It’s Glowtime, baby. Apple’s cringe-worthy title for their recent event proved fitting, with a constant flow of “Apple Intelligence” features tossed around — oh, and some new devices. Few of these features were actually new, with Apple just remarketing previously announced tools, from emoji creation to text editing, but still. All of Apple’s features are examples of “edge AI,” a term used to describe AI tasks handled primarily on-device, only relying on servers for the most advanced tasks. The advantage for users should be speed and privacy, at the cost of power and accuracy. For Apple, the advantage is that they can justify why these features won’t work on older iPhones. The best of these is the ability to take a picture of a poster or flyer and add the event to your calendar.

These tools are cool, and in demonstrations, “Apple Intelligence” seems simpler and more obviously helpful than Microsoft’s “Copilot” or even Google’s “Gemini.” But few of these features are actually widely available yet. Apple was caught off guard by the AI wave and remains far behind in developing its own system. Most previously announced “Apple Intelligence” tools are still a while away from wide rollout. Though the new iPhone 16 is supposed to be built around AI, almost all of these features will be unavailable at launch. When will they be available? Who knows — Apple didn’t say. But Wall Street loves hearing the word “AI,” and that’s what matters.

Now, on to the new products: the iPhone 16. As expected, the updates were small, but the most interesting aspect is that Apple is really trying to differentiate the regular iPhones from the Pro line, despite them seeming awfully similar. They run on similar chips, have very similar cameras, and there aren’t many exciting new hardware features on the 16 Pro. However, the 16 and 16 Plus now have cheaper-looking vertically aligned cameras, while the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max retain the classic slab camera look. The Pro models also have bigger screens, up to 6.3 inches on the 16 Pro and 6.9 inches on the 16 Pro Max.

Otherwise, the best feature on the 16 line is available on all models: the right-side “Action Button.” Most people didn’t actually use the Action Button on the 15 Pro phones, but this one comes with new camera controls, letting you quickly capture a photo or video by pressing the button. Once you open the camera app, you can use lighter and harder presses and swipes to adjust controls like zoom and focus. However, Apple has limited the DSLR-like two-stage shutter control to the Pro models, which is silly. Even stranger, this feature will only be available after a future software update.

Along with new phones, there are several new wearables and accessories. The entire AirPods range got an update, with the base AirPods 4, AirPods 4 Noise Cancellation, AirPods Pro, and refreshed AirPods Max. They all come with some annoying new AI features, which I don’t expect to work well, so hopefully they can be turned off. They also come with some new audio quality improvements, but the base AirPods are the real winners here.

The Apple Watch Series 10 was the biggest news of the event, and though it’s more evolution than revolution, its new features are very handy. On the hardware side, it has faster charging and a larger screen with slimmer bezels. For health tracking, there are a number of swimming-focused features and, notably, sleep apnea detection. It doesn’t have blood pressure sensing, which will likely come with the Series 11, nor does it have blood-oxygen sensing, which was removed from new Apple Watches in January after a lawsuit from Masimo Corp. If you value that feature and own a 2023 or earlier Apple Watch, I’d recommend waiting to upgrade. There is also a new color for the Apple Watch Ultra Series 2, now available in Henry Ford’s favorite shade, but despite rumors, there was no new Apple Watch SE.

Overall, the event was fine, if fairly unremarkable. I’m looking forward to seeing if the new AirPods are a meaningful upgrade over the previous versions, and whether the 16 Pro’s professional photography tools are actually as impressive as they seem. But there were no surprises here. Apple’s executives can keep smiling broadly as they tell us how great their unreleased AI features are, but they need to start shipping the tech. Hopefully, things will be more exciting at their upcoming iPad and Mac event in October.