Hands-on test of Apple Intelligence on China-market iPhones: Siri can call Qwen, while Erase and Translate show mixed performance

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Just moments ago, with the iOS 27.3 developer beta update, Apple Intelligence—which we've waited over two years for—has finally opened for testing to users in China!

From its first appearance at WWDC 2024 to now actually being installed on China-market devices, this AI pie Apple has been drawing for two years has finally been served up to us.

More importantly, Apple has found a pretty good local partner for the China version this time: Qwen.

This time, China-market Apple Intelligence is powered by a foundation built jointly on Apple's in-house models and Alibaba's Qwen. Features like photo cleanup and basic polishing run directly on-device; but once it encounters complex tasks, the system will call on Qwen's cloud capabilities through Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence.

As for which iPhones can use it, the differences between the China and overseas versions, and issues like Apple accounts and regional restrictions, we have already laid this out in detail before—those interested can go read Just now, China-market Apple Intelligence was officially announced, but full-power Siri AI still has to wait.

First, search for and download the official "Apple Developer" app in the App Store, and sign in with your Apple ID in the account section; after a short wait, open the system's "Settings – General – Software Update," and you'll be able to pull up the latest iOS 27 Developer Beta under "Beta Updates."

After all, this is the first developer beta firmware, so some bugs are inevitably present in the system. If you only have one main phone you use heavily every day, it's recommended to wait until the official release in December before getting on board safely.

Are Siri, photo editing, and translation any good?

This system update package is huge—a full 12GB—so before upgrading, be sure to leave enough storage space on your phone.

And because many China-market AI capabilities rely on on-device model operation, new data indexing needs to be established, so right after first setting it up, there are some stability issues. For example, natural language search in Photos, Memory movies, and lock screen notification summaries all need to wait for indexing to complete, and it may take one to two days before they work normally.

Next, let's put a few key features to the test:

The all-new Siri

Leading the charge, of course, is Siri. Gone is the "artificial idiot" that could only set alarms, check the weather, and throw you a few web links the moment you asked anything slightly deeper. The Siri with its new marquee-style skin finally supports double-tapping the bar at the bottom of the screen for direct text interaction.

In our tests, if you only ask simple everyday questions or give straightforward basic setup commands, it can handle them directly. But as soon as you take a slight detour, Siri still gets confused.

As for cramming two tasks into one sentence, or deeper complex system orchestration, it still can't do it—in terms of system control, at its core it's still the same familiar Siri as before.

So what happens with more complex, lengthy tasks? We directly threw it a request to write a guide: "I want to go to Jiuzhaigou for four days next month. Help me put together a travel guide."

Faced with a question beyond its own capabilities, the China-market Siri pops up a window asking whether you agree to call Qwen, and notes that you need to sign in to a Qwen account (if you choose to refuse the call here, Siri will simply give up and not answer at all).

After tapping agree to call, it generates an answer in about 7 or 8 seconds. Looking only at generation speed, it's indeed not slow, but looking closely at the content, it's a bit embarrassing. The so-called four-day guide it gives is extremely brief in both accommodation suggestions and attraction arrangements, with very low information density—at best it can only be regarded as a very preliminary outline preview, and the actual result is far inferior to asking directly in the Qwen app.

Photo cleanup

Compared with the still somewhat wooden Siri, the "Clean Up" feature in the Photos app is much more immediately noticeable, and this capability calls on Apple's on-device model.

In our tests, Apple Intelligence's cleanup feature performs quite commendably.

Specifically, if the subject to be erased in the image is relatively far from the camera, has clear outlines, and the surrounding background is relatively clean, the cleanup effect is very clean and neat, with very little loss in image quality—a single photo's size will only decrease by about 0.2MB.

But once the subject you ask to remove is more complex—such as the large areas of grass and cobblestone pavement in our test image—it's more prone to failure. After cleanup, the painted-over area leaves behind a blurry color block with extremely low resolution, clashing with the originally clear image quality around it.

Live translation

This capability likewise depends on the on-device model, and on first use you need to download the language pack for the corresponding translation language, each about 2GB.

Apple has tucked this capability into apps such as Messages, Phone, and FaceTime, and even when connected to AirPods, it can achieve "translate while chatting."

In our tests, the live translation feature performs surprisingly well in everyday spoken conversation. Its response speed is fast, with latency under 1 second, and accuracy is also decent—enough to support smooth communication with foreigners.

Writing Tools

Anywhere you can enter text, selecting text lets you call up writing tools to rewrite, proofread, and summarize—writing tools are definitely the feature office workers will find easiest to use. But for the China-market version, what we care about more is whether this set of AI writing tools brought in from overseas will be "unsuited to the local environment" in a Chinese-language context?

For example, take a rather blunt message chasing a deadline: "You said you'd deliver the proposal on Friday, and now it's Monday—why hasn't it been sent over yet? Please handle it as soon as possible." When we tried rewriting it with the writing tools, even after deliberately switching to the gentlest "Friendly" mode, the rewritten sentences still felt stiff and formulaic. And the broader summary, key-points, and other features are all similar to the level of most ChatBots.

However, when it comes to convenience of invocation, Apple has leveraged its system-level advantage. In our tests, anywhere there's a text input box—whether the system's built-in Notes or third-party apps like WeChat, Feishu, and DingTalk—it can be easily invoked, which is fairly convenient.

Visual Intelligence

This time Apple has also brought recognition capabilities into the real world—Visual Intelligence, activated by long-pressing the "Camera Control" button, with two main interaction entry points: "Ask" and "Search."

The "Ask" on the left taps into Alibaba Qwen's capabilities; the intent is for you to ask questions directly about the object in front of you, such as snapping a photo of skincare products and asking about their key ingredients and uses.

The "Search" on the right is closer to the familiar "search by image," using Baidu's vision model by default, and can quickly retrieve similar images findable on Baidu.

But during testing we found a pleasant surprise: besides Baidu image search, many apps, by integrating the corresponding API interfaces, can also provide similar functionality.

For example, with Poizon installed on the phone, it appeared in the list of selectable search services and retrieved similar items on sale in Poizon; even a niche chord-query app I had installed on my phone, Guitar Wiz, appeared in the list of selectable search services and could be used to look up chords.

It's not hard to infer that Apple has very likely opened up the corresponding API interfaces to third-party apps—as long as developers have adapted them and the user has the corresponding app installed on their phone, its search capability can be invoked directly through Visual Intelligence. We're very much looking forward to how apps like Taobao and Xiaohongshu perform once integrated.

Humorous.

How far is Apple from true intelligence?

After going through the first batch of features of the China-market Apple Intelligence one by one, friends who normally follow Apple should have a good idea—put plainly, this is the "initial version" of Apple Intelligence that first rolled out overseas in 2024, not Apple's latest phone AI solution.

In fact, in the overseas beta of iOS 27.3, Siri AI already supports Traditional Chinese and has been further upgraded in capability, increasingly showing signs of maturity.

By comparison, the just-updated China-market Apple Intelligence seems somewhat not "intelligent" enough.

But this is still a milestone progress.

After more than two years of waiting, Chinese users' iPhones have finally filled in this long-missing system-level AI piece of the puzzle. Moreover, for the vast majority of ordinary people, no one really expected a omnipotent sci-fi butler to suddenly pop out of their phone; they just hoped Siri would no longer be clueless like before and that they could use useful features like live translation and object removal.

If we dig deeper, has this iPhone undergone any "qualitative change" because of Apple Intelligence?

Obviously not.

The current batch of features is essentially still an "AI +" empowerment approach—Photos plus AI becomes photo object removal; the input box plus AI becomes text polishing. Here, AI is merely an "external plug-in" assisting the original apps, not the phone's underlying logic.

What we truly look forward to is AI taking over underlying interactions: when you say to your phone, "Add the restaurant address my friend just sent to tonight's schedule, and check how long it takes to get there from the office," it can recognize the friend, find the address, write it into the schedule, and handle the matter for you from start to finish.

In fact, the new version of Siri AI Apple launched this year focuses on screen awareness and contextual understanding, and possesses a certain degree of personal context management capability.

Even so, over the past period, the vast majority of users' feedback on Apple Intelligence and even the new Siri AI has been quite lukewarm:

The experience is far from as amazing as in the promotional videos.

Ifanr believes the key to this gap still lies in long-range action capability and personal memory management.

The phone is perhaps everyone's closest electronic device; it can not only remember your life trajectory in the background over the long term—distinguishing who your "friend" is, finding where your "company" is—but also cross permissions to search chat records and mobilize the calendar and maps.

At present, Apple is working hard to connect Siri with the various native apps on the iPhone so that data can flow and scheduling becomes smoother.

But our digital lives are still highly tied to third-party apps like WeChat, Meituan, and Feishu. No matter how seamlessly Apple connects its own Notes and Calendar, as long as it cannot get inside the walls of third-party apps, its understanding of you will be fragmented.

To be fair, even if we can soon use the China-market version of the new Siri AI smoothly, in the short term it won't have an earth-shaking impact on our daily lives. For Apple, how to build a good personal context so that the AI in the phone can better serve people is still something that requires a long time to accumulate.

Over the past two years, we've seen too many dazzling "order coffee with one sentence" demos at various launch events, but after actually using a phone as your main device for a few months, you'll find that the wow factor in demo videos is still a hundred thousand miles away from the stability and reliability of daily use.

Take Apple again as an example: despite just delivering the best fiscal-year financial report in its history, it still faces enormous challenges—

Facing a massive base of more than 2.5 billion active devices and 1.5 billion paid subscriptions, the commercial value of Apple AI is not just about attracting consumers to upgrade their devices, but also a reason for users to pay more.

On this earnings call, Apple executives practically laid this commercial strategy on the table. CFO Kevan Parekh explicitly mentioned that AI will create new monetization opportunities through its own services and partners; the new CEO John Ternus even directly teased that in the future, features relying on cloud-based large models, such as Siri AI and advanced intelligent photo editing, will have a basic usage quota, and heavy users will need to pay for more quota.

This also means that iCloud+, which in the past mainly used cloud storage space to attract users to pay, will likely transform into Apple's subscription gateway for selling "cloud computing power and advanced intelligence." Apple clearly does not intend to measure the value of this long-term investment solely by the performance of this generation of products.

However, no matter how attractive the business blueprint is, that's a long-term story Apple is telling Wall Street; back on the iPhone in our own hands, it's better to keep expectations modest for now.

As for when we'll be able to use that truly AI Phone, whether for Apple or the phone industry, we may still have to wait a while longer. Statement: Exclusive article from Sina, unauthorized reproduction prohibited. tech_web_article_v2015_block_bottom Non-targeted 300*250 button 17/09 wenjing begin

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