At WWDC 2024, Apple announced a truckload of new iPhone software features that will be available when iOS 18 hits the market. Some are simple and long-awaited. Finally, we can adjust the position of icons on the home screen of our iPhone and match their color to the background. (Take that, Android users! We’ve finally caught up.)
But it’s a mixed bag when it comes to communication. Let’s see how iOS 18 will change and upgrade Mail.
First, there is the all good. Later this year, Mail will introduce a new organization system. Apple calls this on-device categorization and automatically sorts email into separate folders.
The most important category is Primary, and that’s where personal and time-sensitive emails go. Transactions hosts all your confirmations and receipts. Updates is for news and social notifications – useful if you’re looking for reading material to kill five minutes. Finally, all marketing emails are placed in Promotions (where you can safely ignore them).
If it all works, it’s gold. One of the best things about this new categorization system is that it can collect all emails from a specific company. This means that you no longer have to frantically search for all the messages that refer to upcoming travel reservations, for example.
On-device categorization will be available for all iPhones that can support iOS 18.
Then there are Apple’s new AI features, grouped under the banner of Apple Intelligence, and which will only be available on iPhone 15 and later.
Apple Intelligence can do so much more than just organize your emails. Thanks to the use of a generative AI model, it can proofread or even rewrite your communications for you.
And if you’re in a hurry, you don’t even have to read an entire email to get the gist or find out if it’s what you’re looking for: you can scan a summary at the top.
Have you written an email that you are not satisfied with? “Rewrite” will rephrase it for you. You can even choose the tone. The main options seem to be ‘Friendly’, ‘Concise’ or ‘Professional’, although there are more troubling possibilities: Rewriting can even turn your email into a poem.
Now, as you imagine the horrors of hundreds of work emails written in rhyming couplets, you’re not the only one screaming inside.
But it doesn’t end there. What better way to illustrate your nightmare email poem than a nice piece of AI art? Image Playground allows anyone to create and add AI art to emails and iMessages instantly and effortlessly.
So unless you’re looking forward to a barrage of boring AI art from everyone – from your local sandwich shop to your elderly and Paddington bear meme-obsessed relative – Apple Intelligence might scare you into visiting your Mail inbox, no matter how well organized is the.