Apple Intelligence D-Day sounds like it’ll be October 28

Apple is planning to roll out the first Apple Intelligence AI features in iOS 18.1 on October 28, according to reporting over the weekend.

The well-connected Mark Gurman says iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 owners will have three more weeks to wait for the feature, which has been used as the key selling point for the new handsets.

The company had told users to expect the first Apple Intelligence features during October, but looks to be waiting until the very end of the month before dropping the eagerly anticipated AI tools.

Gurman reckons Apple is taking extra care to ensure any bugs have been squished, sensing the importance of users’ early interactions with the generative AI.

“I’m told that Apple is taking its time with the rollout to ensure that major bugs are eliminated and it can support all the new traffic on its AI cloud servers,” Gurman writes in his weekly Power On newsletter.

The iOS 18.1 rollout won’t bring too many of the heavy hitting features Apple has been previewing throughout the summer.

There will be support for notification summaries, as well as the new Siri design language. Apple is also expected to include the proofreading and writing tools, as well as webpage summaries. There’s also the new Clean Up tool for the photos app, which will assist users in removing unwanted items from photos.

If you don’t have an iPhone 16 or iPhone 15 Pro, but do have an M-Series iPad or Mac then you should be getting these features in short sorter too, thanks to the iPadOS 18.1 update as well as macOS Sequoia 15.1.

Some of the more anticipated Apple Intelligence features aren’t expected until the beginning of 2025, so it’s very much a drip feed from Apple for the next few months.