Apple (AAPL.US) is planning a significant overhaul of the built-in photo editing features on iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices, heavily leveraging artificial intelligence to strengthen its competitiveness against Android rivals. According to sources familiar with the matter, the company is developing a new suite of tools powered by its Apple Intelligence platform, slated for release with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 this autumn. These features will enable users to expand, enhance, and reconstruct images using on-device AI models. The processing time for these tasks is typically just a few seconds. The sources requested anonymity as the plans are not yet public. A spokesperson for the Cupertino-based company declined to comment.
Apple is currently in a position of playing catch-up in this domain. For years, Google (GOOGL.US) has offered advanced AI photo editing tools for its Pixel devices, including features like Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and generative image expansion. Samsung Electronics, which relies on Google's Android operating system, has also aggressively integrated AI editing capabilities into its Galaxy smartphone lineup.
Currently, Apple's Photos application offers four core editing options: Adjust, Filters, Crop, and Clean Up. The "Clean Up" tool is Apple's only AI-driven feature, allowing for the removal of objects from images. In the upcoming software update, Apple will introduce a new "Apple Intelligence Tools" module within the editing interface, integrating expansion, enhancement, reconstruction, and cleanup functions.
The "Expand" feature will allow users to generate additional image content beyond the original frame. For instance, after taking a close-up of a landmark, a user could employ the tool to fill in the surrounding scenery. Users can control the position and extent of the added content by dragging the edges of the image with their finger. The "Enhance" function utilizes AI to automatically optimize color, lighting, and overall image quality. "Reconstruct" primarily targets spatial photos—a 3D image format designed by Apple for the Vision Pro headset—enabling perspective adjustments after capture, such as changing a front-view car photo to a side view.
However, the development of these features has not been entirely smooth. According to multiple users who have tested the "Expand" and "Reconstruct" tools, these functions have exhibited inconsistent performance during internal trials. Theoretically, Apple could delay or scale back the release of certain features depending on improvements to the underlying AI models. The company's first AI editing tool, "Clean Up," has already faced criticism. Since its introduction, users have consistently reported unreliable results, often including residual traces, image distortion, or inaccurate details filling the removed areas.
In terms of technical implementation, Apple remains committed to its "on-device processing first" privacy strategy. Although these complex AI tasks place stringent demands on chip processing power and memory bandwidth, Apple aims to ensure all image processing is completed locally on the device through optimized kernel scheduling, thereby avoiding compliance and privacy risks associated with cloud processing. Nonetheless, this technical purism presents its own challenges, such as the unstable performance of some generative features in complex scenes.
Apple is currently in an intensive phase of algorithm iteration. This aggressive software strategy is expected to drive accelerated hardware upgrades. The market widely anticipates that the iPhone 18 series, expected in 2027, will be equipped with 12GB or higher memory specifications across the board to handle the increasingly heavy computational load of AI tasks.
Apple's software updates this year will focus on two core directions: first, improving the Siri voice assistant and expanding other Apple Intelligence functionalities; and second, optimizing operating system performance to extend battery life and address bugs that emerged following last year's visual effects upgrades. Other AI-related modifications under development include a dedicated Siri application and a new chatbot-like interface for the Siri assistant. Apple will also introduce the ability to switch to competing voice assistants via the App Store and grant Siri the capability to handle multiple commands within a single request.
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