Apple has announced a round of new features for Safari at WWDC 2024, and there’s a lot of AI involved. We knew it was going to happen eventually — Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have been trialing and launching new AI features for a while already.
First things first, the new Safari is speedy. On macOS, it’s “the world’s fastest browser,” so we can expect to get some snappy responses when we’re searching the web. Apple also claims that Safari can stream video for four hours longer than Google Chrome can manage before depleting your battery.
Privacy features keep getting improved too, using intelligent tracking prevention to help make “private browsing that’s actually private.” This means that as well as protecting your history, Safari also stops websites from seeing what you’re doing as you browse.
We’ll also be able to find important information quicker with the new Highlights feature. It uses machine learning to identify important snippets of information on the page you’re looking at and display them for you to see easily. This includes information like directions, phone numbers, and summaries — the kind of stuff you want to know quickly, without having to find it. It also gives you quick links to learn more about the people, places, music, and movies mentioned on the page.
The Reader feature now uses AI to generate summaries too, as well as a table of contents to help you navigate quickly.
There’s also a new Viewer mode that also lives in the address bar. When you click it, Safari will detect the video on the page and automatically enlarge it, so you can focus on the content you actually want to see. When you click away from the Safari window, it’ll automatically go into Picture in Picture mode so you can continue viewing without having to adjust anything yourself.
This might be only the beginning of Apple’s plans for AI-powered features in Safari but it’s definitely a subtle start. None of it is too in-your-face and there’s definitely a focus on usefulness, rather than arguable gimmicks like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome’s AI browser theme generators. All of the big browsers have AI-assisted writing features too, but Apple’s isn’t just limited to Safari, it’s available system-wide so you can use it in any application you want.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.