As Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote concluded on Monday, market watchers couldn't help but notice that the company's stock price was down, perhaps a reaction to Apple's relatively low-key approach to incorporating AI compared to most of its competitors. Still, Apple Intelligence-based features and upgrades were plentiful, and while some are powered using the company's privacy and security-focused cloud platform known as Private Cloud Compute, many run locally on Apple Intelligence-enabled devices.

Apple’s new Messages screening feature automatically moves texts from phone numbers and accounts you’ve never interacted with before to an “Unknown Sender” folder. The feature automatically detects time-sensitive messages like login codes or food delivery updates and will still deliver them to your main inbox, but it also scans for messages that seem to be scams and puts them in a separate spam folder. All of this sorting is done locally using Apple Intelligence. Similarly, the expanded Call Screening feature will automatically and locally pick up untrusted phone calls, ask for details about the caller, and transcribe the answers so you can decide whether you want to pick up the call. Even Live Translation adds real-time language translation to calls and messaging using local processing.

From a privacy perspective, local processing is the gold standard for AI features. Data never leaves your device, meaning there's no risk that it could end up somewhere unintended as a result of a journey through the cloud. And new features like spam and “Unknown Sender” sorting for Messages, call screening for untrusted phone numbers, and Live Translation tools all seemed to be designed with a strategy of using privacy as a differentiator in an already crowded AI field.

In addition to being privacy friendly, local processing has other benefits like allowing AI-based services to be available offline and speeding up certain tasks since data doesn&rsq...