Apple Developer Weekly #221 iPlayground 2025 Preparation Kicks Off
13 on March 17, 2025
From 13
I'm very curious about the performance of the new Mac Studio, especially when running local LLMs. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, I haven't seen many benchmark results (seems like the M3 Ultra version is shipping a bit later than the M4 Max). All I know is that the Mac Studio M3 Ultra is heavier than the PS5 Pro. We'll look at related news next week.
There's a correction needed for last week's newsletter regarding Apple's new hardware: I mentioned "don't forget that all Macs now have at least 8 GB RAM", it should be "16 GB".
This week also has quite a lot of content.
According to insider information, the highly anticipated iPlayground conference has started its preparation. Welcome to sign up as staff, the link is in the first article.
13 on March 17, 2025
🔰iPlayground Staff Recruitment
Yes, this year's iPlayground preparation is starting.
Organizing a community event requires coordinating a lot of manpower, financial resources, and time.
If you're interested, quickly click the title link and fill out the form.
📺iOS Conf SG 2025 Videos Released
This year's iOS Conf SG was fantastic. I especially recommend these sessions:
Creating a SnowGlobe in visionOS: From Idea to Reality Composer Pro by Jane Chao. Jane presented excellently, maintaining the high standards we see in ChaoCode. Being unfamiliar with Reality Composer Pro, I learned a lot
Reducing App Launch Times: From Diagnostics to Optimization by Dai Ming. Professor Dai's slides are all hand-drawn, not AI-generated!
Don't Just Port Your iOS Apps to visionOS: Develop with Purpose – Building Sign Language Recognition for VisionPro by Monika Mateska. Isn't visual-related application on Vision Pro the most fitting use case?
Shrinking Fish: A Functional Programmer looks at SwiftUI by Daniel Steinberg. I love Daniel and his YouTube channel, which I think is the most underrated iOS channel. The talk was about drawing fractals with SwiftUI, which really resonates with me as someone who also loves drawing with SwiftUI
Beyond Engineering: Essential Soft Skills For Thriving In Your iOS Career by Carola Nitz. I particularly enjoy topics about soft skills, especially from an iOS engineer at top companies like Netflix
10 Years of Swift: A decade in review by Paul Hudson. A brilliant "Pauls" session that can't really be called a talk - it should be called a performance
🍿Harry Ng's "Developing iOS Apps with Cursor" Series
Harry's videos have a more relaxed style, with guests joining to chat and code together.
I think this is a great format because everyone uses tools differently, and the interactions make it more interesting.
Sneak preview: Harry and I will be guest starring on each other's shows.
⏳Apple Intelligence Personalized Siri Delayed
Bloomberg reports that Apple has encountered some internal issues, and the AI personalization features for Siri won't be released this year.
I won't comment on Apple's internal matters. But personally, I'm not surprised that the plan to make Siri smarter is delayed. Rather, I would have been more surprised if it had launched on schedule this year.
Actually, using it makes it clear (including Xcode 16's already released Predictive Code Completion and the yet-to-arrive Swift Assistant) that Apple is not at all ready in terms of AI applications.
However, from a consumer, shareholder, or developer perspective, I personally don't think Apple's lag in AI competition affects its core competitiveness.
Will iPhone sales suffer because it doesn't have Apple Intelligence? I don't think so. Other tech giants and startups have many AI achievements, with new models, services, or tools launching weekly, which I actively try. For instance, Google's Gemini is truly excellent, but it's not tied to Android; iPhone users can use it too.
As for the development platform, Apple Silicon series Macs use a unified memory access architecture. Although memory is expensive, it's actually more cost-effective than NVIDIA GPU's VRAM. This makes Macs with increased memory quite good AI application development platforms in certain scenarios. In other words, Apple's accumulated hardware technology is still very deep.
(I originally wanted to report on Mac Studio M3 Ultra's Local LLM performance this week, but at the time of writing, I haven't seen enough benchmarks. Let's look at it next week.)
The marketing for new products with Apple Intelligence might be hype, perhaps. But the fact that new hardware comes with more memory (all Mac series have started with 16GB RAM since last year) means developers won't have to worry as much about users' hardware limitations.
Regarding developer tools, I agree that Xcode doesn't have good built-in AI development assistance tools. However, ChatGPT's Work with Apps or GitHub Copilot for Xcode extension do help somewhat. It's not really difficult to use Cursor or Windsurf for Xcode projects either. Just spend an hour or two setting up, then gradually get familiar with the operations. I've covered these topics more in-depth in iOS Developer+'s related series, so I won't elaborate here.
In summary, I think Apple's marketing and PR regarding AI are clearly inadequate. As for applications, I still hope Apple maintains its tradition of making features practical and easy to use for the general public, and it's not too late to release them when they're well-done.
🏙️MacBook Air Blue Color Comparison with Other Apple Blue Products──钟文泽
He sincerely laid out various Apple blue products from recent years for comparison.
I originally thought the MacBook Air M4 sky blue would feel similar to the iPhone 13 Pro Sierra Blue, but they're actually quite different.
💻MacBook Air M4 Running XcodeBenchmark──Max Tech
Every time a new MacBook Air is released, people still ask me if it can be used for development.
I bought the M2 myself, but it would thermal throttle after running Xcode compilations continuously for some time, so I eventually bought a MacBook Pro instead.
Will the MacBook Air M4 not easily thermal throttle? It still will. You can watch Max Tech's video, they love observing throttling conditions.
The title link goes directly to the XcodeBenchmark test section. M4: 142 seconds, M3: 184 seconds. The reference table data isn't updated in real-time. So if you can't find the hardware specs you're interested in, you can check the Pull Requests.
🆕Swift 6.1 and 6.2 Changes
While Swift 6.1 included in Xcode 16.3 hasn't been officially released yet, the Swift 6.2 release process is already being scheduled.
The most noticeable update in Swift 6.1 should be SE-0442 Allow TaskGroup's ChildTaskResult Type To Be Inferred. When using withTaskGroup syntax, you can omit writing the return type of: ReturnType.self. However, personally, I think it's still more readable to write it out.
🧪 Apple Releases & News
This week had some patch updates, mainly fixing WebKit vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-24201).
🗺️Apple's New App Surveyor
Used for reporting information to Apple Maps, not for general users. Not available for download in Taiwan App Store.
I just want to say that its icon is quite beautiful. It blends the styles of Apple Maps and Xcode icons.
🗞️AiOS Dispatch Newsletter──Rudrank Riyam
If you want to understand AI news primarily related to iOS development, I highly recommend Rudrank's recently launched AiOS Dispatch newsletter.
I couldn't find a list of all issues, so I'm providing links to the existing three issues for your convenience:
➕Welcome to Subscribe to 13's iOS Developer+
This probably isn't the first time you've heard about my paid membership "iOS Developer+", but this time instead of promoting it myself, I've invited some members to help pitch it:
The Host of Cocoaheads TPE - Hanyu, Chen:
I've known 13 for many years, and he's always willing to share his perspectives on any topic.
In iOS development, he can deeply research very Apple-style native approaches, and I really like this style of development.
In recent years, 13 created the "weak self" Podcast to discuss iOS development-related technologies, established the "Apple Developer Newsletter" to help Taiwan's developers keep up with the latest news and technologies in the most efficient way, and made the "iOS Development with Rice" show on YouTube.
I started using Twitter to follow iOS technology because of 13's strong promotion in the community, but every time I tell friends I use Twitter to follow technology, they give me strange smirks.
When I was an interviewer, I met two very excellent candidates who said they learned these technical knowledge from the "weak self" Podcast. I immediately smiled and said: "So we share the same teacher."
As someone who is also passionate about contributing to the community, I find his dedication beyond my reach, and I worry if he might burn out because of it.
Fortunately, excellent people always find excellent solutions. 13 started preparing the "iOS Developer+" paid membership program, which currently includes but is not limited to "Swift 6 Response Strategies", "The Story of Dependencies", "Xcode and Cursor Interaction Techniques"
(original article titles were too long, please allow me to abbreviate), these articles all gave me great insights after reading them.
Everyone is busy with work and life. If you want to continue improving in iOS development, I believe subscribing to 13's "iOS Developer+" membership program is definitely a relaxed and valuable choice.
Hsun:
In my career, I've always been in one-person teams with no seniors to guide me, so I often spend time exploring new technologies and facing challenges alone. Although I have great autonomy, I also worry if I'm moving in the right direction, which makes me anxious.
13's iOS Developer+ fills exactly this role. 13 knows what we need (when the Taiwan community had no TCA tutorial videos, "Development with Rice" appeared; when engineers were anxious about AI, mental health articles and AI application articles started showing up), and when 13 explains things, he describes the context clearly, often making me think "oh, it's that simple". Also because of 13's videos and articles, I started using TCA + SwiftUI in my side projects and successfully convinced my company to incorporate it into new projects on a small scale, and I look forward to fully adopting it in the future.
I believe whether you're a senior engineer or a newcomer with less than a year of experience, you can gain a lot here and gradually regain the confidence to keep up with the times.
When there's a role model to reference ahead, the journey becomes more solid and less anxious!
If you read their recommendations and feel a connection, consider subscribing, or try a preview here.
That's all for this week's Apple Developer Weekly. Feel free to like❤️, comment💬, or reply✉️ to share your thoughts.
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