The iPhone 15 Pro phones are shown during an announcement of new products on the Apple campus in … [+]
Updated July 31 with details of the iOS 18.1 beta rollout.
Apple is planning to delay the launch of its artificial intelligence features, which are now expected to land after the iPhone 16 and iOS 18 announcements in September.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is concerned about the stability of Apple Intelligence features and needs more time to iron out issues. Apple’s AI tools are expected to start landing on iPhones running iOS 18.1 by October, a few weeks after the iPhone 16 launch.
Before that, Apple plans to give developers early builds of iOS 18.1 and iPad OS 18.1 to test out features and fix bugs, which could happen as early as this week.
That means the very first iPhone 16 buyers could be without some of Apple’s latest AI features that it announced at WWDC last month, including Rewrite, Image Playground, Genmoji, audio transcription, webpage summaries and a revamped Siri.
Apple is playing catch up on mobile AI development against Samsung, which has already rolled out its Galaxy AI suite of features to millions of current and older Galaxy phones. The Korean company’s upcoming update, One UI 6.1.1, will reportedly add even more camera-based AI tools to handsets released up to two years ago.
Google, too, is planning to double down on Gemini features for the Pixel 9 that will land next month. A recent leak revealed that Gemini’s ability to analyze pictures and answer questions, make suggestions, or perform actions, will be baked into the device’s operating system. Read my story on that here.
As Bloomberg points out, there is a lot to play for here. Despite Apple’s popularity amongst smartphone buyers, a fumbled introduction of its next-generation technology could live long in the memory of users. Apple AI will be the first proper introduction to generative AI for many iPhone users and the company will want to avoid another Apple Maps mess.
Outside of releases, one of the interesting battles between Apple, Google and Samsung is how much these tools will cost consumers. Apple told me that “they’re free” when I quizzed the company on possibly charging for AI tools now, or in the future.
Google has a premium AI tier tied to its Google One cloud storage subscription service, but it has long provided AI tools to its Pixel phones at no extra cost. Samsung’s Galaxy AI toolset is currently free, but the company has repeatedly stated that’s only the case until 2025, with no further explanation of what happens after then. If Apple has no plans to charge for its AI tools then it could steal a march on the competition, despite turning up late to the party.
Update July 31st: The iOS 18.1 beta is now available to early testers and we can see how Apple is planning to deploy its AI tools on iPhones in the near future. According to 9To5Mac, Safari will benefit from Apple Intelligence powered summaries of web articles via Reader mode.
On iPhone, the summaries will appear at the top of the article, whereas on iPad they will surface in a sidebar next to the story. The summaries have to be requested by the user, they don’t not generate automatically.
Elsewhere, Siri has undergone some changes too. It now understands contextual questions. For example, asking Siri to set a five minute timer can be followed up with ‘actually change it to three minutes,’ as 9To5Mac explains. The full context of your request doesn’t have to be included in every command. This is a feature that Gemini and ChatGPT have long boasted.
Interestingly, Siri can also answer complex questions related to Apple products. The company trained the chatbot on a model that included lots of Apple support documentation, so you in theory this should make it easier to navigate around devices, and solve potential issues.