Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of AI features, is expected to roll out on iPhones, iPads and Macs in Australia beginning this December – but there’s a catch.
While the company revealed its lineup of new iPhone 16 devices this week, Apple Intelligence will exclude iPhones that are lower in grade than the iPhone 15 Pro family.
Hence, for iPhones, Apple Intelligence will only be available on the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
As for iPads and Macs, devices with the M1 chip and later will receive the new features.
Apple Intelligence will be available as a free software update as part of the iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 updates.
Apple Intelligence will first launch in US English, and will expand to include localised English in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK in December, with additional language support — such as Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish — next year.
Apple said that many of the models that power Apple Intelligence run entirely on-device, while Private Cloud Compute shares more advanced tasks locally between devices and dedicated Apple silicon servers.
The first set of Apple Intelligence features will include writing tools with which users can help by rewriting, proofreading, and summarising text in Mail, Notes, Pages, and third-party apps.
In Photos, the Memories feature will enable users to create the movies they want to see by simply typing a description.
In addition, natural language can also be used to search for specific photos, while search in videos gets more powerful with the ability to find specific moments in clips.
The new Clean Up tool will identify and remove distracting objects in the background of a photo — without altering the subject.
In the Notes and Phone apps, users can record, transcribe, and summarise audio. When a recording is initiated while on a call in the Phone app, participants are automatically notified, and once the call ends, Apple Intelligence generates a summary to help recall key points.
With Reduce Interruptions, a new Focus feature surfaces only the notifications that might need immediate attention. Priority Messages in Mail understands the content of emails and surfaces time-sensitive messages.
Across a user’s inbox, summaries will convey the most important information of each email instead of simply previewing the first few lines.
Smart Reply in Mail provides users with suggestions for a quick response and identifies questions in an email to ensure everything is answered.
Apple noted that part of Apple Intelligence is also focused on making Siri more natural. Siri can now follow along when users stumble over their words and can maintain context from one request to the next..
Image Wand will make notes more visually engaging by turning rough sketches into images. When a user circles an empty space, Image Wand will create an image using context from the surrounding area.
Users will also be able to create original Genmoji by simply typing a description, or by selecting a photo of a friend or family member.
Apple Intelligence will also give users the option to access ChatGPT’s broad world knowledge with access to its expertise as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities.
For users who choose to access ChatGPT through Siri or Writing Tools, Apple says that privacy protections are built in — their IP addresses are obscured, and OpenAI won’t store requests.
Users can access ChatGPT for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT’s data-use policies apply for those who choose to connect their account.
Privacy and data security are key points for Apple to consider. It seems to have surmounted those hurdles in Australia, but is yet unable to do so in the EU. In June, the company said that it would not roll out Apple Intelligence to EU users this year because it contends that the interoperability requirements in Europe’s new Digital Markets Act “could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security.”
