Queues to stores selling Apple products have been long and winding on Friday around the world as the iPhone 16 series went on sale. Many were there to buy the latest phone to use the new Camera Control functionality and for many, it was about taking the next step towards using the hottest technology of the year — Apple Intelligence.

This is the catch-all name for the iPhone maker’s artificial intelligence capabilities. Apple is not the first smartphone maker leaning on AI when one considers Google’s latest Pixel phones or Samsung’s Galaxy range but the Cupertino HQ-ed company’s implementation of the technology is unique and can potentially change the way we use smartphones.

Actual intelligence meets Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence is not about taking bits of data from the Internet before going ‘hey presto’. It’s a comprehensive system designed to understand you and your needs in ways that current AI tools can’t match. The technology is deployed across Apple products and not just the iPhone. Running in the background, it’s meant to make life easy.

iPhone 16 Pro on display in Apple HQ in Cupertino on September 9

With AI, the challenge is to ensure your personality shines in whatever message that’s put out. Take for example Writing Tools, which will be available in messages, Notes and practically anywhere the keyboard pops up.

Text Rewrite can morph your email writing draft into a more professional one. The tone can be set to friendly or concise. Proofreading is also involved, which corrects grammar and sentence structure, besides suggesting better words throughout your work. Or take those TL;DR moments — Summarise Text is for shortening your writing to just the important parts or create a bulleted list or table.

Users have AI or actual intelligence and then there is Apple Intelligence. How does it all come together? There are moments when we want to say something and know the information is there on the phone but you may have to spend time digging for a picture or screenshot manually. Why not ask the digital assistant Siri to use Apple Intelligence to do all the digging around to bring up what you need in the blink of an eye? And you don’t need a third-party app or pay extra to get things done.

Making iphone even more personal

Your iPhone is the most personal product in your life. All your data is on the device and it’s like carrying a mini safe with you all the time. Bringing together the personal context is the power of generative models to deliver intelligence that understands you.

Of course, there are Writing Tools that can turn hastily written notes into polished dinner party invites or adjust the tone of the message to your boss to sound a little more professional.

There’s more. Suppose you have a photo in mind that you took ages ago but can’t remember where and when. Just describe it and Apple Intelligence will find it for you. It will even work to get to a specific moment in a video. You will also be able to create an entire movie just by typing a description of what you have in mind. Apple Intelligence will automatically find relevant photos and videos and smartly arrange them into a storyline.

There are occasions when emoji is the best way to get a message across. You will be able to create a new emoji by typing a description. Or create fun images with descriptions provided to Image Playground.

It’s about helping you prioritise and focus on what is essential communication. In Mail, you will see summaries that convey the most useful information. Your notifications will be summarised too. And priority notifications will be placed on top of your stack, so you don’t miss anything important.

Since the iPhone is on you all the time, why not have the ability to learn about what you see? With iPhone 16’s new Camera Control, things are going to get easy. Suppose you come across a restaurant you have not been to. You click a photo and instantly see information around it, like functioning hours. If you come across a flyer for an interesting event, click using the Camera Control (keep following this space for a full review of the new iPhone 16 and 16 Pro Max) and add the event to your calendar. If you come across a bike you are looking for, click and search on Google to buy something similar.

An Apple enthusiast checks out the latest iPhone 16 series in Cupertino

Siri will not be the same

The day before Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, the iPhone 4s was unveiled. It was a special product because in 2010 Apple bought a start-up called Siri, whose technology was baked into the new phone. It was mind-blowing how inexact user utterances could be, yet Siri understood. Over the years Siri fell somewhat behind. All that’s changing with the latest avatar of Siri.

With richer language understanding, Siri will follow along if you stumble over your words, complete with “hmm” and “umm” or change your track midway. And not just voice, there is the option to type to Siri so that you can be discreet. Siri can give you step-by-step guidance on how to do something, like deleting duplicate photos from your library. And it can take hundreds of new actions, like updating a friend’s contact card with a new address or adding a set of photos to a specific album.

Enhanced privacy

One of the biggest threats of artificial intelligence has been privacy. We are concerned about how our data gets used and the way generative AI models are trained, slurping up web data. A foundational pillar of Apple is privacy and it gets stronger than on any Android phone.

Apple Intelligence draws on the power of Apple silicon to run multiple generative models on the iPhone in your pocket. For more computationally-intensive tasks Apple Intelligence can unlock more intelligence using Private Cloud Compute. It maintains the power and privacy of your iPhone while giving you access to a much larger generative model than what fits in your pocket today. When you draw on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) your data is never stored or shared with Apple. It is used only for your requests.

Most AI tasks will fall back on local processing, like writing features. The beauty of on-device processing is that data never leaves the computer or phone, making life difficult for attackers.

What happens when data goes to the Cloud? To tackle security concerns, PCC comes into play. Private Cloud Compute servers are as bare-bones as they can get, so there is no way to keep processed data long-term. These come with Apple’s dedicated hardware encryption key manager to protect data. Apple is making every production PCC server build publicly available for inspection so people unaffiliated with Apple can verify that PCC is on track.

More focus on life rather than screen

Usually, when we unlock our phones, distractions come easily in the form of social media networks and watching video content. A task that requires five minutes may end up making us use the phone for one hour. Further, a five-minute task can make us unlock the phone twice or thrice.

With Apple Intelligence, many things get done in shorter periods. Take the example of the summarise feature that can offer an overview of, say, a long newsletter or an article. You may not even want to read the article beyond the summary.

There is also on-screen awareness. For instance, if you are scrolling a web page and you pull up Siri and say add this address, it will do that for you without you having to copy-paste anything. Ultimately, Apple Intelligence may lead to fewer unlocks of the iPhone so that you can focus on life.

Contextual power

A very powerful feature on the iPhone is Focus, which is improving year over year. Earlier, it was as simple as “do not disturb”, “sleep”, “work”, “focus” and so on. Things are improving with iOS 18 and the “reduce interruptions” option. For the most part, it blocks out notifications that aren’t of importance unless you actually indicate that certain contacts can reach you. Here’s a smarter implementation: If I am in this mode but I have my colleague text me at midnight with an emergency even though I don’t have his contact under DND. If the smart system detects that the emergency involves something drastic that I should know about, the message will go through.

Staggered rollout is the future of all software

Some analysts have pointed out that Apple Intelligence is not available out of the box with the iPhone 16. The truth is, it is coming in a matter of days. The new iPhones come preloaded with iOS 18 while many of the Apple Intelligence features will come with iOS 18.1.

Apple has just released public betas of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, and they include upcoming Apple Intelligence features like text rewriting tools, the glowy new Siri design, a Clean Up tool to remove objects from your photos, and more. The company will release the final versions of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 in October.

Further, Apple Intelligence features will have a staggered introduction to ensure the AI-powered features are perfectly tuned. So something like the ChatGPT integration is a future feature. Visual Intelligence will come at a later date and so will Image Playground and Genmoji. The same goes for ChatGPT integration.

Phones have come to the point when year-over-year hardware improvements are not the most important aspect as much as new software offerings. The new iPhone 16 series comes with powerful processors (A18 Pro on the ‘pro’ models and A18 on the rest) to deliver AI features over several years. The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max too will be able to handle Apple Intelligence. But get ready for a future when feature rollouts are gradual.

Leap of faith

iPhone is where resides the lungs of Apple’s success. The A18 chip will be a great enabler. Dan Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities, has said this could be “the strongest iPhone unit year ever” and will exceed the previous record of 231 million unit sales (in 2015), making it a supercycle. Though Apple Intelligence will be released in a staggered manner, iOS 18 will offer the building blocks for how hundreds of apps get built within the Apple ecosystem.

An estimated 1.5 billion people already use iPhones around the world (Apple has not confirmed the figure) and Ives believes that 300 million iPhones have not been upgraded in four years, giving Apple an important opportunity.

Opportunity for spatial computing

At the moment, all Apple Intelligence talk is centred around the devices we know well — iPhone, Mac and iPad. But it’s just a matter of time before the feature takes the Vision Pro spatial computing headset to a new level. From a technology standpoint, the headset has more than enough memory to run the technology.

Honouring Steve Jobs’s vision

Steve Jobs would have been proud of the iPhone 16 series. Even before AI became a buzzword, Jobs knew the importance of the technology. He spoke to designers in Aspen, Colorado, on June 15, 1983, five months after Apple introduced the Lisa computer. He said: “And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was the books. I could go and read what Aristotle or Plato wrote without an intermediary in the way…. The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next 50 to 100 years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life — his or her whole life — and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?’ And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will.”

Hear it from analysts

iPhone 16 with ground-up design from silicon to software to services, brings a significant point for Apple to kickstart the AI journey optimised for Apple Intelligence. Since iPhone users use (the phone) for three to four years, we estimate this is a significant upgrade for someone looking to upgrade from iPhone 11/12. Since the iPhone 16 series will be manufactured in India, it will alleviate some pricing concerns for acquiring more premium models and should drive iPhone 16 sales to achieve the highest-ever sales in India growing at least 20 per cent annually for the next calendar year. Further better financing schemes and a move to premiumisation align with Apple’s push for the latest generation iPhones — Neil Shah, partner, Hong Kong-based Counterpoint Research

The iPhone 16 series is poised to play a pivotal role in the Indian market, both in terms of supply and sales. India, as an emerging market, has proven to be a lucrative venue for Apple to expand its sales and establish a significant presence. Notably, India has also become a crucial location for assembling Apple products, elevating its importance in the company’s global operations — Abhilash Kumar, industry analyst, TechInsights