Apple finally shipped the first wave of Apple Intelligence features this week, and the reaction has been... a lot.
If you bought an iPhone 15 last year, congratulations, you own a very expensive paperweight that can't run any of it.
The cutoff is the iPhone 15 Pro and anything newer, which is a genuinely wild way to treat people who dropped a grand twelve months ago.
The features themselves are a mixed bag of genuinely useful and deeply cursed.
Notification summaries are the headline act, and they work exactly as well as you'd expect a robot to work at reading your group chat.
One tester reportedly got a summary of a family emergency text that read "dinner plans uncertain." Cool.
Then there's the new Siri glow, which makes your screen look like a disco floor whenever you summon it.
Under the hood, Siri is supposedly smarter, but in practice it still can't figure out whether you want to call your mom or order a pizza.
The AI writing tools are fine if you enjoy every email sounding like it was drafted by a LinkedIn influencer having a mild stroke.
The Clean Up tool in Photos is genuinely slick, letting you erase photobombers with a tap.
It's also going to be the source of roughly ten thousand awkward Thanksgiving conversations when someone notices Uncle Rick has been suspiciously cropped out of every family photo since 2024.
Here's the part that's going to sting: Apple is calling this a "beta." You are paying full price for a beta.
Google and Samsung have been shipping mature AI features for over a year, and Apple's answer is a staggered rollout that won't be fully baked until sometime in 2025.
Meanwhile, the company's marketing would have you believe this is the second coming of the original iPhone.
The real kicker is the hardware requirement.
Apple says it's about RAM and the neural engine, which is technically true and also a convenient excuse to push upgrades.
Every carrier is already running trade-in promos targeting anyone with a "non-AI-capable" phone.
If you're on an iPhone 15 Pro or 16, enjoy the new toys, but maybe don't reorganize your life around them.
If you're on anything older, you're not missing as much as the ads want you to think.
The summaries are buggy, Siri is still Siri, and the whole thing feels like a company playing catch-up while pretending it invented the category.
The honest take: Apple Intelligence is a solid first draft that should've stayed in the lab a few more months.
Buy the new phone if you need a new phone, not because a glowing Siri border is going to change your life.
Final Thoughts
And if anyone tries to sell you on AI as a reason to upgrade right now, make them show you the notification summaries first.