Apple Intelligence has an official release date — but it won’t be on your new iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro at launch
Apple Intelligence, the brand new AI feature suite coming to the best iPhones, now has an official release date – and we don’t have much longer to wait.
Apple Intelligence will be available in October as part of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 in beta, with additional features coming later this year and into 2025.
Apple officially announced the arrival of Apple Intelligence during its Glowtime event, alongside the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max. You can follow everything Apple announced in our iPhone 16 event live blog.
The new iPhones can be pre-ordered starting Friday and will ship starting September 20, but without Apple Intelligence.
When Apple Intelligence launches next month, it will bring writing tools like proofreading, Mail and notification summaries, improvements to Siri, and Clean Up for photo editing, to name just a few of its AI features. The initial launch will only support US English, however, with localized English coming to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK in December.
The iPhone’s new Visual Intelligence feature won’t arrive until later this year, joining other previously announced Apple Intelligence features like Image Playground and Genmoji.
No Apple Intelligence at launch
At the Apple event, Tim Cook said that the iPhone 16s are the “first iPhones designed from the ground up for Apple Intelligence,” but that you’ll also be able to use the AI features from last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
However, some features, like the new Visual Intelligence, are exclusive to this year’s models, so if you want the best that Apple Intelligence has to offer, you’ll need to upgrade.