I do think the secrecy is a bit silly, at least for well established products like the iPhone, iPad and Mac. I accept it for Vision Pro and other “one more thing” type of announcements.
I also believe Apple has been wise to stay out of Generative AI. The current offerings are a hot mess of copyright infringement, tools for spam, content click farms and scams while burning more power than a sm nation.
Apple have given us very useful tools for on-device face recognition (and pets) in Photos, auto tagging of keywords that let us search for generic terms, the auto OCR of images, that whole magic Photonic Engine. These are practical ML (or now, due to market conditions, AI) applications we all use without thinking.
Earlier Apple AI include the session drummers and bass players in Garage Band, the Siri Suggestions I hear many people use and like, location aware notifications etc. In my book, Apple have been using technology to improve the lives of their users, not just building something “cool” then figuring out how their AI thing is actually useful.
Apple has a large number of creators as their customers. Stupid “help me write” tools or weird renderings of images for the LinkedIn post is not the prime objective among these longtime users.