The confusing state of Apple Intelligence

The first bits of Apple Intelligence are starting to show up on people’s phones. The features in iOS 18.1 are fairly basic: summarizing messages, writing emails, that kind of thing. Apple is already letting developers play with iOS 18.2, though, which looks like a much more substantial update. Meanwhile, the company is about to launch a bunch of new M4-powered and AI-focused Macs, and launched the iPad Mini this week. It’s a lot happening all at once, and it’s a lot to make sense of.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and make sense of it. The Verge’s Richard Lawler joins us as we talk through the small changes in 18.1 and the much bigger changes in 18.2, debate whether Tim Cook can really use every Apple product every day, and wonder what might be coming from Apple’s week of Mac announcements.

After that, we get into the other news in the world of AI. Anthropic built a model that can use your computer for you, which is both cool and horrifying and is also the main goal of practically every company in AI. Humane made its AI Pin cheaper, is working on licensing its operating system to other companies, and has some big questions to ask. Perplexity is under fire for copyright reasons. Watermarking AI images still doesn’t work. It’s all a lot.

Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about the Boox Palma 2, T-Mobile changing the “lifetime” deal it made with older subscribers, and the silly fight against the FTC’s new click to cancel rule. Please, don’t make us make phone calls.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Apple AI:

And in other AI news:

And in the lightning round: