Apple's AI Features Rollout Will Miss Upcoming iPhone Software Overhaul

Apple's upcoming AI features will arrive later than anticipated, missing the initial launch of its upcoming iPhone and iPad software overhauls but giving the company more time to fix bugs. Bloomberg: The company is planning to begin rolling out Apple Intelligence to customers as part of software updates coming by October, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the AI features will arrive a few weeks after the initial iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 releases planned for September, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing unannounced release details.

Still, the iPhone maker is planning to make Apple Intelligence available to software developers for the first time for early testing as soon as this week via iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1 betas, they added. The strategy is atypical as the company doesn't usually release previews of follow-up updates until around the time the initial version of the new software generation is released publicly. The stakes are higher than usual. In order to ensure a smooth consumer release of its big bet on AI, Apple needs support from developers to help iron out issues and test features on a wider scale. Concerns over the stability of Apple Intelligence features, in part, led the company to split the features from the initial launch of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18.

Shift in strategy, not surprising

[Anubis IV]

This report is acting as if Apple never announces features before they ship, but that stopped being true a few years ago, at least when it comes to iOS releases. The last several years have seen Apple announcing features every Summer at WWDC, then shipping those features in point releases over the course of the next year.

For instance, iOS 17's Journal app was announced with everything else at WWDC '23, but didn't arrive until iOS 17.2 in December 2023. Qi2 charging for older devices arrived at the same time, as did several improvements to autocorrect behavior. I think I saw some reporting that they only delivered on their final WWDC promises for iOS 17 in the Spring of 2024.

Hardware releases continue to be kept close to the chest, at least as a general rule, but likely because of the need to give developers time to leverage new APIs and frameworks—especially so for entirely new areas like AI—iOS features tend to be announced well in advance these days.

Apple cannot afford to fail on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple absolutely cannot afford to f*ck this up, not this time. I'm somewhat re-assured that they are slowing down the release to work out bugs. If they f*ck this up, it will be very bad for their business (and they know it). Time to roll back the egos at Apple, roll up the sleeves and do this right. But, let's also hope that their "vision" for what this will be in our devices isn't some skewed version of "we know what's best for you" approach, which as not worked well in the past.

We shall see.....

Re:Apple cannot afford to fail on this

[larwe]

This is a puzzling comment. "AI" is the new 3D TV, the new tulip, the new "blockchain is the future", the new "voice interfaces are taking over the world" (see: current status of Amazon Alexa). There is no particular metric that could be used to declare that Apple, or anyone else, fscked up an AI implementation, because the inherent limitations of this associative, not intelligent technology simply mean that it is currently, temporarily, attracting an oversized amount of capital and press coverage. When the bubble bursts it will be, like those other technologies, relegated to niches. There is no new universe here in which Apple needs to make a splash and create a big footprint - it's just a bubble, quivering as it expands, thinning as it expands, and imminently prone to implosion.

More time to fix bugs!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Now, if only they'd devote the time to actually doing that... but they'll probably just reassign all those workers to beef up their all-important memoji division.