Apple slows its roll

It's easy to be a Debbie Downer about Apple Intelligence.

Apple's Image Playground is a joke. Compared to full-featured AI image creation tools, it's a sad little toy. It refuses to allow many prompts. And even when you can get it to create an image, the results are childish at best and insanely inept at worst.

Genmoji are slightly better, but still underwhelming.

Apple’s system-wide Writing Tools aren’t bad, but they’re clearly not as good or better than the competition.

And don’t get me started on Siri. The voice assistant, which was supposed to get an Apple Intelligence upgrade that made it actually useful, remains dumb as a box of rocks in most contexts.

The good news is, Apple knows it's racing to catch up on AI. And when a company with Apple's talent pool and cash pile focuses on something, it can pull off miracles.

Remember when Apple Maps launched? It was a disaster, just like Apple Intelligence. But Apple devoted resources to making it better, and now it beats Google Maps in many ways.

All that to say, don't expect this year's Worldwide Developers Conference to focus on Apple Intelligence the way last year's did. Instead, the company reportedly will focus on an ecosystem-wide user interface overhaul, while its engineers quietly work to make Apple Intelligence better in the background.

Even though Apple reportedly plans to soft-pedal AI this year, the company will show off a few new Apple Intelligence features during the WWDC25 keynote next Monday. And some of them sound quite useful, even if they’re not as flashy as the stuff from last year’s showcase that ultimately left us disappointed. Here's what to expect.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• How do you like the sound of “macOS Tahoe”? It looks like that’s where Apple’s marketing team is headed for this year’s update.

• If you never got around to trying Freeform, Apple's digital whiteboard tool for collaboration and brainstorming, our latest how-to shows you what you're missing.

• Does your Mac seem sluggish lately? Our friends at Dr.Buho make an app called BuhoCleaner that can help you clean out the sludge, and they offer a special discount for Cult of Mac readers.

• By this point, we’re used to hearing stories about how iPhones and Apple Watches save people's lives. But here’s something new: An iPad saved a classical pianist's career!

— Lewis Wallace, managing editor

^{A message from BuhoCleaner}

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

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