Apple Boosts Their Intelligence
Juli Clover
In hindsight, it's a little strange that Craig Federighi did a sit down with Joanna Stern that ran in The Wall Street Journal just yesterday to talk about Apple Intelligence and specifically address concerns that Apple was rolling it out too slowly – and somehow failed to mention that the next beta would be both dropping any day now and would bring with it significant updates to Apple Intelligence.
The first version of Apple Intelligence, which has been in beta testing for a few months now and is rolling out broadly next week, is pretty underwhelming. There's just not much there. Not a lot beyond perhaps notification summaries that you're going to be using all the time. This new beta, which I just downloaded, has far more meat on the AI bone.
Notably it includes both Image Playground – the entirely new gen AI app – and Genmoji, perhaps the marquee fun new feature of the whole suite. (Both of these you need to apply to get access to – even if you had previous access to other Apple Intelligence features in the last beta builds.) And yes, integration with ChatGPT. Which seemingly is working pretty well right off the bat – I was able to sign in to my paid account and have been using it with Siri. It works!
While Visual Intelligence is also a part of this beta, it's limited to the iPhone 16 with the Camera Control button. I'm not quite ballsy enough to install this just-out-of-the-oven iOS beta on my brand-new iPhone, so I'll have to wait on that one. Though I am excited for what it could bring and mean...
One more thing: also baked into iOS 18.2 is the ability to set default apps for Mail, Browser, Messages, etc. This isn't just for EU users, but for everyone.
As I wrote a couple months back:
I don't want to trivialize all the iOS-level tweaks that need to be made to accommodate such changes – and again, just for iPhone and iPad users in the EU, these changes are not coming to the US. At least not yet...
And that leads me to my other quick take: what if this move is also a signal being sent to the US Justice Department that if the remedies in the Google antitrust case include an end to Google being the default search engine on iPhones, Apple, which is also under investigation by the body, has potential pre-remedies they could do? Such as, you know, allowing users to change the defaults for all of their pre-installed apps. I'm not saying Apple wants to do this in the US, but I'm suggesting they might use it as a dangling carrot for the DOJ if they want to drop (or shrink) that pesky investigation...
Well, if it is a signal, consider it sent!