Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

Summary

Apple’s hotly-anticipated Apple event was chock-full of news about updates to AirPods, the Apple Watch, the new suite of iPhones, and more. But during the one-hour-and-fifteen-minute presentation, which was considerably shorter than usual, there was one notable buzzword missing from a good chunk of the fanfare: AI.Although CEO Tim Cook said during the livestream that the company was “taking the biggest leap ever for iPhone,” there were only cursory mentions of Apple Intelligence during the new iPhone unveiling.Yes, the phones represent “advancements in Apple silicon, hardware, and software,” per Apple, meaning they’re better for gaming, photos, speed, battery life, and more. But most of the specific, consumer-facing AI tools Apple touted — like visual intelligence features and live translation in iMessage and FaceTime — were big talking points back in June during WWDC 2025. And they’re also not necessarily novel, in that Apple competitors, such as Google and Samsung, introduced comparable features a year ago or more.The presentation was a far cry from Apple’s heavy-handed mentions of AI at the iPhone 16 unveiling, which led to public disappointment when some flagship features didn’t roll out as promised.This year, Apple talked more about how AI is helping power features in the background, and less about how it’s putting AI in front of consumers’ faces — unlike Google’s Pixel 10 unveiling last month and Samsung’s event in January. Apple is too behind on its agentic AI efforts to make assistant tools front-and-center in the same way, so it focused a lot of this event on hardware and how AI helps power things behind the scenes.Executives talked about how an updated neural engine powers Apple Intelligence, and how local large language models power better game play at higher frame rates. They mentioned how Apple was now building neural accelerators into each GPU core in order to provide “MacBook Pro-levels of compute in an iPhone,” making intense AI workloads possible.Bu...