TL;DR: I’m in the Netherlands and somehow got Apple Intelligence on my Macbook Air. Anyone else in the EU or am I lucky (?) like that?
I upgraded to .2 yesterday and to my surprise I was asked whether I’d like to configure Apple Intelligence. I was like, sure Jan, configure to your heart’s content, I’m in the EU. The pop-up disappeared and I didn’t think about it anymore until I was told that AI was ready for use.
It doesn’t appear on my iPhone or iPad. The setup is the same on all devices: I am in the Netherlands, the language is set to UK English, I have NordVPN permanently connected in the UK. So, I have no clue why it works on the Macbook but not on the iDevices. Well, I played with it for a few hours, and I’m speechless.
Everything that’s included in the .2 update works, and by ‘works’ I mean ‘does something that is generally not what I would like it to be’. Image Playground is cringey AF. Stable Diffusion can render hands now, but in IP ‘kitten in space’ invariably gives the kitten two tails. Apple, summarised, releases OS updates ‘accidentally’. I selected a sentence with dubious grammar, chose ‘Proofread’, and all AI did was inserting a comma that changed the meaning. There is no way to go through the changes Proofread introduces, only ‘Replace’ or ‘Copy’ for the whole chunk selected. Even switching on tracking changes in Pages doesn’t help, I just get crossed out original text and the new version. Let me show you a quick example…
Oh. (I selected two pages of text in one go hoping it would allow me to do paragraph by paragraph.)
ChatGPT has been spectacularly useless since the 4o model got introduced and remains useless now, although I do like the double-press Command → Type to Siri (not that I ever use Siri on the Mac). Pressing Enter makes the question disappear, though, and when I ask what my last question was it tells me “sorry, there is nothing to repeat.” I don’t use Apple Mail, so I have no opinion on smart replies, and I lost my will to live before trying out the other features.
There is something very self-deprecatory about calling that ‘Apple Intelligence’. I really want to believe that Apple has more intelligence than double-tailed kittens, accidental software updates, and a search in Photos for ‘Apple Museum’ displaying only things that are neither apples nor museums but a huge bonfire, then the search for ‘bonfire’ not displaying those images. At least I know that if I want to look at my New Year’s Eve bonfire night pics, I have to search for ‘Apple Museum’.
So what’s coming next? *checks* Oh! Genmoji! Slideshows! Support in the European Uni– well, good for those Europeans who are not me, I guess. What I really want, and the only reason why I am not still on Sonoma, is Phone Mirroring. Which is ‘not available in your country or region’.
The only real change in my life introduced by Apple Intelligence so far is the drastic drop in resale price of my 8GB M1 Macbook Air.
I upgraded to .2 yesterday and to my surprise I was asked whether I’d like to configure Apple Intelligence. I was like, sure Jan, configure to your heart’s content, I’m in the EU. The pop-up disappeared and I didn’t think about it anymore until I was told that AI was ready for use.
It doesn’t appear on my iPhone or iPad. The setup is the same on all devices: I am in the Netherlands, the language is set to UK English, I have NordVPN permanently connected in the UK. So, I have no clue why it works on the Macbook but not on the iDevices. Well, I played with it for a few hours, and I’m speechless.
Everything that’s included in the .2 update works, and by ‘works’ I mean ‘does something that is generally not what I would like it to be’. Image Playground is cringey AF. Stable Diffusion can render hands now, but in IP ‘kitten in space’ invariably gives the kitten two tails. Apple, summarised, releases OS updates ‘accidentally’. I selected a sentence with dubious grammar, chose ‘Proofread’, and all AI did was inserting a comma that changed the meaning. There is no way to go through the changes Proofread introduces, only ‘Replace’ or ‘Copy’ for the whole chunk selected. Even switching on tracking changes in Pages doesn’t help, I just get crossed out original text and the new version. Let me show you a quick example…
Oh. (I selected two pages of text in one go hoping it would allow me to do paragraph by paragraph.)
ChatGPT has been spectacularly useless since the 4o model got introduced and remains useless now, although I do like the double-press Command → Type to Siri (not that I ever use Siri on the Mac). Pressing Enter makes the question disappear, though, and when I ask what my last question was it tells me “sorry, there is nothing to repeat.” I don’t use Apple Mail, so I have no opinion on smart replies, and I lost my will to live before trying out the other features.
There is something very self-deprecatory about calling that ‘Apple Intelligence’. I really want to believe that Apple has more intelligence than double-tailed kittens, accidental software updates, and a search in Photos for ‘Apple Museum’ displaying only things that are neither apples nor museums but a huge bonfire, then the search for ‘bonfire’ not displaying those images. At least I know that if I want to look at my New Year’s Eve bonfire night pics, I have to search for ‘Apple Museum’.
So what’s coming next? *checks* Oh! Genmoji! Slideshows! Support in the European Uni– well, good for those Europeans who are not me, I guess. What I really want, and the only reason why I am not still on Sonoma, is Phone Mirroring. Which is ‘not available in your country or region’.
The only real change in my life introduced by Apple Intelligence so far is the drastic drop in resale price of my 8GB M1 Macbook Air.
