Next Week’s iOS 18.3 and MacOS 15.3 Updates Will Enable Apple Intelligence During Onboarding

From Apple’s developer release notes for iOS 18.3, now at release candidate (RC) status:

For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.

Same for MacOS 15.3 Sequoia, which is also at RC status and expected next week.

I have mixed feelings about this decision. It’s pretty obvious that Apple Intelligence has a slew of shortcomings. It’s the nature of the beast, though, that it’s always going to have some shortcomings. Human intelligence, which to date remains the gold standard for intelligence in general, has some pretty glaring shortcomings, so it’s unsurprising that all artificial intelligence systems still do too. (Perhaps that’s a good metric for defining the next inflection point, now that the Turing Test has been passed: When humans need to ask AI systems to explain their own shortcomings, because we’re no longer smart enough to detect them ourselves.)

So the bar shouldn’t be “has obvious shortcomings”. It’s whether Apple Intelligence is good enough. Compared to other systems, like ChatGPT, no, it’s not good enough. But Apple has been enabling Siri by default since 2011. And Siri, today, is arguably worse than it’s ever been when compared to the state of the art. A friend just sent me this screenshot after asking Siri “Who won Super Bowl 13?” and getting this answer: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. In addition to wrongly casing the Roman numerals, LII is 52, not 13. The only way Siri could have been more wrong would be if the Eagles hadn’t even won Super Bowl 52. I just tried the same question — “Who won Super Bowl 13?” — on both my iPhone running iOS 18.3 RC1 and my Mac running MacOS 15.1.1, and Siri gave me the same wrong answer, on both devices, both when the question was spoken aloud and when it was typed: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. Siri, today, is an unfunny joke.

But so I think it’s reasonable to ask whether Apple Intelligence is as good as Siri. I’d say yes, that’s about how good Apple Intelligence is. In fact, I’d say several of the Apple Intelligence features — Clean Up in Photos, and notification summaries — are better than Siri. So if Siri has been on by default for over a decade, sure, Apple should go ahead and turn Apple Intelligence on by default too.

I think there could be significant benefit to turning it on by default, sort of in the spirit of dogfooding. Enabling Apple Intelligence features by default will increase the pressure on Apple to keep improving it at a fast clip. It’s also the case that none of Apple Intelligence’s features, with the possible exception of notification summaries, are in the user’s face at all. You have to invoke them to use them. If you don’t want them — or don’t even know about them — you won’t notice anything different once they’re enabled by default. Apple may or may not be over-indexing on Apple Intelligence, but, thankfully, they’re not shoving it in users’ faces.

But, as I wrote two weeks ago, enabling it by default for all users really puts the lie to their claim that all of Apple Intelligence is “beta”. If it’s not just merely shipping to all users, but now enabled by default, that’s not beta. That’s just buggy.

★ Wednesday, 22 January 2025