Summary
- macOS has been missing some Apple Intelligence features, but macOS 15.4 will introduce at least two new ones.
- The Mail app on macOS will get an AI-sorted email inbox and Genmoji.
- Your inbox should be automtaically sorted into different categories.
Apple Intelligence is not present in Apple’s operating systems equally. The vast majority of features are available on the iPhone, while macOS has had to make do with notification summaries, Image Playground, and Writing Tools. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that should start to change with macOS 15.4. The upcoming update will add the iPhone’s AI-sorted inbox to the macOS Mail app, and access to Genmoji for creating custom emoji.
The Mail app on macOS has taken a very “vanilla” approach to email up until this point. You have an inbox for each email account and an All Inboxes tab that collects everything, but otherwise Apple has avoided trying to do anything too clever with email. The addition of Apple Intelligence with macOS Sequoia added the ability to summarize long emails, but that’s about it.
This new AI-sorted email inbox is expected to use the same design Apple used on the iPhone and iPad. Emails are sorted into one of four different categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Tabbing into one of these new categories only shows the email threads Apple Intelligence has determined fit, and archiving an email from the inbox archives everything sent by that sender.
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It’s been three months since Apple Intelligence started rolling out, and the collection of software features still seems like a mixed bag. There are undeniably nice additions — everyone stands to benefit from easy audio transcriptions — but plenty of what Apple’s added feels more showy than useful, or worse, like solutions in search of a problem.
The company recently announced it was pulling back on AI-generated notification summaries after being criticized for getting the content and intention of notifications wrong, and it’s yet to ship its revamped version of Siri that can use apps for you. Having tried out the new Mail app on my iPhone for the last few months, I don’t think it’s radically changed how I use email, but it has made it slightly more annoying to find a message I’m looking for without using search.
Apple isn’t new to the idea of automatically organizing an inbox. Google has been doing it for years in Gmail. Nor is it the first to come up with the idea of integrating AI into an operating system to create time-saving features. But Apple’s “launch later with a more polished product” approach really doesn’t seem to be cutting with Apple Intelligence yet, and increasingly unlikely it ever will.
