The First Phase of Apple Intelligence Arrives in iOS 18.1

As anticipated, Apple officially released iOS 18.1 today, along with corresponding iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 updates, bringing the first Apple Intelligence features to supported iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

There aren’t too many surprises in today’s iOS 18.1 release since it follows a Release Candidate sent out to developers and public beta testers a week ago, complete with final release notes highlighting what’s new. However, today’s public release means that everyone can now install iOS 18.1, and everyone with an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 model can try out the first set of Apple Intelligence features for themselves.

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What Apple Intelligence Offers in iOS 18.1

While there are still more exciting features to come — the first developer beta of iOS 18.2 arrived last week, giving us a hint of what Apple’s image creation and ChatGPT features will look like — the iOS 18.1 release unlocks the ability to take advantage of text-based AI tools to enhance your writing and summarize notifications, messages, emails, and transcripts.

Here’s a rundown of what’s available in this first stage of Apple Intelligence:

1. Writing Tools offer proofreading assistance, enabling you to rewrite sections of text to alter their tone, style, or length. Additionally, they provide the capability to generate concise summaries of lengthy blocks of text.
2. Siri is getting some initial improvements before the major changes come early next year. These include a new user interface that displays a glowing light around the edge of your screen when you activate Siri, and the ability to type your requests to Siri more easily by double-tapping the bottom of your screen. Siri can also better understand when you stumble over words or change them mid-sentence, and maintain conversational context between requests. You can ask Siri for help with Apple products and get step-by-step instructions for various tasks.
3. Photos adds enhanced search features to find photos and videos by describing what you’re looking for — even a specific scene within a video. You can also use natural language to create Memory movies. A new Clean Up tool will also help you remove distracting objects from your photos, similar to Google’s Magic Eraser.
4. Notification Summaries will give you a better idea of what your notifications are about at a glance, especially when you have a stack of them from a messaging conversation. Similar summaries will appear in the message previews in Apple Mail.
5. Smart Replies will offer AI-powered suggestions for replying to messages with a single tap.
6. Priority Mail will use Apple Intelligence to put the most important messages at the top of your inbox.
7. Intelligent Summaries let you distill transcripts of audio recordings, emails, web pages, and other long chunks of text down to their key points.
   

You’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any of Apple’s new iPhone 16 models to take advantage of these features on the iPhone. However, iPadOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 will bring the same capabilities to a broader range of iPads and Macs since only an M-series chip is required to power Apple Intelligence on those devices. That means any 2020 or later Mac, 2021 or later iPad Pro, 2022 or later iPad Air, and the new seventh-generation iPad mini.

What Else Is New in iOS 18.1?

Fortunately, iOS 18.1 offers a bit more than just the new Apple Intelligence features, so even folks with older iPhone models can enjoy the new update.

First among these is the new Call Recording feature in the Phone app. Initially mistaken for an Apple Intelligence feature, it’s available on all iPhone models that support iOS 18.1, which is the iPhone XS/XR and later. You’ll need Apple Intelligence to summarize your call recordings, but you can create and transcribe recordings on all the older models, too.

If you have a set of second-generation AirPods Pro, even the old Lightning-encased version, you’ll also get AirPods Hearing Health features. In addition to iOS 18.1, these require the AirPods Pro to be running firmware 7B19, which should install automatically in the background as long as your AirPods Pro are in their case and near your iPhone. The availability of these services varies by region; currently, only folks in the US get the full trifecta of Hearing Protection, Hearing Tests, and Hearing Aids. In contrast, Apple only offers Hearing Protection in Canada, users in Germany and Japan get Hearing Tests and Hearing Aids, and the United Kingdom has yet to get any of these services. Apple will undoubtedly roll these features out to more countries as it receives the necessary regulatory approvals.

The Control Center gets more customization options, with new buttons for Wi-Fi, VPN, AirDrop, Satellite Communication, Measure, and Level. There’s also an option in the Settings app to reset the Control Center layout to the default.

A few other minor features Apple has listed in the iOS 18.1 release notes include natural language search on the App Store, RCS Business Messaging, and the ability to send Game Center invites from the Contacts app and more easily find them in the Settings app.

Security Updates

If the new features aren’t persuasive enough, iOS 18.1 also includes 27 security fixes to patch vulnerabilities in iOS 18.0 and iOS 18.0.1. These range from maliciously crafted images that can cause your iPhone to leak data, malicious apps that could run arbitrary shortcuts, and an accessibility bug that might allow an attacker to view sensitive user information from a locked device.

While there’s thankfully no evidence that any of these have been actively exploited, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. In fact, now that Apple has disclosed them all in its security update notes, you can bet that hackers and other cybercrooks will be looking for ways to exploit these vulnerabilities against folks that haven’t yet updated to iOS 18.1. The same applies to iPadOS 18.1, macOS 15.1, watchOS 11.1, tvOS 18.1, and visionOS 2.1.

For those who haven’t taken the plunge into iOS/iPadOS 18 or macOS Sequoia, Apple has also released iOS 17.7.1, iPadOS 17.7.1, macOS Sonoma 14.7.1, and macOS Ventura 13.7.1 with similar security fixes.