Macs have been waiting for AI
W hile it may now seem odd, 20 years ago the star of Mac OS X Panther was Preview, claimed to be “the fastest PDF viewer on the planet”, with support for the Mac’s new built-in faxing. Looking at Preview’s subsequent slow decline, it’s hardly likely to make Apple’s list of new features in macOS Sequoia.
That’s because Apple is primarily a hardware vendor, and those original star features followed its success with desktop publishing in the 1990s, which brought together new capabilities in Macs and Apple’s printers.
The next couple of years will see AI assume that role of selling Apple silicon Macs, with their Neural Engines ready and waiting to deliver Sequoia’s Writing Tools and more. While competitor PCs have only just started to feature AI accelerators, every M-series Mac since 2020 has come ready-equipped.