Apple spent two years telling us its artificial intelligence would change everything, and in a way, it did.
It changed my phone from a device that lasted a full day into a hand warmer that begs for a charger by 2 p.m.
The company's big AI push, which it insists on calling Apple Intelligence because "AI" apparently wasn't pretentious enough, has been rolling out in waves since late 2024.
The pitch is simple: smarter Siri, writing tools that polish your texts, notification summaries that condense your group chat chaos, and image generation that turns your dog into a watercolor.
Let's start with the notification summaries, which have become the internet's favorite punching bag.
In one now-infamous case, the feature condensed a BBC headline about a murder suspect into something that read like the suspect had shot himself.
Nothing says "revolutionary" like a feature that confidently lies to you in bullet points.
Then there's Siri, the assistant that has been "about to get good" since 2011.
The new version can supposedly understand context and chain requests together.
In practice, it still occasionally sets a timer when you asked for the weather, just with more confidence now.
Apple reportedly delayed major Siri upgrades into 2026, which is corporate-speak for "we showed the demo too early and everyone noticed." The writing tools are fine, I guess.
They can make your email sound more professional or more casual or more concise.
Congratulations, Apple built Grammarly but worse and it's baked into your operating system so you can't escape it.
The image generation is fun for about eleven minutes, until you realize every result looks like it was painted by a very polite robot who has never seen a human face.
Here's the part that actually matters for your wallet.
If you're rocking an iPhone 15 or older, you're out of luck unless you upgrade to a 15 Pro or newer.
That's a sales strategy wearing a feature-launch costume.
Consumers are being asked to spend four figures on a phone so they can get AI-generated emoji and a Siri that's marginally less confused.
Running AI models locally on a device the size of a deck of cards takes juice, and users have been reporting noticeably shorter battery life with the features enabled.
Apple's solution is apparently to just ship bigger batteries and hope nobody does the math.
None of this is to say the technology is worthless.
Some of it genuinely saves time, and on-device processing is a real privacy advantage over the cloud-based alternatives.
But the gap between Apple's keynote promises and what's actually in your pocket remains wide enough to drive a Mac Pro through. **The Verdict** Apple Intelligence is a beta product wearing a shipping label, and you're the tester.
If you were thinking about upgrading just for these features, wait a year, or at least until the summaries stop inventing crimes.
Final Thoughts
Your battery, your wallet, and your group chat will thank you.