iOS 18.2 beta shows the Apple Intelligence rollout isn’t really slow

While the narrative around Apple Intelligence is that the company is leaning heavily on “coming later” asterisks, and we’ll have to wait a long time for any of it to actually launch, yesterday’s iOS 18.2 beta release tells a somewhat different story.

Now, sure, we have to include an asterisk of our own here – just because a feature is available in the current beta doesn’t mean it’ll make it into the release version in December – but it’s still a good pointer to the intended pace of the Apple Intelligence rollout …

The slow rollout narrative

To be fair to the critics, Apple was asking for trouble. The company launched the iPhone 16 with much fanfare around Apple Intelligence features, and then made it hard to even see the new devices through all the asterisks covering the keynote presentation screen.

It seems fairly clear that the original intention had been to launch the new iPhone with a lot of Apple Intelligence features included on day one, and that iOS 18 development fell behind so it was forced to do this awkward “trust us, it’ll be great later” launch.

That’s a result of the company having locked itself into annual iPhone releases to keep shareholders happy – otherwise if could simply have waited until the software was ready before it released the hardware.

Incidentally, that relentless schedule doesn’t seem necessary to keep customers happy. Even 9to5Mac readers, who upgrade devices way more often than most, were happy to slow the pace.

In our recent poll, only 28% of you felt it important to stick to annual iPhone updates. The largest segment, some 39% of you, would be happy with every other year, and the next most popular choice was ad-hoc releases as and when the company had a worthwhile update to offer.

But shareholders would scream if Apple slowed the pace of iPhone releases, so here we are.

That left Apple with two problems, the first of which was that not much was ready on day one.

The second is that, for many, Apple AI and Siri are synonymous. Sure, writing tools are nice, and the notification summaries are handy when they’re not hilarious, but what most of us want is a much smarter Siri. And that part of Apple Intelligence appears to be on the slowest track, not expected until some point next year.

So the narrative that Apple Intelligence is just a vague promise for the future was inevitable.

But the iOS 18.2 beta is big!

We yesterday outlined all the new features, as well as a 29-minute video run-through.

New Apple Intelligence features include …

Image Playground offers text-to-image creation, which – as we mentioned yesterday – Apple has implemented in a way which cannot be abused. Genmoji also offer the same functionality for custom emoji.

ChatGPT integration with both Siri and Writing Tools. This includes the ability to compose new text according to your instructions, and the ability to describe to ChatGPT the changes you’d like made to any existing text.

Image Wand lets even someone with my drawing ability (rated minus 172 on the International WTF Is That Supposed To Be scale) draw some scruffy, barely recognizable scrawl, tell Apple Intelligence what it should have been (as there isn’t enough computing power in the world for an AI to tell) and have it turned into an actual image. You can even just circle a blank area and it will use the surrounding notes to figure out the image needed to illustrate it!

The Mail app can now automatically organize and sort your emails into four different categories – primary, transactions, updates, and promotions – as well as provide a digest view of all emails from a specific business.

Finally, audio recordings can identify different elements in recordings, and separate them into different tracks. That was something Apple mentioned almost in passing during the keynote – hey, you can record separate tracks, oh and by the way, if you don’t do that the app will separate them for you – but is an incredible capability.

That’s a massive number of new features for a single dot update!

Of course, this is an ongoing project

Sure, non-beta users won’t get to play with iOS 18.2 until December, and we need to see how well all of these new features perform in real-life use. I’ll be sharing my own impressions on this as I play with them.

I’m expecting the first developer beta versions to be rough because, duh, this is a first developer beta. But I’m also expecting the quality of the delivery to improve rapidly because responding to real-life user feedback is how this improvements are made. Like Craig Federighi said yesterday about Siri, there’s never an end-point with any of this stuff, there are only continued improvements over time.

Yes, I’m as impatient as anyone when it comes to Siri improvements. Like I said earlier this week, it’s embarrassing how even the simplest of tasks can defeat Siri, especially when Google Assistant shows how it should be done. At the same time, the current iOS 18.2 beta is a phenomenal step forward, and I’m now much more inclined to cut the company some slack.

Image: Jeff Benjamin/9to5Mac