Introduction to Apple intelligence:
All right. We got to talk about Apple intelligence. So, Apple’s made this promise, this huge thing is coming that’s going to change everything across their whole lineup. They’ve been talking about it for a while, and I think that promise is starting to fade. This was first announced at WWDC 2024. That was nearly six months ago, and it’s still not completely out yet. The new iPhone’s launched in September with exactly zero Apple intelligence features, but then some software updates have started to push out, and eventually it’s supposed to be finished and in everyone’s hands by March 2025. That’s a lot of buildup. So what I want to do now is review every single Apple intelligence feature that’s out so far. And then also get into whether the promise that they’re actually making is even good in the first place.
Writing Tools
So first up, writing tools. So all of these features, unless otherwise specified, are on iPhone, iPad and Mac. So no Apple Intelligence features at all on the Vision Pro. Their most futuristic platform. That’s already kind of fascinating. But the writing tools, you may have heard about these since they’re definitely referenced a lot, maybe the most out of any of these. And, yeah, it’s basically generative AI to help adjust what you’ve already written. So this is easiest to demo on the Mac, but basically you have something you’ve written, you highlight all of it, and then select one of the writing tools. And actually, this is one of the first weird hiccups, just a strangely repetitive UI. You can access any of the writing tools in one click right here or hitch show writing tools, which again shows the same list of writing tools.
Notification Summaries
This one to me personally, I have found almost useless. Basically, it does exactly what it sounds like it does. When it’s enabled, it summarizes your notifications from each app. So if you get a long message from someone or several notifications in a row from a single app, it will do its best to condense that all into a single message to help you kind of get the gist quickly.
Gen Moji
So, okay, believe it or not, there was some hype for this one. And once again, it’s basically exactly what it sounds like. It’s letting you generate any emoji using AI. Anything you want. So let’s say I’m in messages and I want to react to some message with a very specific emoji that doesn’t exist. You would describe an emoji, so you write your text and then hit create a new emoji, give it about three seconds again, and it will use generative AI to create that image for you.
Image Playground
Image playground is another, maybe kind of weird one. This is almost the same tool, but sort of standalone. This is a playground to generate images in a cartoon style of whatever you want. So you open the playground app and again, just describe the image you want in text. Anything, really. But before you type anything, there are also a number of these buttons down here and there are kind of just inspiration suggestions for things or people to include in the image.
Priority Notifications
So, okay, now, this is one that I think had some promise, or at least I’m in the target demographic for it because as an iPhone and Android user, you start to notice that Apple’s weakness has, for a long time been notification management. If it was just kind of had a fire hose and notifications coming in all the time.
Photos App AI Features
So then the Photos app, yes, we all hate the new Photos app. Everyone. You do, I do, everyone you know hates it. We’re all on the same page. It’s terrible. But Apple has added exactly one AI feature to the Photos app in an age where lots of companies are comfortable adding a ton of AI to their photos apps, dozens of things, but they’ve decided, all right, yeah, we can do the background object removal thing.
Recording Summaries
So, okay, this one had promised, but then was kind of confusing to me because when I saw it on the list, I was like, oh, this, I would have loved this as a student. This is amazing, just one place where you can record things, transcribe them, and then summarize them and keep them for later. That sounds amazing. But this is not built into the default voice memos app at all.
Visual Intelligence
So okay, visual intelligence. So these last two are kind of the big ones. Visual intelligence is only available on the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro and you get to it by long pressing that button on the side of those new phones, which opens it up. It’s that camera control button. And when you open it up, you get a full screen viewfinder with three buttons, a shutter in the middle, then ask on the left and search on the right.
ChatGPT Integration
Then there is ChatGPT integration, the sort of last but not least new thing, that’s Siri, worse with ChatGPT. I think a lot of people thought there was a lot more to Siri, like right off the back because it has this new animation. And you see the new Siri animation so you think it’s the new Siri, but most of the new Siri stuff isn’t here yet. But the ChatGPT stuff is.
Future Updates & Conclusion
But yeah, I think Apple is going to build on and sort of iterate on hopefully all of these features. Like we have this sort of standard set that we’re expecting from them now and this is this is the worst they’ll ever be that will only get better from here. But it is pretty crazy to see how much emphasis is in all of the advertising and all the talk about the newest devices on apple.com as if Apple intelligence is this massive game changing, groundbreaking new thing.