Well, I turned on Apple Intelligence on my M1 Max today. I don’t use Siri, so that was left off. When I went to Mail.app, there was this annoying highlighting of the message with a button “summarize message” And that’s with message summaries turned OFF in Mail.app preferences → viewing. So I went back to System Settings and turned off Apple Intelligence altogether. Mail.app is back to its previous appearance.
What experiences have others had with Apple Intelligence on Macs?
I haven’t been able to use summarize in Mail for anything reasonable. But then again, I’m old school: I take time to read my emails and I discard and meticulously unsubscribe from stuff I don’t want to read.
I have made use of writing tools for longer professional (administrative, not technical) documents. I usually do not allow changes to stick, but I see what Apple Intelligence suggests I change and use that to support me in improving my writing. I find that to be very helpful.
I am looking forward to trying out Image Playground. Often for a lecture or talk I need a little cartoon and it will be nice to be able to do this straight on my Mac. My university has obtained site licenses for us to use tools with certain well known AI/ML providers, but in the past my experience with those has been a bit mixed (what’s up with OpenAI’s disdain for baseball metaphors?). I like that MS Copilot seems to do well with my baseball-themed cartoons that I like to use to explain quantum field theory phenomena. 
I’m hoping Image Playground will do well here. I like the idea of being able to do these things locally and exploiting the ANE that my fancy M4 Pro has been equipped with.
A minor aside, folks: Please do not abbreviate “Apple Intelligence” to AI. Everyone reads AI to mean “artificial intelligence,” and we need to keep a clear distinction between general AI and Apple Intelligence.
Actually, Image Wand may be of more use to you. With Image Wand, you start with a sketch from and work with Apple Intelligence to improve it, as opposed to starting with an Apple supplied image. Six Colors has a nice review of the image generating features of Apple Intelligence: