Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools were supposed to be the feature that justified the whole rollout - the thing you’d actually use every day, not just demo at a dinner party. Rewrite, Proofread, Summarize. Clean, native, baked into the system. No ChatGPT tab required.
After using them regularly across iOS and macOS for several months, the honest assessment is that they work just often enough to make you trust them, and fail just often enough to make you stop.
The Good Part Is Genuinely Good
Summarize is the standout. In Mail and Notes, it does exactly what it says: strips a meandering email thread down to three sentences that are almost always accurate. No hallucinated details, no weird extrapolations. For anyone managing a full inbox, this alone earns its place.
Proofread is also competent - closer to a grammar checker than a true editor, but it doesn’t aggressively rewrite your voice the way Grammarly Premium tends to. It suggests; it doesn’t insist.
Where It Falls Apart
Rewrite is where Apple’s ambition outruns its execution. The tone options - Professional, Concise, Friendly - produce outputs that are technically correct and completely flat. Ask it to make something “Friendly” and you’ll get something that reads like a customer service script written by committee. There’s no feel for register, no awareness of context. A casual text to a colleague comes back sounding like an HR communication.
Worse, the feature is inconsistent about where it appears. Some third-party text fields surface the Writing Tools menu; others don’t. There’s no clear rule, and Apple hasn’t documented the developer requirements in a way that’s made adoption uniform.
The Deeper Problem
Apple shipped Writing Tools as a marquee feature of Apple Intelligence, then appeared to largely move on. There have been no meaningful updates to the rewrite quality in the subsequent iOS point releases - at least none that are noticeable in practice. Compare that to how quickly Google has been iterating on Gemini in Workspace, or how frequently Microsoft has updated Copilot in Word.
Apple’s integration advantage is real: these tools live in the OS, not a sidebar. But integration without iteration is just a foundation that nobody builds on. Writing Tools right now feel like exactly that - a foundation Apple laid and then left for the weather.