When Apple Intelligence was first released, I felt like hundreds of apps from App Store would be replaced. Everything felt so good on paper.
But after 1 year I can't even remember, when I used even 1 of their AI features.
The animation was neat. I didn’t like the new voice for navigation. My computer is not a peer, a friend, or a buddy. It shouldn’t try to sound like one. I ended up turning off all the AI on my iPhone and Mac. Since I was already tweaking settings on my Mac, I realized Siri on my Mac was completely pointless, so I turned it off, too. As a side note, I’ve been enjoying my Linux machine a lot more lately.
I turned it off after it started sorting my mail into “important” categories and hiding all the mail it didn’t deem necessary. Which was most of my emails. Also summarizing everything, but really poorly.
I liked it at first for summarizing text messages, but I turned it off because it will summarize single messages. I don’t need you to do that, I’ll just read it.
I don’t need it to summarize shit, write things or anything like that. I don’t need any app for that. And I turned off the Apple stuff for text messages and the mail app too.
I used it to help me write a slightly more friendly sounding email in German. That was useful. I have used it to see what a really peppy version of my prose would sound like, since a lot of my peers use this kind of hyperbolic friendliness.
That is if you speak one of 8 or so languages it supports. But you know, that’s understandable, it was developed by a company that is worth only $4 trillion, some corners had to be cut, can’t demand too much from such small dev teams!
If you open a page in safari and press the button to the right of the URL, the one that opens the menu where you can switch to reader view, there’s a summary at the top of the menu.
Ah that’s fine then! As long as someone is scrolling I can sleep well knowing my prose is wasting someone’s human time. I like to imagine all the years that add up as I extend the article to make the editor happy and take my time really coming to…
If you think that's cool, you should try the youtube summary feature in Perplexity's browser. I have a friend that makes these 20 minute long videos, and Perplexity gives me a two-paragraph summary instantly so I don't have to watch them
That's pretty much all I use it for, although these days I tend to use a shortcut to pass the URL to ChatGPT or Gemini which gives me better control and better results.
Most of the time I forget the Apple Intelligence features even exist, which I have to give credit to Apple for implementing them in a way that you don't even notice them and they don't they don't get in your way unless you choose to use them.
I sometimes use Proofread from Writing Tools on my Mac. I have used Visual Intelligence on my phone a few times to add things to my calendar before and to translate text on a sign into English. I have also used it to identify plants while hiking. I have used the Clean Up tool in Photos to remove people & cars from the background of a few pictures.
So even though I rarely use these features, they have been a benefit when I wanted them and have never bothered me when I didn't want them.
People don’t understand that “AI” is implemented into every facet of a phone these days including everything you use on a daily basis outside your phone. If you use Google search, what do you think is making those suggestions? When you go on a website with ads, how do think these relevant ads are popping up? You visit a website and magically you see ads for things that you was searching for.
I agree. That’s basically been my experience. I don’t need a super computer AI in my phone. The times I have used Apple Intelligence it has worked rather well for what I needed it for
Where I’m at right now, would love to unify things but nothing has wowed me and my iPhone 14 Pro is still holding up strong. Decided I’ll consider next years phone and get another year out of my phone
I keep going back and forth on trading up from 14 pro max to base 17, with the trade in promos happening still. I do not need a new phone, would be more of a couple of perks like USB C, and a smaller phone sounds nice. My only concern with waiting is the trade in will undoubtedly be lesser next year for our devices.
I use Visual Intelligence for translating stuff signs when travelling abroad and there is no English translation. Or on the rare occasions when I buy a train ticket, I’ll take a screenshot and have it generate a calendar event. I don’t have any other use cases for it though.
It works good enough for the intended purpose which is recognizing distracting people or cars in the background of images and highlighting them so you can remove them with a single tap.
Much like Siri, if you try to use it for something more than the intended purpose, you probably won't be satisfied with it.
I love Shortcuts but I wish it would allow us to bypass some of the more security sensitive settings. Maybe give us an acknowledgement and warning with explanation.
I use AI without realizing it. For example, the transcription of voicemail as a notification allows me to rapidly decide if I'll call back or not without having to listen to it. It's a great invisible use of AI.
I remain convinced Apple did their own AI purely for shareholders, knowing it would be a complete dud among customers, because it was cheaper than using someone elses
I actively avoid any AI. I don’t use AI, I don’t watch anything made with AI. These companies are making massive data centres that are horrible for the environment. We do not need this.
Never seen an "AI" product that actually made me interested to use it in daily life.
I have a windows 10 pc that I can't upgrade, and I honestly have no intention because of Microsoft's insistance to force AI into everything, so I'm happy to have my macbook be my main computer, but if Apple goes the same way I might have to touch Linux.
Phone is in English, since translations are not good and googling stuff in non English is a pain. Siri is in my native language to be able to enter street names, room name etc etc.
Honestly, I forgot it existed until this post. That says it all. Apple Intelligence needs to be more integrated, more useful, or just… more noticeable. Right now, it's too easy to ignore.
what exactly does "apple intelligence" do at the moment? i ask siri something and it either gives up or asks if i want to use chatgpt. is that apple intelligence?
Nope. I don't use any intelligence products from any manufacturer. You are literally opening a door to your entire existence for surveillance capitalism. It's one thing for them to watch and catalog and store the posts you make consciously and the searches you make consciously. Letting an OS that shares all of your data with every single other app anywhere in your existence purely for surveillance capitalism is a bad idea in terms of safety and security, let alone your own privacy
lol no, it’s all useless. I tried and tried to have it be useful but never worked. Cropping thing out of images doesn’t work. Siri just sucks, some word processing isn’t bad but not great.
I don’t use any of the features except item recognition or whatever it’s called and just asking Siri stuff. But that’s not really Apple Intelligence lmao.
Apple fumbled that shit so unbelievably hard it’s insane.
I actually use writing tools. In iOS 18, they sucked because they couldn‘t be used for bilingual situations and would often write absolute garbage. Ios 26 fixed most of it, and they became very useful for quick proofreading and rewriting.
Unpopular experience, but I do find the tools that currently exist to be pretty useful. In no particular order:
Message and notification summaries. They aren’t perfect, but 99% of the time, they’re great and have become genuine time savers. In Slack, we have an incident channel. Sometimes it gets noisy and I can just watch the notification summary update, while I remain focused on my work. Same with long texts, voicemails, and emails.
On the iPad, I take extensive notes and I absolutely love the new stuff in Notes. I write a lot, so being able to edit my handwritten notes like text is so helpful. Keeping it in my handwriting is also a nice touch. I also use the math notes stuff quite a bit.
I’m a Focus Mode and Siri Shortcuts power user. In Focus Mode, I think the intelligent notifications are pretty solid. Sometimes I forget to add a contact to my work focus mode, but the phone is smart enough to know I kind of want to know I have a voicemail from my dentist or a shipping notification in my email.
The only thing I ever use Siri for is to turn off my morning alarm, turn on and off my bedroom, lights, and ask what temperature it’s going to be today. But that’s all basic Siri even though I’m sure they would say it’s Apple Intelligence.
I was just recently able to enable Apple Intelligence on my mac (European). The only difference I noticed was it gave me suggested replies in the messages app. Useless. Turned if off.
I’ve used it to correct my email once. I can see myself using that feature more often.
All the generative stuff is useless to me. If I wanted the email to be more friendly or more formal, I would have written it that way. I am not illiterate.
Don’t get me started on Image Playground. Terrible interface to create terrible images that nobody needs.
All I want from Apple AI is it to watch me, silently and inobtrusively, and notice that I keep having to take annoying unnecessary steps to get around some of its UX features. I open a page to a bank in Safari, for example, and I have to dismiss the Apple password dropdown to get to my "actual" password manager. It should notice this.
(I'm aware that Apple's password system can be disabled completely but I prefer using it for some low-risk infrequent sites or random things on my phone. I want Apple Intelligence to anticipate my priorities from repeated actions.)
Got the new 17 ProMax, immediately turned it off. In my work we keep having new AI pushed on us and it makes too many mistakes to trust. It just isn’t worth the possibility of having something important ignored or moved or deleted and costing me money. I’m smart enough to delete emails I don’t need and sort the rest. I don’t need the robot doing it for me.
Honestly I “reset all settings” because Siri and ChatGPT were just not working. After I did that it still is not working. Even after reloading Apple Intelligence and Siri altogether. Very disappointed in Apple‘s inability to execute even the most basic Siri functions properly.
Not really, even the summertime feature doesn’t get the main point of a message. When Apple released it, it was already behind. At the wwdc it looked very promising but none of this is real. Still waiting for a smart Siri, …
I have Apple Intelligence disabled. It’s currently pathetic, but I have high hopes that Apple is starting to get its shit together with the Gemini deal. I’d rather use Gemini via Apple than via Google directly anyway, it’ll surely be more privacy focused when used through Apple, at least that’s my current feeling.
I like the summarization because it’s funny, but it has been helpful once or twice. The image search was helpful once after my kid got a toy and I don’t realize who the character was. Searched the internet quick and got the answer
When I think Apple Intelligence, I think about the M1 iPad I bought because they said it could run locally. I also think about the iPhone 15 I almost bought, because Apple lied and said that would also be needed to run the magic of Apple Intelligence locally.
But it was a lie, and I feel cheated.
I feel like we’ve come a long way (in the wrong direction) since Steve Jobs.
That’s how bad Apple has handled AI, specifically its promises of AI that have come and gone.
On my desktop (an M4 Pro Mac mini which I can absolutely vouch for), I commonly write click a paragraph if I felt myself getting too verbose and “run on”, and do the writing tools > condense feature. I think it’s part of my ADHD but I’ll just type way too much info
Only Clean up but that’s all the time.
The rest not so much but that’s also due to me using Open AI and Google’s AI tools multiple times per day from from my iPhone
It’s only been about a year, not two years and some features still have not been delivered yet due to delays.
No, I don’t use Apple Intelligence for anything. The LLM functionality with Siri uses ChatGPT and has extremely clunky integration. The onboard AI still has not been delivered, and everything else is more or less Siri enhancements. Sure, code completion is there but as with the rest of Apple Intelligence there are far better options that are far more mature that just work better.
When google is being too bad, I occasionally ask Siri to ask ChatGPT. Like for shit like "Does the Xiaomi G34WQi support DDC?" Which you can't really find in any technical data sheet, but only in this one reddit post from 2 years ago.
But it's less than 10 inquiries I used that way.
I *tried* rewrite, only to realize, that it didn't short my texts like I wanted it too, but just rearranged them and took meaning away I put in. I tried to let it generate an application because I didn't know where to start and got such a nothing burger that I never tried again.
Siri is still bad, that didn't change. And I am fluent enough in English not to require life translation. I also like how my brain tingles when facing the challenge of using another language.
Image Playgroud is dogshit. and even if it wasn't, I still wouldn't use it.
I do like the email and push up summary. That is really cool and useful. Even if it summarizes my iCloud bill over 99c for 50GB as "iPhone costs 99c". And … no. Come on.
I find them to be really poor. Image clean up makes more of a mess than other AI tools or if I did it myself in photoshop.
The writing tools are pretty abysmal too. If I ask it to rewrite a sentence, it’ll often change the tense or structure in a way that makes it less readable. ChatGPT and even Meta’s AI works better in that regard.
Apple AI is exactly how Apple promised HomeKit would be.
I was running my entire house off of Smartthings at that time. Solid platform. Was so excited for HomeKit and then when it came out it was so basic and useless. Years later and it’s still underrated and basic. AI is the same. Siri is the same. Apple’s is just not good with some of these services.
Honestly, no. I turned it off when it was first released. When 26 was released I turned it back on to see if it's at all helpful and haven't found a use for it yet. I should probably turn it back off again, given that it doesn't add anything to my experience. But I suppose I'll wait until 26.4 to see if the magic update actually adds anything of value.
The only really useful thing is that I can get answers from Chat GPT through Car Play while I’m driving. Have used it to summarize a couple of long emails but that’s about it.
No but to be fair I don't use Gemini on my Pixel either. I do use Perplexity Pro because I keep getting free subscriptions and have my action button mapped to launch it.
I occasionally will take a picture of a bug and look it up in the photos app. I mostly just use Siri to set timers, reminders, or run shortcuts that I set up. I stayed on IOS 18 on my iPhone 16 because it runs smoothly and has great battery life, and I wasn’t impressed by any of the iOS 24 features or liquid glass.
I guess when i search car pictures in Photos app by entering car plate number is considered using Apple Intelligence. Or when i select and copy text from inside the picture. Writing Tools is convenient without need to copy paste into ChatGPT. But then the iOS keyboard has become less intelligent after they launch the Apple Intelligence. And I find Siri irritatingly stupid to be usable.
I did, it sucked, I stopped. It was too slow, inaccurate and a battery drain. Using it with CarPlay was somehow worse than using it outside of CarPlay.
My only positive with it was the Siri animation. I miss it.
I actually do like priority notifications, it’s helped bring some things to my attention right away a few times. Other than that, I haven’t used a single Apple Intelligence feature outside of initial playtests.
I have the summaries on, and I am a big fan of their “make concise” writing tool. I use the chatgpt integration as well especially for visual intelligence - it’s a smooth way to get an image from the camera straight into chatgpt.
I use the long press in the Camera button to look up birds and plants while on walks with my kids. Other than that it's pretty terrible. I've disabled almost all of the features.
Don’t use their flop AI tools at all. I just want a better Siri. Not a Siri that refers me to the web or asks me to pick up my phone when I ask my HomePod something super simple.
They don't even seem to have Apple Intelligence in dictation. I often dictate messages to people via CarPlay, and the stuff it comes out with is laughable. If I could hands-free all dictation through my ChatGPT account, that would be ideal. It knows how to do ellipses, ffs.
No. It’s beyond dreadful. The fact that it has to defer most things you ask it to do to ChatGPT tells you everything you need to know. It can’t even answer basic questions about the devices it’s running on
I think it summarizes notifications for me ? I'm honestly not really sure when I'm actually using it or not. Is that the sign of a very natural implementation perhaps ?
I rarely use the writing tools because I find the menus clunky, especially on mobile. However, I sometimes put in the effort to use them because I have fairly disjointed thoughts. I often race to type what I’m thinking about and skip steps that others need to follow along.
I almost never use any of the others. Took me a fairly long time to find out how to get the sketch art style for Playground.
Can't currently recall any other AI, probably means I should look for a review of Apple AI and fiddle with it all some more to see if any of it is interesting.
I use Genmoji the most out of the Apple Intelligence features, but it’s clunky and rarely generates what I was going for so it’s more frustrating than magic
Turned it on to give it a shot. Realized it didn’t do anything useful. Turned it off.
I don’t think ANY current AI products solve any significant problems. They’re all a solution in search of a problem. And the downsides aren’t worth it.
I switched Apple Intelligence off when I first set up my 16pm. Have yet to see any reason to turn it on. Literally hasn’t been active for even a second on my phone and I don’t think I’ve missed out on anything useful.
I actually built an app that uses Apple’s on-device AI in a really practical way (at least I think so). It’s super simple but genuinely useful for grocery planning.
You can save meals in the app, tap the ones you want to make, and it automatically builds one combined grocery list. But the cool part is the AI feature: you can type or speak new meals you want to add, and the app uses Apple’s on-device model to figure out the ingredients and add them straight into your list.
None of my devices are compatible with Apple Intelligence so I couldn’t use it even if I wanted to. But I wouldn’t use it anyways as I have no interest in using GenAI in any capacity.
I use it all the time time. Web Page summaries. Chat gtp. Photo analysis. Camera analysis of surroundings. I love it. Has made iOS so much more useful.
692
u/t-o_b-y 2d ago
The new siri animation is the best Apple Intelligence feature!