Apple Intelligence: Can Apple’s Pivot to AI Save the iPhone? 

By Emil Bjerg, journalist and editor at The European Business Review

After a year of dwindling iPhone sales, Apple has released Apple Intelligence. Will the tech giants bet on AI help regain their momentum in innovation?

For the past decade, Apple has been critiqued for a lack of innovation–and increasingly so. As Apple sells fewer iPhone’s–by far Apple’s biggest source of revenue–the company seems forced to return to its roots of high innovation levels. Recent launches indicate they have chosen to bet on AI. 

Can Apple’s Pivot to AI Save the iPhone? 

The launch of Apple Intelligence follows the release of the iPhone 16 in September, which features hardware specifically designed to enhance Apple’s AI capabilities. 

With the launch of Apple Intelligence, Apple hopes to cash in on AI advancements like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which have all gone all-in on AI much earlier than Apple. A central problem for Apple is that iPhone users upgrade their devices less often as the level of innovation has gone down. Will the new AI-infused iPhone help with that? Let’s take a look at its features and reception. 

New AI Features 

A number of features have been rolled out, seeking to help users with summarizing, prioritizing and organizing. 

To help with that, Apple has re-launched Siri. Siri was one of the first widely adopted AI assistants when it was introduced in 2011. Like other voice assistants, it has perhaps been more ridiculed than it has been helpful. 

With Apple Intelligence, Siri has received a makeover to become “more natural, flexible, and deeply integrated into the system experience” as Apple writes. Siri has been integrated to be an assistant across iPhone, iPad and Mac.

A new feature called Writing Tools allows Apple users to get AI assistance rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing texts everywhere they write, from Mail, Messages, Notes, Pages, and third-party apps. 

Other features have also been designed to help users summarize and prioritize information. Priority Messages is designed to show users the most important emails. An email feature also summarizes messages without requiring users to open them. A new feature called notification summaries is designed to enable users to quickly get the key details of notifications. 

Finally, a number of new AI photo features allows users to use natural language search for finding photos and videos, a new tool to remove unwanted elements, and the ability to create personalized “Memory Movies” with text prompts. 

Apple calls the release “the first set of Apple Intelligence features”, stating that more features are to come. 

A Mixed Reception 

The launch of Apple Intelligence has received mixed reviews from early users and media outlets. 

While some features show promise, the overall reception has been somewhat lukewarm. Vox called the technology “magically mediocre” after testing a developer beta, stating that “Apple Intelligence is not that scary, not that advanced, and definitely not finished.” The Washington Post found that a pre-release version showed inaccurate results, including misinterpreting text and incorrectly prioritizing phishing emails. 

Some of the post-release reviews have been more positive, such as CNET writing that “Apple Intelligence shows a lot of promise.” The consensus, however, is that Apple Intelligence still has a long way to go to revolutionize the smartphone. 

Is AI going to reinvigorate the innovative spirit at Apple and save the iPhone? The jury is still out and we will likely need quite a few IOS updates to really know if Apple is the company to successfully integrate AI in smartphones. Rather than catching up with their Big Tech AI competitors, Apple, like Google before them, currently looks like a company struggling to keep up with the competition.