Insider says iOS 18 'Crystal' will be one of the biggest updates in Apple's history
Apple is considering the next iOS release -- iOS 18 -- as one of the biggest updates in its history, claims Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
When asked about the changes to expect in iOS 18, Gurman reiterated that AI integration, which will be tied to an upgraded Siri, will be the headlining change this year.
The next iPhone operating system version is codenamed Crystal and while AI will be the biggest focus, that won't be all, as it's expected to "have ambitious changes all around."
Gurman didn't reveal the specific features and changes that are coming in the latest edition of his PowerOn newsletter, but he told us about some of them in earlier reports.
Apple was caught off guard when generative AI took the industry by storm and it was considered a significant miss within the company, though publicly it said that it had been working on the tech for years.
Apple is revamping Siri in a way that will deeply implement AI. Like Samsung and Google's recent phones, the new AI capabilities will improve how Siri and the Messages app answer queries and auto-complete sentences.
The goal is to add AI to as many services as possible, enabling features like auto-generating audio playlists. The company is also said to be exploring ways to help users write in Pages and auto-create slides in Keynote. We can also look forward to improvement to productivity apps as well as security and performance enhancements.
Similar to what competitors have done, Apple will adopt a combined approach, whereby some of the tasks will be processed on the device, and advanced stuff will be offloaded to the cloud.
Google's emphasis on generative AI isn't the only reason Apple wants to bring the tech to the iPhone though. Gurman had previously revealed that the iPhone 16 wasn't going to be particularly exciting in terms of hardware improvement, and to make up for that, the next operating system update needed to be "extra-impressive."
iOS 18 will be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June and will likely be released in September.
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