Today, Apple released iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2, but not everything went as smoothly as planned. Some features have been pushed off yet again.
Some Apple Intelligence capabilities that Apple advertised as “coming later this year” will actually be available “in the months to come,” meaning in early 2025. The company has issued a press release to announce the availability of the second wave of Apple Intelligence capabilities, and it confirms that some of the expected AI capabilities are notably missing.
For example, Apple’s custom emoji generator, Genmoji, is now available on iPhone and iPad with iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, but Mac owners will need to wait a little more because Genmoji is a no-show in macOS Sequoia 15.2. Instead, “Genmoji will be available on Mac in the coming months,” Apple confirmed.
Available via a dedicated button on the emoji keyboard, Genmoji lets you describe your custom emoji with a short textual description, such as “smiley relaxing wearing cucumbers.” You can even choose a person’s photo from the People album in Photos to create a Genmoji that looks like them. For compatibility’s sake, Genmoji are sent as regular images.
Priority notifications is another Apple Intelligence feature coming later than sooner. Priority notifications leverage AI to summarize and surface what’s most important at the top of the stack. However, priority notifications are unavailable as of today and will instead be “coming soon” to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices.
That’s odd considering iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 brought a new Reduce Interruptions focus mode that leverages Apple Intelligence to understand the content of notifications and limit interruptions to those the system deems important.
Another Apple Intelligence feature missing in action is a Sketch style in Image Playground, Apple’s AI image creation tool. Apple says this style was designed to output “an academic and highly detailed style that uses a vibrant color palette combined with technical lines to produce realistic drawings.” Apple’s press release talks about this feature in the future tense without hinting when it might drop.
When Apple says these features are due in the coming months, it means Spring 2025; the press release clarifies that an initial set of Apple Intelligence languages will be “arriving in a software update in April” (iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3). New Apple Intelligence languages arriving throughout 2025 will include Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
The more capable Siri is “coming in 2025.” Siri will be able to draw on your personal context to deliver intelligence tailored to you, allowing you to ask personally contextualized questions such as “When’s my mom’s flight arriving?” The assistant will know what’s on the screen and gain hundreds of new actions to perform across Apple and third-party apps.
Apple also reiterated that iPhone and iPad owners in the European Union will need to wait until April 2025 to access Apple Intelligence features like Writing Tools, Genmoji, a revamped Siri with enhanced language understanding, ChatGPT integration, and others.
The staggered Apple Intelligence rollout isn’t shocking, but it’s surprising that Genmoji is now available on iPhone and iPad but not Mac and that priority notifications are taking so long.
Source: Apple
