Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April 2025
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> Remember when Apple blamed EU tech rules — and more specifically the Digital Markets Act — to justify the fact that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be available in the European Union? Maybe that was just an attempt to turn EU users against their regulators as Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April 2025 along with local language support.
If they were NEVER bringing it to the EU, maybe I'd understand the cynicism. But that it's part of a phased roll-out where it just takes more time to come to the EU does not make it MORE likely that the cynics were correct. It's impossible to know for sure without some kind of Apple memo/emails, but I don't understand pointing to the new release date as proof of some ulterior motive.
Just recently I've read that camera and battery are still what users looked for when buying a phone in the last 6 months, AI was not a concern to neither iOS nor Android users.
That being said I think that it's the kind of thing that many will want to have once they see a power user playing with it and achieving many things with their voice or few gestures.
These are features to excite shareholders, not users.
I don’t know, if apple can pull it off, that will bring a huge change to human-device interactions.
I've been waiting my whole life for, basically, the computer from Star Trek, and I think it's on the way.
Gemini was really disappointing. It could do some incredible things but it was more like the first hints of what will be possible. For example, I could ask it to show me the biggest files in my Google Drive. And as far as I could tell, it had access to Google Drive APIs, and _could decide how to use them_. That's extremely powerful, that means it could think of what to do to accomplish any goal you have and determine how to do it. If the API can do anything the UI can do, then the AI can do anything you can do, and you don't have to point and click and type like it's 2024, and we're suddenly in the 24th century.
But, it was too early. Many of my requests were met with "I'm sorry I can't access x y z" when it could and did at other times. The unreliability is what got to me.
So I went with an iPhone (my first ever, I'm not American) because I think in the short term, iOS is going to have the experience which is closer to this intelligence. Because it can drive behavior in other apps and will increasingly do so as features roll out.
Don't be fooled though Apple Intelligence is currently very, very limited.
Side note: I don't care about the text and image gen capabilities at all. Though the notification summaries are pretty handy and occasionally hilarious.
.... I might write a piece for http://unlikekinds.com about this.
Integrarion through Siri is not transformational because few actually use Siri - Siri in Europe is dumb as a bucket, even when it correctly understands what you're asking.
Ex: When you see travel pictures with tourists on it… You know it’s a iPhone. Android users have pristine pictures of the Coliseum without anyone in it.
Crowded photos are the green bubbles of iMessage.
The photo of one of my family in law whatsapp group which we also framed in our corridor is a photo of me with my partner and her sister in a scenic historical street with a dog peeing at a light pole on the right corner. Another almost identical picture was taken without the dog but we just decided the "imperfect" one was better.
If I wanted a picture of a momument without tourists, I could just buy the damn postcard or download it somewhere.
Definitely not. Relatedly, the best advice I ever got about taking pictures of not-people is to put people in them. There are countless pictures, many of them better than I will ever get, of almost every mountain/building/whatever in the world. Put yourself, friends, and family in the shot, or it will be forgettable.
We just went through my late mother's albums of pictures a few months ago, and ultimately we ended up discarding a rather large number of them because they were just random pictures of landscapes.
So what? Users don't know what they want, or need. People claim phones haven't "noticeably improved" in 5 years and then spend $600 more on a new phone instead of buying an old one.
Because the vast majority of the user base hasn't really heard of Apple Intelligence and definitely doesn't understand what it is.
It's been out in tangible form for a few hours, and 99% of the people haven't had a chance to update yet.
I think that’s part of the reason Apple calls their stuff ‘intelligence’, not AI.
Users do not want better cameras, they want better pictures, and a large part of what gives that to them is smart software.
for example https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/depth-pro (“Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second”), if it works across huge ranges of pictures, will enable features that users like, but users may not call that AI.
The integration seems well thought out, I think people will find it useful.
But for Apple it's pretty normal to release later in the EU. They almost always do this with new products and services.
What didn’t seem plausible is that Android manufacturers didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing out comparable features, and Apple never elaborated on where exactly they see the difficulties. The whole wording reads more like deflecting blame to the DMA for the delay, rather than taking it on themselves by saying “sorry, we’re already late to the game as it is, we’ll need more time to work through this, and it’s all beta this year anyway”. It certainly seemed like a welcome excuse for why they’ll only release a US version this year.
Personally I don’t really care about those features, but Apple’s communication in recent years has gained a bit of a passive-aggressive side towards the EU.
It seems reasonable in that light to have pumped the brakes on new iOS features when the DMA also targets bundling apps and services and iOS is labeled a gatekeeper.
The issue is the security of the Apple Intelligence model. It was kinda vague whether they had to open up that API to 3rd parties - which would completely taint the work they did to keep it secure and private despite being a cloud AI system.
Android manufacturers don't care, nobody will bat an eye if a Samsung Cloud AI system leaks user data or it's used for training models. If Apple does it, the Internet will have another gleeful hissy-fit and forget it wasn't Apple who leaked the data, it was the 3rd party Cloud AI someone plugged in to their phone instead of Apple Intelligence.
Releasing later in the EU is just standard operating procedure for Apple. Sure the law makes this more difficult but clearly not impossible. This doesn't just go for AI but for all products. They all need different certifications etc than in the US.
The big difference between this and other stuff is that AI is so hyped everyone wants it right now. That's why it seems to stand out.
There does seem to be a narrative against the EU legislation from the AI companies though. I'm not sure if Apple can be counted as one.
As a native Danish speaker - a relatively small language spoken by about 6 million people - Apple had by far the most cohesive and thorough localization story of any tech corporation. Google and Microsoft come really close, but I’ve never seen a single instance of awkward word choice, ambiguous grammar, sloppy punctuation, or imprecise phrasing in an Apple product.
Anybody can do that in Spanish, German, or French, or any of the other major languages.
My pet belief is that this is a big reason why Scandinavia, like the US, is dominated by iPhones, in contrast to the rest of Europe, where Android leads.
I think the relative wealth of northwest Europe also plays a role in the adoption of Apple hardware. Or at least it certainly helps.
Definitely. IPhone here in Spain means tourist or expat :) It's just that most people buy budget phones here. A category in which apple doesn't even compete. The SE is decidedly mid-range (upper mid range in pricing terms even, it's a lot more expensive than in the US)
Also I think people here care less about spelling. There isn't that cultural attention to detail that the northern countries have.
Compare an average street in Denmark or Holland with Spain, where fibre cables hang in a huge spider from facades, streets have potholes, paint is falling off everywhere. People here don't really care about that stuff (and I would agree)
I think Spain would fix its potholes the moment it could afford to make that a priority.
Does Apple think that people in Europe don't understand enough english to do a fitness workout?
At least give us the option, please?
Apple Intelligence is available today on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
EU Digital Markets Act: Litigation Against Apple
The idea that Apple Intelligence is the big feature for the 16 flies out of the window and the only update this year is a button
Don't eat rotten fruit. Go read a fuckdamn math text instead, with a nice cup of tea or coffee and a view of the local vegetation in the background. Then take a walk and count your fingers and toes.