Apple Intelligence Is Set to Make Your Attention Span Even Shorter

One of the biggest blows to our attention spans happened when content started being squeezed into 10-second TikToks, Reels, and Snaps. That gradually made watching long-form content fairly difficult. I’m concerned that Apple will soon kill the few remaining brain cells we have left with its iOS 18.1 update on October 28.

The abundance of summarization features stood out to me about the first Apple Intelligence update rolling out at the end of the month. With iOS 18.1, you will have summaries in all the places you do the major chunk of reading on your phone: Safari, Mail, and Notifications. Look at this tragic example of a presumably long breakup text summarized in a brutal one-liner.

Apple Intelligence on iOS 18.1 is going to summarize articles on Safari. You’d just need to switch to reader mode for it to have the article summarized in a few lines in a box at the top of your screen. This is, of course, going to save time, but it also makes users read a lot less. You can also select a certain paragraph to pull out its summary or key points.

It will also update the Mail app so that you see a one-line summary of your email in your inbox instead of the first few words/lines you usually do. If you’re viewing a number of emails in your notifications, you’ll now see summaries for all of them, too. A Smart Reply option will let you reply to the emails with a single tap, similar to what Gmail offers. Your notifications will also appear in a single sentence summarizing a specific app’s recent activity so you can catch up with a single glance.

The upcoming writing tools will work like Grammarly on your phone, underlining every misspelled word or grammatical error. You can also write a shabby message and have Apple Intelligence refine it in the tone of your choice: Friendly, Professional, and Concise.

The highlight of Apple’s Glowtime event was a revamped Siri on the new OS. This one will feature a glow on the corners of your screen when you activate the assistant and animate in sync with your voice as you speak to it. I’m looking forward to finally being able to type to Siri in addition to talking to it. Apple says it’ll also get better at understanding memory and context so your follow-up questions can be handled better.

Natural language processing is also coming to the Photos app. So, instead of manually scrolling to a specific picture, you can simply say, “Ali making breakfast on the Catskills trip,” and have Photos intelligently look that up for you. You can use the same way to make movies from memories. Just speak your prompt to it. The iOS version of the Magic Eraser on Pixel, Clean Up in Photos, will let you remove an unwanted object in the background by simply circling or finger-brushing it.

Availability

When iOS 18.1 is released on October 28, you’ll be required to join a waitlist. This isn’t usually how iOS updates are rolled out, but it is something Apple is experimenting with this time to ensure a smooth experience for everyone. The waitlist is account-based, meaning joining it on any device will guarantee waitlisting across all your Apple devices. The compatibility criteria for iOS 18.1 is any iPhone 16 model or one of the iPhone 15 Pro models. Initially, Apple Intelligence will only be available in the US and English.