Apple Intelligence has no Arabic at Launch, and UAE Apple Watches lose their headline health feature

Apple Intelligence still does not speak Arabic

Apple spent much of its 9 September event talking about intelligence: Siri AI, Live Translation in AirPods, Workout Buddy on the Apple Watch. Read the small print at the bottom of the press releases and a pattern appears for anyone buying these products in the Gulf.

Apple Intelligence arrives with iOS 27 on Monday 14 September in sixteen languages: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

It’s been two years since Apple Intelligence launched, and Arabic is still not on that list.

Siri AI is English-first, and the second wave is not Arabic either

The new Siri rolls out as a beta on 14 September for devices set to English. Apple says French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish follow in October. Arabic is absent from both waves, with no announced date.

So if you’re buying an AED 5,099 iPhone 18 Pro and switching it to Arabic, the headline software feature of the last two Apple keynotes switches itself off. Bilingual users can run the device in English and get everything — which is what most people here will do — but that is a workaround, not support.

Live Translation in AirPods 5 carries the same dependency. It needs Apple Intelligence turned on, which means an Apple Intelligence language, which means no Arabic. The feature that would be most useful in a city where a taxi ride can involve three languages is the one that does not cover the local one.

The Apple Watch health gap is more specific and more surprising

Buried in the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 releases is this line: hypertension notifications are not available in the UAE at launch on either watch.

Apple leads with this feature on both watches. The Health Sensing System reads your heart rate every five seconds and samples heart rate variability twenty-four times more often than before, specifically so the watch can spot patterns consistent with chronic high blood pressure over 30 days. In the markets where it is enabled, it is the strongest argument for upgrading.

Hypertension affects a substantial share of adults in the Gulf, and the region’s health authorities treat it as a priority condition. So the buyer with the most to gain from the feature is the one who cannot switch it on.

To be fair, regulatory clearance rather than hardware is the constraint: Apple says additional clearances for these models are in process and expects availability next year. The sensors in a UAE Series 12 are identical to those in a US one.

What this means if you are buying this month

The Series 12 and Ultra 4 are still the best watches you can pair with an iPhone, and every UAE price is listed in our Apple UAE price guide, and the 18 Pro’s camera and battery gains are real regardless of what language you run it in. But two of the headline reasons Apple gives for upgrading — the intelligence layer and the blood pressure feature — land differently here than they do in Cupertino’s demo.

If you are buying an Apple Watch specifically for hypertension notifications, know that Apple’s own guidance is 2027, not a software update in the next few weeks. If you want Apple Intelligence in Arabic, there is nothing to wait for yet, because Apple has not committed to a date.

Apple has given a timeline for one of the two — next year for hypertension notifications — and none at all for Arabic. We will update this piece when either changes.

Both caveats came out of the same launch, which we followed live in our iPhone 18 event live blog.