The iPhone 16 was marketed as being made for Apple Intelligence, but that much-hyped feature wasn’t available when it launched. And it seems disgruntled owners still have a few weeks to wait.
In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman claims that iOS 18.1 is currently slated for a public roll-out on Monday, October 28. That might not sound terrifically exciting, x.1 point updates generally being less momentous than the x.0 releases that land each September, but this one is important because it heralds the arrival of Apple Intelligence.
Gurman explains that the rollout is happening later than originally expected because Apple wants to play it safe following a number of recent software problems: the iPadOS 18 bug, for instance, that bricked some iPad Pros. “I’m told that Apple is taking its time with the rollout,” he writes, “to ensure that major bugs are eliminated and it can support all the new traffic on its AI cloud servers.”
Understandable, but likely to cause more frustration for those who spent big on new iPhones this fall and were looking forward to trying out Apple’s belated entry into the AI space. What’s more, Apple Intelligence is scheduled for a gradual rollout across a span of months, with many features not slated to appear for several more months. And that’s before we even get to the tinkering and tweaking that’s likely to be necessary before Apple Intelligence reaches the same level of reliability and usefulness as rival AI platforms that have been on the market for a while–a process that could run into years.
Still, as the old tech saying goes: better late than crippled with bugs that will drive users to rival platforms. Apple Intelligence will be here eventually, and we hope it’ll be worth the wait.