Apple's AI Strategy: Unveiling 'Apple Intelligence' Amidst Skepticism and Anticipation

5 questions I still have about Apple Intelligence after the iPhone 16 launch

Apple Intelligence running on all your Apple devices. (Image credit: Apple) From next month Apple Intelligence will be deployed on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. On the face of it, flexible writing tools, a more personal Siri, and the ability to clean up my photos by removing anything I don't want in a flash all sound good, but Apple Intelligence raises almost as many questions as it answers. Because the beta versions of iOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia have been around for a while now we know a lot more about how Apple Intelligence will work once it's released, but there are still some questions that remain unanswered. Here are five big questions that Apple's 'Glowtime' event left me wondering about. Apple talked so much about how secure my data would be in their hands, once I gave Apple Intelligence permission to analyze it, that I'm now starting to wonder if it's really secure at all! One of the big selling points of Apple Intelligence is that it does most of its processing on your device, which explains why it isn't backwards compatible with the vast majority of iPhones. You need a device with the required number of neural processing units, to perform the complex processing that AI requires. But despite making a big deal of its on-device processing, for requests that require more processing power, Apple uses something called Private Cloud Compute. "When using Private Cloud Compute, users' data is never stored or shared with Apple; it is used only to fulfill their request", Apple says. As if to press home the security message, Apple is keen to stress that independent experts will inspect the code that runs on Apple silicon servers to continuously verify this privacy promise. But Apple doesn't stop with its own servers. ChatGPT is accessible on iPhone through Siri 2.0 expected next year. This appears to be the opposite of secure, given OpenAI's tendency to help itself to public data. However, Apple assures us that when using ChatGPT your IP address will be obscured, and OpenAI won't store any of your requests. In fact, you don't even need to create an OpenAI account to use ChatGPT. We're being asked to trust Tim Cook and his Apple friends here, and there doesn't seem to be much we can do if we don't. The alternative is to refuse to use ChatGPT, in which case you'll severely limit what you can do with your iPhone. The new iPhone 16 looks lovely. You can check out our iPhone 16 Pro hub and for our first impressions, do read our hands-on iPhone 16 Pro review and hands-on iPhone 16 Plus review for more information. Tim Cook said, more than once, during the 'Glowtime' event, that iPhone 16 had been "built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence", but that doesn't mean you have to ditch your iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max to use it. We know they are both capable of running Apple Intelligence, but I'd like to see how the final version of Apple Intelligence performs on an iPhone 15 Pro, compared to an iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro. Will there be a performance hit? One thing to be wary of though is that the new Visual Intelligence feature makes use of the iPhone 16's new Camera Control button, which obviously doesn't exist on older models. Ironically, when it comes to Macs, Apple Intelligence is much more forgiving of older models. If you've got a Mac with an M-series processor, even from a few years ago, then you are welcome to the AI party. Talking about Macs, we know how Apple Intelligence functions on a Mac, thanks to the beta of macOS 15.1 Sequoia. All the announced Apple Intelligence features, including Image Playground, Genmoji, and Writing Tools, are coming to macOS Sequoia 15.1 as well as iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1, but will they keep being developed to be the same, or will we get specific Mac-based Apple Intelligence tools in the future? Everything Apple has shown us so far in its demos has been so heavily based around the iPhone 16, that it feels like the iPhone is the thing that's pushing the development of Apple Intelligence. There is potential here for macOS to do something unique with Apple Intelligence and I'm left wondering if Apple will take it. What if I want a new iPhone 16, but have no interest in using Apple Intelligence? We know from the beta versions that you can turn Apple Intelligence off completely using a toggle switch, but will it be possible to fine tune what elements you want to turn off or on in the future? Perhaps I want the ability to use Genmoji, but I don't want the Writing Tools. While those two things both use Apple Intelligence, from a user point of view they feel like very different features. Finally, excuse me for being a bit of a jaded and cynical journalist, but a lot of the Apple Intelligence features that Apple showed off are already available from the likes of Google, OpenAI, and even Microsoft. Even the new Visual Intelligence feature they premiered at the Glowtime event is a knock-off of Google Lens. It's a great feature, but nothing new. The Image Playground features are very similar to other AI-powered image generators. Genmoji is perhaps the one new feature you'd find hard to replicate elsewhere. I'm left wondering, is that it? Of course, the special sauce with an iPhone is the way everything integrates so seamlessly and Apple's competitive edge has always been in perfecting technologies and marrying that with great design, not necessarily inventing them.

iPhone 16 Makes Us Question Apple's Intelligence

Apple is building its future on a suite of tools that are ill-defined at best. Apple Intelligence is not a new operating system or an AI model like GPT-4o. Best I can tell, it's a curated collection of generative AI features grouped under the Apple Intelligence branding umbrella. When Apple Intelligence was unveiled in June, the company defined it as a "personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models at the core of iPhone, iPad, and Mac." Essentially, it's an AI that can do things for you. During this week's iPhone 16 launch event, Apple expanded that definition to call it a "personal intelligence system that combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that is incredibly useful and relevant." Did your eyes glaze over when reading that? Mine did. Perhaps Apple Intelligence is so far-reaching and revolutionary that there is no simple elevator pitch for it. It will eventually do everything a human can do on their phone using their personal data -- or "grounded in personal context," as Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering at Apple, put it this week. This may present a challenge for Apple's marketing team, which will have to convince people to upgrade to a smartphone that won't have its marquee feature at launch on Sept. 20. Consumers will get bits and pieces of Apple Intelligence over the coming months, starting in October with Writing Tools, notification prioritization, and the ability to text to Siri. These features all have elements of ChatGPT's bread and butter: Writing, editing, and summarizing text and searching the web. A ChatGPT integration with Apple Intelligence is expected...eventually. On Monday, Apple said the ChatGPT rollout is among the features coming "later this year and in the months following." Also MIA for now: a completely revamped version of Siri. "Siri will be even more capable, with the ability to draw on a user's personal context to deliver intelligence that is tailored to them," Apple said this week. "It will also gain onscreen awareness, as well as take hundreds of new actions in and across Apple and third-party apps." But when? In July, Bloomberg said Siri's big upgrade isn't expected until spring 2025 but Apple didn't announce any specifics, or address how it will compete with OpenAI's Voice Mode and Google's Project Astra. Apple seems a little bit lost, like a teenager going through some growing pains. It may have to rely on customers with aging iPhones for iPhone 16 sales. Without Apple Intelligence, few features, save for a new Camera Control button, differentiate the device from the iPhone 15. Maybe by the iPhone 17, Apple will have defined "Apple Intelligence" -- the features it entails, the tech that powers it, and how it all knits together into a single "intelligence system."

Apple Intelligence feels like the HomePod all over again

Apple plays catch up in AI like it did with its smart speaker effort not so long ago Apple's Glowtime event served an avalanche of new products and features centered around the Apple Intelligence AI that the company has been hyping up for months. For a lowdown on everything you need to know, check out our iPhone 16 Pro hub. And for our first impressions, do read our hands-on iPhone 16 Pro review. But, amid all of the new and upcoming features, the actual rollout felt familiar. I kept noting how each new feature already had a counterpart at Google, or OpenAI, or Meta, or all three and more. I have more than a passing knowledge of what's out there, but even so, Apple's rush of features felt more like someone setting up a comparison than forging new, innovative ground, which was what Apple used to do in the 2000s. What it really felt like was watching Apple's announcement of its HomePod smart speaker and its later iterations. Siri blew everyone's mind when it first came out, adding real power to the iPhone and setting a standard no one could reach for a while. But when Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa came along, suddenly Siri wasn't so special, but still, no one was keen on using either with their smartphone the way they were with Siri. Then came the Amazon Echo and Google Home (later Nest after an acquisition). Both companies poured resources into not only making appealing, relatively cheap smart speakers and displays but also making sure to keep their voice assistants equal to the task, often with better natural language processing, superior context retention, and deeper third-party integrations than anything Siri could bring to the fore. The first Echo came out in 2014 and the first Google Home arrived two years later. Both quickly iterated the voice assistant and the hardware linking users to Alexa and Google Assistant. The first HomePod didn't come out until 2018, and it had much of the rigidity in performance that drew complaints about Siri. The HomePod, while technically impressive in terms of sound quality, failed to compete with Amazon Echo and Google Home. Both rivals had already solidified their place in homes, offering affordable smart speakers with expansive voice assistant capabilities that tied into a wider ecosystem of smart home devices. Apple's HomePod was more expensive, limited, and frankly late to the game. Even the later HomePod Mini could only try to match what had already been available for a while from Amazon and Google. Apple Intelligence doesn't have quite the dire delay in release time as Apple's voice assistant and smart speaker faced, but if you look at the list of AI features, you could repeat the words, "Google/OpenAI/many more did it already", nearly every time. The advanced natural language understanding, photo editing tools, and enhanced smartphone controls have all already been announced or released by Google and others. They reflect a company that is still trying to close the gap left open by its AI rivals. Even Apple's partnership news seems familiar. Embedding OpenAI's models to give ChatGPT-power to its features is a good idea, but one that Microsoft and others have already pursued. Even Google, with its own stable of AI models, looked to ChatGPT's abilities in developing features for the Gemini AI assistant. There were only two ideas, one frivolous and one possibly important, from Apple that struck me as unique or at least notably different from what we've seen before. The custom emojis of Genmojis are a cute idea that doesn't seem to be quite as easy to set up on Google-powered devices. More crucially, Apple made a point about how much on-device AI processing will happen and how it will leverage its Private Cloud Compute system to encourage privacy and data security. That could be a big selling point to potential customers even if it limits some of what the AI can do compared to a cloud-first approach. But, even the on-device processing as a selling point for a smartphone has already been done by Google when it debuted the Pixel 9. Apple had a lot to say, and Apple Intelligence may bring some unique features to the table, but the company's late entry and iterative approach to AI suggest that it is still playing catch-up. Much like the HomePod's struggle to gain traction in a market dominated by earlier entrants, Apple's AI tools -- while carrying the Apple design polish and privacy focus many admire -- seem designed more to match what others are already doing than to push the envelope further. Apple used to set the stage for the next big tech fad, but it will take more than fun custom emojis to retake that position; just ask the ten people who still have a HomePod.

Apple punts on AI | TechCrunch

It was reasonable to expect that Apple would do with AI what it has done before with so many features and apps: wait, take notes and then redefine. But though it has filed off some of the sharper edges of the controversial technology, the company seems to have hit the same wall as everyone else: Apple Intelligence, like other AIs, doesn't really do anything. It does do something. A few things, in fact. But like other AI tools, it seems to be an incredibly computationally demanding shortcut for ordinary tasks. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially as inference (that is, performing the actual text analysis, generation, etc.) becomes efficient enough to move to the device itself. But Tim Cook told us at the outset of Monday's "Glowtime" event that Apple Intelligence's "breakthrough capabilities" will have "an incredible impact." Craig Federighi said it will "transform so much of what you do with your iPhone." The capabilities: Any of those feel like a breakthrough to you? There are countless writing helpers. Summary capability is inherent to nearly every LLM. Generative art has become synonymous with a lack of effort. You can trivially search your photos this way across any number of services. And our "dumb" voice assistants were looking up Wikipedia entries for us a decade ago. True, there is some improvement. Doing these things locally and privately is definitely preferable. And there are some new opportunities here for people who can't easily use a regular touchscreen UI. So there is certainly a net increase in convenience. But literally none of it is new or interesting. There doesn't appear to have even been any meaningful change to these features since they were released in beta after WWDC beyond the expected bug fixes. One would have expected that "Apple's first phone made from the ground up for Apple Intelligence" would justify being so. As it turns out, the 16 won't even ship with all the features mentioned; they'll arrive in a separate update. Is it a failure of imagination? Or of technology? AI companies are already beginning to reposition their models as yet another enterprise SaaS tool, rather than the "transformative" use cases we heard so much about (it turns out those were mostly just repeating stuff they found on the web). AI models can be extremely valuable in the right place, but that place doesn't seem to be in your hand. There's a bizarre mismatch between how commonplace these AI capabilities are becoming, and how bombastic the descriptions of them are. Apple has become increasingly prone to the kind of breathless promotion it once showed up with its restraint and innovation. Monday's event was among the least exciting in recent years, but the language was, if anything, more extravagant than usual. Like the other AI providers, then, Apple is participating in the multi-billion-dollar game of make-believe: that these models are transformative and groundbreaking even if almost no one finds them to be so. Because who could justify spending as much as these companies have when the result is that you can do the same things you did five years ago? AI models may be legitimately game-changing in certain areas of scientific research, some coding tasks, perhaps materials and structural design, possibly (though perhaps not for the better) in media. But if we are to trust our eyes and thumbs, rather than Cook and Federighi's reality distortion hour, it sure looks like the ones we're supposed to be excited about don't do much that's useful at all, let alone revolutionary. Ironically, Apple's announcement has failed to provide AI its "iPhone moment."

Apple Intelligence features explained - everything you need to know about Apple AI and when you can use it

The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro are here and Apple's next best iPhones are the 'first iPhones built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence.' This year's iPhones introduce bigger screens, faster chips, better cameras, new colors, and a snazzy Camera Control button made for Visual Intelligence. The iPhone 16 lineup launches on September 20 and will come with iOS 18 and no Apple Intelligence features. That's because Apple Intelligence won't be available until iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 are released, when lots of the advertised features come to your Apple devices. If that sounds hard to understand and a bit complicated, then we've done all the hard work for you. Here's every Apple Intelligence feature, what device you'll need, and when you can expect to use them. Imagine Grammarly, but Apple. Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools allow you to proofread text, rewrite text in your choice of tone of voice, quick reply to messages or emails, and even summarise conversations in group chats. These new tools will be available across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, completely removing typos from your life and at the same time creating a potential dystopian future where every Apple user sounds exactly the same. Summaries are a huge part of what Apple Intelligence offers, whether that's summarising group chats, as we mentioned above, or emails in the Mail app. On any webpage you can now summarize articles with just the press of a button, built-in to Reader on Safari. The most impressive use of summaries, however, is with notifications where your Apple device will condense notifications and prioritise them to prevent distractions. Your favorite voice assistant is getting a complete redesign, so much so that the changes will arrive gradually over the next few months. Initially Siri will get a completely new look on Mac, iPhone and iPad. On the iPhone and iPad it will pulsate from the edges of your device when activated, and on Mac you'll be able to place Siri wherever you want to. In iOS 18.1, Siri will get smarter thanks to Apple Intelligence, allowing you to ask follow up queries and more difficult questions. You'll also be able to interact with Siri by using Type to Siri, so when you're out in public you don't need to talk out loud to a virtual assistant. While we've had accessibility features that allow typing to Siri in the past, this new design allows you to choose between voice or text without opening Settings. The Photos app with Apple Intelligence will add Clean Up, Apple's competitor to Google's Magic Eraser and in our testing it works really well. You can simply select an object and remove it completely from a photo, just like magic. Searching within the app will also be much improved by the ability to use natural language prompts and find exactly what you're looking for in seconds. You can also create Memories from prompts, a more curated version of the Photos apps' current Memories offering. The Mail app gets a whole lot easier to use thanks to Apple Intelligence. Not only will you be able to use smart replies, as mentioned above, but Mail will now prioritize your most important emails, summarize them, so you don't have to read the whole thing, and categorize every incoming message for you. Transcription is excellent on iOS 18.1 thanks to Apple Intelligence. With Apple's AI transcription tools you can now record phone calls and turn them into notes (don't worry everyone on the call will be alerted that this tool is in use). Not only can you record calls, but you can even use the Notes app for voice recordings, perfect for combining with other Apple Intelligence tools, like the summaries, to get a quick idea of what's been said. Visual Intelligence is the snazzy new iPhone 16-exclusive Apple Intelligence feature and it's seriously cool. Imagine Google Lens, but Apple. By pressing and holding the new Camera Control button, you'll launch Visual Intelligence which allows you to search for anything you point your camera at. In Apple's presentation at the 'Glowtime' event, the feature was demonstrated by a man taking a photo of his friend's dog, getting the name of the breed in an instant. You'll also be able to use Visual Intelligence with Google and ChatGPT in the future. Interested in Visual Intelligence? Read our hands-on iPhone 16 review or our hands-on iPhone 16 Pro review to see what we think of the phones it's available on. Genmoji is exactly what it says on the tin: generative emoji. Want to see a dinosaur on a skateboard? You can. How about a frog playing a banjo? Yep. Pineapple on a pizza? Nope, too far. With Genmoji, any combination of emojis you can think of can combine to create AI-generated versions of everyone's favorite yellow smiley face. Expected in 2025, Siri's most impressive Apple Intelligence feature will arrive: The ability to have on-screen awareness and reply to your prompts based on the thing you're doing. This is a seriously impressive use of AI and one that we can't wait to use. Siri's major overhaul has been rumored to arrive with iOS 18.4, but we'll need to wait and see to know for sure. You've seen the weird AI-generated images that look like Pixar with no soul? Well Image Playground is exactly that. Apple's image generation tool lets you draw pictures in notes and quickly improve them or imagine anything you want in almost in any app. Expect this feature towards the end of 2024. How useful it is? Time will tell. Last but not least, Siri will get ChatGPT integration at some point in the near future allowing you to send more complex prompts to OpenAI's server instead of Apple's. You'll have to grant access every time you do it, and Apple has made it very clear that privacy in Apple Intelligence is pivotal, so this might be the best way to interact with the world's most famous chatbot.

Apple's practical, dull AI is a stark contrast to Windows Copilot

Apple's Apple Intelligence uses AI as a productivity tool, and not as an assist for creatives. Why? The new Apple Intelligence within the new Apple iPhone 16 provides a surprisingly practical approach to AI. It's straightforward, helpful, and well, boring -- a stark contrast to Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs, which position themselves as the cusp of a revolutionary new era of computing, complete with a mandatory new keyboard button. Apple, which touts itself as the foundation for creative work, could have used AI to allow creatives to generate "photos" of imaginary objects, as Google's Pixel now does. It could have used AI, either running locally on in the cloud, to produce AI-generated art, or AI-produced facsimiles of celebrity voices. It did none of that. Instead, the Apple iPhone 16 uses AI as a productivity tool, first and foremost, with a focus on supercharging existing features with machine smarts. Apple is revamping Siri with a new AI foundation to help it better understand what you yourself are looking for, and follow complex conversations. AI organizes your photos into albums of your favorite people. Visual intelligence will summon information about objects you're looking at. Apple Intelligence will create summaries of your meetings -- and in a very quick, blink-and-you'll-miss-it feature, it even uses a "semantic index" to surface information you're looking for and forgot about, which is its own version of the controversial Windows Recall feature. In fact, Microsoft and Apple seemed to have swapped places. While Microsoft splashes generative AI art inside Photos and Paint, Apple presented the ability to rewrite an email as something special! Apple took such a conservative approach to AI that it barely implemented it all as part of photo or video creation. Yes, you'll see it in features like live previews of various camera filters, but the only feature I'd associate with traditional AI art was the ability to use generative AI to create your own "genmoji," or custom emoji. Really, using a prompt to find specific photos and combine them together into a "movie," or to search your albums for a specific scene that you describe, feels like features that have been in various operating systems and apps for years... because they have been! Honestly, I kept waiting for more: Maybe the ability to capture the scene of a dancer, say, and then to use AI to remove the dancer and insert her into another video. Yes, Apple showed off the ability to highlight and then remove an object from a photo. But we've seen that before, too. It all felt very muted, and that's probably not surprising. If Apple had pushed all of its chips in on generative AI as a feature, rather than a tool to enhance other features, it would have risked angering and alienating the cadre of creatives that traditionally turn to Apple and its iPhones. What Apple seemed to imply is that it doesn't plan to use iOS or the iPhone to promote generative AI itself. Instead, its A18 silicon will instead be the foundation of AI, which app developers can write to. If a developer wants to build AI into its app, and if that user wishes to buy and download that app, that's fine -- Apple's hands are clean. Apple's Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said that there are "multiple generative models on the iPhone in your pocket." There most certainly are, doing all sorts of things. But Apple seems determined to let those features speak for themselves, without using "AI" in every other sentence. Apple, then, is walking a fine line: AI as a productivity solution and a helpful tool that makes existing more powerful is A-OK; AI as a creative aid feels much more controversial. Apple even downplayed Siri's newfound AI powers. All that leaves an opening to rivals like Microsoft and Google to keep pushing their own AI capabilities. Remember, Apple leans heavily on preserving privacy. Apple appears to be betting that consumers are as distrustful of AI as they are as of tech giants slurping up their data, and acting accordingly.

Apple's Focus on Hardware, Not Apple Intelligence, Was a Breath of Fresh Air

During its iPhone 16 event on Monday, Apple didn't discuss its suite of generative AI features in depth until about an hour in, after unveiling hardware like the Apple Watch Series 10, AirPods 4 and the iPhone 16 lineup. Following high-profile phone launches from major Android phone makers, which were chock-full of AI, it was refreshing not to be bombarded with the word "AI" right off the bat. And I hope it's an approach other tech giants eventually adopt, too. Instead, Apple saved its presentation on Apple Intelligence for later into the keynote, allowing hardware to be the (rightful) focus of its big fall event. If this had been any other year, you may have read that sentence and thought, "Of course hardware would be the focus of an iPhone event." But it's 2024, and it's all AI, all the time. Events held by other major phone-makers like Google and Samsung have referenced artificial intelligence ad nauseam, touting all the supercharged capabilities it'll bring across messages, notes, photos and digital assistants. Even during Google's Pixel 9 reveal last month, Gemini stole the spotlight. AI has become an indelible part of the tech fabric, woven into almost every product reveal and company keynote. However, Apple appears to be doing a better job of reading the public's temperature when it comes to generative AI features on phones. In fact, according to a recent CNET survey, just 18% of people say AI integrations are their main motivator for upgrading their phone. The biggest drivers are relatively more old-school: longer battery life (61%), more storage (46%) and better camera features (38%). Apple smartly focused on those features during this year's event, despite all the general AI hype. That is not to say AI didn't underlie Apple's announcements on Monday. Along with being allotted a portion of the keynote, Apple Intelligence was referenced throughout as powering iPhone 16 features across Photos, Siri and Messages, as well as being supported by the A18 chip. Despite some uncertainty among smartphone consumers, Apple, along with other phone makers, is working tirelessly to convince you that you need its latest AI features for the best mobile experience. It's just not using the entirety of its events to do so, and I'm grateful. The timing of Apple Intelligence's release is still somewhat vague, with the company noting it'll "start rolling out next month with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 and MacOS Sequoia 15.1." Apple's more measured approach to this rollout suggests it doesn't want to overpromise and underdeliver. And with something as unpredictable as AI, that may be a good approach. Understandably, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June dedicated more time to explicitly touting Apple Intelligence -- along with debuting it. Much of the AI talk during the iPhone 16 event was a recap of what was announced a few months ago. But Apple's more modest approach to uttering the words "artificial intelligence," and its decision to defer that portion of its presentation is reflective of the company's general approach to the burgeoning tech. Even during WWDC, the iPhone maker didn't say "AI" anywhere near as frequently as Google did during its I/O event this year and last. Apple has been characteristically cautious about how and when it joins the AI arms race, opting for a more subdued (and belated) approach. Yes, AI will still be baked into practically every task you do on your iPhone, but you won't have to hear about it nonstop. Here's hoping the "Apple effect" does its thing here, and other companies take note.