Apple is being overly ambitious with Apple Intelligence, and it knows it

Apple is banking a lot on Apple Intelligence. It’s the main selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup, including the new iPhone 16e — in fact, it’s why all those devices use an A18 chip instead of a mixed set of processors. It’s also becoming a major feature of macOS and iPadOS, so there’s no turning back for the company, at least not without a lot of engineering work, not to mention backtracking on marketing.

Now that the dust has settled on Apple Intelligence’s launch, I think it’s time to admit that the company may be racing to do too much, too quickly, too late. Generative AI certainly has a place in the company’s platforms, but it’s important to tackle it in the right way.

The signs of a rushed product

Still incomplete, months later

Apple

There’s a philosophy that you should never buy a product for promised features, only what it can do today. That’s because companies sometimes delay those features or deliver them in a half-baked manner — if they arrive at all. One non-Apple example you could point to is Tesla, which has yet to deliver reliable Full Self-Driving (FSD), and recently scrapped the idea of an affordable “Model 2” EV.

Following that thinking, many people should have skipped the iPhone 16 at launch, since it came without any promised Apple Intelligence features. That wasn’t fixed until iOS 18.1 in October 2024, and even then, we only got small parts, like notification summaries and Writing Tools. iOS 18.2 continued the rollout with features like ChatGPT integration, but after 18.3, we’re still waiting on major items — above all an upgraded version of Siri with contextual awareness and more elaborate in-app commands. Those were originally expected in iOS 18.4, but the latest rumors suggest we might have to wait for 18.5 in May.

By the time all the major Apple Intelligence features are out the door, we’ll have been waiting over half a year. Given that Apple actually warned us about a staggered launch, it’s obvious that the company was trying to rush things out the door to avoid appearing behind the times, with Google’s Gemini having launched in late 2023 and ChatGPT releasing even earlier.

All this would be fine if Apple Intelligence was amazing and indispensable, but it’s not. Notification summaries can be useful, but are too often botched to the point that Apple actually disabled them for news alerts to avoid confusion. Many people write well enough to skip Writing Tools, and I can’t think of a single person I know that uses things like Genmoji or the Image Playground app. The most I use Image Playground for is avatar pictures or entertaining my seven-year-old son.

I appreciate features like Clean Up and Visual Intelligence, but mostly because they can help me out in a jam, like if I want to identify a product model or salvage a personal photo. They’re not things I need daily, and it seems to me that Apple prioritized them because they were easier to implement than the upcoming Siri overhaul.

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Is this really fair to Apple?

Or, the state of the AI industry

Apple is late to the party, struggling to make up for lost time, and in that sense it does deserve criticism. ChatGPT premiered in November 2022, and prior to that, people had been complaining about Siri for years. The assistant was quickly outclassed by Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, never mind Gemini, left to stagnate as Apple got more excited about things like augmented reality or its (now abandoned) Apple Car project.

I think there’s a more fundamental issue at play, however, and that’s the excessive hype over generative AI as a whole. The tech assimilates data it doesn’t understand, so every AI model tends to make mistakes — or “hallucinate,” to use the industry euphemism. There’s no sign of the hallucination problem being solved anytime soon, so it’s no wonder that Apple has been taking a long time to develop something that halfway matches its reputation for quality and privacy.

Gemini and ChatGPT haven’t exactly been sterling counterpoints. While they’re capable of things Apple Intelligence may not touch for a while, if ever, they’re still prone to hallucinations, and continue to have conspicuous gaps of their own, such as smart home control. You can technically use Gemini to control a Google Home setup, but that support is only now exiting beta, and it still can’t do things like create automations or broadcast messages. It’s not much better than Siri. If it can’t manage a smart home, I’m certainly not going to trust Gemini to plan an international vacation or write a research paper.

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The outlook for the next year

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care

Apple Intelligence is in a critical phase right now. While it’s too late for Apple to land a perfect first impression, it still has to get things “right” enough to persuade consumers, and everything it’s introducing today will lay the groundwork for years to come. Visual Intelligence might not be a huge selling point for an iPhone 16, but it’s going to be fundamental to Apple’s AR products when they expand beyond the Vision Pro.

Similarly, Image Playground might be weak, but Apple has the money and resources to make it competitive with Midjourney someday. One day I might look back and wonder how Apple ever got along without generative AI.

It’s mostly a question of Apple executives making smart decisions that prioritize having a reliable product and not just something that can be shoved out the door. At the moment, it feels like Apple is trying to have its cake and eat it too — but if it can stabilize development and focus on what people want to use, I could see Apple Intelligence becoming the must-have feature Apple was promising, perhaps by the time iOS 19 rolls around — or at least, iOS 20.

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