almost ready —
Betas of iOS 18.1 et al with Apple Intelligence could land as soon as this week.
Apple
Apple spent a lot of time at its Worldwide Developers Conference this year talking up the new iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 features powered by Apple Intelligence, the brand name Apple is using for various generative AI features. But beta testers still haven't been able to use any of these features for themselves, even though Apple has released four developer beta builds and two public beta builds of all of these updates at this point.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple still plans to release a preview of these features this summer, but the Apple Intelligence features will actually be "later than anticipated." Apple Intelligence reportedly won't be ready when the initial versions of these operating systems launch in the fall—usually mid-to-late September—and Apple currently plans to launch them to the general public in an update in October, the report says.
Gurman says that Apple will still have a preview of the Apple Intelligence features available for beta testers this summer as promised. But they'll be available in beta versions of iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1 updates that will be released and tested separately from the 18.0 updates that are currently available in Apple's developer and public beta programs. (Gurman doesn't specifically mention macOS 15 Sequoia, but hopefully a 15.1 update with the Apple Intelligence features will be available for Macs, too.)
It's not unheard of or even particularly unusual for Apple to delay individual features or entire software updates; Apple's annual September iPhone updates are set in stone at this point, and some version of the new software needs to be ready for them, whether all the features are implemented or not. Usually Apple's strategy is to cut back on features to make that deadline.
In 2022, Apple held back the iPadOS 16 update until October because it needed more time to finish the Stage Manager multitasking interface, making iPadOS 16.1 the first public release of the update for Apple's tablets. Version 11.0 of the macOS Big Sur update also wasn't released to the general public in 2020—the 11.0.1 update was the initial release of Big Sur for most people, and it didn't launch until November, unusually late for a macOS update (11.0 was the version installed to the very first Apple Silicon Macs at the factory, though).
Apple Intelligence features that Apple has announced so far include basic image generation, summaries of Messages, image doctoring features, automated sorting of high-priority emails, an improved Siri, and writing tools for editing and summarizing text.