How to play it on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Apple Intelligence is available now in developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1. It will be publicly available to all users later this fall. The device requirements are strict, and it should deliver a high-quality experience no matter what device you’re using. I measured Apple Intelligence’s performance across my own devices, and here’s what I found.

My testing equipment Apple’s intelligent performance

Currently, Apple Intelligence only works on one iPhone model: the 15 Pro series. So performance should be similar between the 15 Pro and Pro Max thanks to the identical chip.

However, there’s a lot of versatility with iPads and Macs. Each platform is powered by Apple’s intelligence, starting with the M1 chip. The M1 chip debuted in 2020, while the top-of-the-line M4 chip arrived just a few months ago.

My test devices for Apple Intelligence were the following:

• iPhone 15 Pro
• iPad Pro M4
• MacBook Air M1

I’ve been using Apple Intelligence on these devices since the first beta of 18.1 a few weeks ago. The tests documented below were conducted using the second developer beta, which was released on August 12.

Here’s a comparison of how each device performs when using different Apple Intelligence features.

Pictures of creating a memory movie

Photos in iOS 18.1 requires a lot of processing power to run. This feature lets you provide instructions about what type of Memories movie you want to create. The AI ​​then searches your library to identify photos and videos that match the prompt, and instantly creates a new movie.

When running the most recent timing test, I used the “My Birthdays” prompt for the movie. Here’s how long it took each device to create the new memory.

• iPhone: 19 seconds
• iPad: 15 seconds
• Mac: Not available (macOS does not currently support this feature)

I’ve used this feature a lot, and I’ve consistently found that my iPad Pro produces movies faster than my iPhone 15 Pro. No wonder. But it’s worth noting that the difference between the devices isn’t huge.

Siri’s speed and responsiveness

I’ll try to be brief, because there’s not much to say.

Siri performs identically across all hardware platforms.

In all my tests, there was no noticeable difference between the speed of Siri on the iPad Pro M4 and the MacBook Air or iPhone 15 Pro M1. It was fast and responsive no matter which device I used.

Writing tools are one of the most important features of Apple Intelligence. While ChatGPT integration isn’t available yet, there are still a few powerful writing tools that Apple has created and are built into Apple Intelligence. You can read my experience using them here.

What I quickly learned when testing writing tools across my devices is two things:

1. These are beta versions, and interface bugs often slow down performance, so keep that in mind.
2. As you might expect, the longer the text being analyzed, the more important the device segment is.

For this article, I wanted to test two different writing lengths: a 100-word email, and a 600-word article.

Here’s how my devices perform when using the Proofread and Rewrite features in Apple Intelligence.

Proofreading

Email:100 words

• iPhone: 2 seconds
• iPad: 2 seconds
• Mac: 2 seconds

condition:600 words

• iPhone: 6.5 seconds
• iPad: 5 seconds
• Mac: 6.5 seconds

Rewrite

Email:100 words

• iPhone: 4 seconds
• iPad: 3 seconds
• Mac: 3 seconds

condition:600 words

• iPhone: 21 seconds
• iPad: 16 seconds
• Mac: 20 seconds

As you can see, with email-length text, Apple Intelligence performed almost identically across all platforms. It was very fast regardless of device, which is great because I expect most people will use AI for shorter content like this. Emails, text messages, and the like will get almost instant AI support.

With the longer article, the amount of time required was more apparent. There was also more variation across devices. These rewrites in particular brought up a lot of UI issues and bugs in the iOS 18.1 beta builds. This leads me to believe that the time will get shorter as these issues are fixed.

Safari Summaries

Safari has a small AI-powered feature in iOS 18.1. You can get summaries of web pages on demand. When you open a page in Reader view, you’ll see a summary button accompanied by the Apple Intelligence logo. Here’s how my devices performed with summaries This article About the land of villains coming to Disney World.

• iPhone: 3.5 seconds
• iPad: 3.5 seconds
• Mac: 3.5 seconds

That’s right, all devices performed identically. The summaries were fast no matter what platform I was using.

Apple Intelligence Performance Conclusion

It’s still early days for Apple Intelligence. We’re in the second developer beta of iOS 18.1, so there are a lot of improvements to come before the public release—likely in late October.

Overall, aside from a few beta bugs, I was very happy with the performance I saw from Apple Intelligence across my devices.

Small tasks—Siri requests, Safari summaries, and email rewrites—were equally fast no matter what device I was using. Which is great. And it’s great that my four-year-old MacBook Air M1 doesn’t feel any slower than my new iPad M4, or the iPhone I’m carrying in my pocket.

When Apple Intelligence is released to the public, most people will be doing these “small tasks” most of the time. So Apple providing a fast experience regardless of device is a plus.

For more processor-intensive tasks, the differences between devices start to show.

It’s worth noting that my iPhone was the slowest device overall. While it was a bit slower, it was still outpaced by a Mac that’s several years older. That’s not surprising for an A-series chip, but I’m curious to see how iPhone chips get better at AI tasks over time.

How did Apple Intelligence perform for you? Let us know in the comments.