Less than half of iPhone users care about Apple Intelligence… so far

Apple has been selling the iPhone 16 range based on the strength of its Apple Intelligence features, but a new survey suggests the AI advancements are not connecting with the majority of the user base.

A new survey from SellCell does suggest more iPhone users are more enthused by Gen AI than their Samsung-loving counterparts.

However, 73% of iPhone users surveyed believe the Apple Intelligence features “add little to no value” to the experience. For Samsung Galaxy AI users that figure was even higher at 87%.

The survey did report that iPhone users are more enthusiastic about AI than Samsung Galaxy device owners, by a considerable distance. However, that’s still only 47.6% of iPhone users who consider AI features as a motivating factor for a phone purchase, compared to less than a quarter of Samsung users (23.7%)

The survey appears to have been conducted when only the first wave of Apple Intelligence features were available to iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro owners.

It’s not clear whether more advanced features like Genmoji, Image Playground and Chat GPT integration that just arrived within iOS 18.2 will be enough to move the needle more significantly and win over the 73% of iPhone owners unenthused by the AI features Apple initially rolled out with iOS 18.1.

Those include notification summaries and handy writing tools, but it’s entirely plausible the more playful and smarter options in iOS 18.2 will leave users more excited by the potential of Gen AI.

Apple is still in the preliminary stages of rolling out its Apple Intelligence features and will be doing so throughout the next few months of iOS 18 updates. The key feature may be the more conversational version of Siri that remains in the pipeline.

“Smartphone users in general are unsatisfied with the existing AI features as the survey recorded 73% of Apple Intelligence users and 87% of Galaxy AI users stating the new features to be either ‘not very valuable’ or they ‘add little to no value’ to their smartphone experience,” SellCell says.