Apple‘s $69.14bn iPhone revenue for FY Q1 2025 represents a drop of 0.8% YoY overall and an 11.1% drop in sales in China, and the absence of Apple Intelligence in China was highlighted by CEO Tim Cook as a contributing factor to the shortfall.
However, even in countries where Apple Intelligence is accessible, sales have not mushroomed as expected, and the overall performance of Apple’s AI does not meet the reliable performance standards consumers have come to expect from its services and devices.
Apple Intelligence has performance issues
Despite CEO Tim Cook’s enthusiasm for its potential, the core functionality of Apple Intelligence – particularly its news summary algorithm – has been criticised for inaccuracies and misrepresentations.
Users of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) News have encountered instances where the summaries either misrepresents the original content or includes factual errors, suggesting that the algorithm may struggle with complex natural language processing tasks or lack sufficient training data to handle the nuances of news reporting.
BBC faced multiple instances of inaccurate summaries by Apple Intelligence. One example involved a darts player where Apple wrongly claimed Luke Littler won the PDC World Championship when he only reached the final.
Another incident falsely reported that Rafael Nadal, a Spanish tennis player, came out as gay when it was actually Brazilian player João Lucas Reis da Silva. Another separate summary error stated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was detained, and Pete Hegseth, not confirmed as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, had resigned.
BBC had to issue corrections due to these inaccuracies, potentially harming its reputation, as audiences would likely associate the inaccuracies with BBC rather than with Apple Intelligence.
Stricter standards needed
Due to the surge in summary issues across media organisations, Reporters Without Borders expressed concerns about AI-generated summaries, highlighting the need for stricter standards to prevent such errors in the future and impact their adoption by media outlets.
Apple is listening to user feedback
CEO Tim Cook stressed the importance of the summarisation feature in the latest earnings call. Apple’s most recent release, iOS 18.3 beta 3, which debuted in January 2025, incorporated a corrective measure for the summaries tool after a complaint by BBC. Apple added the ability to disable the news summary feature.
The company typically refrains from reversing its decisions, and its swift band-aid measure on this topic underscores the how important Apple Intelligence is for the company. Apple also added a cautionary notice for users that the beta feature was likely to make errors that could misrepresent the meaning of the original notification. It also differentiated the AI summaries from regular notifications by making them italicised.
Harsh judgement for Apple Intelligence
Mess-ups in initial AI services are not unheard of, but companies like Apple, that enter the AI market later than their competitors, face a more critical audience. Any missteps are judged more harshly, as they are expected to have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors and to have leveraged the additional time to refine their offerings.
