What Is Apple Intelligence? ExtremeTech Explains
Apple Intelligence is a multimodal artificial intelligence system from Apple, the manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks.
By now, you're probably familiar with the basic features of a multimodal generative AI, like ChatGPT , Copilot, or Gemini. In case you aren't, generative AI can parse, edit, and create images, audio, video, and blocks of text, and even hold collaborative (if a little sycophantic) conversations with the user to refine its process. Apple Intelligence is a streamlined version of AI heavyweights like ChatGPT, with on-device processing for an assortment of AI-powered tools.
Apple introduced its eponymous AI at WWDC 2024, in tandem with (and as a feature of) iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.
Features and Functionality
Apple Intelligence employs both local and cloud-based AI models, which run on servers that are reported to use mostly Apple silicon. Apple announced at WWDC 2025 that its own cloud models will also be available to developers as part of its Foundation Models API. In addition, Apple struck a deal with OpenAI to use ChatGPT for certain AI tasks that don't require access to sensitive on-device data, such as your personal photos, calendar, email, and so on.
Credit: Apple
Here's a brief rundown of the features included with Apple Intelligence:
Writing Tools
iOS 18 comes with a suite of AI writing tools designed to refine and polish your work. These utilities offer many of the same copyediting and tone features as Grammarly's AI, and according to Apple, it's all done on-device. The LLM-powered toolset can generate summaries, tables, and lists from an online article or a block of text.
Image Playground
Image Playground, Apple's new AI image generation tool, allows the user to take a text prompt, an image, or even a rough sketch done with an Apple Pencil and turn it into a full-featured, AI-generated image. This, too, is done on-device.
You're also able to access Image Playground via the Notes app with the Apple Pencil palette, without having to exit Notes to manually open it.
Credit: Apple
Emoji fans may be pleased to hear that Apple Intelligence includes a way to make "Genmojis," custom emojis that resemble the people in your photos, using a text-to-image model.
Siri Overhaul
Apple's virtual assistant, Siri, got an updated GUI, improved natural-language parsing capabilities, and new text and gestural options for a variety of user interactions.
Apple Intelligence will also reportedly see under-the-hood improvements in forthcoming updates, relative to the first-generation versions in iOS 18. Apple executives have talked about underlying architectural improvements that will allow it to finally roll out a new version of Siri, for example, and notification summaries should also benefit. (When contacted by Ars for comment, Apple declined to share more specific information about exactly what has been changed or improved.)
Notifications
Apple's July update asks users to enable or disable three broad categories of app notifications: "News & Entertainment" apps, "Communication & Social," and a catchall category for everything else. To show you which apps you'll be muting or allowing with each category, the tool will attempt to identify relevant apps you currently have installed on your device.
Apple still describes its AI notification summaries as being in beta, for reasons that quickly become clear when you engage with the tool. Perhaps the most obvious difference between versions is a prominent new disclaimer that pops up when you enable summaries for News & Entertainment, pointing out that trying to distill the whole story into a single sentence "may change the meaning of the original headlines." AI notification summaries also get a little note at the bottom of the bubble, a reminder that the notifications were produced by AI and may contain errors.
Before this update , Apple had disabled news notification summaries as part of the January iOS 18.3 update . Inaccurate, misleading, or just plain botched AI summaries of news headlines had begun to circulate on social media, prompting a wave of complaints from customers and media outlets. One widely criticized AI summary asserted that Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died by suicide (which hadn't occurred).
Photos and Mail
Other core iPhone apps are scheduled for a facelift as Apple adds AI parsing tools with a chatbot veneer.
The Mail app is getting a variation of the Notification Summaries treatment, with an in-app feature called Priority Messages. Emails that are both important and urgent—boarding passes, same-day event invites, and the like—will float to the top with AI-generated summaries of their contents.
In the Photos app, you'll be able to create custom movies of the memorable moments you've captured by selecting some of your photos, videos, and music. The app will also reportedly be able to pick out images or video clips from a text prompt, description, or keyword, and even identify specific moments within a video clip.
How to Access Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence is available for free on compatible devices, including (as of July 2025) iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, iPhone 16 models, and later; any iPad with an A17 Pro or M1 processor or newer; Macs with M1 or later; and the Apple Vision Pro. You'll also need 7 GB of storage, so make sure you back up your photos and such if you need to clear out space on your device.
If you've updated to iOS 18.1 or macOS Sequoia 15.1, Apple Intelligence and some of its lower-level tools will be included in beta with the update and will download in the background after the update is complete. You may need to go into your device's settings to enable features that are already present. (Apple Intelligence will be available in the EU starting with iOS 18.4.)
Image Playground is accessible through the Messages app, but it can also be found as a standalone app in the App Store .
Limitations and Concerns
Apple's initial unveiling of Apple Intelligence was met with a warm enough reception, although the company was already perceived as being late to the party—but it didn't take long for cracks to appear in the facade. Apple announced its overall roadmap for generative AI on June 10, 2024. By the end of July, there were already widespread concerns that Apple Intelligence might not be ready for iOS 18.
Historically, Apple is known not for moving first, but for moving best . The company's much-vaunted reputation for building software and hardware that "just works" rests on the idea that when it does enter a market, it does so with enough panache to justify a substantial price premium. How true you personally feel this is will depend on your overall opinion of Apple products, but it's a substantial part of the company's carefully cultivated mystique.
After decades of success with products like the iPod, iPhone, and Mac, investors and end-users felt confident that Apple would pull off something similar with Apple Intelligence. The fact that it hasn't says as much about the overall state of AI in 2025 as it does about Apple itself. Media reports have questioned the feasibility of the company's ambitious rollout plans.
Apple did manage to ship some of its AI features by October, roughly a month after iOS 18, but the Cupertino company ran into the same problem that has bedeviled Microsoft through its many improvements to Copilot . None of the AI experiences it shipped through late 2024 felt necessary or, in some cases, like any kind of improvement. Things took a further turn for the worse in early 2025, when the hullabaloo over Apple's News Summary feature began.
And then things got bad .
Siri-ous Errors
In early March, Apple admitted that the AI upgrades it had prominently advertised for Siri in iOS 18 would not, in fact, ship for that OS at all. The admission highlighted a significant difference between Apple and other tech companies in Silicon Valley: While the likes of Intel, AMD, and Microsoft are fairly comfortable marketing their vision of what your computer will be able to do in the future, Apple has typically avoided this approach, announcing products only when they are ready. With AI, Cupertino got out over its skis and advertised a full-scale Siri overhaul that its product team couldn't deliver in an appropriate window of time.
There's been a lot of reporting on what, exactly, went wrong for Siri, with blame typically falling on a combination of senior leadership and the company's reluctance to fully pursue AI at the cost of accuracy, privacy, or factually correct responses. Whether that's a positive or a negative may come down to your opinions on pizza glue and/or MechaHitler , but it contributed to a larger narrative that Apple had fallen behind in the AI race. After Apple's demo in March, Silicon Valley analyst and Apple expert John Gruber called the company out onto the mat for using the demo to advertise based on promised features that weren't finished, which he characterized as borderline vaporware:
My deeply misguided mental framework for "Apple Intelligence" last year at WWDC was something like this: Some of these features are further along than others, and Apple is showing us those features in action first, and they will surely be the features that ship first over the course of the next year. The other features must be coming to demonstratable status soon. But the mental framework I should have used was more like this: Some of these features are merely table stakes for generative AI in 2024, but others are ambitious, groundbreaking, and, given their access to personal data, potentially dangerous. Apple is only showing us the table-stakes features, and isn't demonstrating any of the ambitious, groundbreaking, risky features.
Apple's head of AI development, John Giannandrea, was ousted from his position as the head of Siri development. Siri's difficulty answering simple queries was no secret—it's why I don't use the feature personally—but Apple's decision to pull down Bella Ramsey's TV spot, showing the actor using AI to quickly recall the name of someone they had met previously, cast into sharp relief that the company was nowhere near delivering on its promises.
So, where does all of this leave Apple? Stuck somewhere between the profound shift in corporate culture required to shamelessly embrace the AI-slop era and the reality that most of its customers aren't particularly interested in bad AI features in the first place. It's never been more important for Apple to maintain its historic dedication to quality—and the company has never been under more pressure to ignore its own heritage in favor of six-fingered images and rewritten AI summaries that say the opposite of what the article does.
"Think different," in this case, is a shorthand way of saying, "Could we have one manufacturer who doesn't go all-in for stochastic parrots?" Perhaps the least clear aspect of the situation is whether Apple has been cowed by its much-discussed failures, or if someone at the company is willing to stand up for the end-user experience.
