What It Actually Is
Apple Intelligence is not a ChatGPT competitor. Apple was explicit about this from the beginning, but the framing was immediately lost in the media coverage. It is a set of on-device AI features β writing tools, photo editing, notification summarisation, a more capable Siri β integrated into the operating system.
The integration with ChatGPT (via a partnership with OpenAI) handles requests that require more capability than the on-device models can manage. This is a sensible architecture that most commentary missed entirely.
What Works
The writing tools are genuinely useful β proofreading, tone adjustment, and summarisation work well for everyday tasks. Photo cleanup and the image generation features (Image Playground) have been adopted more widely than Apple probably expected.
Notification summarisation has been Apple Intelligence's most visible feature and its most publicly controversial. Several summarisations produced embarrassing errors β most famously, a BBC notification that was incorrectly summarised as stating that a murder suspect had killed himself rather than surrendered to police.
The Privacy Differentiation
The Private Cloud Compute architecture β where requests that leave the device are processed on Apple-controlled servers with strong privacy guarantees β is the most technically interesting part of Apple Intelligence. Whether users care about this distinction enough to pay for it remains unclear.