Apple announced This is the next era for Apple. Your experience with your iPhone, Mac, and iPad will be guided and saturated with artificial intelligence. Apple is calling it Apple Intelligence, of course. Coming later this year. Yes, we’ll have another “AI” to deal with.
You may have already heard plenty about how it can make Siri smarter, rewrite emails and essays, create never-before-seen emojis, and turn rough sketches into bland AI art.
It really is One It’s a vision of the future, and while it’s nothing groundbreaking, thanks to the usual Apple hype, it might just be one of the most usable, intuitive, and useful implementations of generative AI we’ve seen yet.
But the pressing factor for most of us is the lack of invitations, with the iPhone being the most affected of Apple’s devices.
To use Apple Intelligence, you need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max. The regular iPhone 15 won’t suffice, meaning that any mobile less than a year old is outdated, at least in this particular sense. All Mac users need is an Apple Silicon computer, that is, one released in 2020 or later.
No-go areas
A more cynical view is that these exclusion periods relate to the average upgrade cycles for mobile phones and laptops. Someone who upgrades their mobile phone every year might be considered normal. Someone who buys a new laptop every year is probably stupid, prone to theft, or just plain clumsy.
The reality is more complicated: the calculations required for at least some parts of Apple Intelligence are quite different from the tasks of your average iPhone or Mac.
And so far, the way we’ve all become accustomed to this format has made all of this confusing to the average generative AI or chatbot layman: when you use ChatGPT, Midjourney, or even Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature, your computer does very little actual work.
This happens on a remote cloud server, which performs the necessary calculations and sends the final result back to your smartphone or laptop. In this sense, generative AI so far is similar to digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. Generative AI can do amazing things, but little or nothing actually happens on the device where the AI will be used.
Apple Intelligence will attempt to change that, at least in part.
Apple’s familiar privacy strategy
Why? “You don’t need every detail of your life stored in someone’s AI cloud and analyzed,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said when announcing the new features.
“The foundation of our Personal Intelligence System is on-device processing — deeply integrated into your iPhone, iPad, Mac and across our apps — so it can know your personal data without collecting it.”
