Apple Intelligence is available today on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Wow, this is... underwhelming. Some text summaries for apps nobody use, and minor Siri improvements that bring it up to par where Google Assistant was 5-10 years ago? Even the "do you want to change it, or send it?" prompt is straight outta Android. It also seems like they copied Google Photos and Gmail features.

And the place a better Siri would be really useful, Apple TV, isn't included at all :(

All that marketing for this...? None of these things require a dramatic new AI chip or months of announcements. They're minor improvements at best.

Does anyone else want to talk to Siri like a normal human? Like an actual assistant?

It drives me nuts that Siri can't interact correctly when spoken to like this: 'Siri, could you text my wife that I will be home in 20 minutes'

Converts to:

Text Wife: That I will be home in 20 minutes

Should be: I will be home in 20 minutes

Drives me nuts. This is what I actually want. It's just so much more natural. This is my biggest grievance with virtual assistants. I want to talk to it like a real assistant. Hopefully after the LLM refactor of Siri this will happen, but on 18.2, still doesn't work with redesigned Siri. I don't know if they have added the LLM integration with her, but I thought they had in 18.2

I have zero interest in Ai helping me to write or rewrite email or other text. Siri maybe, lets hope it finally becomes somewhat useful, considering how useless and stupid the current version is.

I’ll take ‘not relying on my computer to do tasks that are inherently and inextricably human, like actually reading a text message from my mother or daughter, or replying to them,’ for $5, Alex.

I’ll stay on Sonoma for as long as I safely can.

Question. Is this phoning home all the time?

Observation: the primary user base for this is not us (technology professionals already using Copilot, and dealing with management layers who do),

it's "everyday" people doing everyday tasks.

I updated my macOS and iOS device as soon as I could because I was curious to finally see how these features will work.

Turns out it's not even available today! The Apple Intelligence settings just showed a "Join waitlist" button, I clicked it and it says "You'll be notified when Apple Intelligence is available for [you]".

A not-so-fun footnote for those who looked forward to this:

> The first set of Apple Intelligence features is available now as a free software update with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, and can be accessed in most regions around the world when the device and Siri language are set to U.S. English.

More to come later:

> Apple Intelligence is quickly adding support for more languages. In December, Apple Intelligence will be available for localized English in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K., and in April, a software update will deliver expanded language support, with more coming throughout the year. Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and other languages will be supported.

How much of this can be disabled, either through the GUI or via other means (e.g. terminal commands, binary/library removal, hosts file / firewall network block) on Mac OS?

FWIW the good thing to come out of apple intelligence is their private cloud compute, which should open up the doors to more safe and secure processing of data on the cloud. I know there's a push to make everything run on the edge nowadays, but cloud computing still has it's strengths in some areas.

honestly making siri event a little bit better (which as far as I can tell has stubbornly refused to improve over the last few years) would make me more exicted about apple intelligence than all the text summarization and rewriting features

I signed up for the iOS beta and haven't used any of the writing tools, but the AI summary of texts or emails has been really nice for glancing at the phone and getting a glance, especially for wall of text texters.

In honor of election season, I hope I can use the 'priority messages' stuff to better filter the political spam I get.

Is this the introduction of native call recording on iPhone? I've always had to use an app to record calls.

I updated MacOS to 15.1 but it turns out that I need to be on some kind of waitlist to access the actual new Siri features. Kinda false advertising to call this "available today"...

I can’t believe they didn’t update the USB location on the Magic Mouse. Still on the bottom. Unbelievable.

Rather disappointed that this isn't available on my 14 Pro.

> Apple Intelligence allows users to stay on top of their inbox like never before with Priority Messages and message summaries.

Ugh.

I mean, really - my manager gets enough emails he doesn't read, fully understand, pipe through Copilot, still doesn't grok 'em, answer and delegate sh't he shouldn't (and wouldn't, if he'd read the email himself) already.

Looking forward to this excuse of having even more overworked people /s

I’m interested to see where this goes. That said, I am now planning to delay upgrading my iPhone 11 Pro until iPhone 18 comes out.

IMHO Apple and everyone else is moving way too fast with adoption. The deployment surface of iPhone is huge - I’m interested to see how Apple handles their first really serious issue (like “diverse Nazis”).

Also - current AI programs are complete and total pigs. iPhone 16 offers 8GB of memory and 1TB storage. I know the programs need the memory and so forth but still. I get it but I’m also going to wait now for the vendors to figure out the new future.

In the meantime, I will watch and wait. Plus, if Apples history is any indicator, the first 2-3 versions will be lame but then around 4 or 5 it will take off.