Malcolm Owen
While some of Apple Intelligence will arrive in iOS 18.1 long after the launch of the iPhone 16, the image generation features may not arrive until iOS 18.2.
Potential owners of the iPhone 16 are probably already aware that Apple Intelligence won't be arriving as part of the release of iOS 18. Thanks to the developer betas, it is evident that Apple Intelligence functionality won't be available until iOS 18.1.
Even so, it seems that not all of Apple Intelligence's features will make it in that update. Instead, users may be waiting until iOS 18.2 for a full rollout.
According to Sunday's Bloomberg newsletter, image-generation features will be delayed until iOS 18.2. The features include Image Playground, an app for creating images from prompts, and Genmoji, producing AI-based emoji from prompts.
This could mean that users will have to wait until December to see the new features, outside of a developer beta.
The decision is meant to be a slow rollout of the features, which will help Apple's testing and development before an actual release. At the same time, delaying the features means the initial Apple Intelligence wave involving Photo's Clean Up and text-based tools will be all that's offered to consumers at first.
This won't be the only delayed feature release of Apple Intelligence. The much-touted integration of ChatGPT into Siri and other Siri changes won't be arriving until 2025.
While most of the world will have to wait for Apple Intelligence to land on their devices, one area that may wait longer than the rest is the European Union. Apple warned in June that it wouldn't bring Apple Intelligence and some other features to iPhones in the EU due to the interoperability requirements of the Digital Markets Act, but it was still "highly motivated" to do so eventually.
Later that month, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager proposed that the declaration was a "way of disabling competition, where they have a stronghold already."
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William Gallagher
Andrew Orr
Christine McKee
Andrew O'Hara
4 Comments
According to Gurman, who is usually more accurate than not, the Siri improvements are also delayed until 2025. Overall, the delays suggest that Apple was indeed caught as flat-footed on the AI front as many suspected, and is now lagging behind on delivering its "Apple Intelligence" promises at WWDC. That said, Apple will be far better served by delivering these features when they "just work," even if late--the last thing it needs is for Apple Intelligence to work as poorly as Siri. Look at the situation Microsoft has on its hands with its new Co-Pilot-equipped PCs being unusable for gamers because the chip will not play the most popular games. Oof!
I will be curious to see how Apple handles Apple Intelligence features at tomorrow's Glow Up event. Will it still headline them in pre-recorded video pieces with a "coming later" asterisk at the end? That could be confusing for consumers if those features are then headlined by press coverage of the new phones because they'll discover that their brand new iPhone doesn't have those features now, and will not have all of them for at least six months and possibly longer.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: kudos to Apple's crack marketing team for very simply managing to brand "AI" as something that's uniquely Apple. (Which of course, it's not!)
I truly believe that it is utterly naive to imagine that a full suite of 8-10 game changing AI/ML based functionalities arrive at a mature state all at once on any given platform whether it be on mobile, notebook, desktop, or enterprise.
Staggering out new functional releases really makes more sense. Being first to market isn't a dealbreaker. This isn't a race, there is no finish line. You have to still have some mindshare though.
It is critical to stress that consumer electronics innovation is driven by smartphones. They are the primary computing modality for consumers in 2024 -- not personal computers (Macs, Windows PC or otherwise).
There are already students who are using today's rudimentary LLM chatbots to write term papers, do homework, etc. Even the generative AI images being made today blows doors on what was being done a year ago.
Let's face it: the technology is already here and an ever-increasing percentage of young people are using it on a very regular basis. Unsurprisingly many people on these technology media bboards/discussion forums are way behind the times.
But for sure judging AI/ML seated in front of a computer is a completely obsolete paradigm in 2024. AI/ML will find a way to change the daily tasks of smartphone users. It could be something like removing distracting images from a video you shot, noise reduction from the video's audio, stuff like that. No one (sane) expects that your iPhone will be able to generate a 10 slide deck with graphs and charts of TTM sales revenue data in 10 minutes from a quick command. Not in 2024 at least. But that sort of thing isn't that far off.