Want a new iPhone with Apple Intelligence? Before today, that would set you back about $800. After Apple’s latest iPhone announcement, however, the cost to access Apple Intelligence on iPhone is 25% less. There are just two very minor caveats.
Apple Intelligence is a suite of various features powered by artificial intelligence. Apple provides its AI tools with privacy in mind, using a stateless server system called Private Cloud Compute. This privacy-centric approach is unlike other modern AI systems that retain data on the server and use it for training models.
Top Apple Intelligence features include Writing Tools for improving or changing your writing style, Clean Up for removing unwanted subjects from photos, and Genmoji for creating custom emoji characters based on your description.
Visual Intelligence
Visual Intelligence is another component of Apple Intelligence. Most of Apple Intelligence is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac for now. So far, Visual Intelligence has been exclusive to the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro — with no support on iPhone 15 Pro or iPad, where Apple Intelligence is also available.
That’s mostly because of marketing and product differentiation.
iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro have a new button called Camera Control. Pressing and holding the Camera Control is how you activate Visual Intelligence.
Once invoked, Visual Intelligence lets you use your rear-facing camera to aim at an object to reference in a ChatGPT query or Google visual search. More recently, Apple added the ability to add events to your calendar based on things like concert posters and board messages.
That’s where the first minor caveat for Apple Intelligence on the new iPhone 16e arises.
iPhone 16e has no Camera Control like the other iPhone 16 models, but Apple still supports the Visual Intelligence feature. The easiest way to invoke Visual Intelligence on iPhone 16e is to assign it to the Action button. The downside, however, is that doing this pretty much rules out using the Action button for anything else, like launching the Camera or muting your iPhone.
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