After nearly a year of using Apple Intelligence’s writing tools across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the honest verdict is this: they work exactly as advertised, and that turns out to be a fairly damning thing to say.
The rewrite, proofread, and tone-adjustment features sit inside the system text menu - no separate app, no subscription prompt, no onboarding flow. You select text, tap Writing Tools, and get options to make something friendlier, more professional, or more concise. The proofread function catches real errors. The summaries in Mail and Notifications are accurate more often than not. None of it crashes, none of it hallucinates in ways that will embarrass you, and all of it runs on-device for the core features, which means it’s fast.
So why does using it feel like eating a meal you can’t remember afterward?
The Rewrite Problem
Every rewrite Apple Intelligence produces is competent and slightly worse than what you wrote. “Friendlier” means it adds filler phrases. “More professional” means it removes the specific word that made your sentence interesting and replaces it with something that could have come from a corporate template circa 2019. “Concise” is the best of the three - it’s occasionally genuinely useful - but even then, it tends to flatten sentences rather than tighten them.
This isn’t a bug. It’s a direct consequence of training on consensus language at scale. The output is statistically average, which means it’s never wrong enough to offend and never right enough to surprise.
Grammarly, which has had years to tune its suggestions to individual writing style, still feels more like a collaborator. Apple Intelligence feels like autocomplete with better PR.
The Notification Summaries Are the Actual Win
Strangely, the feature that gets the least attention is the one that earns its place. Notification summaries - particularly in group chats and news apps - are genuinely useful in a way the writing tools aren’t. They collapse noise without requiring you to do anything, and they’re accurate enough that checking the original message is optional rather than mandatory.
That’s a real quality-of-life improvement. It’s just not the thing Apple spent most of its WWDC stage time on.
Where This Leaves Things
Apple Intelligence writing tools are not worth going out of your way to use, but they’re also not worth disabling. If you’re already in the Apple ecosystem on a supported device, they’re just there - occasionally useful, never transformative, occupying the same mental space as predictive text. For a feature Apple positioned as a reason to buy new hardware, that’s a quietly uncomfortable place to land.