When iOS 18.1 was released on October 28, I updated all of my devices and enabled Apple Intelligence. It’s been three weeks, and today, I disabled the feature.

It’s not just that Apple Intelligence is extremely limited, or that Siri is still terrible; it just wasn’t useful. I don’t use AI writing tools, and the summarization of texts and emails actually increased my mental load.

Ludovico Einaudi has a song that I love, “Pathos.” But when I ask Siri to play it, using the Greek pronunciation (Pā-thōs), she can’t figure it out. When I ask her using the English (Pa-thos), she understands and responds to me with the Greek pronunciation. How long has Siri had to get better at basic stuff like this?!

Instead of approaching each message with a blank slate, I first had to read and parse the summary, then open the actual message, and read and parse it again. I was doing everything twice.

For notifications, I like that I see the person’s name and photo. That’s enough to give me context about what I’m jumping in to, and how quick I need to act and respond. Summarization allowed certain messages to jump the line. As soon as I saw the message notification, I had a summary and my brain went to work on responses.

In the end, Apple Intelligence was a lot like a child. It disrupted my workflow, and distracted me from the task at hand, even if it was a lower priority item. Apple wants to be AI like everyone else, but this implementation was useless.