Technology

Yup. Photo cleanup was cool to try once, but I’ll never use it again. Removing stuff from photos with a single tap also bugs me a bit in general, I’m not sure it’s something we should make so easy. Message summaries are absolute shit and have already caused confusion for me. I’m not even talking about the proper notification summaries, just the auto-summaries in the preview lines of the whole iMessage list. A number of them have really fucked with me. For example, a friend asked me to FaceTime her in a few days, and the summary just said “FaceTime request.” And I was like “shit, did I miss a call?” As far as I can tell I can’t turn that off without disabling the entire AI setting.

I’m also not sure how to feel about all of Apple’s privacy talk when it comes to their AI features. They say certain features will stay on device, which is great, but for everything else, as far as I’ve noticed there is no mention of what goes to OpenAI’s servers, since their AI is still primarily powered by OpenAI. There’s actually no mention of OpenAI in any of the disclaimers or warnings I read when I first enabled it.

As the owner of a 13 Mini; what’s that?

We didn’t get anything at all from 18.1. There is literally nothing on my phone to tell me that it exists.

However, I do have it on both of my Macs, and have yet to do anything with it. I’m not in any hurry to bother either.

From my experience iOS actually got dumber. At least the keyboard did, which is annoying. There's a certain way how keys responded to what you typed which has been a thing since the first iPhone. But two updates ago or so, they butchered it completely (especially if you type in German), making texting pretty difficult at times. I've asked other users and some of them experience the same issues in that certain keys just do not want to get tapped sometimes because the algorithm expects something else, making hitboxes of unwanted keys way too big. Needlesly to say I'm not ready to trust Apple's Intelligence just yet.

Daily iPhone user. Haven’t really noticed any difference. They really pushed how tightly integrated the experience would be, but honestly, I don’t really notice.

Maybe they integrated it so well that it looks exactly the same as what they started with.

I gotta be honest, the push notification summaries are more annoying than they are useful. Like. I’m going to read a text blurb of 100 or so characters. It’s an extra step to see the summary and then the actual message itself.

I’m very much enjoying the GenMoji stuff. Being able to send or react with an emoji tailored to the situation is not useful, but it’s fun when you come up with a good one.

Also Siri is definitely more functional than it used to be. It understands when I correct myself or change my mind. Very handy. Still far from perfect though.

Also on iPad all the AI-driven handwriting cleanup and stuff is really nice when taking notes.

But otherwise it’s not super useful. I don’t like the notification summaries, they aren’t very good. Though they are sometimes hilarious. Like Ring being summarized as “Thirteen people at your door and gunshots heard.”

Shock, I tell you. Absolutely shocked. S

it's just one big pile of meh. but then i dont even use siri, so i'm not really the target audiance for anthropomorphized chatbots.

They need to let us whitelist 2FA App notifications from summary, so there is no lag time. I have to wait 30 seconds, where it used to be instant. My friend turned it off and his notifications went back to being instant again.

For me the best new feature on macOS is the ability to natively put the temperature in the menu bar. You click on it, and it gives you some more info and from there can launch the full weather app.

It's a small addition and could have been there for a decade, but I like it a lot.

Is it worth the hype that Apple and cell carriers are throwing at it? Not really, but do I, as a user, enjoy a lot of the new features? For sure.
Double tap to type to Siri is great, and access to ChatGPT for answers Siri doesn’t know is much better than, “I couldn’t find the answer. Would you like me to search the internet?” And as a person with slight dyslexia and ADHD, Proofread is a fucking god send.