Category: Specials

In today’s multi-device, work-from-anywhere world, unified endpoint management (UEM) is crucial for efficiency and security, providing a “single pane of glass” for managing mobile, desktop, and cloud environments. Microsoft Intune is a leading example of a UEM product that has continuously expanded to meet IT’s evolving needs.  

What is Microsoft Intune?

Microsoft Intune is a suite of management tools that are the core of Microsoft’s UEM strategy as well as part of Microsoft 365’s broader technology stack. The company’s goal is to simplify managing mobile devices and applications, PCs, and other devices — and to reduce complexity and cost for IT teams.

For example, Intune’s mobile device management (MDM) capabilities are built to allow IT administrators to enforce security policies, remotely wipe devices, and manage configurations across heterogeneous platforms. Its mobile application management (MAM) features are designed to help businesses manage applications on both corporate and personal devices — enabling deployment, updates, and retirement of applications — and to protect corporate data within apps, preventing data leaks without disrupting user experience. (Download our 2025 UEM vendor comparison chart for a comprehensive list of capabilities in Intune and its main competitors.)

Fetcher bots, on the other hand, they said, “access website content in response to user actions. For example, when a user requests up-to-date information on a specific topic, a fetcher bot retrieves the relevant page in real time. They are also used to help surface website links that match a user’s search query, directing them to the most relevant content. Crawler bots contribute nearly 80% of the total AI bot request volume, with fetcher bots making up the remaining 20%.”

‘Massive surge in AI bot traffic’

Real-time fetching by AI bots, the report states, is a greater challenge than peak crawler rate. Analysis revealed that in one case, a single crawler reached a peak of around 1,000 requests per minute.

Real-time fetching, on the other hand, is significantly more aggressive: in one instance, a fetcher bot made 39,000 requests per minute to a single website at peak load. “This traffic volume can overwhelm origin servers, strain server resources, consumer bandwidth, and cause expensive DDoS-like effects even without malicious intent,” the report noted.

Cuo asks students not to simply accept whatever results advanced genAI models spit out, as they may be riddled with factual errors and hallucinations. “Students need to select and read more by themselves to create something that people don’t recognize as an AI product,” Cuo said.

Some professors are trying to mitigate AI use by altering coursework and assignments, while others prefer not to use it at all, said Paul Shovlin, an assistant professor of AI and digital rhetoric at Ohio University.

But students have different requirements and use AI tools for personalized learning, collaboration, and writing, as well as for coursework workflow, Shovlin said. He stressed, however, that ethical considerations, rhetorical awareness, and transparency remain important in demonstrating appropriate use.

CalypsoAI’s numbers, he said, “show how strong that pull is. Their data shows that more than half of workers say they would use AI even if their organization’s policy says no, a third have already used it on sensitive documents, and almost half of surveyed security teams admitted to having pasted proprietary material into public tools. I’m not sure it’s as much about disloyalty as it is about how governance and enablement lag behind how people work today.”

The risk here is clear, added St-Maurice, because every unmonitored prompt can lead to intellectual property, corporate strategies, sensitive contracts, or customer data leaking out to the public. “And naturally,” he noted, “if IT blocks these AI services, it’ll drive users further underground to look for new ways to access them. The practical fix is through structured enablement.”

A proper strategy, he said, is to provide a sanctioned AI gateway, connect it to identity, log prompts and outputs, apply redaction for sensitive fields, and publish a few clear and plain rules that people can remember. This should be paired with short, role-based training and a catalog of approved models and use cases. This gives employees a safe path to the same gains.

So, what’s with the latest speculation?

Chips with everything

If the code is correct, Apple is about to breathe new life into numerous products with chip upgrades to make them more powerful. It also plans to introduce brand new product families, though the schedule for many of the following products is likely to extend into 2026. There’s exciting news across Apple’s product range:

• iPods: Apple’s plotting a new iPad mini with the same high-end A19 Pro chip you’ll find inside iPhone 17 Pro models. Also, as it seeks to broaden its market to guard against economic unpredictability, Apple plans a spring launch for a new low-cost iPad equipped with an A18 chip, a big upgrade from the A16 inside the current entry-level model.
• Vision Pro: As expected, Apple will put an M5 chip inside the Vision Pro.
• Home: Apple’s new HomePod mini will hold an updated S-series chip, while Apple TV gains an A17 Pro processor — a substantial boost beyond the current A15 Bionic chip. It will likely need this power for those sofa-based Apple Intelligence interactions. It might also need this for the smart home it plans, including a Ring-competing security camera with movement and person detection, and its first attempts at home robotics. 
• Mac: Not only do we now expect the first M5 Mac models and also a $599 MacBook, but the latest news claims Apple intends introducing a next-generation Studio Display 2. Code-named J427, this isn’t expected to debut until 2026. But the introduction of a new A19 Pro internal processor should make it capable of accurately handling modern and future video and audio codecs.
• iPhone: In a chime of loud synchronicity, all these new product speculations come just in time to raise the temperature as Apple prepares to introduce the first of its new iPhone 17 range. They’re expected to bring more memory than ever, double the entry-level storage for a small price increase, and 8x optical zoom (on Pro models). Expect iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max models.
• Apple Watch: Expect a third-generation Apple Watch Ultra, with a faster chip, larger display and 5G (including satellite messaging support); Apple Watch Series 11 gets a processor upgrade and the first Apple Watch SE upgrade since 2022.
• AirPods and AirTags: Apple is also preparing upgrades to AirPods Pro and AirTags. The latter are expected to be more accurate and operate at longer range, while AirPods Pro 3 promise improved noise cancellation and advanced sleep and hearing health features.

Is that all there is?

This extensive collection of rumored product upgrades seems to provide a good glimpse at the next 12 months of planned introductions, but there are some things missing from the list. Apple will no doubt introduce new Macs and iPad Pro models during this time, even as it will at last introduce the contextually aware Apple Intelligence it promised us at WWDC last year.

This was certainly what Apple’s 2024 announcement of a smarter Siri promised. And while that work has been seriously delayed, the company recently said it is going well, and it hopes to introduce the new tools in spring.

Unlocking the apps

The sticking point for App Intents is that they require app functionality (those “verbs”) to be unlocked and made available using Apple’s own APIs. The problem there is that some developers might be resistant to making such functionality available outside of their own app, as they fear loss of user engagement.

I think that resistance is part of the reason Apple is working with the big name developers behind some of the world’s most widely used apps. Bloomberg’s senior Apple sleuth tells us it is working with Uber, AllTrails, Threads, Amazon, Temu, YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp on this, so once these new features do appear, the “verbs” for the most widely used apps will be supported by the system. 

It also hallucinates less, the company said, and “minimizes sycophancy.” (How reassuring.) It seems particularly strong on coding skills, health, and assisting you in creative writing — with or without an em-dash! You can read more about how OpenAI thinks GPT-5 is great in the company press release. The model is available to Plus, Pro, Team, and Free users, with different usage models depending on what you pay.

Apple, of course, provides integration with ChatGPT via Apple Intelligence, which sends requests to OpenAI’s system when Apple can’t handle them alone. Within this integration, users are warned if they are about to use the third-party AI service. Apple has also built in privacy protection so if you use ChatGPT through Apple Intelligence, OpenAI shouldn’t store requests and your IP address should be obscured. If you pay for ChatGPT access, then the service’s own privacy promises apply.

Apple continues to develop its own AI

While Apple has extended support to the new ChatGPT model, it continues to invest in developing its own more targeted AI solutions.

Firms in the space are signing massive multi-billion dollar deals, governments are investing vast quantities of cash and resources to support AI industry development, and consumers are preparing to pay for all this investment come the inevitable industry collapse. 

Consumers will pay? Just look at history. We know this because that’s what happened following the dotcom boom, the South Sea Bubble collapse, and the financial crisis, when unsustainable investments came before a fall. We know this because by the time the highly probable AI industry collapse happens, the tech will be so deeply intertwined in our daily lives we will be told these companies are strategically important, making them “too big to fail.”

So we will bail them out.

At that time, Autotrader’s own internal data showed that 72% of all business employees would choose a Mac above all other devices, and 78% of millennial employees believe that access to the tech they like makes them more effective. We know data like that reflects findings at companies worldwide, from Cisco to IBM to Rituals, SAP, and elsewhere. With digital experiences becoming the primary employee experiences, these lights show the road.

Autotrader gets this and as a title focused on methods of transport seems to understand that the direction is accelerating to become the norm, which is why since publishing that clip, the company has gone all in and now operates a 100% Mac fleet. 

The transformation of IT

To help manage and support its Mac fleet, Autotrader is now looking for a Senior Mac Engineer, a role in which it intends to help optimize the user and employee experiences Apple tech brings to any company making the migration. This isn’t seen as a reactive role for troubleshooting tech problems, but as a leadership position intended to nurture positive deployments of technology for real business challenges.