Apple Intelligence .1 Review: A small start of something big?
With the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, Apple is hopping aboard the generative AI train. Apple Intelligence is a suite of disparate features, first announced earlier this year at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, that the company is gradually rolling out over the course of several software updates in the next months.
The first round of these features includes a few different capabilities, most prominently a systemwide set of Writing Tools; summaries of notifications and email messages; minor changes to Siri (with more coming later); and tools in Photos that led you remove unwanted elements or create themed movies with just a text prompt.
It’s unquestionable that Apple is putting its weight behind these efforts, but what’s been less clear is just how effective and useful these tools will be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for anybody who has used similar generative AI tools, the answer is a definite maybe.
A collection of Writing Tools
One of the more complete and functional pieces of the first wave of Apple Intelligence is Writing Tools, a set of language-model-based tools that are designed to refine, summarize, and reformat things you’ve written.
Writing Tools’ Proofread can be useful, but it’s also inconsistent.
The Proofread feature is meant to offer a set of intuitive corrections that go beyond a standard spelling or grammar checker (both of which are already offered by Apple’s built-in text system). It’s sort of an inbuilt version of something like Grammarly Pro, which costs $144 a year. When you choose Proofread, an animation represents Apple Intelligence “scanning” your document. (Apple Intelligence is full of this sort of razzle-dazzle. You can decide for yourself if it’s whimsical or phony.) When it’s done, a floating palette appears, letting you navigate between suggested corrections and choosing whether to approve or undo the changes.
Unfortunately, I found Proofread’s interface to be pretty inconsistent. Sometimes the “scanning” animation never ended. Other times, it would say that it had found numerous corrections, but didn’t show them to me or let me navigate to them. When it did work, the results were also spotty. I introduced five common mistakes (ones I make myself, all the time, like dropped words) to a document and Proofread found three. Better than nothing, but Grammarly would’ve aced the same test. Building a feature like Proofread into the OS is a great idea, but this particular feature needs more polish.
All Writing Tools are collected in a single view.
The Rewrite command lets you use the power of Apple’s LLM to change your writing into one of three different styles: Friendly, Professional, and Concise. Now, let me be honest: I am not the target audience for this feature, because I’m someone who writes stuff for a living. The goal of Rewrite is to provide output that is superior to content provided by someone who struggles with writing, with getting their points across, with getting the right tone. When I wrote sample paragraphs that were halting and a bit confused and messy, Rewrite did a pretty good job of making them serviceable.
When I turned it on my own writing, I saw it do what LLMs tend to do—change a bunch of the words to synonyms, add two-dollar words when simpler ones would do, and drain the entire thing of personality. Look, LLMs are all about finding the middle ground, embracing clichés, and stamping out individualism. If you’re a professional writer, your job is to avoid writing samey stuff. But if you’re someone who struggles to get your point across in writing, the middle ground is exactly where you dream of being. This set of tools will be a boon for people who struggle with writing. If you’re already an average writer, though, they’ll be of no use to you.
LLMs are great at churning through content and then summarizing it, and Apple has embraced that by adding two different summarization features to Writing Tools: Summary and Key Points. Summary takes your selected text and generates a one-paragraph summary in a floating box. You can choose to have the summary replace your text, or put it on your Clipboard to use elsewhere.
Key Points is a little more expansive. It creates a bulleted list of the points in your content—basically it’s an executive summary, for the kind of people who prefer to view the world as a series of bulleted lists. Your boss might be one of those people. Key Points will be able to help you out—though I found some of its suggestions a little iffy. As with so many LLM-generated bits of content, my advice is to use Key Points and then edit it a bit to match your own understanding of the key points. LLMs are best used in conjunction with a human brain, as an aid, not as a replacement.
The last two Writing Tools are really reformatting tools, and I like them unreservedly. List takes your selection and turns it into a list—great for quickly converting a sentence that lists a bunch of stuff (separated by commas) into a bulleted list. And Table will take text that would probably be better formatted as a fancy table, and turns it into that table! Computers exist to remove drudgery from our lives, not create more of it. If an LLM can be harnessed to save you a minute of formatting, or four minutes of remembering how to make a table in your text editor, that’s the right thing to do. —Jason Snell
Photos gets cleaned up
Background items to be cleaned up will be highlighted (left), and then intelligently replaced with generated background imagery.
The major addition is Clean Up, which allows you to remove unwanted items from your photographs. To use it, you need to enter editing mode and then click or tap on the Clean Up icon. Apple Intelligence will scan your photo for potentially distracting items and will highlight them with a shimmering effect. Tapping shimmering items will remove them, but you can try to remove anything at all in a given image. The best way to remove an item is probably to swipe across it as if you’re blotting it out, but you can also try just circling an item to indicate that you want it gone.
Apple Intelligence will look at the context of your entire photo and then attempt to replace the erased item with something that matches the rest of its surroundings. In my tests, it worked quite well, though occasionally it failed. Most of the failures seem to have been when there was a complex background and just not enough additional information for it to make a good guess about what should be back there.
