What's New in Apple Intelligence: Issue 1

All-In On The Betas, Use Model: What's Today?, and Links from the Weekend

In an effort to simply get started, this is Issue 1 of “What’s New in Apple Intelligence,” the continuation of “What’s New in Shortcuts” but rebooted for 2025.

All-In On The Betas

Starting off Week 27 of 2025, this last Monday of June is hot here in Portland, with a high of 97° – that certainly didn’t help my beta devices dealing with Shortcuts Sync.

Over the weekend, I had to go nuclear and delete all my shortcuts from my devices—after backing them up, of course—and starting to add only the most-necessary back. I’ve already had two weeks of sync issues, which I basically can’t avoid since there’s a file format change in Shortcuts that could cause issues if half your devices aren’t on the betas, and I can’t afford to lose any more time this summer.

Plus, I’ve long needed an overhaul – my library of over 6,000 grew way too quickly, and my strategy of providing my own Shortcuts Gallery to the public simply doesn’t scale inside this app. Way too many were also simple URLs into apps that didn’t have Shortcuts support, and I got too obsessed with providing them myself instead – no longer.

So I am trashing most of them, sharing the exports with my membership as an optional archival download, and starting over – I’ll always have my exports to pull from.

The new Use Model action, which lets you tap into Apple Intelligence’s Foundation Models directly, also changes the game – I want to truly rethink how I’m using this app.

Use Model: What’s Today?

I caused some confusion being overly cheeky about a failure with the new “Use Model” action in Shortcuts, .

Using the new Spotlight for Mac experience, I’d asked it “What’s today?” as a simple test of the On-Device model, curious if the design was smart enough to simply get the system time rather than performing an actual request to the model.

In the process, a Private Cloud Compute was made instead—either a feature or a bug—and it returned October 25, 2023. Given that MacRumors reported, in their testing, the cutoff was sometime in October 2023 (and that it’s the ChatGPT 4o cutoff), I tweeted “So, uh, I just found the Apple Intelligence cutoff date.”

Naturally, multiple people informed me that’s not how LLMs work and not to use Foundation Models for world knowledge – very much true, and basically the exact limitation I was testing.

So, not only did I accidentally made a bunch of people think Apple Intelligence and the Use Model is entirely out of date by two years, but I also made it look like I don’t know what I’m doing. 🙃

For what it’s worth, asking the ChatGPT Extension does get it correct as well – you can get up-to-date world knowledge easily in the Use Model action. Otherwise, Private Cloud Compute is simply better at analyzing your inputs than the On-Device model, and can handle more complex tasks like processing images.

Links from the Weekend

• Alyx caffeine tracker (iOS 26-only)
  Jordan Morgan (who has shared an App Intents field guide) posted about his upcoming iOS 26 caffeine tracker app, which is described as such: “Alyx helps you log caffeine, visualize its impacts, and see how it affects your sleep.” Sounds like someone’s been playing with the Foundation Models… (via @jordanmorgan).

• AI Coding: Mirage or Magic?
  Cameron Cooke, developer of the XcodeBuildMCP, posted an excellent reflection on The AI Coding Revolution: Mirage or Magic? In the piece, Cameron talks about his role shifting to managing AI rather than working on his own projects, plus how optimizing for downtime meant he never got any himself. Interesting read now that the immediate novelty has worn off a bit. (via @camsoft2000)

• Get your tickets to the Swift Bharat conference in India
  Swift Bharat is a new conference located in Bengalaru, India and hosted by my friend Mustafa Yusuf. Mustafa is a wonderfully sharp developer (he makes Karo and Tasks, two innovative task managers) with an incredible work ethic and indie spirit who is always willing to help – it makes a ton of sense he’d bring together folks for India’s first International Apple Developer conference. Get your ticket: swiftbharat.org. (via @mufasaYC)

• Long Press for Domain Extensions
  For some reason, in all my years I’d never discovered this tap-and-hold gesture on the period key to show the .com, .net, and .eu selector.

  

  I assume international users get more mileage out of this, but sometimes it’s simply surprising to come across a feature so prominent, especially as a power user of Apple platforms. (via @avstorm)

That’s it for this issue! See you later, nerds.