for folks who were of the appropriate age to play it at school or at home on personal computers from the 1970s through the 1990s.
The game is a major cultural touchstone for a certain generation—to the point that “The Oregon Trail Generation” has been used as a label for many of the people born in the early 1980s. It’s long been a thing to joke about the game’s morbid content, like the infamous phrase: “You have died of dysentery.”
Since the film was greenlit by Apple, it’s likely to debut on the Apple TV+ streaming service, but we don’t yet know when it will arrive or who will star in it.
The Apple TV platform, tvOS, and the original Apple TV app were initially intended to solve this problem by offering an a la carte, consumer-friendly way to manage the options in a burgeoning streaming-TV industry.
However, Apple’s attempt to make the TV app a universal hub of content has been continually stymied by the fact that industry giant Netflix has declined to participate.
Users of the TV app and Apple TV set-top-box still must launch a separate Netflix app to see their watch history on that service, or to see if movies or shows they want to watch are available. Content from most other services—including Amazon Prime Video—is exposable through search within the app and rolls into a unified watch history.
Fighting to succeed in a messy business
Further, streaming services have become increasingly expensive, and streamers have begun trying to find new revenue from sources like bundles and advertising. The reasons for these trends are complex, but one of the key problems is that scripted television content is immensely expensive to produce—especially as the prestige TV era has driven up viewer expectations in terms of quality and production values.
As an early leader in the industry, Netflix established unrealistic expectations for everyone involved—consumers, production houses, investors, and so on—by simply throwing immense amounts of money into content without immediately seeing a return.
When larger economic factors put an end to that practice, streamers had to adjust—including Apple, which among other things is tweaking its film strategy for the new landscape.
Apple still offers several of those central hub features—for example, you can subscribe to services like Paramount+ and launch their shows from the Apple TV app, just like Amazon is doing with its app and Apple TV+ here. But the realities of the mess the industry finds itself in have clearly led Apple to keep an open mind about how it can attract and retain viewers.
Enlarge/ A still from Wolfs, an Apple-produced film starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.
Apple
For the past few years, Apple has been making big-budget movies meant to compete with the best traditional Hollywood studios have to offer, and it has been releasing them in theaters to drive ticket sales and awards buzz.
Much of that is about to change, according to a report from Bloomberg. The article claims that Apple is “rethinking its movie strategy” after several box office misfires, like Argylle and Napoleon.
It has already canceled the wide theatrical release of one of its tent pole movies, the George Clooney and Brad Pitt-led Wolfs. Most other upcoming big-budget movies from Apple will be released in just a few theaters, suggesting the plan is simple to ensure continued awards eligibility but not to put butts in seats.
Further, Apple plans to move away from super-budget films and to focus its portfolio on a dozen films a year at lower budgets. Just one major big-budget film is planned to get a wide theatrical release: F1. How that one performs could inform future changes to Apple’s strategy.
The report notes that Apple is not the only streamer changing its strategy. Netflix is reducing costs and bringing more movie production in-house, while Amazon is trying (so far unsuccessfully) to produce a higher volume of movies annually, but with a mixture of online-only and in-theater releases. It also points out that movie theater chains are feeling ever more financial pressure, as overall ticket sales haven’t matched their pre-pandemic levels despite occasional hits like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.
Cinemas have been counting on streamers like Netflix and Apple to crank out films, but those hopes may be dashed if the media companies continue to pull back. For the most part, tech companies like Apple and Amazon have had better luck gaining buzz with television series than with feature films.
Too often, new tech product or service launches seem like solutions in search of a problem, but not this one: ESPN is launching software that lets you figure out just where you can watch the specific game you want to see amid an overcomplicated web of streaming services, cable channels, and arcane licensing agreements. Every sports fan is all too familiar with today’s convoluted streaming schedules.
Launching today on ESPN.com and the various ESPN mobile and streaming device apps, the new guide offers various views, including one that lists all the sporting events in a single day and a search function, among other things. You can also flag favorite sports or teams to customize those views.
“At the core of Where to Watch is an event database created and managed by the ESPN Stats and Information Group (SIG), which aggregates ESPN and partner data feeds along with originally sourced information and programming details from more than 250 media sources, including television networks and streaming platforms,” ESPN’s press release says.
ESPN previously offered browsable lists of games like this, but it didn’t identify where you could actually watch all the games.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll have access to the services needed to watch the games in the list, though. Those of us who cut the cable cord long ago know that some games—especially those local to your city—are unavailable without cable.
For example, I live within walking distance from Wrigley Field, but because I don’t have cable, I can’t watch most Cubs games on any screens in my home. As a former Angeleno, I follow the Dodgers instead because there are no market blackouts for me watching them all the way from Chicago. The reverse would be true if I were in LA.
Even if you do have cable, many sports are incredibly convoluted when it comes to figuring out where to watch stuff. ESPN Where to Watch could be useful for the new college football season, for example.
Expansion effort
ESPN isn’t the first company to envision this, though. The company to make the most progress up until now was Apple. Apple’s TV device and app was initially meant as a one-stop shop for virtually all streaming video, like a comprehensive 21st-century TV Guide. But with cable companies being difficult to work with and Netflix not participating, Apple never quite made that dream a reality.
It kept trying for sports, though, tying into third-party offerings like the MLB app alongside its own programming to try to make the TV app a place to launch all your games. Apple got pretty close, depending on which sport you’re trying to follow.
ESPN’s app seems a little more promising, as it covers a more comprehensive range of games and goes beyond the TV app’s “what’s happening right now” focus with better search and listings.
ESPN execs have said they hope to start offering more games streaming directly in the app, and if that app becomes the go-to spot thanks to this new guide, it might give the company more leverage with leagues to make that happen.
That could certainly be more convenient for viewers, though there are, of course, downsides to one company having too much influence and leverage in a sport.
Boundless premieres tonight, taking Vision Pro users on a hot air balloon ride in Turkey.
Submerged will be Apple’s first fictional short film for Vision Pro.
Users will get a glimpse into the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend.
This cryptic image teases The Weeknd’s Vision Pro “experience.”
The new series Elevated will tour places of interest around the world from above.
Apple is partnering with Red Bull for a surfing documentary.
Wild Life returns with an episode about elephants in a wildlife preserve.
Today, Apple announced a slate of more than a dozen upcoming Immersive Videos for its Vision Pro spatial reality headset. The first, titled Boundless, launches tonight at 9 pm ET. More will follow in the coming weeks and months.
The announcement follows a long, slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content from Apple. The headset launched in early February with a handful of Immersive Video episodes ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Since then, only three new videos have been added.
On March 28, Apple released a highlight reel of Major League Soccer plays from the season that had ended months prior. A second episode of Prehistoric Planet, Apple’s Immersive Video dinosaur nature documentary, went live on April 19. Likewise, a new episode of the Adventure series titled “Parkour” landed on May 24.
The MLS video played more like a short ad for Apple’s MLS programming than anything else, but other Immersive Videos have impressed with their quality if not their creative ambition. They’re all short videos that put the viewer inside a moment in space and time with either animals or people doing their thing. The videos are high-resolution, and the 3D is generally well done. The production values are high, even if the narratives are light. They come across as tech demos, as much as anything, but they are impressive.
Tonight’s Boundless episode will allow viewers to see what it’s like to ride in a hot air balloon over sweeping vistas. Another episode titled “Arctic Surfing” will arrive this fall, Apple says. Sometime next month, Apple will publish the second episode of its real wildlife documentary, simply titled Wild Life. The episode will focus on elephants in Kenya’s Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Another episode is in the works, too. “Later this year,” Apple writes in its newsroom post, “viewers will brave the deep with a bold group of divers in the Bahamas, who come face-to-face with apex predators and discover creatures much more complex than often portrayed.”
More on the way
In September, we’ll see the debut of a new Immersive Video series titled Elevated. Apple describes it as an “aerial travel series” in which viewers will fly over places of interest. The first episode will take viewers to Hawaii, while another planned for later this year will go to New England.
Apple is additionally partnering with Red Bull for a look at surfing called Red Bull: Big-Wave Surfing.
In addition to those documentary episodes, there will be three short films by year’s end. One will be a musical experience featuring The Weeknd, and another will take basketball fans inside the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend. There will also be Submerged, the first narrative fictional Immersive Video on the platform. It’s an action short film depicting struggles on a submarine during World War II.
It’s good to see Apple finally making some movement here; the drought of content after the launch didn’t inspire confidence in the platform. Many people with mixed reality headsets use them a bunch for a few weeks but either fail to find ways to fit them into their daily habits or run out of compelling content and taper off before long. To keep people invested in visionOS, Apple needs to keep a rapid cadence of new content that users look forward to at least every week. Otherwise, some users will see their headsets sit on shelves, forgotten.
When I reviewed the Vision Pro, I assumed that the Immersive Video episodes would roll out weekly. That hasn’t proven the case, and it still doesn’t look like it will. Apple is going to have to invest more in content (and take more risks with that content, moving beyond short tech demo documentaries) to make the Vision Pro stick with customers.
Enlarge/ Apple seeks to continue to augment its library of original films like Argylle with films from other studios.
Apple TV+ has carved a niche for itself with strong original programming, and while it’s still far behind the likes of Netflix in terms of subscribers, it has seen a fairly strong initial run. To build on that, Apple is talking with major studios about ways to complement its slate of original programming with films from other companies in order to expand and extend the service’s appeal.
That’s according to Bloomberg reporters Lucas Shaw and Thomas Buckley, who cite people familiar with Apple’s workings. Those sources say Apple is “having discussions” with more than one large film studio about bringing more movies to the service.
Apple previously experimented with this by licensing around 50 movies and making them available on the service for limited runs over the past several months. That experiment seems to have gone well, leading Apple to begin laying the groundwork for expanding on that.
That test run was just in the United States. Bloomberg claims the focus this time is international, with the possibility of new films not just in the US but in other regions, too.
Hollywood studios have reportedly been anticipating this move. As you may have noticed amid the numerous subscription service price hikes, media companies have begun putting greater emphasis on profitability after the conclusion of a long period where subscriber growth at any cost was the goal. Licensing deals like this can help with that new goal.
It’s worth noting that while Apple has found some big successes in terms of series (Ted Lasso, Severance, The Morning Show) it has struggled to make as much of an impact with its movies. Despite big stars and budgets, the films have not always made as much cultural impact as the shows.
That means that bringing in films from studios with a more proven record can be a win-win: It will help Apple bolster the TV+ subscription service while generating revenue for film studios that are struggling to keep up in the new era.
Services like TV+ are a growing part of Apple’s business, which has historically been focused on hardware sales. In the second quarter of its 2024 fiscal year, the services bucket accounted for $23.9 billion in quarterly revenue, which is more than half the revenue generated by iPhone hardware sales.
Enlarge/ A screenshot of tvOS 17. Recent betas have included evidence that Apple is working on a touchscreen-enabled version of the interface.
Andrew Cunningham
Apple’s tvOS betas are usually among its least exciting; the Apple TV’s operating system has changed so little in the last decade that the most exciting thing to happen to it in recent memory is an extra column of icons.
But this week’s tvOS 18 beta 3 release includes a hidden feature that might be exciting for smart speaker enthusiasts, if not for people who still want their Apple TV boxes to develop exciting new capabilities. 9to5Mac has discovered a touchscreen interface (codenamed “PlasterBoard”) inside of the latest beta, a sign that Apple is testing alternate input mechanisms for software that is currently manipulated via remote control and voice.
Last week, MacRumors also discovered a reference to a device called “HomeAccessory17,1” in Apple’s beta software, a naming convention similar to the “AudioAccessory” device identifiers that Apple uses for HomePod speakers. Together, these developments suggest that Apple is working on a version of the HomePod with an integrated touchscreen, a device that rumors have suggested could launch in 2024 or 2025. The company has reportedly been working on a smart home device with a screen since at least 2021.
MacRumors also points out that the 17,1 model identifier could imply that the new HomePod is being powered by Apple’s upcoming A18 chip—model identifiers across Apple’s product lineup are normally tied to chip generation rather than product generation, which is why the Vision Pro (for example) is called “RealityDevice14,1” rather than “RealityDevice1,1.” Using an A18 will presumably give a new HomePod the necessary speed to support upcoming Apple Intelligence features, including a new and improved version of Siri.
All HomePod speakers have been running a forked version of tvOS since version 13.4 of the HomePod software was released in early 2020, which is why HomePod-related leaks seem to be showing up in tvOS-related code. This would also explain why Apple would use tvOS as the basis for a HomePod with a screen rather than a version of iPadOS.
Apple’s take on an Amazon Echo Show
A version of tvOS running on a tablet-style device could use more than just a touch-driven interface to reach its full potential—a tvOS version of Safari would be useful for browsing recipe sites or casual reading while you’re doing something else, for example. However, what Apple adds depends on the form that the screen takes.
Some rumors have suggested that it would be a circular panel that replaces the swirling LEDs on the top of current-generation HomePods, but Bloomberg’s normally reliable Mark Gurman has described the display as “iPad-like,” suggesting that it could look more like a version of Amazon’s Echo Show. Amazon advertises its Show devices as digital photo frames, miniature TVs, and general kitchen aids, and Apple’s pitch for a screen-ified HomePod would likely feature a lot of the same uses.
Amazon has already released multiple generations of Echo Show devices, and Google has made a couple of stabs at the category, too. A HomePod with a screen, whether released in 2024 or 2025, would be far from the first of its kind. However, the HomePod wasn’t a cutting-edge product when it was released either, and it’s still managed to carve out a niche.
We don’t know what a HomePod with a screen might cost, but assuming it includes a HomePod-esque speaker, an iPad-esque screen, and a cutting-edge iPhone processor, it seems likely that it will be priced well above the $299 Apple currently charges for the full-size screen-less HomePod. Apple’s original $349 HomePod flopped partly because it was priced too high relative to competitors and because it didn’t do a whole lot—a speaker that did more things could probably be priced higher without drawing as much criticism.
Apple’s initial pitch for the tvOS and the Apple TV as it currently exists was centered around apps. No longer a mere streaming box, the Apple TV would also be a destination for general-purpose software and games, piggybacking off of the iPhone’s vibrant app and game library.
That never really panned out, and the Apple TV is still mostly a box for streaming TV shows and movies. But the same App Store rule change that recently allowed Delta, PPSSPP, and other retro console emulators onto the iPhone and iPad could also make the Apple TV appeal to people who want a small, efficient, no-fuss console emulator for their TVs.
So far, few of the emulators that have made it to the iPhone have been ported to the Apple TV. But earlier this week, the streaming box got an official port of RetroArch, the sprawling collection of emulators that runs on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the Raspberry Pi. RetroArch could be sideloaded onto iOS and tvOS before this, but only using awkward workarounds that took a lot more work and know-how than downloading an app from the App Store.
Downloading and using RetroArch on the Apple TV is a lot like using it on any other platform it supports, for better or worse. ROM files can be uploaded using a browser connected to the Apple TV’s IP address or hostname, which will pop up the first time you launch the RetroArch app. From there, you’re only really limited by the list of emulators that the Apple TV version of the app supports.
The main benefit of using the Apple TV hardware for emulation is that even older models have substantially better CPU and GPU performance than any Raspberry Pi; the first-gen Apple TV 4K and its Apple A10X chip date back to 2017 and still do better than a Pi 5 released in 2023. Even these older models should be more than fast enough to support advanced video filters, like Run Ahead, to reduce wireless controller latency and higher-than-native-resolution rendering to make 3D games look a bit more modern.
Beyond the hardware, tvOS is also a surprisingly capable gaming platform. Apple has done a good job adding and maintaining support for new Bluetooth gamepads in recent releases, and even Nintendo’s official Switch Online controllers for the NES, SNES, and N64 are all officially supported as of late 2022. Apple may have added this gamepad support primarily to help support its Apple Arcade service, but all of those gamepads work equally well with RetroArch.
At the risk of stating the obvious, another upside of using the Apple TV for retro gaming is that you can also still use it as a modern 4K video streaming box when you’re finished playing your games. It has well-supported apps from just about every streaming provider, and it supports all the DRM that these providers insist on when you’re trying to stream high-quality 4K video with modern codecs. Most Pi gaming distributions offer the Kodi streaming software, but it’s frankly outside the scope of this article to talk about the long list of caveats and add-ons you’d need to use to attempt using the same streaming services the Apple TV can access.
Obviously, there are trade-offs. Pis have been running retro games for a decade, and the Apple TV is just starting to be able to do it now. Even with the loosened App Store restrictions, Apple still has other emulation limitations relative to a Raspberry Pi or a PC.
The biggest one is that emulators on Apple’s platforms can’t use just-in-time (JIT) code compilation, needed for 3D console emulators like Dolphin. These restrictions make the Apple TV a less-than-ideal option for emulating newer consoles—the Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Sony PlayStation, PlayStation Portable, and Sega Saturn are the newest consoles RetroArch supports on the Apple TV, cutting out newer things like the GameCube and Wii, Dreamcast, and PlayStation 2 that are all well within the capabilities of Apple’s chips. Apple also insists nebulously that emulators must be for “retro” consoles rather than modern ones, which could limit the types of emulators that are available.
With respect to RetroArch specifically, there are other limitations. Though RetroArch describes itself as a front-end for emulators, its user interface is tricky to navigate, and cluttered with tons of overlapping settings that make it easy to break things if you don’t know what you’re doing. Most Raspberry Pi gaming distros use RetroArch, but with a front-end-for-a-front-end like EmulationStation installed to make RetroArch a bit more accessible and easy to learn. A developer could release an app that included RetroArch plus a separate front-end, but Apple’s sandboxing restrictions would likely prevent anyone from releasing an app that just served as a more user-friendly front-end for the RetroArch app.
Regardless, it’s still pretty cool to be able to play retro games on an Apple TV’s more advanced hardware. As more emulators make their way to the App Store, the Apple TV’s less-fussy software and the power of its hardware could make it a compelling alternative to a more effort-intensive Raspberry Pi setup.
The Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan. The conversation about Apple begins around 16: 30 in the video.
Before the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+, Apple forbade the inclusion of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as a guest and steered the show away from confronting issues related to artificial intelligence, according to Jon Stewart.
This isn’t the first we’ve heard of this rift between Apple and Stewart. When the Apple TV+ show was canceled last October, reports circulated that he told his staff that creative differences over guests and topics were a factor in the decision.
The New York Times reported that both China and AI were sticking points between Apple and Stewart. Stewart confirmed the broad strokes of that narrative in a CBS Morning Show interview after it was announced that he would return to The Daily Show.
“They decided that they felt that they didn’t want me to say things that might get me into trouble,” he explained.
Stewart’s comments during his interview with Khan yesterday were the first time he’s gotten more specific publicly.
“I’ve got to tell you, I wanted to have you on a podcast, and Apple asked us not to do it—to have you. They literally said, ‘Please don’t talk to her,'” Stewart said while interviewing Khan on the April 1, 2024, episode of The Daily Show.
Khan appeared on the show to explain and evangelize the FTC’s efforts to battle corporate monopolies both in and outside the tech industry in the US and to explain the challenges the organization faces.
She became the FTC chair in 2021 and has since garnered a reputation for an aggressive and critical stance against monopolistic tendencies or practices among Big Tech companies like Amazon and Meta.
Stewart also confirmed previous reports that AI was a sensitive topic for Apple. “They wouldn’t let us do that dumb thing we did in the first act on AI,” he said, referring to the desk monologue segment that preceded the Khan interview in the episode.
The segment on AI in the first act of the episode mocked various tech executives for their utopian framing of AI and interspersed those claims with acknowledgments from many of the same leaders that AI would replace many people’s jobs. (It did not mention Apple or its leadership, though.)
Stewart and The Daily Show‘s staff also included clips of current tech leaders suggesting that workers be retrained to work with or on AI when their current roles are disrupted by it. That was followed by a montage of US political leaders promising to retrain workers after various technological and economic disruptions over the years, with the implication that those retraining efforts were rarely as successful as promised.
The segment effectively lampooned some of the doublespeak about AI, though Stewart stopped short of venturing any solutions or alternatives to the current path, so it mostly just prompted outrage and laughs.
The Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s segment criticizing tech and political leaders on the topic of AI.
Apple currently uses AI-related technologies in its software, services, and devices, but so far it has not launched anything tapping into generative AI, which is the new frontier in AI that has attracted worry, optimism, and criticism from various parties.
However, the company is expected to roll out its first generative AI features as part of iOS 18, a new operating system update for iPhones. iOS 18 will likely be detailed during Apple’s annual developer conference in June and will reach users’ devices sometime in the fall.
