iPhone 16 debuted today without its most touted feature: Apple Intelligence

The iPhone 16 officially goes on sale on Friday. But for its early adopters, it arrives with a fundamental compromise built into the deal.

Simply put, this isn’t the iPhone 16 they were promised. Tim Cook said it will be “the first iPhone built for Apple Intelligence.” But that “for” is vital: the phones won’t even have the most anticipated AI features from the get-go.

This appears to be a turning point for Apple. When it involves recent features on phones, the corporate is not at all times known for being the primary to market or jumping on the bandwagon, but it surely is understood for being the perfect. That’s not the case here. Apple has been forced to leap on board the AI ​​hype train, and in doing so, it’s taking a leap into the unthinkable void.

Apple has mentioned its Apple Intelligence Suite twice before — first announcing the AI ​​Suite at its WWDC developer conference in June, and again throughout the iPhone 16 launch in September.

In reality, nevertheless, the corporate falls far short when it comes to feature offerings in comparison with competitors like Google and Microsoft, in addition to newcomers like OpenAI and (*16*).

The company’s first AI toolkit, announced and released in developer beta, includes tools for transcribing, article and notification summarization, object removal from photos, and audio transcription. Much of this functionality already exists available in the market. Apple is betting that its give attention to privacy — your usage data just isn’t shared with other users or other tech corporations, it guarantees — might be enough to draw buyers.

Strictly speaking, the difference between product and have isn’t as drastic because it might sound — or a minimum of that’s how Apple would defend all of it. The iPhone went on sale on September 20, and Apple has promised to begin rolling out AI features in October.

However, only a number of features might be made available at the moment, and so they might be available only in U.S. English. (Recall that the corporate is banking heavily on international markets, with North America accounting for just over half of all iPhone sales.)

And we’ll need to wait for more complicated AI gadgets. The company plans to introduce features like visual search and Image Playground next month, and support for added languages ​​will begin in December — but first with English localization. Other languages ​​will follow in 2025.

The iPhone 16 just isn’t absolutely vital for individuals who want the brand new AI features. The company has already confirmed that the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max can even get access to the platform.

So if Apple Intelligence is actually the game-changer Apple guarantees, one wonders whether the disruptions and delays in rollouts will deter users from upgrading. Or whether we’ll start seeing consumers adopt a wait-and-see attitude — which could also translate into lower sales.

As my colleague Sarah has identified, Apple’s AI features could grow to be more useful once third-party developers can fully integrate them into their apps. That’s nice to contemplate, but when and when that happens, that’s more of an iPhone 17 conversation.

That stands out as the crux of the matter. Apple is constructing for the long run, and for the primary time, it appears to be asking buyers to take that leap of religion.