While the story around Apple Intelligence is that the company is relying heavily on “coming later” asterisks and we’ll have a long wait before any of it actually launches, yesterday’s iOS 18.2 beta release tells a slightly different story.
Now, of course, we have to include our own asterisk here — just because a feature is available in the current beta doesn’t mean it’ll make it into the final release in December — but it’s still a good indicator of Apple’s expected rollout pace of Intelligence…
The Narrative slow deployment
To be fair to its critics, Apple was asking for trouble. The company launched the iPhone 16 with a lot of fanfare around Apple Intelligence features, and then made it hard to even see the new devices because of all the stars covering the presentation screen.
It seems pretty obvious that the original plan was to release a new iPhone with lots of Apple Intelligence features on day one, and iOS 18 development was delayed, so it had to make this awkward “trust us, it’ll be great later” launch.
This is a result of the company limiting itself to annual iPhone releases to keep shareholders happy — otherwise, it could have just waited until the software was ready before releasing the hardware.
By the way, that rigid schedule doesn't seem to be a requirement for customer satisfaction. Even 9to5Mac readers, who upgrade devices far more frequently than most, were happy to slow down.
In our recent survey, only 28% of you thought it was important to stick with annual iPhone updates. The largest segment, about 39% of you, would be happy with an annual update, with the next most popular choice being special editions when the company had a worthwhile update.
But shareholders would scream if Apple slowed down the pace of iPhone releases, so here we are.
That left Apple with two problems, the first of which was that there wasn't much ready on day one.
The second is that for many, Apple AI and Siri are synonymous. Sure, the writing tools are great, and the notification summaries are handy when they're not funny, but most of us want a much smarter Siri. And that part of Apple Intelligence seems to be moving the slowest, and isn't expected until next year.
So the narrative that Apple Intelligence is just a vague promise of the future was inevitable.
But the iOS 18.2 beta is great!
Yesterday, we outlined all the new features, as well as a 29-minute video overview.
The new Apple Intelligence features include…
Image Playground offers text-to-image generation, which — as we mentioned yesterday — Apple has implemented in a way that makes it hard to abuse. Genmoji also offers the same functionality for custom emoji.
ChatGPT integration with Siri and Writing Tools. This includes the ability to compose new text according to your instructions and the ability to describe to ChatGPT the changes you would like to make to any existing text.
Image Wand allows even someone with my drawing abilities (rated at minus 172 on the international WTF Is That Supposed To Be scale) to draw some sloppy, barely recognizable scribbles, tell Apple Intelligence what they should be (since there isn't enough computing power in the world for the AI to tell), and turn them into an actual image. You can even just circle an empty area and it will use the surrounding notes to figure out what image to use to illustrate it!
The Mail app can now automatically organize and sort your emails into four different categories — primary, transactions, updates, and promotions — as well as provide a digest view of all the emails from a particular company.
Finally, audio recordings can identify the different elements in recordings and separate them into different tracks. This was something Apple mentioned almost in passing during the keynote — hey, you can record individual tracks, oh, and by the way, if you don’t, the app will separate them for you — but it’s an incredible feature.
That’s a lot of new features for a single point update!
Of course, this is an ongoing project
Top comment from Steve
I don't think Apple has been slow to roll out AI because they were behind the times. I think they're just following the Apple Playbook. Let others rush to bring an unfinished product to market, while Apple watches, learns, and then improves it. As Tim recently said, “not the first, but the best.”
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Of course, non-beta users won't be able to play with iOS 18.2 until December, and we'll have to see how well all these new features work in the real world. I'll share my own impressions of it when I get to play with them.
I expect the first developer betas to be rough because, well, it’s the first developer beta. But I also expect the quality of delivery to improve quickly because these improvements are being made in response to feedback from real users. As Craig Federighi said about Siri yesterday, there’s never an end point to this, only continuous improvements over time.
Yes, I’m as impatient as anyone when it comes to Siri improvements. As I said earlier this week, it’s a shame that even the simplest tasks can beat Siri, especially when Google Assistant shows you how to do them. At the same time, the current iOS 18.2 beta is a phenomenal step forward, and I’m now much more inclined to cut the company some slack.
Image: Jeff Benjamin/9to5Mac
