Apple will reveal iOS 18 in just four months. That’s the software which will power the iPhone and go on general release from this fall. And while some years Apple has gentle updates, it’s believed that this year’s will be exceptional.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter, and spotted by 9to5Mac, this year’s software update will be one to look forward to. Gurman says, “I’m told that the new operating system is seen within the company as one of the biggest iOS updates—if not the biggest—in the company’s history. With that knowledge, Apple’s developers conference in June should be pretty exciting.”
Well, that sounds promising. Wherein lies its greatness, you may wonder. First up, it seems that Apple is getting round to building artificial intelligence into the iPhone in a big way.
Sure, the iPhone already does a bunch of stuff through machine learning, Apple’s preferred term for AI, but it looks like generative AI will be debuting this year.
Gurman has previously said that we can expect to a significantly upgraded Siri that is smarter and better able to handle language, auto-completion in Messages, and playlists in Apple Music which can generate themselves.
There will also be generative AI in apps like Keynote, Pages, Numbers and so on. And Xcode will have generative AI to make it quicker for developers to write new applications.
And “there’s a lot more,” we’re told. “Apple’s head of software engineering, Craig Federighi, told employees last year that the OS—codenamed Crystal—will have ambitious changes all around,” Gurman reports.
There are no further details about what this might entail, but it’s another promising sign. In previous years at about this time, it’s been reported that Apple would be doubling down on reliability and performance (both good things, obviously) but at the expense of show-stopping new features.
It looks like this will not be one of those years. And this year’s releases have been promising. Sure, there was a hiccup with the second beta of iOS 17.3, which was quickly pulled, but it didn’t put Apple off its stroke, with the general release happening bang on schedule, and the huge changes coming to iOS 17.4 also looking to land on time.
We may hear more about iOS 18 between now and June—though Apple is better at keeping software under wraps—but the first impressions of what might be coming are exciting.
