Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools have been available long enough now that the initial novelty has worn off, and what’s left is a feature set that’s technically competent and practically frustrating.
The Rewrite function - the one that rephrases selected text in a different tone - works well in a narrow, almost boring way. Ask it to make something ‘professional’ and it will reliably strip contractions, flatten idioms, and produce something that reads like a moderately well-written LinkedIn post. Ask it to make something ‘friendly’ and it adds a light warmth without becoming embarrassing. The outputs are clean. They’re also interchangeable, because Writing Tools has no idea what you’re actually trying to say or who you’re trying to say it to.
That’s the core problem. The tool edits at the sentence level while ignoring everything above it. It can’t tell the difference between a message you’re struggling to write because you don’t know the right words and one you’re struggling to write because the situation is genuinely complicated. Both get the same polished, generic result.
The Proofread function is more defensible. It catches grammar errors and awkward phrasing without rewriting your voice wholesale, which is exactly what proofing should do. It’s the one Writing Tool that seems to understand its own limits.
The Summarize Feature Is a Confidence Trick
Apple’s ability to summarise long threads and documents feels impressive for about thirty seconds. Then you notice it favors brevity over accuracy - it will confidently omit a qualifying clause that changes the meaning of a sentence, producing a summary that reads well but says something slightly different than the source. For email triage on low-stakes threads, that’s fine. For anything where the details matter, you’re re-reading the original anyway, which makes the summary largely pointless.
What’s telling is that the entire Writing Tools suite is built around output polish rather than thinking support. It tidies up what you’ve already decided to say. Compare that to tools like Notion AI or even Google Docs’ Help Me Write, which attempt - imperfectly, but genuinely - to help structure or develop an idea from a rough prompt.
Apple’s approach is more private, more controlled, and more limited in the exact proportion you’d expect from a company whose instinct is always to contain rather than expand. The writing tools aren’t bad. They’re just solving for the moment a piece of text looks finished, not for the harder moment before that, when you’re not sure what it should say.