How Apple’s AI Could Help Make the iPhone 16 a Success

“Introducing iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16, designed for Apple Intelligence” is the phrase with which he greets us today the official website of Apple The Cupertino company is celebrating, after having held this Monday, September 9, the presentation event of its new range of smartphones, which will begin to reach their owners from next week in the United States.

However, for Chilean customers, The page comes with a small but important warning at the bottom of the site: “Apple Intelligence will be available in beta this year with an iOS 18 update on all iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max models, with Siri and the device language set to US English. Some features and availability in other languages, such as Spanish, French, and Japanese, will be added over the next year. “.

This means that Those who purchase their device and want to take advantage of the platform’s biggest usability update will need to set their device to English and interact with it in that language to do so. .

And this is not the first time this has happened. In 2011, Siri was launched, the voice assistant for iPhone that is still a fundamental part of the experience of all Apple devices. But at the time, Siri only knew how to speak English, so it took a whole generation, from the iPhone 4S to the iPhone 5, before she could learn Spanish.

Of course, being a fan of Apple and any technology brand today, requires a certain level of patience (there are those who have already had 9 versions of the Pixel who are waiting for it to arrive in Chile, for example) but in the case of the iPhone 16, this wait can be felt even more than other launches because both the public and the competition in the smartphone market have changed.

Officially presented on June 10 at WWDC, Apple Intelligence It’s the company’s response to the boom in generative AI in the tech world. And with several Android phones integrating AI features into their hardware, the Tim Cook-led giant’s response has, as expected, been ambitious and innovative.

Refusing as always to use the generic name of the technology, Apple’s artificial intelligence is not artificial, it’s just Apple, but it is designed to work actively and also invisibly on your phone.

With Apple Intelligence, you can do many things we already know: Generate images on demand or even with the Genmoji system, create your own original Emojis I just ask with a few words. The system is able to help you write texts and even transform them to sound more formal or family-friendly with just one touch.

You can also do searches in your content stored on the device or in your personal cloud, be able to describe a type of image (for example, “photos of my daughter where she appears with a cat”) or even a specific moment within a video and find it.

Can use the camera to ask questions about your surroundings —for example, going to a restaurant and getting its menu, or a bike model to find out what it is and how much it costs— and in addition, it is able to read the messages that arrive in your applications and write a summary of what was said instead of having to read message by message. And of course, Siri has also gained new features, like being able to understand you even when you change order in the middle of a sentence.

All this is done mainly, within the device, thanks to the new A18 and A18 Pro processors which not only include speed improvements, but are specialized in processing artificial intelligence data with its NPU. In fact, this is the reason why Apple Intelligence will only reach the entire iPhone 16 family, but only the Pro models of the iPhone 15, unlike other software updates that usually extend to phones of other generations.

In other words, and paying attention to the slogan of this generation, indeed iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro are set to launch Apple Intelligence something that will undoubtedly remain the basis for future generations. It is, in a way, a launch that will be a pillar for the future not because of the design of the equipment, but because of the user experience that the phones will have.

It is therefore curious that, despite its importance in the speech, Apple Intelligence deployment seems very neglected and, clearly, very pressed by market trends and not because of Apple’s interest in having technology that works like magic from day one.

Let’s forget about the Chilean market for a moment. When the iPhone 16 goes on sale on September 20 those who receive it in the United States They will not have access to any of the functions of Artificial Intelligence . That’s how it is. The phone “designed for Apple Intelligence” will not have these features by default.

What is known is that during the month of October, on a date yet to be defined, a free update will be made that will include some of Apple Intelligence features in beta That is to say, anticipate from now on that the system may have flaws, which will obviously become more viral than its successes.

There is no mention of what features these will be and which ones will be added, over time, with subsequent updates. Only in December, for example, will local versions of the system be added for users who speak English but in countries like Canada, the United Kingdom or South Africa. And as Apple said, support for new languages, among which only Chinese, French, Japanese and fortunately Spanish were named, was subject to a vague “next year”.

The situation in Europe is even worse: Apple Intelligence has no planned release date due to the regulations currently required by the European Union regarding the interoperability of iPhone features with other devices. These are the same regulations that forced it to accept the installation of external app stores and that we have to thank for leading Apple to finally use the USB-C connection to charge devices and transfer data.

It must be fair: The new iPhones have hardware innovations that justify their existence anyway such as a new camera system that improves macro photos, portrait mode and the inclusion of a new button created specifically to control the camera and change its settings. There are new colors, new materials, they are more resistant, they have more battery and the screen of the iPhone 16 Pro Max is the largest that any iPhone has ever had, in addition to other changes more internal than external.

But if the function that drives the entire marketing of the product is not going to work in its entirety from day one, and even more so for a large part of the customers, with a date to be defined, it only leaves the feeling that Apple tried to jump on the AI ​​train as quickly as possible and that his fans, known for their patience, would wait for him anyway.

As has become the custom, Apple Intelligence looks like a new “public beta” where users will have to pay to test and adjust functions that, starting next year, will be much more stable and, of course, will already be available with the purchase of the next phone. An oversight that, of course, at least for the American public – where the iPhone is king – there will not be so much waiting, but For the rest of the world, this will mean having a very advanced phone but running at half speed. .