The long-awaited iPhone iOS 18.1 will officially launch next week, bringing with it Apple intelligence, but we’re already on to the next new thing. The company is busy preparing for iOS 18.2, which has already entered its beta phase and should be widely released in December. As MacRumors reports, this next operating system will include daily Sudoku puzzles for Apple News+ subscribers.
Users will be able to choose from three difficulty options each day, ranging from easy to challenging. There’s a scoreboard to track stats, including the total number of puzzles solved, speed metrics, and more. This is the fourth puzzle game to be included with an Apple News+ subscription, joining Crossword, Crossword Mini, and Quartiles. The New York Times also offers several games with a subscription, including Wordle, so this is becoming a real trend.
Sudoku will also be available to Apple News+ subscribers with the upcoming launch of iPadOS 18.2, and rumors indicate a similar release for macOS Sequoia 15.2. Apple News+ costs $13 per month alone, but it’s often available as a bundle with Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, and iCloud storage.
Of course, the number-based mobile game isn’t the only feature coming with iOS 18.2. Apple Intelligence is expanding, including custom emoji maker Genmoji and ChatGPT/Siri integration. There’s also a child safety feature that can blur nude content and report it to Apple.
It looks like the ultra-thin iPhone we’ve been hearing about for the past few months will get Apple’s “Air” branding. In the Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says the iPhone 17 lineup will feature a new model that could be called the iPhone 17 Air, and it will be about 2 millimeters thinner than any other model we’ve seen so far.
“It will have a base-level A19 chip and a single-lens camera system,” Gurman said, and it will “serve as a testbed for future technologies, including technologies that allow for foldable devices.” According to Gurman, this and the upcoming new iPhone SE will use Apple’s first in-house modem.
We may also see upgrades to the entry-level iPad that will make it compatible with Apple Intelligence. Gurman revealed that the next-generation iPad will get an A17 Pro chip and 8 GB of memory. According to Gurman, this news should arrive in the spring with the iPhone SE and new iPad Air models.
Some important changes are coming to the Apple Intelligence Notification Summary. With the latest slate of developer previews for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Apple has suspended the system’s collection of notifications, particularly from news and entertainment apps, while it works on improving alerts.
The company has also added a new disclosure that appears when users enable notification summaries for the first time. It says that notifications are a beta feature and they may produce unexpected results. Separately, the beta added a new option that allows users to decide from the lock screen whether they want to summarize notifications from an app. Finally, alerts generated by AI use italicized text to distinguish them from their non-summarized counterparts.
Last week, Apple told Engadget that it was working on an update to Notification Summaries. “Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we’re constantly making improvements with the help of user feedback,” Apple said. “A software update in the coming weeks will make it clear whether the text being displayed is a summary provided by Apple Intelligence.
We encourage users to report concerns if they see an unexpected notification summary.” Notification Summaries are one of the features that arrived with the initial release of Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1. Shortly after being rolled out to regular users, they led to bad press for Apple. Notably, the BBC published several reports accusing the company of spreading misinformation. One particularly nasty example included a summary claiming that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.