Now that the HomePod is nearly here, Apple is dribbling out details of what its first smart speaker will do... including, apparently, that it's a power miser. The company has posted environmental data showing that the HomePod uses no more than 9.25W of power when playing music at 50 percent volume. As MacRumors noted, that's less than the consumption of a typical LED light bulb (such as the 10W of a Philips Hue A19). You're going to use more power if you crank it up, of course, but you probably won't cringe at your electricity bill if you stream music all day. And importantly, the speaker should consume little power when it's silent.

The deep-learning models need to be shipped as part of the operating system, taking up valuable NAND storage space. They also need to be loaded into RAM and require significant computational time on the GPU and/or CPU. Unlike cloud-based services, whose resources can be dedicated solely to a vision problem, on-device computation must take place while sharing these system resources with other running applications. Finally, the computation must be efficient enough to process a large Photos library in a reasonably short amount of time, but without significant power usage or thermal increase.

In case Siri coming to macOS wasn't enough for you, Apple Pay is joining the virtual assistant on desktops and laptops. That means you'll now be able to use the service on the web, making it faster and simpler to check out on some of your favorite shopping sites. Meanwhile, to help with productivity, macOS Sierra will feature a picture-in-picture mode, similar to what we've seen on the iPad. Without a doubt, the biggest announcement is Siri expanding outside of iOS. Functionality-wise, Siri for macOS can control apps and do web searches -- and tell you jokes, of course, because we all know how important that is. For its part, macOS Sierra is set to release in the fall as a free upgrade.