Safari and Mail Summaries are the kind of AI every company should be thinking about.

When Apple introduced updates to its operating systems at WWDC this summer, the only thing anyone wanted to know was what Apple had planned for artificial intelligence. The iPhone maker was generally considered to be far behind competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which are all either developing their own large language models, or integrating those of the de facto leader, OpenAI. Apple, as you might expect, took a measured approach, mostly focusing on making Siri smarter and more useful, as well as a handful of text and image generation tools. It called its flavor of AI, Apple Intelligence, because, of course. Courtesy, Apple, Inc. On Monday, it finally shipped a beta version of iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1, which includes some of those Apple Intelligence features, to developers. I've spent a day now using Apple Intelligence on an iPhone 15 Pro Max, as well as an M3 MacBook Air, and the most interesting thing about it so far isn't that it's missing many of the most high-profile features. The most interesting thing is that the best parts of Apple Intelligence aren't what you think. Look, every tech company is trying to figure out how to sprinkle AI into pretty much every product they make. The thing is, a lot of it is just fancy marketing for computers doing computer things. A lot more of it is just overhyped chatbots that will readily lie to you. But, Apple managed to come up with a few subtle features that I think will change the way a lot of people use their iPhones. Safari Safari is the default, and most important mobile browser in the world. In iOS 18.1, it gets Apple Intelligence summaries of webpages that give you a brief overview of what a page or article is about. It seems like such a small feature, but it's actually really practical, and really useful. Being able to quickly summarize long content to pull out key information or decide if you want to spend the time to read the entire thing is something I find myself doing all the time with Apple Intelligence. It's also the type of thing that generative AI tools are very good at. Mail Along similar lines is the new Mail Summarization. In fact, this might even be more useful than Safari Previews since email is a thing that a lot of us deal with all day. The good news is that Mail.app will now summarize your emails and display those summaries in the email preview instead of just showing you the first two lines of text. Courtesy, Apple, Inc. This is just brilliant and it's the way every single email should function. If I'm only going to see a dozen or so words in the preview of an email, it's so much more helpful for those words to be a summary of what the entire email is about, instead of just whatever words the sender typed first. Anything that helps me quickly triage emails and decide whether to archive, act on, or delete them quickly saves me time every day. Let me just say that I'm sure people will love using features that let you do things like rewrite text to be more professional or to proofread large amounts of copy. And I'm sure people will have plenty of fun with image-generation tools like Genmoji and Image Playgrounds. But I don't think those are the real quality-of-life improvements that Apple Intelligence promises to make us a little more productive. To be fair, none of the text or image generation stuff is in the 18.1 beta anyway. Neither is the ChatGPT integration. For those, we'll have to wait until later this year at the earliest. Apple Intelligence itself won't even ship with the initial version of iOS 18. Instead it'll likely come a few weeks later with 18.1. Apple may have taken a far less ambitious approach than other tech companies when it comes to incorporating LLMs into its software, but I think it's the right approach. Sure, there's some stuff in there that's just meant to get attention, like the image-generation tools. For the most part, however, Apple seems to be sticking with features that are actually useful and make using its devices better. There's a good lesson here, which is that your main job should always to be thinking of ways to delight customers by making the experience of using your product better. Right now there's a huge temptation to lean into the hype by making promises about stuff that sounds really cool but that doesn't actually improve anyone's life. Apple just showed that the best AI features aren't necessarily flashy. They just make it easier to use the technology you already have. Expert Opinion By Jason Aten, Tech columnist @jasonaten