There's a reason Apple's preferring on-device processing: user privacy. This doesn't make sense for music (stems, lyrics) since it's not listener's data.

> There's a reason Apple's preferring on-device processing: user privacy.

Is that the actual reason though? My personal impression has been that it's a combination of reasons that benefit Apple. The increased user privacy being a nice bonus for users, but not the primary reason:

1. Producing phones powerful enough for on-device ML both justifies the high price point to the general public and is a good marketing point (along with increased user privacy)

2. Avoid backend infrastructure costs. Why spend extra money on servers, maintenance, and compliance when we can just offload the work to the devices themselves since they're capable?

3. Bonus: The unplanned obsolescence for new features like the one announced is also a side effect that benefits Apple.

I do not get the impression that Apple's primary focus is to benefit users and their privacy.

>There's a reason Apple's preferring on-device processing:

It makes it so you have to buy new devices sooner.

The privacy thing is a nice side-benefit and PR thing, but let's be realistic here.

EDIT: Just to remind everyone, we are literally in a thread about a new device feature that is trivial to do in the cloud, which Apple chooses to do on-device, which makes it only a feature for its newest generation of products...

Android has had on-device captions long before Apple did.

There's no extra back and forth. You have to fetch the songs from the datacenter in the first place, right? So you fetch the additional data at the same time.

If Apple wanted to support this for user-provided mp3s then on-device would make sense. It doesn't sound like they support that though.

A lot of Android processing is done on the device now.