5 small (but still kinda big) changes coming to your iPhone in iOS 18.3

Macworld

With iOS 18.3, Apple is sort of taking a breather before it continues its staged rollout of major Apple Intelligence features. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there but bug fixes and security patches (though there are those, too). There are plenty of small changes that are coming to your iPhone—here are the five ways your iPhone will be different after you update to iOS 18.3.

Apple Intelligence is on by default

When Apple introduced Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1, you had to choose to enable it. With iOS 18.3, it’s turned on by default. You still need an iPhone, iPad, or Mac that supports it, of course.

If you want to disable Apple Intelligence, open Settings, choose Apple Intelligence & Siri, and flip off the toggle.




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Notification Summaries are italicized

The new Apple Intelligence feature that summarizes notifications has been met with mixed reviews. Sometimes it just gets things wrong, and when you can’t tell it’s an AI summary instead of a real text from Mom, that can lead to disaster. That little tiny “summary” icon on the notification isn’t enough.

So in iOS 18.3, Apple is making it more obvious when a notification shows an AI summary. The text will be italicized, while normal notifications will have regular text.




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Notification Summaries are disabled for some apps

Even if you recognize that the notification text is an AI summary, there are some that can be very problematic if they’re wrong. The Apple Intelligence notification summaries for some news events have been wrong at times, to the point where a person reading them would think the opposite of what happened.

Of course, we all know it’s just a notification and just an AI-generated summary at that, and you should always go read the article before passing judgment, right? Just kidding! This is the internet, where you have to immediately post an opinion just from seeing a link to a headline somewhere.

To help reduce the very obvious problems this can cause, Apple has disabled Notification Summaries from all apps in the “News & Entertainment” app category for now. The company plans to re-enable it in the future when the quality of the summaries is more reliable.

The Calculator app gets its repeat operation function back

Up until iOS 18, you could continually tap the equals sign (=) on the Calculator app and it would repeat the last operation. If you said 10 x 2 and tapped = you would get 20. Tap = again and you get 40. Tap = again and you get 80. And so on.

With the new Calculator app and all its fancy features (not to mention an iPad version!) Apple seemingly forgot this popular capability.

With iOS 18.3, it’s back!




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Visual Intelligence gets new powers

If you have an iPhone 16 with a Camera Control button, you can press and hold it for a couple of seconds to launch a special camera interface Apple calls Visual Intelligence. Snap a pic of something and you get all sorts of contextual information. You can get business details, details, and books or albums, ask ChatGPT about the image, search Google for similar images, and more.

With the iOS 18.3 update, you get an instant display at the top of the screen to identify animals and plants, without needing to take a pic. And if you show something with an event on it, you can quickly add it to your calendar.

You’ll have to wait for iOS 18.4 for the new Siri

I know what you’re thinking–all this AI stuff, but when does Siri get good? The answer is: in the next update!

Or at least, Apple has said to expect the improved Siri, with personal context and lots of app intents, in the spring timeframe which is when we expect iOS 18.4. Will these new Siri capabilities change people’s perception of Apple’s AI assistant, or will it remain the subject of ridicule for another year? We’ll know more as the next round of betas get underway.