An Honest Review of Apple Intelligence... So Far

All right, we got to talk about Apple intelligence

So Apple's made this promise. This huge thing is coming that's going to change everything across their whole lineup

They've been talking about it for a while, and I think that promise is starting to fade

This was first announced at WWDC 2024. That was nearly six months ago, and it's still not completely out yet

The new iPhones launched in September with exactly zero Apple intelligence features

but then some software updates have started to push out, and eventually it's supposed to be finished

and in everyone's hands by March 2025. That's a lot of buildup

So what I want to do now is review every single Apple intelligence feature that's out so far

And then also get into whether the promise that they're actually making is even good in the first place

So first up, writing tools. So all these features, unless otherwise specified, are on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

So no Apple intelligence features at all on the Vision Pro, their most futuristic platform

That's already kind of fascinating. But the writing tools, you may have heard about these since they're definitely referenced a lot

maybe the most out of any of these. And yes, it's basically generative AI to help adjust what you've already written

So this is easiest to demo on the Mac, but basically you have something you've written, you highlight all of it, and then select one of the writing tools

And actually, this is one of the first weird hiccups, just a strangely repetitive UI

You can access any of the writing tools in one click right here, or hit show writing tools

which again shows the same list of writing tools. Okay. So I suppose there's a world where, you know, you write some message to someone, and you just want it to be a little more friendly

Or maybe you've typed out a bunch of stuff that needs to be sent in a work email. So you want to get the AI to make it more professional for you

Sure, I guess. So I've run it through various things that I've written from, you know, whole video scripts to just a bunch of messages

And it works, technically. I think the friendly mode mostly uses like shorter sentences and lots of exclamation points

And then the professional mode kind of does the opposite. Like it's still pretty terse, but never uses exclamation points

I think maybe concise is the most useful. Basically, it takes whatever you highlight and makes it maybe 40% shorter

And then you can hit copy or just directly replace it if you trust it

And each of these things takes about three or four seconds to generate entirely on device

so it works offline as well. The proofreading is nice because it picks up on extra things like capitalization and proper nouns

if you really need that on top of the auto punctuation checker. And then summary or make table would be really nice for like really large documents

but it doesn't seem to want to work on some of my huge documents that would be nice to summarize

or make into a table. So unfortunately, even as basically a professional writer at this point, I haven't gotten much

use out of writing tools at all. So, notification summaries. This one, to me, personally, I have found

almost useless. Basically, it does exactly what it sounds like it does. When it's enabled, it summarizes

your notifications from each app. So if you get a long message from someone or several notifications

in a row from a single app, it will do its best to condense that all into a single message to help you

kind of get the gist quickly. So no matter how long or how short the messages are, whether it's just a text

or maybe a group chat has absolutely blown up and you missed 100 messages, it's going to try to summarize all that

into one or two lines. The thing is, once I enable it and started using it

it basically seems like the notifications that I'm getting are almost never benefited from being summarized or shortened

Like I've never gotten four text messages that are perfectly summarized into a single one

And I'm sure it's possible. There are going to be some instances where it works for people, but it's not just me

I've seen lots of examples online. And there's plenty of memes, too, of Apple's notification summaries doing some sometimes hilarious work, some brutal stuff

So it works, and I guess it's good for a laugh once in a while. But yeah, this is a feature I straight up turned off

Then gen moji. So, okay, believe it or not, there was some hype for this one

And once again, it's basically exactly what it sounds like. It's letting you generate any emoji using AI, anything you want

So let say I in messages and I want to react to some message with a very specific emoji that doesn exist You would describe an emoji so you write your text and then hit create a new emoji

give it about three seconds again, and it will use generative AI to create that image for you

That's fun, I guess. And yes, it will sometimes refuse to make what you ask of it if you ask for something like crazy or graphic

although it seems to have no problem making a potato with a gun. So that's an emoji reaction you can send

Sick. very specific use case. There's no doubt some people will have fun with it. I just think I'm not in the

target demographic to use this sort of thing all the time. So again, over my head, cool, it exists

but that's it. So then image playground is another maybe kind of weird one. This is almost the

same tool, but sort of standalone. This is a playground to generate images in a cartoon style

of whatever you want. So you open the playground's app and again, just describe the image you

want in text. Anything, really. But before you type anything, there are also a number of these

buttons down here, and they're kind of just inspiration suggestions for things or people to include

in the image. So yes, you can choose any of the people that your phone recognizes from your photos

app, and that'll be the starting point for the image, and then add some themes or accessories or

background or props or whatever on top of it. So here's me with a hard hat on at a disco

and it generates it again in a few seconds on device. Always cartoon style, never photorealistic

and it can give you a few options to choose from, and once you hit done, you can copy and paste that image wherever you want

Google and a few others have this on their devices too, just sort of a playground to make some artificially generated images

Again, it's of debatable usefulness. Of course, it makes sense that it won't do photorealistic images

because that would open up a whole can of worms, but it's even supposed to not do some things that could potentially be offensive

Again, like if you ask it for a gun, it typically refuses. But I found if you add a few more variables like a chef hat and some fireworks to something

then it will be a little more likely to actually pull through for you. So, yeah, good thing it says it's in beta and may create unexpected results

This is yet another app that they've added to my phone that I predict

that I will probably never use again after making this video. So then, priority notifications

So, okay, now this is one that I think had some promise, or at least I'm in the target demographic for it

because as an iPhone and Android user, you start to notice that Apple's weakness has, for a long time

been notification management. If it was just kind of had a fire hose of notifications coming in all the time

So priority notifications surfaces certain notifications above the rest when you're in a focus mode that reduces notifications

But this should also work in the mail app to put AI identified

high priority messages up at the top, plus some other categories. So if you use the default mail app, which I don't, but a lot of people do, then this could be helpful

something Gmail has had for many years. And the reduced notifications mode also specifically tries to do a good job of only letting important notifications through, but keeping the rest quiet

So then the Photos app. Yes, we all hate the new Photos app, everyone

You do, I do, everyone you know hates it. We're all on the same page. It's terrible

But Apple has added exactly one AI feature to the photos app in an age where lots of companies are comfortable adding a ton of AI to their photos apps, dozens of things

But they've decided, all right, yeah, we can do the background object removal thing

We can do that. So basically the same thing as Google's magic eraser tool. Let's say you've got a picture with a subject in the front and you just want to remove that annoying thing in the background

You hit the edit button and then on the right side you hit the cleanup tool. And a lot of times it will automatically highlight in this sort of rainbow glow

the thing that it auto detects that you want to remove. But if it doesn't, you can just tap or circle whatever you want, and it takes a few seconds

and then it just gets rid of it and uses generative fill to fill in the background

And of course, some scenes work better than others. It's kind of the same deal as Magic Eraser or Photoshop

Typically patterns or repeating backgrounds will give you the best results. I'm going to say I actually think this one works better than Google's

It's better at getting a good outline of the photo bomber or the background object in a single

gesture, which is nice. It's really smart. So to me, this is also one of the more useful features

Recording summaries. So okay this one had promise but then was kind of confusing to me because when I saw it on the list I was like oh this I would have loved this as a student This is amazing Just one place where you can record things transcribe them and then summarize them and keep them for later

That sounds amazing. But this is not built into the default voice memos app at all

So if you're on a phone call, you can turn on call recording. You hit that little button down there

It'll take a second. It'll warn the person that you're on the phone with with a little message

This call will be recorded. And then from there, it'll record everything that gets said and transcribe it

And the transcriptions are amazing. It identifies each speaker. It is accurate

I love this part. But then, if you care about the summary part, this is where it starts to get weird again

Because you go into the notes app. This is where it's saving everything. And it shows up as a new note

And the preview actually summarizes it right here pretty well. But then when you click in, there is a whole transcript

Great. and then there's another summary button up here at the top

You hit that, and there's a different summary. And this one's a little worse

The first one back in the preview actually picked up and included that I said Ridge Wallet

The second one didn't get that at all, but it did get Best Buy. Interesting

But Apple, why don't you bring this to the voice memos app? I want to be able to sit this down in a lecture or a meeting

and have it record things so I can summarize them later. That's like the main place I figured this would be useful

but it's not there, so please. Please. The only way to initiate this right now is actually to go through the Notes app, to create

a new note, and then attach, and then create a new recording, and then record your audio into there

But it just feels like it could be one step easier. So okay, visual intelligence

So these last two are kind of the big ones. Visual intelligence is only available on the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, and you get to it by long

pressing that button on the side of those new phones, which opens it up

It's that camera control button. And when you open it up, you get a full screen viewfinder with three buttons, a shutter in the

middle, then ask on the left, and search on the right. So if you point this at any object or a subject and you hit ask, that lets you ask chat

GPT anything about what it sees. And if you hit search, then it's basically just reverse Google image searching, whatever

it sees. So chat GPT or Google. So if you hit the shutter button, it snaps a photo and then continues to give you those two

items or a pop-up menu where you can again either search or ask. Again, pretty repetitive

if you ask me, but okay, while this is a very pretty UI and it works pretty quickly, it also isn't

anything, you know, particularly new that we haven't seen before. Like I was just watching my Galaxy

S8 review from back in 2017 where I do a demo of the exact same thing. I take a picture of something

in front of me. It looks it up with Bixby AI and it could tell you if it was a landmark or a product

that you could shop for. This is going to be more capable. Obviously, chat GPT has a lot more

capabilities and maybe even a little bit more trust these days than Bixby had back then. And it's

certainly more well integrated. But yeah, so it's not something mind-blowing or groundbreakingly new

but it is ideally more accurate and more capable than before. Maybe they're going to continue to

build on top of this in the future. But then there is chat GPT integration, the sort of last but

not least new thing. That Siri works with ChatGPT. I think a lot of people thought there was a lot more

to Siri like right off the back because it has this new animation and you see the new Siri animation

so you think it's the new Siri, but most of the new Siri stuff isn't here yet. But the chat

GPT stuff is. So if you ever make a request or ask a question that's out of the normal scope of

Siri, maybe ask for a recipe or you ask for it to make a trip itinerary or something big

then it recognizes it and it can prompt you if you want to ask chat GPT instead

And if you confirm, then it pulls from chat GPT to respond

This is all free. You don't need an account for this. Apple has promised all sorts of masking so your data is not used for training models

OpenAI doesn't get to collect any of this information about you through the requests

But you can also sign into your chat GPT account if you want to keep a history of your queries

or use higher-end models or even go over the daily limit of your free. free queries. There's even actually a button to upgrade to chat GPT Plus built into iOS now

so it's pretty well considered. So yeah, the new Siri animation might be fooling some people

but really it's other than being able to type to Siri more easily, there's really not a whole lot actually new yet with Siri But that brings me to the rest of the things that aren here yet still that are coming soon with software updates That list is right here There are more Apple intelligence

features that are in the works coming soon. And honestly, Siri is the main one I'm interested in

because it's supposed to be able to take in-app actions. It should be able to reach into apps

and take action inside of them, which I think could be awesome. I think developers could all

update their apps to work really well with it, and it could be really useful. It could differentiate

Siri to actually make it useful again. But yeah, that's still coming. But yeah, then from there

my take is the rest of the AI stuff really not super amazing or compelling to me, just to be real

Like the writing tools, that seems like a nice safe use of generative AI. That's the thing they're

sort of talking about the most, but I don't even find myself needing to rewrite things that often

And like I said, I'm not in the target demographic to use the image playgrounds all that much

or gen mojis all the time. The visual intelligence is definitely super useful like three or four times a year for me

like when some interesting plant or dog or whatever is in front of me and I want to just

figure out what it is. But that's actually funny. You remember the clip from the Apple keynote of that person who walks up to a dog

And instead of asking the person walking the dog, what kind of dog it is, they just go

hey, can I take a picture of your dog? And then they ask the phone what kind of dog it is instead of just asking the person

And that to me is the perfect encapsulation of so many of these Apple intelligence features

You could use them, and they might work really well, but should you

Should you? Like, you can ask for a more friendly version of this letter to send to your friend

Or you could try to write it in a friendly way in the first place

Like, you can ask ChatchipT to plan a whole trip for you with an itinerary and everything

And honestly, it's really impressive when it works. but are you actually going to just go in blind and just follow the AI generated itinerary

If you even like packing, like I know there's two types of people when packing, maybe some people will just follow the AI generated prompt

But I feel like I'm in the type that kind of wants a little bit more than that, I think

Luckily, no matter what I'm packing, it always fits in my Ridge travel gear

So shout out to Ridge for sponsoring this portion of the video. Specifically, I helped design the new commuter bag for Ridge

And actually I've been deliating this creation for the past couple months. We got it some really good water bottle holders on the sides now

And I also added a tablet sleeve in the back. So if you've got a tablet and a laptop, they both have their own padded slot

And then I double down when I'm flying because I also have the Ridge Carry On, which is basically perfect

It's weatherproof. It's rugged. It's got, you know, these aluminum corner protectors

It also has the 360 spinning wheels. They're super smooth. Of course, it has a slot for a tracker in case it's ever separated from you

it's incredibly lightweight. It's the go-to. And you already know that they work perfectly together

like a little ecosystem to create a perfect little travel combo. So shout out to Ridge

for sponsoring this portion of the video and for letting me design some of these products

and some more that are upcoming, so we'll have to stay tuned for those

But if you want to pick up both the carry-on and the backpack, you can get them together at ridge.com slash MKBHD

and get 30% off. And they also have their Black Friday still going on right now. But yeah, I think Apple is going to

build on and sort of iterate on hopefully all of these features

Like we have this sort of standard set that we're expecting from them now and this is the worst they'll ever be

that will only get better from here. But it is pretty crazy to see how much emphasis

is in all of the advertising and all the talk about the newest devices on Apple.com

as if Apple Intelligence is this massive, game-changing, groundbreaking new thing. You know, there are parts of it that are really good

I think the background eraser tool in photos is probably the best we've seen

It's better than Google's. It's really impressive. I think the visual intelligence stuff

has potential to be really good, but honestly, the best thing I think we've gotten

from Apple Intelligence, because all this stuff is running on device, is bumping up the base memory in everything

There's more RAM in every iPhone now, and the base memory on every Mac is 16 gigs now

which made the base Mac Mini an incredible deal. So shout out to Apple Intelligence for that

Either way, hopefully a lot more coming. Thanks for watching. get you guys the next one

Peace