Get the latest tech news

iOS 18 is a smart upgrade, even without the AI

You can ugly up your homescreen in unprecedented ways.

The real moment of truth will be when my friends finally upgrade to iOS 18 and we’ll be able to message photos to each other without a lot of complicated side channeling. This incarnation of RCS on the iPhone isn’t going to end the blue-bubble, green-bubble wars, but it will relieve the biggest pain points in cross-platform messaging for people on both sides. I’ve been able to preview some of it in early betas: the new glowing Siri will make you go “Oooh” out loud the first time you use it, and the first iteration of Apple Intelligence will offer email summaries, notification digests, and writing tools.

Get the Android app