Yesterday, Apple introduced new products such as a new iMac and updated versions of accessories (keyboard, trackpad) to support USB-C instead of Lightning, but the biggest introduction was the release of iOS 18.1. Although only a ".1" update in terms of numbers, this is a major update because it is the beginning of Apple Intelligence on the iPhone, iPad, and more—assuming that you have a new device that is ready for Apple Intelligence.
Apple plans to introduce Apple Intelligence features over time, and features that are ready today are not as impressive and useful as many that are coming in the future. Even so, there are some big changes. For a more comprehensive overview of everything that is now available in Apple Intelligence, I recommend the following articles:
Note that to use Apple Intelligence, not only do you need to download iOS 18.1 but you also need to open the Settings app, tap Apple Intelligence & Siri, and then ask to join the waitlist to get access to this beta software. For me, permission was granted in about an hour.
In this post, I'm just going to touch on a few Apple Intelligence features that I tried out yesterday.
Siri
The look of Siri is all new. Utter those famous words "Hey Siri" and your iPhone screen becomes surrounded by a wave of color and the screen ripples. For now, I think that the effect is pretty cool, but I wonder if it will become stale over time.
Siri is also a little bit smarter than before. If you stumble over your words, Siri is more forgiving. You can ask limited follow-up questions. You can use your iPhone while you are talking to Siri. And you can ask Siri questions about how to use certain features of the iPhone (or other device you are using). It is sort of like having an Apple Genius from the Apple Store built-in to SIri.
I'd love to see even more improvements in Siri, but this is a good start.
Photos improvements
The major new addition to the Photos app is the ability to remove unwanted items from photos. This is a feature that third-party apps on the iPhone and iPad have had for years, and of course, it has also existed in computer software like Photoshop for a long time. But it is useful to have a great version of this feature built-in to the Photos app. Here are two quick examples.
First, I recently scanned an old picture of me when I was a baby, but it had lots of dust and scratches on it, plus parts of the picture had started to decay and change colors. So I decided to see what I could do with those problems in the new Photos app. Here is the original scan (tap to see larger), which is very much what the actual photo looks like:
I simply zoomed in and circled every dot or every area of the picture that I wanted to fix using the new Clean Up feature. Most of the time, Photos instantly did what I wanted. Sometimes, the effect wasn't as good, so I would undo, adjust the selection, and then try again. It didn't take long to have a version of the picture that removed everything that I wanted:
Then I adjusted the colors, and the final result—while not nearly as good as a modern picture—was much better than what I started out with.
This feature is also useful for removing unwanted objects in photos. For example, here is a picture that I took of the beach during a vacation:
But what would it look like if I removed all of those pesky people from the sand who were interfering with my view? And while were are at it, how about losing the big boxes that hold rental beach chairs. Easy peasy:
Modifications like this obviously have some ethical implications, depending on what you are doing with the photo. But if I have a wonderful picture of my family that would look so much better if I removed that one guy in the background, I can do it and have no trouble sleeping at night.
There are other Apple intelligence changes in Photos that I look forward to trying, such as improved search capabilities and the ability to create a Memory Movie just by describing what to include, but I need to give Photos time to index all of my Photos before I can try that one out.
Proofreading
Even the best writer can use a good editor. Grammarly is a helpful product because it can often find mistakes in your writing and offer suggestions to improve your writing, and it does so virtually instantly and automatically without you needing to get another human involved. In Apple Intelligence, Apple has added a Proofreading feature that makes similar suggestions that may improve the quality of your text.
This sounds really useful. However, in the tests that I ran last night, I disagreed with perhaps 75% of the suggestions. Indeed, some of them made no sense to me at all. To be fair, I often disagree with Grammarly as well, but not nearly this much.
I like the idea of adding a built-in proofreader to Apple products. But it needs to work much better than it does now. I think that Apple released this feature before it was ready.
Summaries
Apple Intelligence loves to offer you the ability to create summaries. Have a long email string? Tap one button at the top in Mail to summarize all of the emails. Looking at an article on a webpage is Safari that seems rather long? Tap the button to use Reader View and then tap Summary. And in lots of other places, the iPhone and iPad in iOS 18.1 offer you the ability to create a summary.
Sometimes, this feature works, and when it does, it is neat. But in my limited tests so far, the accuracy of the summary seems rather hit-and-miss. Moreover, I'm not even sure how useful a summary is to me in most of these cases; I'm going to probably need to, or at least want to, read everything anyway.
Let's start at the very beginning
These initial tools are interesting, and in the case of the Photos app seem pretty helpful, but this is just the beginning. Some features are still half-baked, and some features like writing aids don't interest me very much. But I suppose that I wasn't all that useful when I was just a baby in the picture featured above, and I can certainly do much more now. Apple emphasizes that we will see even more Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.2 this December, and then we will see even more next year. Now that we have iOS 18.1, the age of Apple Intelligence is now upon us. Hopefully, as Apple has the time to work on more sophisticated features, it will develop into something that is really special.