I mean, just to expand on this.... there's no explicit sync, and no explicit backup. It's always synced. It's always backed up.
Imagine you walk into an Apple Store and pick up the latest iPhone XV. And there you are looking at your phone, your contacts, your apps, everything.
Underneath, it's a virtual shim. In the first instant it's merely grabbing thumbnails of all your apps and notification metadata so it can "look right". As you click in, scroll around, you polyfill data as you need it. Obviously in some cases a more substantial download would be needed, so you may not be able to pop into an AR game with 1GB of assets within the first 10 seconds of picking up the device, but if your primary is on the LAN you could bring the necessary data locally in ~5 seconds from tapping the icon. Underneath it's doing something analogous to "docker run" on that apps image. In some cases this would lock the image from running concurrently on another device, in other cases multi-master could be fully supported with live sync of the backing stream, e.g. for Apple Mail.
> Imagine you walk into an Apple Store and pick up the latest iPhone XV. And there you are looking at your phone, your contacts, your apps, everything.
Imagine anyone points their phone at you in the street, and there they are looking at your phone, your contacts, your apps, everything.
Thanks for saying this. Personally I view a future where the entirety of my data is sloshing around in the cloud, ready to clone to an arbitrary device at the tap of a few keys to be a nightmare scenario.
I keep having to point out that assuming this is built on existing infra, FaceID is just the username. Everything is end-to-end encrypted. You can't get the data onto a new device the first time without the encryption key which Apple doesn't have.
You need your iCloud login/password and also (I think) an existing device which has the key to approve the request.
This is literally no different than how it works exactly today when restoring an iCloud backup onto a new phone, except imagine it can happen as a polyfill so it looks instantaneous instead of the 2-4 hours it seems to take today.
Haha - how embarrassing! What's the term d'art for a virtual/shim file system which dynamically reconstitutes the data onto local storage as you request it, while presenting a false image to user-space that all the data actually is local already?
First time auth on new hardware would certainly ask for at least a PIN but more likely your iCloud password. For the encryption keys to transfer I think you would also have to allow the request from some other device which currently held them.
The Secure Element would need to be upgraded to support "multi-tenancy".
That's all assuming the feature works by building on the existing infrastructure.
Ideally between your face and your iCloud password you could bring your "profile" to new hardware without having to touch an existing device. After the first time, just your face is enough.
Meanwhile the front door lock on my house built a couple of years ago only has 10,000 different keys. They probably sold more locks than that in the last few months.
Read the GP comment. This is talking about walking up to any random phone and having your own environment synced to it seamlessly. For that to work, the phone would have to know it’s you with basically perfect precision. So 1 in a million is not nearly good enough for that use case.
But you can only enter a pin on a phone you have physically with you. With this proposed auto-sync, every new phone is potentially a gateway to anyone else's phone.
Imagine you walk into an Apple Store and pick up the latest iPhone XV. And there you are looking at your phone, your contacts, your apps, everything.
Underneath, it's a virtual shim. In the first instant it's merely grabbing thumbnails of all your apps and notification metadata so it can "look right". As you click in, scroll around, you polyfill data as you need it. Obviously in some cases a more substantial download would be needed, so you may not be able to pop into an AR game with 1GB of assets within the first 10 seconds of picking up the device, but if your primary is on the LAN you could bring the necessary data locally in ~5 seconds from tapping the icon. Underneath it's doing something analogous to "docker run" on that apps image. In some cases this would lock the image from running concurrently on another device, in other cases multi-master could be fully supported with live sync of the backing stream, e.g. for Apple Mail.