iPhone 15 Pro to Get Visual Intelligence in Future Update, Likely iOS 18.4
Apple's new iPhone 16e, announced on Wednesday, supports Visual Intelligence despite having no Camera Control button, and now Apple has confirmed that the Apple Intelligence feature is coming to the iPhone 15 Pro as well in a future software update.
On iPhone 16 models, Visual Intelligence lets you use the camera to learn more about places and objects around you. It can also summarize text, read text out loud, translate text, search Google for items, ask ChatGPT, and more.
The feature is activated via the Camera Control button that's exclusive to iPhone 16 models. It was thought that the extra button was necessary to activate the feature, but the new iPhone 16e lacks such a button. Instead, Visual Intelligence can be assigned to the device's Action button or enabled via Control Center.
Now, Apple has told Daring Fireball's John Gruber that Visual Intelligence is coming to the iPhone 15 Pro "in a future software update." Like the iPhone 16e, the iPhone 15 Pro doesn't have a Camera Control button, but Apple says the function will be able to be launched in the Control Center interface or via the Action button once the update drops.
Apple would not confirm whether the update in question is iOS 18.4, beta releases for which are expected any day now. But given that the iPhone 16e will become available to buy on February 28, iOS 18.4 seems like the most likely update that will bring Visual Intelligence to the iPhone 15 Pro. Following yesterday's debut of the iPhone 16e, Apple updated its website to indicate that iOS 18.4 will be released publicly in early April.
Popular Stories
2026 could be a bumper year for Apple's Mac lineup, with the company expected to announce as many as four separate MacBook launches. Rumors suggest Apple will court both ends of the consumer spectrum, with more affordable options for students and feature-rich premium lines for users that seek the highest specifications from a laptop.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
...
Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models at the same time, which is why we often get rumored features months ahead of launch. The iPhone 18 series is no different, and we already have a good idea of what to expect for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.
One thing worth...
In a statement shared with CNBC today, Apple confirmed that Google Gemini will power the next-generation version of Siri that is slated to launch later this year.
"After careful evaluation, we determined that Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we're excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users," the statement...
The Unicode Consortium has published a draft list of emoji that could come to smartphones and other devices in the future. The list shared by Emojipedia outlines 19 emoji candidates under consideration for Emoji 18.0, which is expected to be finalized in September 2026.
Among the proposed additions are a squinting face emoji, left- and right-pointing thumb gestures, a pickle, a lighthouse, a ...
Back in late 2022 and early 2023, Apple rolled out a new architecture for its Apple Home platform to deliver improved performance and compatibility, although the rollout came with some hiccups that forced Apple to pull and later re-release the upgrade.
Three years later, Apple is now on the verge of ending support for the old version of the Home architecture, which may result in access to...
In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Lujan, and Edward Markey have requested that Apple and Google remove X Corp's X and Grok apps from their app stores over recent incidents of "mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children."
X has come under fire over the past week amid reports of Grok's AI image...
Update: As noted by Nick Heer on his Pixel Envy blog, analytics data is unreliable because Safari on iOS 26 is reporting a different operating system version in the user agent string that analytics services rely on for data. For example, devices on several versions of iOS 26 are reporting themselves as being on iOS 18.7 when using Safari. The relatively low number of mobile devices correctly...
