Apple Intelligence Arrives in macOS 15.1 Sequoia, iOS 18.1, and iPadOS 18.1

In my informed opinion from 34 years of full-time work exploring, writing about, and analyzing Apple technologies. I’m pushing back on this because encouraging paranoia about unrealistic threats makes it harder for people to take the real threats seriously.

You can imagine any bogeyman you like, but the idea that Apple Intelligence could be undermined for significantly malicious purposes is unrealistic. Even if we assume that all of Apple’s security measures—such as the signed system volume, sandboxing, and notarization—could be compromised, it’s difficult to see how the exposure of Apple Intelligence would pose a serious security or privacy threat because it operates entirely on-device or through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. At worst, a compromise of Apple Intelligence could:

  • Inject unwanted text into notification or message summaries?
  • Make Clean Up replace removed objects with dirty pictures?
  • Replace photos in Memories movies with something else?

It’s little more than digital graffiti, because that’s all Apple Intelligence can do. Any threat actor with the technical knowledge, skills, and attack vector to breach Apple’s security would be far more interested in exfiltrating confidential information like passwords or financial data, encrypting data for ransomware use, or some similar action that would have political or financial gain.

There are many real Internet threats, but as I said, this is not the topic to discuss them.

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Whatever you say, Adam. :relieved:

Just thought I’d post an update to my comments above. After a new USB-C cable didn’t solve the issue, I talked with dealer about updating the infotainment firmware on my car. They confirmed there was an update available and thought it would fix my problem, but since the car is out of warranty they wanted $170 to do a software update!

I thought that ridiculous and found several videos on YouTube showing how you can do it yourself. There’s some risk of bricking your system as this isn’t a supported update by Mazda (and I had to download the firmware file from some rando’s google drive account), but the great news is that it only took about 30 minutes and worked great! Problem solved, $170 saved.

I’ve never been anti computers in cars, but the mix of tech with the typical auto support/repair system is the worst of both worlds.

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