Apple Intelligence Launch: Features, Reviews & Privacy Focus

Written by Lexx Thornton

Apple CEO Tim Cook waxed poetic about the arrival of some Apple Intelligence features for the iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max and iPhone 16 last week, saying in a tweet that the intro of Writing Tools along with new cleanup features for photos and a more conversational version of its Siri voice assistant is “the beginning of an exciting new era.” 

 But reviewers say Apple Intelligence isn’t all that, at least not yet. CNET editor Bridget Carey reminds us that the new generative AI features will be available in the US in only a limited way — you need to go to your iPhone settings to get on the wait list, and doing things like making your own emojis with AI (a feature Apple calls Genmoji) will come later. 

 Meanwhile, CNET mobile reviewer Lisa Eadicicco said you shouldn’t “expect your iPhone to feel radically different” and called the new features “a first step in what could hint at larger changes” later on. So far, she finds the message and notification summaries the most useful. 

“What I’ve come to appreciate most is that I can look down at my phone after getting a barrage of texts or Slack messages and know whether it’s an emergency just from the lock screen,” she says in her iOS 18.1 early review. “The summaries aren’t perfect (AI, as it turns out, can’t nail sarcasm and doesn’t know the inside jokes I share with my friends),” she adds. “But this type of functionality is exactly the type of passive, practical intelligence I’m hoping to see more of on smartphones in the future.” 

 Though Apple continues to roll out AI features slowly as part of what software chief Craig Federighi said last month is the company’s strategy to “get each piece right and release it when it’s ready,” one thing Apple feels very confident about is how it’s handling the privacy and security on the Private Cloud Compute, or PCC, servers that power some Apple Intelligence features. 

 That’s why it’s inviting hackers as well as privacy and security professionals and researchers to verify the security claims it’s made about PCC and is offering bounties from $50,000 up to $1 million to anyone who finds a bug or major issue. PCC, Apple claims, is the “most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud AI compute at scale.” 

Here’s a nontechnical explainer of PCC, and you can find a more technical one from Apple here. Bottom line: Apple guarantees it protects all the data on your iPhone by keeping it on the device (which is known as on-device or local processing). If a complex AI task needs to be handed off to more-powerful computers in the cloud — PCC servers running custom Apple chips — the company promises it’ll use “your data only to fulfill your request, and never store it, making sure it’s never accessible to anyone, including Apple.” 

 “Because we care deeply about any compromise to user privacy or security, we will consider any security issue that has a significant impact on PCC,” Apple says about the Apple Security Bounty reward program. “We’ll evaluate every report according to the quality of what’s presented, the proof of what can be exploited, and the impact to users.”