Apple launches to iPhone 16 lineup on September 20, 2024

iPhone 16 is built for Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that helps you write, express yourself and get things done effortlessly. With groundbreaking privacy protections, it gives you peace of mind that no one else can access your data — not even Apple.

Although I didn’t get the chance to watch Apple’s It’s Glowtime event, I checked out a few opinion pieces and summaries of the latest Apple announcements, and to be honest, I wasn’t too impressed. It felt like a repeat of last year’s stuff, and some people are saying it’s just another iteration on the design language of the iPhone 11.

The cool part was Apple’s focus on their AI tools, especially their aptly named Apple Intelligence1 feature. I realize that some of the features Apple is introducing with Apple Intelligence have been questionable given that apparently Apple trained their model on some resources where the publisher’s consent was not requested. I can understand the reaction of publications like MacStories, and their feelings on having an AI model use their content without consent.

What little experience I had with Apple Intelligence came in the form of the macOS Sequoia 15.1 developer beta when setting my Mac mini to the US. The only part of it I used was their writing tool, since I am an active user of Grammarly and was curious how it measures up to it. My end result is that in the short term Grammarly has nothing to worry about, it won’t be sherlocked any time soon. Apple’s take on Grammarly felt very basic, there was maybe three options to re-write the text in comparison to Grammarly which has far more options - to make it concise, shorten it, change the tone to professional, etc.

I know Apple’s AI tools will get better over time and might eventually compete with Grammarly. But for now, it’s not as versatile and Grammarly has the huge advantage that it is multiplatform, where Apple Intelligence and its Writing feature will most likely remain exclusive to Apple platforms.

  1. It is still mind boggling to me that the iPhone 15 which is running a 2-year old ARM CPU cannot run Apple Intelligence, but a 4-year old M1 can. ↩︎