The iPhone 16 will ship as a work in progress

Apple's all in on AI - at least Apple's version. "The next generation of iPhone has been designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up," Apple CEO Tim Cook said before revealing the iPhone 16. Software chief Craig Federighi pitched Apple Intelligence as a "personal intelligence system" that's at "the heart of the iPhone 16 lineup." After the event, Apple even published a whole press release dedicated to Apple Intelligence.

There's just one catch: when the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro first come out, they won't have any Apple Intelligence features.

Sure, the new A18 and A18 Pro chips in the iPhone 16 lineup each have a 16-core Neural Engine that Apple says is "optimized for large generative models," so they will probably be good at handling Apple Intelligence features. Yes, Apple has been testing Apple Intelligence upgrades, like a new design for Siri and tools that can help you improve your writing, remove objects from photos, and summarize notifications, as part of an iOS 18.1 beta for developers. But unless you're running that beta, you won't be able to put those features to the test for a while.

A few Apple Intelligence features will arrive soon-ish, as Apple gave a vague October release window for iOS 18.1 as part of its iPhone 16 announcements. But I should note that the Apple Intelligence features will still be called a beta and only available in US English to start. (Apple says it will launch Apple Intelligence in Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish starting next year.) The company's arguably more powerful Apple Intelligence upgrades, like a tool to make images, a feature that lets you generate custom emoji, Siri improvements that let it understand your personal context, and integration with ChatGPT are rolling out on a very vague timeline of "later this year and in the months following." 

There are some indications about when: Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that the image generation features will launch with iOS 18.2 in December, and Apple said at WWDC that the ChatGPT integration is set to launch "later this year." But despite how much of a spotlight Apple is putting on its AI features, it's being quite cagey about when those features might actually come out. Apple didn't reply to a request for comment.

Despite how much the big tech companies have talked about AI over the past year or two, there are still concerns about AI tools, too. There's the hallucinating and potential generating bad stuff and misinformation. And Apple Intelligence hasn't exactly wowed beta testers with innovations or must-have tools. Apple's slow rollout could give it time to work out issues.

But do you want to wait around until it does? If you were looking at Apple's AI features as the main reason to get a new phone, you probably shouldn't. Maybe just wait to upgrade until next year - or at least until October.