Apple Intelligence 'changed my life': Tim Cook says Apple's AI is as innovative as the iPod’s click wheel or the iPhone’s touch screen

Apple Intelligence is set to launch before the end of October – and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook believes the AI tools have already changed his life.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Cook emphasized just how much he believes in Apple Intelligence, despite the messy launch of the technology, which sees new features rolled out to users in phases over the next year.

“We weren’t the first to do intelligence,” Cook told the WSJ. “But we’ve done it in a way that we think is the best for the customer.” At Apple’s WWDC keynote in June, the company claimed Apple Intelligence was “AI for the rest of us”, and in the interview Cook said that while Apple isn’t the first company to introduce AI tools to a smartphone, the company’s approach is “Profoundly different.”

He added that he believes the addition of Apple Intelligence will completely change the way people use the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in the same way the iPod’s click wheel or iPhone’s touch screen once did. “I think we’ll look back and it will be one of these air pockets that happened to get you on a different technology curve,” he said.

Cook said one of his favorite Apple Intelligence features is the ability to summarize emails and notifications, which had, he told WSJ, “changed my life.” He added, “If I can save time here and there it adds up to something significant across a day, a week, a month.”

Apple's AI approach

Apple Intelligence is expected to release on October 28, and while users who get to use Apple AI for the first time might find the limited features underwhelming at first, Apple is banking on small quality-of-life improvements like email summaries making a huge difference to the way we use our devices.

Initially, Apple Intelligence will launch with Writing Tools, Notification Summaries, Clean Up, and a redesign of Siri which emanates from the edges of your device. These features are similar to other generative AI tools we’ve seen on the best Android phones, including the Google Pixel 9, although this is with Apple’s polish and design.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be an iPhone, iPad, or Mac user with Apple Intelligence’s arrival upon us. While we can’t fully predict the impact of Apple’s entrance into the AI industry, we anticipate that it's going to be significant. The first few months of Apple Intelligence might prove to be frustrating at times, with some of the best features held back until 2025, but if these features prove as life-changing as Tim Cook suggests, we might in time be able to forgive Apple for the less-than-seamless launch.

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