I’ve been living with a beta version of Apple Intelligence for over a month, and life hasn’t changed much since its features arrived on my iPhone 16 Pro.

If you haven’t braved the public beta, today you’ll get to experience it for yourself. Apple is finally shipping its much-hyped artificial intelligence suite of features in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and ‌MacOS Sequoia‌ 15.1, software updates rolling out for select iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

Powered by the company’s large language models, Apple Intelligence has been pushed as one of the biggest reasons to buy the new iPhone 16 or iPad Mini. At WWDC this past June, Tim Cook said it would take the experience of using Apple products to “new heights.” The problem? That experience, in its current form, is quite flat.

The First Landing

The Apple Intelligence rollout is uncharacteristic for Apple, which typically bundles all its flagship features and rolls them out in one big update, often alongside new devices. Here, iOS 18.1 arrives one month after iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 series. Even after installing iOS 18.1, you’ll have to join a waitlist to access Apple Intelligence—assuming you have a compatible device—though this should only take a few hours to be approved. And even then, you won’t be able to access the best of Apple Intelligence’s features. They won’t come until iOS 18.2.

So what can you do right now? Let’s start with Writing Tools, which helps to you Rewrite, Proofread, or Summarize text wherever you are in the operating system. Rewrite changes the sentence’s tone from casual to professional, for example, while Proofread fixes typos and improves grammar. Too bad it’s nearly impossible to remember this feature exists because it only shows up when you highlight words. Perhaps Writing Tools would be better as a little button built into the virtual keyboard.

You can type to Siri now, though this is technically not new. Previously this was an accessibility setting, which Apple has now baked into the experience, finally catching up to Alexa and Google Assistant that have had this default capability for years. Siri also has a new design, with a glowing effect around the screen, and the ability to understand queries a little easier, even if you trip up while asking the question. Still, it feels largely the same in day-to-day use, despite its new coat of paint—and that might feel like a bit of a let down.

Elsewhere, you’ll see the option to send Smart Replies—quick AI-generated messages based on the context of the conversation, like “Thank you” or “Sounds good”—to people in Messages and Mail. While this can be helpful, it’s hard to get excited about a feature built into Gmail since 2017.

Summaries are another big part of Apple Intelligence. You can use it to get an overview of webpages, and even your notifications. If you have multiple messages from a group chat, the summary will highlight important things that were said and you’ll be able to click in to see the full details if you need. I have yet to get much use out of this as my summaries are often a garbled mess of words.

One time, it summarized my work emails and said, “medical emergency” as a part of it. I checked my inbox to see what was up. Turns out someone said they were responding a day late due to a medical emergency but that they were fine. It wasn’t an important work email—glad to hear they were fine—but the summary made me check my inbox when I didn’t need to. More times than not, I found myself clicking into my notifications because Apple Intelligence highlighted something that seemed crucial but wasn’t.

The most actionable first-wave Apple Intelligence features are Clean Up and the real-time transcribing capabilities in the Phone, Notes, and Voice Memo apps. The former lets you erase objects in your photos, something Google introduced in 2021 on its Pixel phones—just hit Edit on a photo and choose Clean Up, and it does a solid job of erasing whatever you selected and filling in the gap. The latter lets you hit record in Notes, Voice Memo, or even during phone calls, to get a transcription saved automatically. This one is super handy as a journalist.

Lastly, this one’s a bit of a sleeper hit, but try the search function in Apple Photos. There are now fewer guardrails when you search for a photo, meaning just inputting something like “at the park with [your spouse’s name]” should drum up all the images in your library for your perusal. It can understand that context, though you’ll need to take advantage of features in Apple Photos like labeling people and pets. (Google also just unveiled a very similar feature in Google Photos.)

The Second Coming

It’s not so much that what few features available in the first Apple Intelligence update are things we’ve seen from competitors years ago. After all, it doesn’t matter if Apple is playing catch up or not because Apple users can now take advantage of some of these capabilities in a more private, secure way thanks to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (more info on this technology here).

But Apple should have waited to launch Apple Intelligence until all of its key features were available simultaneously, not in a piecemeal fashion. Siri’s reputation has long been in the gutter—Apple Intelligence promises to change that, but Siri is almost the same in iOS 18.1. Most of the time, when I ask a question, I get the same result: “Here’s what I found on the web.” Turns out you’ll have to wait for iOS 18.2, which brings the ChatGPT integration that lets you ask more open-ended questions and get more detailed responses. The current Apple Intelligence experience suggests you’re getting something new but that’s not the case.

It’s with the next update that the most interesting voice features will arrive. For example, Siri will be able to understand the context of what’s on your device’s screen, so if someone texts you an address, you can ask Siri to save it to their contact card. And since Siri has access to your emails and messages, it will even be able to tap into personal context. Ask things like, “When do I have to leave for the airport to pick up my sister?” and Siri will provide the answer, looking at flight emails or messages your sister may have sent, and then pairing that with traffic estimates.

The features that may indeed take the iPhone to new “heights” are only available in iOS 18.2. These include Image Playground, which lets you call on AI to generate images from text; Genmoji, to create new emojis from text; and Visual Intelligence, which can identify what’s in front of you and provide context (like the name of an actor on a poster). I fully expect Genmoji to be the next hot thing because who doesn’t want to create custom emojis?

I downloaded the developer beta of iOS 18.2, which arrived late last week. I’ve only been able to access Visual Intelligence so far but it’s more interesting to use than many of the other existing Apple Intelligence features. To launch, press and hold the Camera Control button, point the camera viewfinder at something in the real world you want to learn more about, and you can “Ask” through ChatGPT or “Search” through Google. Is this experience similar to what Google Lens has been doing for seven years? Yes, but I’ve used it more times in the past week than most Apple Intelligence features in the past month (a dedicated button goes a long way).

Just yesterday, my wife wondered how our neighbor’s flowers were still blooming so beautifully. We were curious what the flower was—she pulled out Google Lens on her Pixel and I brought up Visual Intelligence on the iPhone. We snapped pics of the flowers and both technologies more or less said the same thing—we were looking at daisies, and some varieties can bloom through the fall if they’re well cared for in the right weather.

In any case, if you’re feeling underwhelmed with Apple Intelligence, specifically with Siri, it’s the next update that will finally elevate the more than 10-year-old assistant and hopefully bring it up to speed with the competition. But given its history, you’d be right to be skeptical that Siri will ever be useful for anything more than the weather report.