Apple Intelligence can still save AI—by solving the smallest problems

If you were hoping that flipping the calendar for the new year would mean we’d stop talking about artificial intelligence, then you’d better keep flipping for a while. In the end we won’t talk about it because the AI ​​will be in charge of everything.

How my colleague Jason Snell recently wroteGet ready for 2025 to be the year of Apple Intelligence again. While we wait for the latest batch of features announced by Apple last yearthe company will no doubt be vocal about the features it plans to add this year. All of this remains a contentious issue in the tech industry. It seems like not a day goes by without one company or another announcing a new lawn mower with artificial intelligence or weird keyboard. The prevailing view in the tech industry right now is that AI is the solution to every problem you face, and many of the ones you don’t.

While I think it’s far from true, there are places where AI – Apple Intelligence in particular – can be useful in our lives. On every playground of images that make us wonder, “Who asked for this?” there is a corollary: “Why hasn’t AI solved this problem yet?”

Spamahecofalot

Why, after all this time, is spam still a problem in 2025? We’ve all just come to terms with the fact that our inboxes and text messages will be filled with stuff, but Apple Intelligence can really help us. Apple has made every effort to achieve this goal by releasing the mail categorization feature in iOS 18.2 (which, it should be noted, is still not available on either macOS or iPadOS), but not only is this system not designed specifically for fighting spam, but its effectiveness at even classifying mail is… hit or miss.

Here’s one big problem: iOS/iPadOS. has no spam filtering in email. Yes, there is a junk mailbox, but it’s reserved for messages you manually move into it; messages moved there by Mac spam filtering, if you have one; and messages classified as spam by your mail server. This is a real patchwork quilt with lots of holes. Sometimes Apple’s spam filtering looks like three outfielders going at each other only for a baseball to fall between them. There’s still spam in my inbox and good stuff in my junk mailbox, and let’s not even get started Silent iCloud email filtering which sometimes simply doesn’t deliver messages at all.

Spam has penetrated other places as well. Text messages and iMessage have also seen a sharp increase in junk, but calling Apple’s tools “dim” is an insult to things that lack shine. There’s no message filtering (except for unread and unknown contacts), and Reporting Junk’s usefulness is questionable (it doesn’t even block the sender, for example).

Pattern recognition is something that AI is actually very good at. Apple Intelligence should take on the problem of spam across the board because the end result should be that users spend less their time managing your mailboxes.

Seek and you will find (maybe?)

From Sherlock to Spotlight, Apple has long been trying to improve search on its platforms. Unfortunately, this is still not good enough. A Spotlight search for “files edited in the last 30 days” turns up nothing. Even typing with Siri in macOS 15.2 bravely suggests that I should try ChatGPT instead, which is an extreme disclaimer. Yes, you can set up an advanced search in Finder and select all the criteria you want, but natural language analysis seems like an impossible task these days.

Even basic search seems horribly broken in some places. Take Settings in iOS for example: if you want to search for a specific section, say Messages, you’ll find yourself sifting through dozens of irrelevant results to find the one you’re looking for, if you can find it at all. .

I don’t necessarily want Spotlight or Siri to give me all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips, but in the area my files and information, it seems that this system should be better informed than any other source. Siri’s offerings for iOS have demonstrated that Apple’s systems can be good at anticipating the needs of their users, so a little old Apple Intelligence doesn’t go to waste when I’m just trying to find that document I was working on yesterday.

Call me Dan the Automator

One of the places where I’ve been using AI with great success in recent weeks is while working on some hobbyist programming projects. Programming is a very related problem for which there are many tutorials, and tools like ChatGPT and Claude understand it much better than I do, given the time I have to learn. And that’s not even mentioning tools like Copilot or Apple’s Swift Assist, which integrate directly into development environments.

I am, as I said, an amateur. But I like to automate the task to save time. However, too often I get an idea, open Shortcuts, and don’t know where to start. This seems to be a place where Apple Intelligence can notice that I do a certain task frequently and suggest some steps I could take to automate it and save time in the future. It’s complicated? Without a doubt. But Apple’s systems need to understand their capabilities and how to help users get the most out of them.

This is exactly the case with Apple Intelligence. These technologies work best for Apple when they make its devices more functional (and save time) for the people who use them. The late Steve Jobs liked to describe computers as like bicycles for your mind, and I, for one, would like to spend less time fiddling with Allen keys and more time enjoying the ride.