Apple Intelligence’s writing tools have been available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac for over a year now, and the consensus seems to have settled into mild appreciation. Rewrite, Proofread, Summarise - they work, they’re fast, they run on-device. Nobody is complaining. But ‘nobody is complaining’ and ‘actually useful’ are different things, and after using these features daily across several writing contexts, the gap between the two is wider than Apple’s marketing implies.
The Proofread tool is the strongest of the three. It catches grammatical issues and awkward constructions with reasonable accuracy, and it does so without requiring you to copy text into a separate app. On iPhone especially, having that inline is genuinely better than the alternative. If you write emails, notes, or messages in volume, Proofread earns its place.
Rewrite is where the product reveals its assumptions. The feature offers tone variants - Friendly, Professional, Concise - and they all trend toward the same corporate-casual register that populates LinkedIn and internal Slack channels. ‘Concise’ tends to strip not just filler but specificity. ‘Professional’ adds a smoothness that feels performed. If you’re drafting stakeholder updates or HR communications, this is probably fine. If you write anything with a distinct voice - criticism, satire, technical explainers where precision matters - Rewrite will sand it down into something publishable but forgettable.
Summarise works, full stop.
The deeper issue is that Apple built these tools around a model of writing as a chore to be processed rather than a skill being practised. That’s a coherent product decision - most people do treat writing as a chore. But it means the tools actively work against anyone trying to develop or maintain a voice, because the feedback loop they create rewards convergence toward an average.
For a student drafting assignments, a manager clearing an inbox, or anyone who needs to produce clear, inoffensive prose at volume: Apple Intelligence writing tools are probably the best frictionless option available right now. The on-device processing is real, the latency is low, and nothing gets sent to a server.
For anyone whose work depends on writing that sounds like a specific person wrote it, these tools will tidy your sentences and quietly make them worse.