At WWDC 2024, Apple announced a slew of new iPhone software features that will be available when iOS 18 is released. Some are simple and long overdue. Finally, we can customize the position of the icons on the home screen of our iPhone and change their color to match the wallpaper. (Take that, Android users! We’ve finally caught up.)
But the situation is mixed when it comes to communication. Let’s take a look at how iOS 18 will change and upgrade Mail.
First of all, there’s the whole good thing. Later this year, Mail will introduce a new organization system. Apple calls this on-device categorization and will automatically sort emails into separate folders.
The key category is Primary, and this is where personal and urgent emails will be directed. Transactions will host all your confirmations and receipts. Updates are for news and social notifications – handy when you’re looking for reading material to kill five minutes. Finally, all marketing emails will be integrated into promotions (where you can safely ignore them).
If everything works, it’s gold. One of the benefits of this new categorization system is that it can bring together all emails from a specific company. This means no more panicked searching to find all the messages referencing upcoming travel bookings, for example.
On-device categorization will be available for all iPhones that support iOS 18.
Then there are Apple’s new AI features, grouped under the Apple Intelligence banner, and which will only be available on iPhone 15 and above.
Apple Intelligence can do more than just organize your emails. Thanks to its use of a generative AI model, it will be able to reread or even rewrite your communications for you.
And if you’re in a hurry, you won’t even need to read an entire email to get the gist of it or know if it’s what you’re looking for: you can scan a summary at the top.
Have you written an email that you’re not happy with? “Rewrite” will rephrase it for you. You can even choose the tone. The key options appear to be “Friendly”, “Concise” or “Professional”, although there are more worrying possibilities: Rewrite can even turn your email into a poem.
If you now imagine the horrors of hundreds of business emails written in rhyming couplets, you’re not the only one screaming inside.
But it does not stop there. What better way to illustrate your electronic nightmare poem than a beautiful piece of AI art? With Image Playground, anyone can instantly and effortlessly create and add AI art to emails and iMessages.
So unless you’re looking forward to a deluge of bland AI art from everyone – from your local sandwich shop to your elderly, Paddington Bear meme-obsessed parent – Apple Intelligence might make you afraid to visit your Mail inbox, no matter how. it’s well organized.
