Apple Unveils iPhone 16, Complete with New AI-powered Features
The company is leaning heavily into Apple Intelligence as the technical foundation of its latest generation of smartphones.
Apple’s ’It’s Glowtime’ hardware event Monday culminated in the unveiling of the new iPhone 16 series, which has been built with some noteworthy AI-powered upgrades.
The company made headlines during its most recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with the announcement of Apple Intelligence, a collection of new generative AI features, including a new and improved Siri and a ChatGPT integration. (The company has been conspicuously avoidant of using the term ’artificial intelligence,’ perhaps in an effort to distinguish itself from the general AI fervor that has engulfed Silicon Valley of late.)
“The next generation of iPhone has been designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up,” CEO Tim Cook said during today’s event, which was livestreamed online. “It marks the beginning of an exciting new era.”
The new models – the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max – all come with AI-powered communication features which will, for example, allow users to adjust the tone of an email or create a new emoji from a text prompt.
Apple Intelligence is also being integrated into the company’s voice assistant Siri, which will now be able to understand users’ voice commands more reliably, even when those users stumble over their words. It’s also now capable of what Apple senior vice-president of software engineering Craig Federighi dubbed “on-screen awareness,” meaning that a user can, for instance, request that the system queue up a song that’s just been recommended via text in Spotify.
The company also debuted new AI features designed to enhance visual experiences, accessible via a camera control button on the side of the new phones. Users can point their iPhone 16’s camera at objects in the physical environment to learn more about them. A demo depicted a man pointing his phone camera at a dog to identify the breed, and at a vexing math problem, for which ChatGPT was able to offer some text-based guidance.
Federighi positioned the new iPhones as an ideal balance of personalization, privacy and AI. “Apple Intelligence is the personal intelligence system at the heart of the iPhone 16 lineup, with the ability to understand and create language, as well as images, and take action on your behalf to simplify daily tasks,” he said. “And each of these powerful capabilities is grounded in your personal context” – meaning that the new AI-powered features respond dynamically to each user’s unique interactivity with the device.
“For more computationally intensive tasks,” Federighi added, Apple Intelligence can tap into a cloud-based feature called Private Cloud Compute, which leverages Apple’s proprietary servers without sharing users’ personal information with the company. “This is an extraordinary step forward for privacy and AI,” according to Federighi.
The iPhone 16 also comes with a new chip, dubbed the A18, designed to process compute-hungry on-device machine learning models.
Slated for availability next Friday, September 20, the iPhone 16 will start at $799.
Credit: The Drum
