Apple’s first foray into generative AI features is not coming as soon as initially promised, according to a new report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Gurman wrote Sunday that unidentified sources claim company officials are now targeting a launch in October to give their developers more time to fix bugs. Company leaders now plan to include the first features of the service with iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1. This means iPhone 16 models may not support the buzzy features the day they hit store shelves.
Despite the delay, the rollout is still moving forward””the sources claim Apple plans to release a beta for these follow-up updates to developers “as soon as this week” ahead of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18’s official launches in September.
Gurman notes the unconventional nature of this strategy as a crucial way of getting developers on-board by integrating their apps with the service and ironing out bugs to get it ready for primetime. Company leaders are making a big bet on AI, he said, and they need to address stability concerns after industry analysts raised concerns that Apple was late to the AI boom.
Even with a delayed launch, Gurman said the Apple Intelligence feature set will not be complete at launch; it will still be missing on-screen awareness features and the ability to use data from the device. In the WWDC 2024 keynote, Machine Learning and AI director Kelsey Peterson only announced plans to support improved speech understanding, Type to Siri, and the Apple product knowledge base at launch.
Company leaders plan to finish rolling out the complete package of features through the first half of 2025, Bloomberg reports. Apple Intelligence will work across the latest iPhone models, as well as iPad and Mac models with Apple silicon. Gurman reiterated that their developers are hard at work behind-the-scenes to bring the service to Vision Pro, but do not have a planned release date for that rollout at this time.
Once completed, Apple Intelligence will provide a more powerful Siri experience that will synthesize data across apps to answer questions and complete complex requests. It will also be able to assist users with their writing and answer world knowledge questions with the help of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
