Taylor Swift is known for her “eras,” but for as much as I respect her as an artist and childless cat lady, I could not tell you what any of those eras happen to be. However, as a geek, I can definitely tell you all about iPhone’s eras.
The first iPhone era is the release of the original iPhone in 2007 (of course!). The original iPhone wasn’t just a new era for Apple, but a new era for the entire world. iPhone changed us, and it continues to shape our lives in ways no other singular consumer product ever has (except maybe the internet).
The original iPhone wasn’t just a new era for Apple, but a new era for the entire world.iPhone’s second era began almost five years later with the release of iPhone 4s — significant for both the introduction of Siri and as the final Apple product announced in CEO Steve Job’s life, who died the following day. iPhone 4s was a massive success, with over a million sales on its first day of release, and introduced iCloud and iMessage, providing iPhone users with free, unlimited rich text messaging.
Two years later, iOS 7 changed the design language of iPhone, departing from Jobs’ skeuomorphic style of design to a flatter style of icons and windows. iOS 7 was released with iPhone 5s, which was the first smartphone with a 64-bit processor and introduced biometrics to iPhone with Touch ID.
iPhone’s forth era began in 2017 with iPhone X, the first (and so far only) complete redesign of iPhone. The Home Button and bezels were replaced with a 5.8 inch display that covered the entire front of the phone, with new gestures for unlocking and navigating the phone without a Home button. At the top of the screen was the notch with the front facing camera and the new Face ID biometric system.
This year, 2024, has been a big year already for iPhone: The EU’s DMA has forced major changes to iOS in Europe, Apple released the iPhone 16 models with the new Camera Control not-a-button, and iOS 18 brought a multitude of customization options to the iOS Home Screen.
And this week, as Apple releases iOS 18.1, it marks the fifth era of iPhone with the release of:
Apple Intelligence.
The regular old Artificial Intelligence has been the buzzword from Silicon Valley to Redmond for the past several years, but there’s no concensus yet on AI’s usefulness to the average consumer. Sure, there’s viral videos of people using AI to cheat at job interviews or win art contests, but AI’s daily use cases have their limits. I don’t need AI to message a friend, get directions to their house, and throw a blue shell at them in Mario Kart.
Apple’s pitch for Apple Intelligence is a more “personal intelligence” that understands you, using the contacts, calendars, and other data on your iPhone to give you tools and information. Apple Intelligence can proofread and re-write emails, summarize and organize notifications, remove unwanted subjects from photos, use “visual intelligence” to learn about the places and objects around you with your iPhone’s camera, and make Siri useful enough that you might mistake it for actually being intelligent. (Not all of Apple Intelligence’s new features are available with this week’s iOS 18.1 update, but stay tuned to your iPhone’s Software Update screen.)
You might mistake Siri for actually being intelligent.Apple’s Apple Intelligence rollout has been a long time in the making, with the features first announced at WWDC in June 2024. We’re only now getting the first of several updates in the final week of October, and Apple is saying that the full scope of AI on the iPhone could be years or decades of slow, “responsible” progress. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft have already removed the training wheels from their AI systems and allow users to generate photo-realistic images of lions and tigers walking down the street, add or remove entire objects to photos, scan and summarize entire videos, write essays with a short prompt, and the list goes on. Whether these AI-powered tools are actually useful is up for debate, but they’re flashy, heavily reviewed, extremely visual tools that are easy to advertise to the consumer and shareholders alike.
Apple’s first new AI tools are arguably a lot less fun than what Google is showing off with the Pixel 9 and Gemini, but Apple’s bigger problem is that their new AI features are not unique. Apple is known for pairing hardware and software to create experiences that other companies can’t easily replicate, with products like sharing files and audio across devices with Handoff, AirPlay, and AirDrop. Apple Intelligence is just some software features — and the same features that everyone else is selling right now, just lacking the interesting bits.
Society isn’t ready for one-tap image manipulation on a massive scale.To the casual observer, it looks as if Apple is playing catch-up to the competition. Apple’s Image Playground — with goofy, dare I say ugly little cartoon characters and Disney-esque drawings — will undoubtably be compared and contrasted to the Pixel 9’s photo realistic image manipulation, and it’ll look bad for Apple. But this is Apple’s vision for phones and AI: solid glass slabs with useful databases that know things about you and that specifically exclude wiz-bang photo editing tools. In fact, Apple’s definition of a photo is, according to Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack, “a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.” As such, Apple is making difficult and deliberate choices as to what their AI systems will and will not do, keeping the guardrails high and reality-altering low.
This is a difficult road Apple has chosen to take — and one they may be defending for years to come — but frankly, this is probably for the best: our society simply isn’t ready for one-tap image manipulation on a massive scale. But let’s be honest — from an “oh wow!” perspective, Google’s generative imagery is easier to show off and far more impressive than summarizing an email. While I appreciate Apple’s efforts to focus on user privacy and prioritizing thoughtful, ethical AI features, are they enough to keep Apple at the forefront of smartphone and software design? Apple seems to think so: they’re already teasing the next iOS 18.2 update, even as most iPhones today are still on the iOS 18.1 Apple Intelligence waitlist. The only thing I know for certain is that by this time next year, this blog post will appear charmingly outdated.
Apple wants to distance themselves from the fever insanity of AI, hallucinating chatbots, and dangerous image manipulation.Apple wants to distance themselves from the fever insanity of AI, hallucinating chatbots, and dangerous image manipulation. Apple believes, with a very different set of ideals and ethics, that AI on iPhone can be more useful if it’s personal, helpful, and a little bit whimsy. They don’t believe in the long-term success of photo-realistic image manipulation and the exploitation of society. But Apple has to make it known — to consumers and (exasperated sigh) shareholders — that Apple is not ignoring the AI bandwagon. Bundling all of these unrelated tools — writing tools, photo editing tools, Siri — under some sort of AI marketing umbrella is simply Apple giving the public what they (think) they want to see and hear. And over time, they will reiterate, expand on, and lower the guardrails of their AI systems — that’s what Apple does best! But for Apple to truly succeed in AI, they need to merge Apple Intelligence with Apple Engineering, creating a seamless blend of AI inside and out, in a way that shows us they’re not just marketing some software features, but instead building a product nobody else can build, and nobody can live without, as only Apple can. For better or worse, we’re in the era of AI. 
- There’s a whole argument to be made that iPhone brought the internet to people who had never had access to it, but there’s another argument that the internet is not a singular technology. However you slice it, iPhone and the internet as we know it today couldn’t exist without each other, and both have had an undisputed effect the world over. ↩︎
- The days of cell phone carriers charging consumers ridiculous prices to send an SMS message were finally over. ↩︎
- But only on supported iPhones, iPads, and Macs with the memory and processing power to support it. Watches, HomePods, Apple TVs, and older devices — including the only one year old iPhone 15 and two year old iPhone 14 Pro — are stuck with dumb-as-a-rock Siri. I suspect I will be yelling and cursing at my HomePod even more often than I do now. ↩︎
- Apple released a few ads with Game of Thrones and The Last of Us HBO star Bella Ramsey using Apple Intelligence in some very strange ways. In the first ad, Ramsey forgets the name of a party guest but asks Siri who she had a meeting with “a couple of months ago,” and Siri tells her the guy’s name. In another ad, she fakes having read an email during a meeting and has Apple Intelligence summarize it quickly for her. In the final ad, she’s at a backyard funeral for a pet goldfish and saves an otherwise terrible eulogy by asking Siri to create a “memory movie” with “sad vibes”. The ads are not compelling reasons on their own to buy a new iPhone. How many “memory movies” are you really going to make before the thrill wears off? (I’ll give you a hint, it’s between -1 and 2.) An ad that demonstrates society-ending photo manipulation is pretty exciting. An ad where the user summarizes an email is a pretty boring ad, even one featuring Lyanna Mormont. ↩︎
- You think I‘m being facetious? ↩︎