Remember when Apple blamed EU technical regulations, more specifically digital market laws, to justify the fact that Apple Intelligence is not available in the European Union? Perhaps this means that Apple Intelligence is not available in the European Union. is scheduled to come to the EU in April 2025 with local language support, so it may have just been an attempt to antagonize EU users against regulators.
Apple today released iOS 18.1, bringing the first set of smart features to recent iPhone, iPad, and Mac models. However, when Apple announced Apple Intelligence at its developer conference in June, the company said the new AI capabilities would initially be limited to American English and would be rolled out slowly.
And that remains true today. Apple Intelligence isn't technically in beta, but it does require your iPhone or Mac to be set to US English. On iPhone, Apple also checks whether your Apple account is associated with a European address. In that case, you won't be able to enable Apple Intelligence on your iPhone, even if you set your iPhone to US English.
On the Mac, it's a different story, as users in Europe can try out Apple Intelligence features starting today. If you have a Mac with an M1 chip or later, you can change your language and turn on Apple Intelligence right away. Observers speculated that this is because Apple is designated as a gatekeeper under the DMA for iOS, iPadOS, App Store, and Safari. macOS was not included in that list.
The company previously announced that support for more languages is on the way, starting with localized English support for other countries in December 2024. Apple plans to add 12 more languages in 2025, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
However, Apple Intelligence will also be available on iPhones in the EU in just a few months. “This April, Apple Intelligence features will begin rolling out to iPhone and iPad users in the EU, including writing tools, Genmoji, a redesigned Siri with richer language understanding, ChatGPT integration, and more. , includes many of the core features of Apple Intelligence,” Apple wrote in a press release.
From this list, you can see that all Apple Intelligence features except Notification Overview are coming to the EU. We've reached out to Apple for more information on what it doesn't offer to the EU, but it seems difficult to tell the difference. This begs the simple question: What was the problem with DMA?