00:00:03
All right.
00:00:05
We got to talk about Apple intelligence.
00:00:05
So, Apple's made this promise, this huge thing is
00:00:08
coming that's going to change everything across their whole lineup.
00:00:11
They've been talking about it for a while, and I think that promise is starting to fade.
00:00:16
This was first announced at WWDC 2024.
00:00:19
That was nearly six months ago, and it's still not completely out yet.
00:00:23
The new iPhone's launched in September with exactly zero
00:00:26
Apple intelligence features, but then some software updates have started to push
00:00:29
out, and eventually it's supposed to be finished and in everyone's hands by March 2025.
00:00:35
That's a lot of buildup.
00:00:38
So what I want to do now is review every single
00:00:41
Apple intelligence feature that's out so far.
00:00:44
And then also get into whether the promise
00:00:47
that they're actually making is even good in the first place.
00:00:50
So first up, writing tools.
00:00:52
So all of these features, unless otherwise specified, are on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
00:00:57
So no Apple Intelligence features at all on the Vision Pro.
00:01:01
their most faturistic platform.
00:01:03
That's already kind of fascinating.
00:01:05
But the writing tools, you may have heard about these since they're definitely
00:01:08
referenced a lot, maybe the most out of any of these.
00:01:10
And, yeah, it' it's basically generative AI
00:01:13
to help adjust what you've already written.
00:01:16
So this is easiest to demo on the Mac, but basically you have something
00:01:19
you've written, you highlight all of it, and then select one of the writing tools.
00:01:22
And actually, this is one of the first weird hiccups, just a strangely repetitive UI.
00:01:26
You can access any of the writing tools in one click right here
00:01:31
or hitch show writing tools, which again
00:01:34
shows the same list of writing tools.
00:01:37
Okay.
00:01:39
So I suppose there's a world where, you know, you write some message to
00:01:41
someone and you just want it to be a little more friendly or maybe you've typed
00:01:45
out a bunch of stuff that needs to be sent in a work email.
00:01:47
So you want to get the AI to make it more professional for you.
00:01:51
Sure, I guess.
00:01:53
So I've run it through various things that I've written from, you know, whole video scripts to just a bunch of messages.
00:01:56
And it works, technically.
00:01:59
I think the friendly mode mostly uses like shorter sentences and lots of exclamation points.
00:02:04
And then the professional mode
00:02:06
kind of does the opposite.
00:02:08
Like it's still pretty terse, but never uses exclamation points.
00:02:11
I think maybe concise is the most useful.
00:02:13
Basically it takes whatever you highlight and makes it maybe 40% shorter.
00:02:16
And then you can hit copy or just directly replace it if you trust it.
00:02:20
And each of these things takes about three or four seconds to
00:02:23
generate entirely on device, so it works offline as well.
00:02:26
The proof reading is nice because it picks up on extra things like
00:02:29
capitalization and proper nouns.
00:02:32
if you really need that on top of the auto punctuation checker
00:02:35
and then summary or make table would be
00:02:39
really nice for like really large documents, but it doesn't
00:02:43
seem to want to work on some of my huge documents
00:02:46
that would be nice to summarize or make into a table.
00:02:49
So
00:02:51
unfortunately, even as a basically a professional writer
00:02:53
at this point, I haven't gotten much use out of writing tools at all.
00:02:57
So notification summaries.
00:02:59
This one to me personally, I have found
00:03:02
almost useless.
00:03:04
Basically, it does exactly what it sounds like it does.
00:03:05
When it's enabled, it summarizes your notifications from each app.
00:03:09
So if you get a long message from someone or several notifications
00:03:12
in a row from a single app, it will do its best to condense that all into
00:03:16
a single message to help you kind of get the gist quickly.
00:03:19
So no matter how long or how short the
00:03:22
messages are, whether it's just a text or maybe a group chat has absolutely blown up and you missed 100 messages.
00:03:27
It's going to try to summarize all that
00:03:29
into one or two lines.
00:03:31
The thing is, once I enable it and start using it, it basically
00:03:35
seems like the notifications that I'm getting are almost never benefited
00:03:38
from being summarized or shortened.
00:03:41
Like I've never gotten four text messages that
00:03:45
are perfectly summarized into a single one.
00:03:48
And I'm sure it's possible There are going to be some instances where it works for people, but
00:03:51
it's not just me.
00:03:53
I've seen lots of examples online and there's plenty of memes, too, of Apple's
00:03:55
notifications, summaries doing some sometimes hilarious work, some brutal stuff.
00:04:00
So it works and I guess it's good for a laugh once in a while,
00:04:03
but yeah, this is a feature I straight up turned off.
00:04:06
Then Jen Moji.
00:04:08
So, okay, believe it or not,
00:04:10
there was some hype for this one.
00:04:12
And once again, it's basically exactly what it sounds like.
00:04:14
It's it's letting you generate any emoji using AI.
00:04:19
Anything you want.
00:04:21
So let's say I'm in messages and I want to react to some message with
00:04:23
a very specific emoji that doesn't exist.
00:04:26
You would describe an emoji, so you write
00:04:29
your text and then hit create a new emoji, give it
00:04:33
about three seconds again, and it will use generative AI to create that image for you.
00:04:38
That's
00:04:40
fun, I guess.
00:04:41
And yes, it will sometimes refuse to make what you ask of it.
00:04:43
If you ask for something like crazy or graphic, although it seems to
00:04:46
have no problem making a potato with a gun, so that's an emoji reaction you can send sick.
00:04:51
It's a very specific use case.
00:04:53
There's no doubt some people have fun with it.
00:04:55
I just think, I'm not in the target demographic to use this sort of thing all the time.
00:04:58
So
00:05:00
again, over my head, cool, it exists, but that's it.
00:05:02
So then image playground is another, maybe kind of weird one.
00:05:05
This is almost the same tool, but sort of standalone.
00:05:08
This is a playground to generate images in a cartoon style
00:05:13
of whatever you want.
00:05:15
So you open the playground app and again, just describe
00:05:18
the image you want in text.
00:05:20
Anything, really.
00:05:22
But before you type anything, there are also a number of these buttons
00:05:25
down here and there are kind of just inspiration suggestions for things or people
00:05:28
to include in the image.
00:05:30
So, yes, you can choose
00:05:33
any of the people that your phone recognizes from your photos app,
00:05:36
and that'll be the starting point for the image and then
00:05:39
add some themes or accessories or background or props or whatever on top of it.
00:05:44
So here's me with a hard
00:05:47
hat on, at a disco, and it generates it
00:05:50
again in a few seconds on device, always cartoon style,
00:05:54
never photoalistic, and it can give you a few options to choose from.
00:05:57
And once you hit done, you can copy and paste that image
00:06:00
wherever you want.
00:06:02
Google and a few others have this on their
00:06:04
devices too, just sort of sort of a playground to make some artificially generated images.
00:06:09
Again, it's of debatable usefulness.
00:06:12
Of course, it makes sense that it won't do photalistic images because that would open up a whole can of worms.
00:06:17
but it's even supposed to not do some things that could potentially be offensive again.
00:06:22
Like if you ask it for a gun, it typically refuses.
00:06:25
But I found if you add a few more variables like
00:06:29
a chef hat and some fireworks to something, then it
00:06:32
will be a little more likely to actually pull through for you.
00:06:34
So
00:06:36
yeah, good thing it says it's in beta and may create unexpected results.
00:06:40
This is yet another app that they've added to my phone that
00:06:43
I predict that I will probably never use again after making this video.
00:06:47
So then, priority notifications.
00:06:49
So, okay, now, this is one that I think had
00:06:52
some promise, or at least I'm in the target demographic for it because
00:06:55
as an iPhone and Android user, you start to notice that Apple's
00:06:58
weakness has, for a long time been notification management.
00:07:01
If it was just kind of had a fire hose and notifications coming in all the time.
00:07:05
So priority notifications surfaces certain
00:07:08
notifications above the rest when you're in a focus mode that reduces notifications.
00:07:12
But this should also work in the mail app to
00:07:15
put AI identified high priority messages up at the top plus some other categories.
00:07:20
So if you use the default mail app, which I don't, but a lot of people do, then this could be helpful.
00:07:25
Something Gmails had for many years.
00:07:27
And the reduced notifications mode also specifically
00:07:30
tries to do a good job of only letting important notifications through, but keeping the rest quiet.
00:07:34
So then the Photos app
00:07:37
yes, we all hate the new Phot app.
00:07:40
Everyone.
00:07:42
You do, I do, everyone you know hates it.
00:07:43
We're all on the same page.
00:07:45
It's terrible.
00:07:46
But Apple has added exactly one AI feature
00:07:48
to the Phot app in an age where lots of
00:07:51
companies are comfortable adding a ton of AI to their photos apps, dozens
00:07:55
of things, but they've decided, all right, yeah, we can do the background object removal thing.
00:07:59
We can do that.
00:08:01
So basically the same thing as Google's magic eraser tool, let's say you've
00:08:03
got a picture with a subject in the front and you just want to remove that annoying thing in the background.
00:08:07
You hit the edit button and then on the right side, you hit the cleanup tool.
00:08:11
And a lot of times it will automatically highlight in this sort of rainbow
00:08:14
glow the thing that it auto detects that you want to remove.
00:08:18
But if it doesn't, you can just tap or circle whatever you want and it takes a few seconds
00:08:21
and then it just gets rid of it and uses generative fill to fill in the background.
00:08:25
And of course, some scenes work better than others.
00:08:27
It's kind of the same deal as magic eraser or Photoshop.
00:08:29
Typically patterns or repeating backgrounds will give you the best results.
00:08:32
I'm going to say I actually think this one works better than Google's.
00:08:35
It's better at getting a good outline of the phot bomber
00:08:39
or the background object in a single gesture, which is nice.
00:08:42
It's really smart.
00:08:44
So to me, this is also one of the more useful features.
00:08:46
Recording summaries.
00:08:48
So, okay, this one had promised, but then was kind of confusing
00:08:51
to me because when I saw it on the list, I was like, oh, this, I would have loved this as a student.
00:08:54
This is amazing, just one place where you can record things, transcribe
00:08:58
them, and then summarize them and keep them for later.
00:09:01
That sounds amazing.
00:09:03
but this is not built into the default voice memos app at all.
00:09:08
So if you're on a phone call, you can turn on call recording.
00:09:11
You hit that little button down there.
00:09:13
It'll take a second.
00:09:14
It'll warn the person that you're on the phone with with a little message.
00:09:18
And then from there, it'll record everything that gets said and transcribe it.
00:09:22
And the transcriptions are amazing.
00:09:24
It identifies each speaker, it is accurate.
00:09:27
I love this part, but then, if you care about the summary
00:09:30
part, this is where it starts to get weird again, because you go into the notes that.
00:09:34
This is where it's saving everything, and it shows up as a new note,
00:09:37
and the preview actually summarizes it right here pretty well, but
00:09:41
then when you click in, there is a whole transcript, great.
00:09:44
and then there's another summary button up here at the top.
00:09:47
You hit that, and there's a different summary.
00:09:50
And this one's a little worse.
00:09:52
The first one back in the preview actually picked up and included that I said ridge wallet.
00:09:57
The second one didn't get that at all, but it did get Best Buy.
00:10:00
Interesting.
00:10:02
But Apple, why don't you bring this to the voice memos app?
00:10:04
This is I want to be able to sit this down in a lecture or a
00:10:07
meeting and have it record things so I can summarize them later.
00:10:10
That's like the main place I figured this would be useful, but it's not there.
00:10:12
So, please,
00:10:14
please.
00:10:16
The only way to initiate this right now is actually to go through
00:10:18
the notes app to create a new note and then attach and then
00:10:21
create a new recording and then record your audio into there.
00:10:25
But it just feels like it could be one step easier.
00:10:28
So okay, visual intelligence.
00:10:30
So these last two are kind of the big ones.
00:10:32
Visual intelligence is only available on the iPhone 16
00:10:35
and 16 Pro and you get to it by long pressing that button
00:10:38
on the side of those new phones, which opens it up.
00:10:41
It's that camera control button.
00:10:43
And when you open it up, you get a full screen view finder with three buttons, a shutter in the middle,
00:10:47
then ask on the left and search on the right.
00:10:51
So if you point this at any object or a subject and you hit ask,
00:10:54
that lets you ask ChatiPT anything about what it sees.
00:10:58
And if you hit search, then it's basically just reverse Google image searching, whatever it sees.
00:11:02
Sohati BT or Google.
00:11:04
So if you hit the shutter button, it snaps a photo and
00:11:08
then continues to give you those two items or a pop up menu
00:11:13
where you can again either search
00:11:16
or ask again, pretty repetitive, you ask me, but okay,
00:11:20
while this is a very pretty UI and it works pretty quickly, it
00:11:24
also isn't anything, you know, particularly new that we haven't seen before.
00:11:27
Like I was just watching like Galaxy S 8 review from back in
00:11:30
2017, where I do a demo of the exact same thing.
00:11:32
I take a picture of something in front of me.
00:11:34
It looks it up with Bixby AI and it could tell you if
00:11:37
it was a landmark or a product that you could shop for.
00:11:39
This is going to be more capable, obviously GPT
00:11:43
has a lot more capabilities and maybe even a little bit more trust
00:11:46
these days than Bixby had back then, and it's certainly more well integrated.
00:11:50
But yeah, so it's not something mind blowing or groundbreakingly
00:11:54
new, but it is ideally more accurate and more capable than before.
00:11:58
Maybe they're going to continue to build on top of this in the future.
00:12:00
But then there is Chati PT integration, the sort
00:12:03
of last but not least new thing, that's Siri, worse with ChatPT.
00:12:07
I think a lot of people thought there was a lot more to Siri, like right off the back because it has this new animation.
00:12:11
And you see the new Siri animation so you think it's the new Siri, but
00:12:16
most of the new Siri stuff isn't here yet.
00:12:18
But the chi PT stuff is.
00:12:20
So if you ever make a request or ask a question that's
00:12:23
out of the normal scope of Siri, maybe asked for
00:12:27
a recipe or you ask for it to make a trip itinerary or
00:12:30
something big, then it recognizes it and it can prompt you
00:12:33
if you want to ask Chatchi PT instead, and if you
00:12:36
confirm, then it pulls fromhatchi PT to respond.
00:12:39
This is all free.
00:12:41
You don't need an account for this.
00:12:43
Apple has promised all sorts of masking so your data is not used for training models.
00:12:47
Open AI doesn't get to collect any of this information about you through the requests.
00:12:51
But you can also sign into
00:12:54
your chatPT account if you want to keep a history of your
00:12:57
queries or use higher end models or even go over the daily limit of free queries.
00:13:02
There's even actually a button to upgrade to chat GPT
00:13:05
plus built into iOS now, so it's pretty well considered.
00:13:09
So yeah, the new Siri animation might be fooling some people, but really it's
00:13:12
other than being able to type to Siri more easily, there's really not a whole lot actually new yet with Siri.
00:13:17
But that brings me to
00:13:19
the rest of the things that aren't here yet
00:13:22
still, that are coming soon with software updates.
00:13:25
That list is right here.
00:13:27
There are more Apple intelligence features that are in the works coming soon.
00:13:32
And honestly, Siri is the main one I'm interested in because it's
00:13:36
supposed to be able to take in app actions.
00:13:38
It should be able to reach into apps and take action inside of
00:13:41
them, which I think could be
00:13:44
awesome.
00:13:46
I think developers could all update their apps to work
00:13:48
really well with it, and it could be really useful.
00:13:50
It could differentiate Siri to actually make it useful again.
00:13:53
But yeah, that's still coming.
00:13:56
But yeah, then from there, my take is the rest of the AI stuff
00:14:00
really not super amazing
00:14:03
or compelling to me just to be real.
00:14:06
Like the writing tools, that seems like a nice safe use of generative AI.
00:14:10
That's the thing they're sort of talking about the most, but
00:14:13
I don't even find myself needing to rewrite things that often.
00:14:16
And like I said, I'm not in the target demographic to use the
00:14:20
image playgrounds all that much or genis all the time.
00:14:22
The visual intelligence is definitely super useful like three
00:14:25
or four times a year for me, like when some interesting plant or dog
00:14:29
or whatever is in front of me and I want to just figure out what it is.
00:14:31
But that's actually funny.
00:14:33
Do you remember the clip from the Apple key note
00:14:35
of that person who walks up to a dog?
00:14:38
And instead of asking the person walking the dog, what kind of dog it is, they just go, hey, can I take a picture of your dog?
00:14:43
And then they ask the phone what kind of dog it is instead of just asking the person.
00:14:46
And that to me is the perfect encapsulation of so many of these Apple intelligence features.
00:14:50
You could use them,
00:14:52
and they might work really well, but should you should you
00:14:56
like you can ask for a more friendly version of this letter to send to your friend
00:15:02
or you could try to write it in a friendly way in the first
00:15:05
place like like you can ask
00:15:08
Chhat GPT to plan a whole trip for you with an itinerary and everything.
00:15:12
And honestly, it's really impressive when it works,
00:15:15
but are you actually going to just go in blind
00:15:18
and just follow the AI-generated itinerary?
00:15:21
If you even like packing, like I know there's two types of people when packing.
00:15:25
Maybe some people will just follow the ad generated prompt.
00:15:28
But I feel like I'm in the type that kind of wants a little bit more than that, I think.
00:15:33
Luckily, no matter what I'm packing, it always fits in my Ridge
00:15:36
travel gear, so shout out to Ridge for sponsoring this portion of the video.
00:15:39
Specifically, I help design the new commuter bag for Ridge.
00:15:43
And I actually I've been dailying this creation for the past couple months.
00:15:46
We got it some really good water bottle holders on the sides now and
00:15:49
I also added a tablet sleeve in the back, so if you've got a tablet and a
00:15:52
laptop, they both have their own padded slot.
00:15:54
And then I doubled down when I'm flying because I also have
00:15:57
the ridge carry on, which is basically perfect.
00:16:01
It's weather proof, it's rugged.
00:16:03
It's got, you know, these aluminum corner protectors.
00:16:05
It also has the 360 spinning wheels.
00:16:07
They're super smooth.
00:16:09
Of course, it has a slot for a tracker in case it's ever separated from you.
00:16:11
It's incredibly light weight.
00:16:13
It's the go-to, and you ready to know that they work perfectly together like
00:16:17
a little ecosystem to create a perfect little travel combo.
00:16:20
So shout out to Ridge for sponsoring this portion of the video and for letting
00:16:23
me design some of these products and some more that are upcoming,
00:16:26
so we'll have to stay tuned for those.
00:16:28
But if you want to pick up both the carry-on and the backpack,
00:16:32
you can get them together at Ridge.com slash MKBHD and get 30% off.
00:16:36
And they also have their Black Friday sale going on right now.
00:16:38
But yeah, I think Apple
00:16:39
is going to build on and sort of iterate on
00:16:42
hopefully all of these features.
00:16:44
Like we have this sort of standard set that we're expecting from them
00:16:47
now and this is this is the worst they'll ever be that will only get better from here.
00:16:51
But it is pretty crazy to see how much emphasis is in all of the advertising
00:16:57
and all the talk about the newest devices on apple.com
00:17:00
as if Apple intelligence is this massive game changing, groundbreaking new thing.
00:17:05
You know, there are parts of it that are really good.
00:17:07
I think the background eraser tool in photos is probably the best we've seen.
00:17:12
It's better than Google's.
00:17:14
It's really impressive.
00:17:16
I think the visual intelligence stuff has potential to be really good,
00:17:18
but honestly, the best thing I think we've gotten from Apple Intelligence,
00:17:22
because all this stuff is running on device, is bumping up the base memory in everything.
00:17:27
There's more ram in every iPhone now and the bass memory
00:17:30
on every Mac is 16 gigs now, which made the bass Mac mini an incredible deal.
00:17:34
So
00:17:36
shout out to Apple Intelligence for that.
00:17:37
Either way, hopefully a lot more coming.
00:17:40
Thanks for watching.
00:17:42
Get you guys the next one.
00:17:43
Peace.
