If you haven’t heard of Apple Intelligence, well, where have you been hiding? The next big thing for the iPhone (and iPad and Mac) is on its way and will change how you use your device. When it comes to the iPhone, it will work on all the new releases, that is the iPhone 16 series, plus iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Here’s when it’s coming: Monday, Oct. 28.
Apple Intelligence is here—almost.
That’s according to to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter, which claims that the very last Monday in October is the date to put in our calendars.
Well, that’s about three weeks away. That will disappoint some who might have hoped that the promise of an October debut for the first of Apple’s widely touted AI features might come sooner in the month.
But eyebrows were raised when a beta release expected in the last few days didn’t appear. Even so, at that stage, the thought was that we would see the new software in mid-October.
So, what’s changed? Gurman says, “I can provide a little more detail on when in the month it’s supposed to arrive: Monday, Oct. 28. That means new iPhone buyers will have to wait a few more weeks to get the most hyped component of their devices. I’m told that Apple is taking its time with the rollout to ensure that major bugs are eliminated and it can support all the new traffic on its AI cloud servers.”
When it comes, it won’t be the whole shebang. Features like writing improvement help, summaries of notifications, email chains and more will be first, but for U.S. English users only. This means your device settings must have U.S. English as the language and Siri must be set to U.S. English as well. Apple dropped the restriction that insisted your region be set to U.S. as well, not least because that interfered with unit measurement settings.
Other English versions, such as New Zealand, Australia and (hooray) U.K. English, will come in December. Then more features will arrive, such as integration with ChatGPT and a way to create bespoke emoji (Apple calls these Genmoji). New Siri upgrades will follow in the Spring.
The countdown is on.