The 2020s are the year of artificial intelligence. First came ChatGPT, introduced by OpenAI in November 2022. In February of 2023, Google released Bard, now known as Gemini. The very next day, Microsoft announced a new version of Bing, which integrated AI chat (now Microsoft Copilot) into search. This groundbreaking moment brought to the open internet. In May of 2024, OpenAI updated ChatGPT to GPT4o, offering advanced reasoning functions to the program. Meanwhile, social media companies such as Meta integrated AI chatbots into their software.

Throughout this storm of innovation, Apple sat silent. This isn’t an unknown characteristic for the company, which has been known to wait for new technologies to settle before releasing a finished product to the wild. One of the last times Apple provided a sneak peek into an upcoming product was the disastrous AirPower announcement of 2017. After a few years of silence, AirPower was cancelled due to heat issues with the Qi charging array.

In 2024, Apple realized that they had to act on artificial intelligence to remain relevant. At WWDC 24, Apple announced their take on AI, Apple Intelligence. From the very beginning, Apple made it clear that Apple Intelligence would be done their way. This could be perceived as equally exciting and boring, as Apple would likely address some of the flaws in present AI applications while also introducing restrictions that weren’t added to their competitors.

For Mac and iPad users with devices that contained Apple Silicon, this was excellent. Apple Intelligence would be supported on all M series devices. For iOS, however, support was limited. When Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC, only the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max would be supported. Of course, this changed in September when Apple released the iPhone 16 series to the public. Apple claimed these devices were “built for Apple Intelligence” and spent a considerable portion of their press release hyping AI. This was amusing as Apple Intelligence was still in beta when iPhone 16 was available for purchase. Consumers who purchased iPhone 16 at launch were sold an iPhone that couldn’t do the task it was advertised as “built” to do.

When Apple Intelligence was finally released to the public, it became clear that the product was rushed. Even in February of 2025, Apple has yet to finish Apple Intelligence. Notification Summaries became a haven for misinformation (and have since been dialed back because of this) and the overhaul of Siri has reportedly been pushed to a later version of iOS 18. When comparing the release of Apple Intelligence to other companies such as OpenAI and DeepSeek, iOS 18 transforms from “the biggest release of iOS ever” to “the most disappointing release of iOS ever).

While I don’t daily drive an iPhone capable of running Apple Intelligence, all my other devices do. After the first few days of trialing Apple Intelligence, I can confidently say I haven’t used it since. Image Playground and Genmoji are fun to play around with, but after a while, the fun wears off. As well, I turned off Notification Summaries. Half the time it would lose the context of the message, and the other half would just not work. For me, I would rather just continue to use ChatGPT in the odd occasion that I decide to want the help of artificial intelligence.

As a self-proclaimed “Apple Fanboy” I have been greatly disappointed with Apple’s recent progress with Apple Intelligence. I believe that the push to bring this feature to consumers has caused other areas of Apple’s software to fall behind. This has left a worse experience overall for Apple users. I hope that Apple will regroup in the coming months (either with iOS 18.4 or 5, or iOS 19) and realize that quality beats quantity. Apple needs to realize once again that yes, it is okay to wait, to ensure that for the end user, “everything just works”.