Do You Use It? Apple Intelligence Sees Weak Adoption

[ace (Adam Engst)]

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2025/06/20/do-you-use-it-apple-intelligence-sees-weak-adoption/

In last week’s Do You Use It? poll, I asked how much Apple Intelligence has impacted your everyday experience of using Apple devices (see “Do You Use It? Apple Intelligence,” 11 June 2025). Since Apple Intelligence requires users to have a supported device and enable the feature, I added a Haven’t Used It option to our three tiers of impact—None, Some, and Major—allowing people to acknowledge that they had no experience at all.

I have been saying for some time that Apple Intelligence is underwhelming, and the poll results support that conclusion in spades. I’ll examine each feature separately below, but for an overview, I combined the Haven’t Used It and No Impact answers and the Some Impact and Major Impact answers to rank the features by the extent of their impact. As you can see below, only two features—Clean Up and descriptive searches in Photos—were recognized as having any impact at all by more than 20% of respondents. Half of the features had an impact on fewer than 10% of respondents.

The table below presents the numerical results, while the chart below illustrates just how stark the low level of impact is. As always, remember that this is a self-selected survey of TidBITS readers, who are likely not representative of the overall Apple audience. Although we may be more technically experienced and savvy, we are also older and potentially less inclined to try new ways of working.

Apple Intelligence Feature	Haven’t Used It or No Impact	Some or Major Impact
Clean Up in Photos	74.2%	25.8%
Descriptive searches in Photos	76.1%	23.9%
ChatGPT integration in Siri	83.8%	16.2%
Writing Tools	84.2%	15.8%
Message summaries in Mail	84.4%	15.6%
Notification Summaries	85.3%	14.7%
Categorization in Mail	89.5%	10.5%
Priority Notifications	89.5%	10.5%
Page summaries in Safari	89.7%	10.3%
Visual Intelligence on the iPhone	89.7%	10.3%
Priority Messages in Mail	90.1%	9.9%
Smart Replies in Messages and Mail	90.3%	9.7%
Genmoji	90.9%	9.1%
Image Playground	91.2%	8.8%
Richer language understanding in Siri	91.6%	8.4%
Reduce Interruptions Focus	92.0%	8.0%
Custom memory movies in Photos	93.1%	6.9%
Product knowledge in Siri	93.6%	6.4%
Transcript summaries of audio in Notes	94.7%	5.3%
Image Wand in Notes	98.4%	1.6%

Rather than treating Apple Intelligence as a monolithic entity—which it very much is not—let’s examine each of the features in order of impact. First, the legend. It’s important to pay attention to the Haven’t Used It bar in each graph because that serves as a proxy for lack of awareness and unsupported hardware (particularly with Visual Intelligence, which works only on recent iPhones).

Clean Up in Photos

Topping the impact list is Clean Up in Photos, as it’s an easily understandable feature—removing awkward parts from photos—that already exists in other apps. With Clean Up, Photos is merely catching up to other, more advanced photo editors. Even if Clean Up isn’t as strong as features found elsewhere, it’s sufficient for most informal uses.

Along with the highest number of respondents indicating it had a major impact on their lives (4.4%), it was noteworthy that more people reported Clean Up had some impact (21.3%) than those who felt it had no impact (12.5%). This achievement was only matched by the feature with the second-highest overall impact.

Descriptive Searches in Photos

That second feature is descriptive searches in Photos. I’m not entirely sure of the extent to which we can trust these numbers because Photos has allowed some level of descriptive searches for a while now. You could, for instance, search for “cats” to find all your pictures containing cats. What’s new is that you can now find photos that match complex searches like “cats on a tractor.” Many people may have confused the previous feature with the new Apple Intelligence-enabled complex searches.

As with Clean Up, more people indicated that descriptive searches had some impact (21.3%, the same as for Clean Up) on their lives compared to no impact (a lower 11.1%). However, votes for major impact were also fewer (2.7%).

ChatGPT Integration in Siri

I’m a bit surprised that the ChatGPT integration with Siri ranked as highly as it did, with 14.3% of respondents indicating it had some impact and 2.0% viewing it as having a major impact. I say that because using ChatGPT directly, whether in the ChatGPT app on an iPhone or Apple silicon Mac or in a Web browser, provides a much better experience. ChatGPT’s Voice Mode is especially impressive and puts Siri to shame. If you like talking to ChatGPT through Siri, you’ll really like talking to it directly.

Writing Tools

The Apple Intelligence Writing Tools are among the more useful features because Apple has made them available in any Mac app. Admittedly, the interface is lacking in apps that don’t utilize Apple’s text handling routines and don’t include explicit support, but if you’re just looking for something to proofread a paragraph or rephrase an awkward email, Writing Tools will suffice. Professional writers who find Writing Tools helpful should consider trying Grammarly, which is far, far more powerful (see “Why Grammarly Beats Apple’s Writing Tools for Serious Writers,” 30 January 2025). A reasonable 13.7% of respondents said Writing Tools had some impact for them, and 2.1% acknowledged a major impact.

Message Summaries in Mail

I’m not a big user of summarization (nor do I use Mail), so I’m guessing that 13.2% of people said it had some impact on their lives, and 2.5% a major impact due to the desire to summarize long conversations. I get it—I have threads that can go on for dozens of messages, and there are times when I need to extract a conclusion from numerous messages in the thread. I’ve tried using Gemini within Gmail’s Web interface for such work and found it helpful on several occasions.

Notification Summaries

This feature generated a lot of bad press for Apple when its egregious mistakes went viral, so much so that Apple turned it off for news apps. Nevertheless, 11.5% of people said it had some impact for them, and 3.3% said it had a major impact. That’s second only to Clean Up. I’m in the former category—I leave it on, but I can’t say that it has notably improved my life, probably because I already limit notifications fairly severely.

Categorization in Mail

Apple Intelligence’s ability to categorize email into several buckets is another example of Apple trying to catch up with Gmail and other email systems. In my testing, it made quite a few mistakes, and commentary on TidBITS Talk trends against it for similar reasons. Nevertheless, 8.0% said it had some impact on their usage, and 2.7% found it extremely helpful.

Priority Notifications

The responses for Priority Notifications, where Apple Intelligence attempts to identify which notifications are more important and surface those first, were somewhat odd. It had the third-highest ranking for generating a major impact at 3.2%, but when it came to some impact, it fell halfway down the list. My guess is that for some people, it just seems to hit—every time it prioritizes a notification, the user says, “Wow, that was useful!” For others, like me, there was no apparent difference between prioritized notifications and all the rest. I turned it off because it was just confusing to have it disrupt the otherwise chronological list.

Page Summaries in Safari

With page summaries in Safari, we encounter our first instance of over 70% of people indicating that they haven’t used it at all. Perhaps summarization of webpages is simply not that desirable? It’s certainly one of the features emphasized by all browsers with AI capabilities—Microsoft Edge, Dia, Brave, and Opera One. I’ll admit that I never use it in those browsers because I’m more interested in asking specific questions than in getting a general summary. 7.9% of respondents reported that it had some impact for them, but only 2.4% gave it a major impact.

Visual Intelligence on the iPhone

I like the idea of this feature—point your iPhone’s camera at something and do a Google image search for it or ask ChatGPT about it—but in reality, I’ve never used it outside of testing. Many people can’t use it due to Apple Intelligence’s stiff system requirements: an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16. For 8.5% of respondents, it has had some impact, but only 1.7% said it has had a major impact.

Priority Messages in Mail

As I’m not a Mail user, I have limited experience with this feature, but having Mail alert you to certain messages that it deems more important doesn’t seem to be popular among the poll respondents. Only 8.3% said they had some impact, and 1.7% voted for major impact.

Smart Replies in Messages and Mail

I’m sufficiently bloody-minded that even when a suggested smart reply is close to what I would have written in Messages anyway, I still never accept the suggestion. I just don’t like the idea of Apple replying for me. I’m guessing that most people don’t find this terribly helpful, given that only 0.4% said it had a major impact for them, although 9.5% voted for some impact. Maybe they accept the occasional reply?

Genmoji

When Apple first introduced Apple Intelligence, I was quite intrigued by the concept of Genmoji, which are custom emoji (essentially stickers) created using text prompts. In reality, it’s rather slow and cumbersome to make them, so I never bother. Additionally, I wasn’t impressed with the results. It’s not surprising that only 0.9% of respondents indicated it had a major impact for them, considering the TidBITS audience likely uses emoji less than younger people. But 8.1% admitted to some impact, so we’re not totally impervious to the appeal of custom emoji.

Image Playground

What the Genmoji feature does for custom emoji, Image Playground does for goofy little graphics that can be fun to share in Messages conversations. I’ve found them challenging to create and entirely unsatisfying, to the extent that I’m surprised 8.5% of people claimed they had some impact. Only 0.4% voted for a major impact. Honestly, if you want to create graphics with AI, use ChatGPT, which does a vastly better job and lets you iterate on specific aspects of the image.

Richer Language Understanding in Siri

Apple keeps listing this as an Apple Intelligence feature, but I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference when talking to Siri. If you’re among the 7.7% (some impact) or 0.7% (major impact) who have noticed, please let us know in the comments how you can tell that Siri has improved its language skills.

Reduce Interruptions Focus

Some people make heavy use of Focus, and I suspect they belong to the 1.7% of respondents who indicated that the Reduce Interruptions Focus has had a major impact for them, or at least the 6.3% who found it has some impact. Most people I know, myself included, only use Focus to silence notifications while sleeping, driving, and on demand during performances or other live events.

Custom Memory Movies in Photos

Just because the two highest-rated Apple Intelligence features involve Photos doesn’t mean people are excited about everything related to Apple Intelligence in Photos. Nearly 80% of respondents haven’t used custom memory movies (created by giving Photos a description of which photos to pull out) at all, and only 6.3% felt it had some impact, with a tiny 0.7% voting for major impact. I’ve never been a fan of the memory movies in Photos, and it seems I’m not alone.

Product Knowledge in Siri

It’s a crying shame that this feature isn’t better, which could boost its ratings beyond the dismal 6.1% for some impact and 0.3% for major impact. Chatbots are pretty good at answering tech support questions, and I see no reason why Apple shouldn’t have a top-notch AI assistant ready to help users with anything that might go wrong. Apple would have to accept the possibility of it being wrong, but a carefully customized system with content from Apple and highly respected sources (like TidBITS and TidBITS Talk!) could work well.

Transcript Summaries of Audio in Notes

I gave this feature one of my major impact votes! That said, I’m not surprised it didn’t rank higher. For me, audio transcripts of recordings in Notes are a helpful tool when I’m covering an Apple keynote or earnings call. They’re essentially a professional-level feature that most users don’t need, or at least don’t realize they need. That accounts for the sky-high 82.3% ranking for Haven’t Used It, the low 4.0% response rate for some impact, and the proportionately higher 1.3% of people who find it has a major impact.

There may be some confusion about what exactly constitutes Apple Intelligence here. Audio recording in Notes is not included—it works on any device, I believe—but creating transcripts is, and Apple concentrates on the summaries. Still, I think transcription is a powerful and useful feature, and it’s worth keeping in mind when you know you might want to refer back to something said in a conversation. For example, if I had a significant health issue, I’d ask the doctor if I could record the conversation so I would have a transcript from which to continue my research.

Image Wand in Notes

Bringing up the back of the pack is the Image Wand feature, which supposedly takes your amateurish sketches in Notes and transforms them into polished graphics. No one said it had a major impact on their lives; only 1.6% said it had some impact; and at 87.9%, it was by far the least used of all the Apple Intelligence features.

There you have it. I assume that Apple also has usage statistics for each feature, and I’d love to know how our numbers compare. That will never happen, so for now, all I can say is that Apple Intelligence has not captured the hearts and minds of TidBITS readers.

[Simon]

I think the only one I had checked in @ace’s poll was Writing Tools.

But after reading this article, I decided to try out descriptive search in Photos. And I must say, I’m impressed. It works far better than I would have guessed (once I figured out it does not understand what “me” means).

The only problem now is that I search for pics these days probably more often on my iPhone than on my Mac. And my iPhone’s a 15. Oh well.

[aforkosh (Alan Forkosh)]

Although I don’t usually use Mail Categories since I already have Rules and Smart Mailboxes for categorizing my email, I found them to be quite useful for one thing:

I get about 100 to 150 messages a day. I can usually pick out bills and other financial items as they come in. For security reasons, I don’t have my financial records on my laptop, but only on a desktop computer at home. So, when I return from a trip, bills can be buried in a stack of 100s of items to be processed in the Inbox. Selecting the Inbox, turning on category view, and checking the Transactions category lets me see these items unencumbered by other items. I can deal with them, turn off category view, and return to reading my email using my personal filters and collections.

[Dafuki]

Although I’ve tried most all of these with the exception of Image Wand in Notes (Got to try that!) I don’t use or actively avoid many of them. The reason is . . . they’re inaccurate. I don’t trust them and I don’t want to spend the time to verify whether they are accurate. It’s like OCR in the old days. They breathlessly told you it was past 90% accurate (amazing!) but when you thought about it that meant that in a thousand word article you would have to fix 100 words. Ugh. Mind you OCR is getting pretty good these days (scanned a curved wine bottle label lately?) but it’s taken decades to get there.

Dave

[alexjohnson]

@ace

Priority Messages in Mail

So far, I’ve had blatant spam which isn’t even using my email address in the to: line, or addressed to name that isn’t me, marked as a “priority message.” I’ve given feedback but the performance is shockingly bad.

I have long observed that Apple’s junk mail filtering, on iCloud email, is poor, but having an early iTools (!) mac.com email address, I am committed to it both because it’s a good one, but also 25 years of accreted contacts and logins. Unfortunately it isn’t just that too much gets through, but it also has an unacceptable false positive rate: I’m going to guess 2% or so? 1 in 50 sounds about right. It’s enough I have to eyeball my junk folder to make sure a message hasn’t been flagged. Recently this has included messages from friends where the email is in my contacts folder, and existing mail is in my sent folder.

I don’t know who the project manager is for Mail but I would love focus on things like this, rather than shiny objects like categorization — which, when I tried it (better: until I angrily found out how to turn it off!) was also not nearly accurate enough. My hunch is no one dog-foods this: apple.com email is probably a lot more robust; incoming members of staff likely have pre-existing Gmail accounts from their college days; and people use Messages, which very clearly gets much more love, viewing email, perhaps not unfairly, as a Boomer / Gen X hangover. One thing that would fix a lot of my spam is to disable iCloud email variant domains like icloud.com and me.com, which Apple does allow in Messages and FaceTime. Not Mail.

[ctmurray]

I am just getting old. I don’t really incorporate these additions to the OS. I just read email, browse my favorite sites. Sometimes the new feature is implemented without me doing anything and then it is confusing (like priority mail - just give me my normal inbox please). I didn’t know of hardly any of the features you mentioned and I am glad I read through your article. I do understand why Apple has to keep up with the times.

[eyeless (Jerry Nilson)]

Grammarly – could be useful, but hard to use the computer at all with Grammarly active (like here) (slight overstatement) … ideally one should start it only when one wants to use it.

Apple Writing tools help me edit my second edition of my book of the paved +2000m roads of the Alps, where ChatGPT 4 (playground) missed to identify a lot of grammar mistakes, so Apple Writing Tools is hugely better than hopeless ChatGPT. BUT the interface makes it VERY impractical to use at all and other solutions, Grammarly included, are not much better. I had to use BBedit and paste each original paragraph in one document and the suggested Writing tools suggestions in another document, change the highlight colour in BBedit (default color is hard to see), then use Find Differences and then edit the original as made sense (typically never the original or suggested ones are the best version, but of course Apple engineers have not thought that far… yet). Given that, Apple Writing Tools is excellent and the only helpful feature of AI so far on the Mac (as I am concerned).

[ace (Adam Engst)]

As someone who pays for and uses Grammarly all day, every day, I would disagree with general criticisms of the Grammarly interface, as I wrote in TidBITS. While not perfect, it offers several different ways to interact with your text. But perhaps some of my comfort with it is based on familiarity.

Why Grammarly Beats Apple’s Writing Tools for Serious Writers - TidBITS

[eyeless (Jerry Nilson)]

I did read that article and it was good. I am not as positive in my judgement though as you, but likely mostly because I do not use it as much and do not need it as much (not that I am writing so good ;-) ). When you are stressed out helping writing down documentation for a customer and suddenly Grammarly comes up and you by mistake overwrite some important data with something that just popped up you get a little annoyed. Of course you can disable it per app, but it has become a little like a whack-a-mole game to me … but also I just use it in free mode (still … haven’t brought myself to uninstall it either, so guess I am still a bit undecided). Fixed an error here now with Grammarly

[Frank1256 (Frank Terranova)]

There might have been a different way to do the poll.

I would be inclined first to try to understand people’s general ideas and feelings about available AIs, not just Apple’s current AI.

I have acquaintances who think AI will bring on doom and gloom, not to mention destruction and death.

Other acquaintances and friends haven’t gone much beyond sticking their toes into AI, mainly using the AI results in Google.

Still others tried and found ChatGPT unsuitable several months ago. They just stopped investigating available AI, such as CoPilot or Gemini.

Regarding grammar help, I swear by Grammarly; however, I have used various AIs to rewrite mail responses and social media posts. Each one does the job far better than Apple’s Writing Tools. I have been thinking that perhaps this is due to the limitation of Apple’s “on-device” AI.
More importantly, I seriously dislike the confusing way Writing Tools deals with the text it edits. I have had to copy things into a text app like Bear so Apple’s Writing Tools doesn’t screw up what I want to say by including my first version as well as the revised version. I would do things differently.