Renowned technology journalist Mark Gurman revealed that in recent days, Apple has decided to postpone the release of some key features of Apple Intelligence. Gurman bluntly stated that the long-awaited "super cycle" triggered by the iPhone 16 will not come.
Gurman sorted out the Apple Intelligence feature that will be postponed:
In June of this year, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI, but current reports indicate that ChatGPT will not be integrated into Apple Intelligence until later this year.
The delayed integration of ChatGPT will also cause a chain reaction. Apple originally planned to implement a comprehensive reform of its voice assistant Siri based on this AI model, including the introduction of a more personalized and contextualized chat mode. However, these main features will be postponed until next year.
In addition, Apple plans to release the AI image generation feature "Image Playground" and AI custom emoji feature "Genmoji" in iOS 18.2, which will be released in December.
Currently, the first batch of Apple Intelligence features will be available starting from iOS 18.1. It can be confirmed that iOS 18.1 will not be released together with the iPhone, but will only be released to the public in October. The first batch of features provided includes new writing tools for generating and summarizing text, suggestion replies in iMessage, automatic phone transcription, and cleaning functions in the "Photos" app. However, Gurman stated that even these basic functions may not necessarily be open in China and the EU region.
Overall, the advancement of Apple Intelligence to a 'complete entity' will be a slow and staggered process. Gulman pointed out that the reason why Apple adopts this strategy is because the AI function itself is not attractive enough to drive consumers to upgrade their models. On the contrary, Apple needs to promote the changes in the phone itself, including the new photo shooting button and customizable operation buttons.
In addition to the delay in AI functionality and low consumer acceptance of AI, Gulman pointed out that the appearance of the new iPhone this autumn is almost the same as the previous generation, which also leads to a significant decrease in its appeal to consumers.
At present, many analysts expect that the iPhone 16 series equipped with Apple Intelligence features will trigger a wave of replacement craze. However, Gulman believes that this craze is more likely to be driven by the release of the iPhone 17 next year, when AI functions will present a relatively more complete version and the new models may also have a brand new appearance.