Apple's Siri Struggles: The Unfulfilled Promise of AI Assistants

All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets

David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a "supercycle" of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you'd never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world. This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they'd change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn't need to do things yourself; you'd just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things. There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn't work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize. In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships. Others have resorted to shipping more iterative, less interesting upgrades because they have run out of ideas other than "put AI in it." That has made the post-ChatGPT product cycle bland and boring, in a moment that could otherwise have been incredibly exciting. AI isn't good enough, and it's dragging everything else down with it. Apple is probably the worst and most obvious offender here. For nearly a year, ever since the company debuted Apple Intelligence at WWDC last June, it has pitched just about every one of its new products the same way: "it runs Apple Intelligence!" The iPhone 16 ads were less about the iPhone 16 and more about showing off what Apple Intelligence could do -- never mind that Apple Intelligence didn't even ship until months after the iPhone 16. When Apple upgraded the iPad Mini, then the iPad Air, it promoted Apple Intelligence as the reason for both. (The also-new base iPad doesn't support Apple Intelligence, and so Apple has effectively tried to bury its existence.) The website for the new MacBook Air promotes three things about the bestselling laptop on earth: its battery life, its chip, and Apple Intelligence. Meanwhile, Apple Intelligence is currently just a couple of writing tools and a way to poorly summarize your text messages. (And, sure, Genmoji.) The feature people actually want, the one Apple has been relentlessly promoting, is a vastly improved Siri that can better understand and execute your requests, even using your apps on your behalf. That feature is nowhere to be found and "is going to take us longer than we thought," Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy recently told John Gruber at Daring Fireball. The company pulled a commercial with Bella Ramsey in it that advertised the iPhone 16 Pro using this now-even-further-delayed feature. It's hard not to feel bait and switched by the whole thing. For months, people have seen advertisements for features that don't exist, bought gadgets that don't work the way they're supposed to, and been generally duped into thinking a tiny spec bump was a game-changing upgrade. At this point, of course, Apple is too committed to Apple Intelligence to walk it back, and investors would crush the company if it did. Siri's ongoing crappiness appears to also be the reason behind the delay of Apple's next big product launch. We've been hearing for months about a smart home hub that would leverage Apple Intelligence -- and, in particular, that better, more aware Siri -- to control your house and accomplish tasks on your behalf. (Imagine Alexa, but Siri, and you basically have it.) Bloomberg reported that the device was supposed to launch as soon as this month but is being pushed back in part because the underlying tech just doesn't work. These kinds of context-aware, voice-enabled ambient computing devices were supposed to be what AI made possible. That's why Amazon, too, allowed itself to be totally captured by AI long before AI was ready to be a useful consumer product. Amazon was once among the most interesting, experimental hardware makers on the market -- remember that one year it launched like 6,000 Alexa devices in one day, including a microwave and a wall clock? Amazon wasn't always right, but it was never dull. Amazon hasn't released a meaningfully new Echo device since September 2023, the day the company also announced a new version of Alexa that then-hardware chief Dave Limp called "a superhuman assistant." Since then, we've gotten old ideas on slightly larger screens, with the same problems Amazon has had for years. Amazon was all in on this new Alexa, betting that it could turn its smart speakers from a music and timers machine into something vastly more useful. You wouldn't even necessarily need new hardware for it; your gadgets would just keep getting better. But then, of course, Amazon confronted the reality of the AI situation. It took nearly 18 months of work, and a lot of rumors and reports that suggested AI Alexa was actually pretty terrible, before the company launched pretty much the same thing all over again. Only this time, with new hardware chief Panos Panay doing the talking. And no devices to show. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy promised "beautiful" new hardware this fall but revealed no other details. It's not just big companies, either. For the last year or so, the hottest thing in startups has been "put a microphone on a lanyard, record your whole life, and use AI to do... something with it!" That's the pitch for Friend, and Omi, and Limitless, and Plaud, and Bee, and so many others. Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on some kind of AI hardware together. Investors poured huge money into Humane, only to see that collapse less than a year after its first launch. Rabbit's R1 was a flop. None of these devices have so far been compelling, and some of them just plain don't work. To be fair, product makers are in a tough spot right now. If you believe AI is a paradigm shift, that it will change the world the way smartphones or the internet did, you'd be foolish to wait around for the tech to be perfect. By then, it'll be too late, and you'll have lost the race. The problem is that too many companies have made all their plans based on some theoretical and perfected end state of AI, rather than looking for ways to make it useful right now. There are already lots of ways AI can make products more useful and interesting: cutting-edge models can make your robot vacuum more efficient or help your video doorbell better distinguish between people and tree branches. AI can make your smart lights a lot smarter or figure out what you're cooking and get the sear just right. In all these cases, though, AI is an enabling technology for some other feature -- not the feature itself. Nobody's buying a smart grill for the AI; they're buying it for the steaks. Maybe someday, "you can do AI with it" will be a selling point for gadgets. In the interim phase, it feels like we're wasting an entire generation of hardware while we wait for the software to catch up. And there are so many other interesting problems to solve! What if, instead of hand-wavey promises about AI, we got smartphones that lasted twice as long or didn't break so easily? What if startups focused less on AI and more on the millions of people looking for devices that are less addictive and more attuned to a specific purpose? What if Amazon and Apple stopped waiting for some magical technological overhaul and spent time making their existing devices easier to use? There's still so much room for innovation and improvement in the hardware we use every day, and yet nobody wants to try that stuff. They'd rather sit around and wait for AI to solve all our problems. No matter how long it takes.

Apple should focus on fixing Siri, not redesigning iOS again

Now that Apple's recent are behind us, we got some news on the software side last week. First, the company publicly announced that it was delaying the smarter, more personal version of Siri that'll be powered by Apple Intelligence. Then, rumors sprang up again that Apple was giving an extensive visual update to its software platforms, including iOS 19 and macOS 16 which are expected to be revealed at WWDC in June. The sources for this redesign rumor are solid. Jon Prosser dropped a video on his YouTube channel Front Page Tech back in January where he said that he had seen a redesigned Camera app for the next version of iOS that had a number of interface changes that made it feel more like a visionOS app. His thinking is that Apple wouldn't redesign a core app like Camera without bringing changes to some of the rest of the OS, as well. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg followed up on that, reporting that iOS 19, iPadOS 19 and macOS 16 "will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple's various software platforms more consistent." He also specifically mentioned visionOS, which runs Apple's wildly expensive ($3,500) Vision Pro headset, as an inspiration for the new design. This rumor could definitely have legs. Even though visionOS doesn't feel radically different to Apple's other software, it does make sense that the company would unify visual themes across all its platforms and devices as it usually does. But at a time when the company is struggling mightily with its Apple Intelligence rollout and delaying a new Siri (which feels to me like the most significant update the company could deliver), slapping a new coat of paint on iOS and macOS feels like a distraction at best and misguided priorities at worst. The delay to a more intelligent Siri is a major blow to Apple's AI ambitions. Since it was first introduced at WWDC 2024, it's been the single thing that might make me upgrade my phone to one that works with Apple Intelligence. The promise is an assistant that has a better understanding of the apps on your phone and can use them more extensively on your behalf; it can do things like automatically adding addresses to a contact card. Another example Apple showed was asking Siri to find an image of your driver's license, take the ID number on it and put it into a form you're filling out. It'll also have more awareness of what's on your screen and better natural language understanding. That, of course, is all just a promise right now. Apple commentator John Gruber, who typically takes a fairly positive view of the company, absolutely over the Siri delay. He says that at WWDC 2024, he and other members of the press saw controlled demos of Apple Intelligence features, but no proof of a smarter Siri -- thus far, all we've seen are product videos showing what it could do. In retrospect, Gruber says that a smarter Siri is nothing more than "vaporware." "They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature 'Siri, when is my mom's flight landing?' segment of the WWDC keynote itself," he says. "Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices." Apple's presentation of Siri at WWDC 2024 can be seen above. It's a bad look for Apple, and was made worse when Bloomberg published a piece showing the turmoil inside the Siri team following the delay announcement. The publication reported that Apple senior director Robby Walker held an all-hands meeting for the Siri team saying the delays have been "ugly and embarrassing," and that the decision to promote these features to the public before they were ready compounded the issues. To be fair, Apple has shipped a few Siri improvements since the fall (most significantly the addition of ChatGPT), but they're not things that have radically changed the voice assistant's most glaring weaknesses. Additionally, Gurman's sources claim that we won't see these features until sometime in 2026 at the earliest, long after iOS 19 would be released. With all that in mind, these redesign rumors feel like a fresh coat of paint to distract people from the structural issues with Apple Intelligence as a whole and the delays on a massively important feature. The timing also feels strange. While Apple hasn't embarked on a full-scale redesign of iOS since it released iOS 7 way back in 2013, the company has made small but significant changes and refinements nearly every year since that have added up to software that's far more customizable and refined than it was more than a decade ago. Since iOS 14 in 2020, Apple added home and lock screen widgets, major customization features for lock screen visuals, and the wild notion of not having all your apps aligned to an inflexible grid. Apple also added the ability to color-tint the icons to match your background image (or just make them any color you want, dark or light). These all add up to an iOS that is a lot more visually customizable than ever before. Android has had these features for years, so I'm not praising Apple for being some paragon of user freedom. But it's clear from these changes that Apple is finally interested in giving users more control over how their phones look. With all this as well as many smaller visual tweaks the company has made over the years, it's fair to say that iOS 18's design language has evolved far beyond what we saw with iOS 7's complete and abrupt makeover. As for macOS, Apple has given it several notable visual updates over the last decade or so. In 2014, OS X Yosemite largely brought over the flatter design from iOS 7 that removed skeuomorphic elements that had littered iOS and the Mac for years. Apple continued to tweak it over the following years before giving it another big visual overhaul in 2020 with macOS Big Sur. That was the first OS that supported Apple's M-series Macs and as such the company dropped the OS X branding and moved to macOS alongside the new design. While I was initially skeptical of a major macOS visual refresh, I am a little surprised to remember that it's been almost five years since Big Sur launched -- maybe we're right on schedule for a visual refresh. And in recent years, Apple has wanted to keep its platforms as aligned as possible, both from a feature perspective as well as how they look. It's not hard to imagine designers wanting to unify things across platforms again. Given that the user interface is literally how we interact with all these devices, a design refresh can certainly keep things feeling new, even if the functionality hasn't changed much. And without a smarter Siri to look forward to at WWDC this year, a fresh coat of paint might be Apple's best option to make its next software updates feel new. That said, I don't mean to suggest that the people working on the visual design of Apple's software platforms could or should abandon their work and rush a better Siri out the door -- the skill sets and priorities of those two teams are surely completely different. But at the very least, Apple's going to have to more forcefully address the elephant in the room that is Siri than it has before it can try selling us on a new design.

Siri isn't an assistant, it's an embarrassment

Apple's inability to make its signature assistant good, let alone competitive, should have heads rolling in Cupertino. It's time to call it: Siri sucks. And if we're being honest, it's been terrible for years. Apple's voice assistant was so far ahead of the competition that it had every opportunity to basically become the default for a generation. It could have been a brand that encompasses all things of its type, like how all cola is "Coke," all facial tissue is "Kleenex," and every personal watercraft is a "Jet Ski." It could have been a verb, the way every web search is now "Googling it." (The only reason Google's assistant hasn't stepped into that role is that the company can't settle on a brand name.) Now, the company is telling us that the big new Siri features that might have made Siri pretty good have been delayed for a year (maybe more). In the meantime, we don't see any reason to believe that Siri won't continue its pitiful pace of "improvement" that has left it miles behind its AI competitors. Apple should be deeply embarrassed by Siri. It's integral to every Apple device, but it's not a good experience, and it's so far behind in the AI race it leads one to wonder if Apple is ever going to catch up. When asked about AI, Apple will be quick to remind you that, really, it's a pioneer. They've been using AI and machine learning throughout their products for years, ever iPhone since the iPhone X brought dedicated AI acceleration hardware. That's all true, but it's also fair to say the company had no idea at all that generative AI would be so popular or powerful. And so, from image and video generation to text generation and chatbots, Apple is years behind what they're doing at OpenAI, Google, or Meta. Ignoring that Apple's own text generation is mediocre, summaries of notifications and emails are often hilariously askew, and the image generation looks like MidJourney circa 2022, the "other guys" are even doing better voice assistants than Apple. I can have a full-on, free-flowing conversation with ChatGPT or Gemini. I can have them give longer or shorter answers, ask them to change their voice or personality, and more. If ChatGPT had access to my phone functions, it would be game over. With Siri, I have to call upon years of playing Infocom text adventures to phrase my queries in just the right way to make it work like it should. Open mailbox. Go south. Open window. That sort of thing wasn't even on tap for the Siri update in iOS 18, the one we thought we would get in a month or two but has now been kicked down the road to next year. Conversational Siri? Once rumored to be coming in an update to iOS 19 (read: early 2026), Mark Gurman now says it's probably going to be bumped back to iSO 20 in 2027! In other words, Apple is still at least a year and probably two away from delivering the experience its competitors are today. By the time Apple catches up, those competitors will have advanced even further. Apple is safe, but only because the iPhone's core functions and the frameworks that enable access within apps are under Apple's lock and key. Competitor's superior AI can only work on the iPhone or iPad as far as Apple allows, so I won't ever get the ability to ask ChatGPT or Gemini to set an alarm. I won't ever get a hands-free, always-listening voice assistant that isn't Siri, no matter how far behind it is. But Siri's lock-in is getting to be more of a liability than a feature. Siri has been bad for years, and the existence of superior alternatives, and their popularity, is making Siri's failures into an internet meme... and a bad one. Siri's problems started long before the recent boom in LLM-based, generative AI chat companions. Siri has been a disappointment for years. Here's a fun little test I like to do from time to time. Open Spotlight on your iPhone (drag down from the home screen) and type in a flight number. United 800, for instance. You'll get a nicely formatted card of flight info, with an image showing where the plane is in its route, departure, and arrival times, and so on. Now, ask Siri, "What is the status of United Flight 800." You'd expect that same card to pop up, right? Apple has had this great flight info card for ages -- this is a no-brainer. Instead, you'll get anything but flight info. You'll get a general web search, or maybe a news article (as an unreadable notification for the News app), or maybe it will kick the query over to ChatGPT if you have that enabled. Siri will often deliver wrong historical sports scores, incorrect information on a variety of topics, or perform a different function than the one you asked for. There are dozens of memes, TikTok videos, and social media posts of users asking Siri to do one thing only to have it set a reminder or respond with something else unrelated. It also can't do things you would expect it to. If I have a timer running for my bread in the oven, and I say, "Siri, add two minutes to the timer" it will start a new 2-minute timer. If I want to do the math myself, looking at how much time is left and adding two minutes, then issuing the command "Siri, change the timer to 8 minutes," that will work. Frustrating, inconsistent, and unintuitive. I still use Siri every day to add items to my grocery list (which is hit-and-miss and shouldn't be), set timers, and play music. But this is the stuff that has been solved for a decade. Ten years later I'm doing the same things, only with a glowing border around my iPhone display. None of this has anything to do with our new age of generative, conversational, LLM-based AI. Like autocorrect, another feature the casual user associated with "AI," Siri's general functions seem to be getting worse with age. Maybe they're not deteriorating and it's just our expectations that are changing, but either way, Apple has a huge problem on its hands. With its inability to address obvious Siri problems for the last 5+ years, or to even make basic features like autocorrect work in a way that doesn't frustrate users, the world's most valuable company is falling dangerously behind on the biggest technology trend in a generation. Apple has a couple billion users locked into a tight ecosystem, which buys it a lot of time to right the ship, but it has to demonstrate that it can right the ship. We have to see signs of real, meaningful improvement, and a roadmap that speaks to a company-wide vision of AI that is cohesive, futuristic, and exciting. This is not the kind of thing one can usually expect from a company as famously secretive and incapable of admitting error as Apple. So I'm left wanting, hoping for a surprise at WWDC or some other event. A clue, hidden in the subtext of a slick marketing video, is that somewhere within Apple Park they have a bright and audacious vision for AI and a plan to deliver it before everyone else does.

Apple Intelligence is a fever dream that I bet Apple wishes we could all forget about

Apple is my bread and butter. I saved up for ages as a kid to buy my first MacBook, I invested all my time as a teenager learning all there was to know about the iPhone, and I started working at the Genius Bar in my local Apple Store as a young adult. When I got my "big break" in journalism I was thrilled to finally be able to merge my passion for tech and knowledge for Apple with my talent for writing. After working for a few years at iMore, an Apple-enthusiast site, I moved to TechRadar to cover AI, ready to take on a new challenge that I thought would, yet again, be shaped by some kind of Apple-infused impact: Apple Intelligence. Fast forward to now, I've been part of the Apple Intelligence journey since day one, covering all the major AI announcements at WWDC 2024 and using Apple's take on "AI for the rest of us." since its very early beta days. At first, the Apple Intelligence features were confusing, with tools scattered across the UI, but Apple's take that AI should be there for when users need it rather than forced down their throats felt like a refreshing approach to the tech world's favorite buzzword that's hard to avoid. The thing is, the more we fast forward through the first year of Apple advertising AI as the headline feature in all its hero products, the more the cracks have begun to show, and there's no more damning visual than Apple's need to push back (with no timeframe) the key to Apple Intelligence's success, Siri. I was off work last week, so I missed the whole announcement of the delay to the upcoming Apple Intelligence-powered Siri where an Apple spokesperson said, "It is going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year." Off the grid, I had no idea what was waiting for me on Monday morning, and when I saw the news the disappointment hit me like a tonne of bricks. You see, I've championed Apple Intelligence for months. Not so much because of its "intelligence" but because I have full belief in Apple's ability to do something the right way, and based on the company's track record it would've been a safe bet to place. I've been writing about how I believed consumer AI's success was reliant on Apple Intelligence's success and if any company in the world could make AI make sense for my nephew and my parents alike then it would be Apple. Over the last nine months, I've tested everything Apple Intelligence has to offer, from features that I've used once and not touched since like Writing Tools to the more endearing options like Genmoji. When it launched I said "Apple is onto something with Genmoji, and it might just be the best Apple Intelligence feature, ready to expose other AI tools to the average customer" to this day I use the AI tool whenever regular emojis just don't fit the situation. But let's be real, the Genomji, Image Playground features of the world are not needle movers, they are simply nice-to-haves that come in handy whenever you want to cheer up a friend or family member. The Siri showcased at WWDC 2024, on the other hand, is a needle mover, a system seller if you will - that would be if it actually existed. I've been talking with my colleague and TechRadar's US Managing News Editor, Jacob Krol, about this for months and how I was starting to worry about Apple Intelligence's prowess considering we hadn't really seen anything to suggest it was even capable of improving people's lives in the way Apple would make you believe. John Gruber's damning criticism of Apple's AI situation captured that feeling perfectly, highlighting the lack of even a guided demo or showcase of Siri 2.0 at WWDC in June or at the launch of the iPhone 16 in September, leaving the question: Does it even exist? In recent times, Apple's AirPower charging mat springs to mind. I remember working at the Apple Store when it was announced and the excitement from customers who wanted an easy-to-use wireless charging solution that could charge multiple devices at once. Then... nothing. AirPower was never released, and two years after its initial announcement in 2017 the product was canceled and sent into the abyss. AirPower was a fairly niche product, unlike Apple Intelligence which Apple has been touting as the main selling point of the current best iPhones, the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. After the unveiling of the iPhone 16 in September, I wrote an article highlighting my dismay with the Apple Intelligence launch. The piece was titled "The Apple Intelligence launch is a mess - don't buy the iPhone 16 or install iOS 18 based on the promise of what's to come" emphasizing the fact that Apple was selling consumers a smartphone that wasn't shipping with any of its headlining features. I said, "This is where my bigger concern lies: the promises of what's to come. I've used Apple Intelligence as part of the iOS 18.1 developer beta and I like what I've tried so far, but Genmoji, Image Playground, and the wonder of an actually useful Siri are all just pipedreams right now. No one outside of Apple has even seen these AI tools in the flesh; they aren't even in beta testing yet as part of a Developer Beta." Since then, we've seen Genmoji and Image Playground, in fact, they are now available on compatible devices, but Siri (the feature we're all waiting for) is still nowhere to be seen. It was meant to launch as part of iOS 18.4 in April or May, and I was waiting patiently, giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, hoping for Siri to bring the keys to unlock AI on the iPhone. I've had countless conversations with colleagues where I've explained how it's tricky to critique Apple Intelligence fairly without having all the pieces to the puzzle, and how Apple's "beta" moniker makes it unfair to criticize. But honestly, with this Siri delay and delving deeper into the capabilities of Android with Gemini integration, I feel completely let down by Apple and I feel like it's only right to make that clear. If I had to describe Apple Intelligence, the umbrella term for all things AI in iPhone, iPad, and Mac, I'd call it underwhelming. There's not one AI tool on my iPhone 16 Pro right now that fulfills Apple's ultimate goal of simplifying life. It's so insignificant, in fact, that I had it switched off after an update for about two weeks without even noticing the AI features were disabled. If Siri's Apple Intelligence upgrade was available then we'd be a step closer to the personal assistant in your pocket that everyone is hopeful for, but as it stands iPhone users and loyal Apple customers are living in the AI-less past while even non-flagship smartphones like Google's Pixel 8a have excellent AI integration. I'll admit it, I'm sometimes blinded by the Apple bubble and therefore spend most of my life using Apple products instead of the competition. Because of that, I think sometimes Apple's aura clouds purchasing decisions and consumers miss out on the capabilities of the other side. I know the grass isn't always greener, but when it comes to AI it definitely is. Take Gemini in Gmail for example, which allows users to quickly ask AI to help take control of their emails right from the Gmail app, it's a neat feature and the kind of useful AI tool that serves a purpose, not just a nice-to-have. Gemini is integrated throughout Android 15 and now that Apple has decided to delay Siri even longer, those of us who trusted the concept of Apple Intelligence are being punished. I don't have faith that the iPhone 16, a device sold as the best place for Apple Intelligence, will even have a Siri capable of Gemini's prowess before the iPhone 17 launches - and that's just not cool Apple. We've become accustomed to Apple doing what's right for its consumers and ultimately creating hardware and software that's beautiful to look at and easy to understand. With AI it feels like Apple was blindsided and has taken for granted just how quickly artificial intelligence would become part of our daily lives. In the past Apple has been able to hide behind limitations by marketing them with its consumers in mind: Siri isn't as good as Alexa or Google Assistant because Apple doesn't access your data. But when it comes to AI, the privacy focus doesn't bear the same weight. Competitors, while not offering the same world-class privacy and security as Apple, have caught up to a certain extent and consumers want AI that genuinely makes a difference, removing the mundane from their lives. That means that people are more likely to overlook things that might've been a sticking point in the past, purely to gain access to tools that significantly enhance the user experience. I could write about this situation all day, but I'm going to push the brakes. Ultimately, Apple has overpromised and by doing so has significantly disappointed its most loyal customers. Owning a flagship iPhone with a gorgeous OLED display and an incredibly fast Apple-produced chip means nothing if the software is living in the past compared to its competitors. Whether you like AI or not, the last year has proven that this is one of the most significant software productivity jumps we've ever seen, and unless Apple gets its game together it's going to be completely left in the dust.

The big Siri Apple Intelligence delay proves that maybe we really don't know Apple at all

Most quotes about disappointment focus on the bright side: "Disappointment is a detour on the road to success," said Zig Ziglar. Maybe he's right but when the disappointment leads to an immutable fact or harsh realization, there may be no coming back from it. The Siri Intelligence delay and subsequent fallout is that kind of disappointment and became a wake-up call of sorts as everyone is reassessing their Apple point of view. I'm sure by now many of you have read the various analyses and excoriations of Apple's failure to deliver on its Apple Intelligence and Siri promises. My favorite, by far, is Daring Fireball's epic "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino" exploration of what went wrong and how "Apple pitched a story that wasn't true." Our own John-Anthony Disotto calls Apple Intelligence "a fever dream" that perhaps Apple might like to forget. Fast Company's Harry McKracken is a bit more measured and while he thinks Apple might've failed to "emotionally bond with Siri" he writes that he'd rather see a "great" Siri than one that arrives "on time." In some ways, they're all right. Apple is the most credible tech company on the planet. It did over-promise and create this mess, and sure, I'd like to see the very best Siri possible and, honestly have no choice but to wait for it. But my disappointment is rooted in something far deeper and more disturbing than just Siri. I've been chatting with Siri for almost 15 years and, in the early days, was impressed with its almost conversational capabilities. I wrote in detail about its numerous brain transplants and speech updates. Even as Alexa overtook it, I knew we were still in the horse-and-buggy stage of AI and I waited patiently for the magic I knew only Apple could bring. My patience began to wane during the early days of the AI revolution as OpenAI and ChatGPT took the world by storm and then Microsoft supercharged awareness with Bing AI and eventually Copilot. Apple seemed to be sitting on its hands as Google and Samsung showed off impressive native AI feats in apps, on the web, and in Galaxy and Pixel phones, respectively. WWDC 2024 changed all that and gave me hope that Apple was in the AI race, but there were worrisome signs even back then that because, well, it was Apple, I chose to ignore or forgive. Chief among them was that Apple was quickly ceding key AI elements to the competition. The integration of ChatGPT and Google for complex natural language prompts was seen as a win, but it was also Apple throwing up its hands and saying, "Here. You handle this." Anything more complex than "Hey Siri, play my Pump Up playlist" is handed over to ChatGPT. Essentially you are leaving Apple land for a world managed by an open source AI platform, albeit arguably the best one in the world. I cut Apple slack because of the big promise: Siri would get better and not by a little bit. It would be the intelligent assistant you dreamed of. An AI that, with your permission, could see all on your best iPhone and on its screen. It could take action based on your written or spoken prompts, and keep the conversation going so you got the best result out of Apple's ecosystem and all your data that's embedded in it. I believed because, like so many others, we believe in Apple. Apple is a special company. It all but appropriated the word "magical." Nobody launched products like Apple. No company has the aura. Its chief executives are mythical creatures. CEO Tim Cook is a bona fide celebrity and his warm Alabama cadence can lull you into submission: yes, Apple will do that. But the hard realization is that Apple is just another tech company and one that is facing perhaps its most difficult technical challenge. Yes, I appreciate the transparency. I've worked on many projects that took longer than I anticipated. It's hard to tell your boss: this will be delayed. For Apple, it had to share the news with almost a billion users. Over the years, I've seen Apple fail or underdeliver and watched how it's held to an almost higher standard than others. Its efforts to bring us the thinnest phone ever resulted in the possibly bendable iPhone 6 but Apple recovered with a stronger iPhone 7 and future designs that almost challenged you to bend them. Apple's not great at apologies. 15 years ago, the late Steve Jobs held an apology, non-apology press conference to explain away "Antennagate." For those who don't recall, that was when the iPhone 4 came out and some people reported connectivity issues that may have been related to their hands covering the ill-positioned antennas on the outside of the phone. The company initially said we were holding the phones wrong, and then Jobs held that press conference to clear the air. Sort of. He never exactly apologized and did his best to minimize the issue and encourage reporters to move on. It's not that Apple is incapable of admitting fault. Back in 2017, Apple invited me to Cupertino to talk about a Mac Pro do-over. This was unheard of. Not only was Apple saying it made a mistake, it was detailing where it went wrong and how it planned to recover and deliver a new Mac Pro for its devoted creative and development customers. Oddly, what I did not take away from that day is that Apple is fundamentally a company like any other, with hits and misfires, and delays and struggles. Similarly, I did not take Apple Intelligence promises with a grain of salt. Even as the company slowly stepped its way through delivering fresh AI updates, I waited patiently - and confidently for the big Siri update. I did have some frustration and tried, in my own way, to cajole Apple into action. Even though Apple operates in secret, rumors and leaks are surprisingly precise about future activities. And for the longest time, they had the big Siri reveal pegged to iOS 18.4. When that didn't come, I was confused. And when Apple admitted that the update would be delayed to "in the coming year" I was surprised and upset. That's when it finally sunk in. My understanding of Apple as this precise and near perfect and well-oiled machine was, if not wrong, artificial. Yes, it is a massive and highly accomplished company with a spectacular campus that has done more to change the world than most, but it's also a gigantic enterprise of regular people operating in a demanding corporate bureaucracy trying to solve difficult engineering and programming challenges. I don't know what went wrong, if it was the scale of the problem, the lateness of Apple's AI start, or someone inside over-promising about what they could deliver and when, but I should not have been so surprised. Apple's not special. It's just a great company that often delivers great things. And sometimes it doesn't and we have to accept that.

Everyone is a loser in the Apple Intelligence race

There's a lot of AI out there, but picking winners and losers isn't that simple Apple Intelligence is seemingly being lapped in the AI race, but it's hard to determine who's really winning when the competitors change the victory condition every few laps. Humans are a tribal species that thrives on competition and debate, and it's no different when it comes to technology. Whether you're talking about Android versus iPhone or PlayStation versus Xbox, people love to pick sides. It's no different for the various artificial intelligence systems available. However, almost universally, it seems people and pundits are calling Apple Intelligence the biggest loser -- even when compared to systems that haven't released yet. I remember when this whole "Artificial Intelligence" thing started. It was and still is a bad name for an evolution of technology that has nothing to do with computers knowing anything. Intelligence is literally defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge or skills. Artificial Intelligence does neither. The so-called "artificial intelligence" is just a brute-force technology that works best when it has access to mass amounts of data stolen by mostly large corporations from the web. It can't think, it can't reason, and it doesn't have knowledge -- it has access to knowledge. It then parses that knowledge into a soup that sometimes makes sense, and sometimes doesn't. But it does it so confidently, that Google likes to put it forth as gospel, eager for people to scoop up, right or wrong, credited or not. I'll say it up front in case anyone is confused. I'm not here to defend Apple's current state in Apple Intelligence. Let's be frank -- Apple's position isn't ideal, and I'm not going to try and convince anyone it's getting an unfair bad rap. It deserves the criticism it gets. There is a narrative going around that Apple wasn't even thinking of this technology until pressure mounted in late 2023. While it is possible Apple wasn't targeting a 2024 release, I doubt they completely missed that ChatGPT and Google Bard were part of a zeitgeist. Apple has been working on computational photography for many iPhone generations, from the bokeh effect introduced with iPhone 7's dual cameras to the intensive camera systems on iPhone 16 Pro Max. These advancements in iPhone photography necessitated a new chipset that would take the load off of the GPU -- the Neural Engine. The Neural Engine debuted in the iPhone 8 with the A11 Bionic. While no one was calling these advanced models "AI" at the time, it was the foundation of the technology we use today. OpenAI began research for generative AI models in 2016, which is when Apple, Google, and Qualcomm also announced similar research projects. Apple revealed it was researching AI in December 2016, revealed the Neural Engine in 2017, then ChatGPT was released in 2022, and Apple Intelligence in 2024. That doesn't mean Apple didn't already have so-called AI before Apple Intelligence. A lot of early AI wasn't even generative. Google and others were waltzing on stage talking about AI when the technology they showed wasn't fundamentally different from the advanced ML used on iPhone at the time. Apple wasn't behind on AI in 2016, 2022, or 2024, it's been in the game since it started work on Project Titan in approximately 2015. For those that have already forgotten, Apple had always planned on it being an autonomous driving unit with AI. Increasing pressure to announce something, anything related to AI in 2023, seemingly forced Apple's hand. It can be seen in how the company talked about AI before WWDC 2024. The executives even went out of their way to avoid saying AI to the point it was a running joke in the tech community. Then suddenly, everyone at Apple was saying "AI." An internal adjustment occurred as they came up with their strategy on the fly. Market pressures from the stockholders, customers, and global influences forced Apple to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the iOS cycle they had planned wasn't going to work. Apple Intelligence had to be revealed in June or the company would face incredible pushback. Without AI, Apple was "behind" and people would turn to competitors that offered access to this new popular technology. Let's not forget that at the time the existing models were doing little more than producing wild hallucinations and poorly conceived student essays. Even so, Google and OpenAI were promising a technology so grand and dangerous it could destroy humanity, eliminate all work, and collapse economies. While this Skynet level of AI never showed up, people ate up the idea, and Apple wasn't part of the conversation. Tech folk kept repeating the lie that AI was changing the world and Apple wasn't going to be part of the revolution. ChatGPT and Google Gemini are hammers, not self-aware computers. They help with very specific situations and make some really cool stuff. I can't help but be in awe at some of the generated images and videos. Interacting with a chatbot can be entertaining and unique, like talking to a video game. Zork writ large. There are people out there producing some really interesting stuff thanks to AI. When the technology is applied to science, research, analysis, and other academic or enterprise uses, it can do amazing things. But let's not fool ourselves. It is already having a detrimental effect on the internet. The real threat of AI from companies like Google and ChatGPT is the death of the information industry as a whole. Google started life with a goal to organize the world's information, now it is using that access to eliminate the need for the web outside of Google search results. It's thanks to companies like Google that we have a web built around ads and tracking users. That ad system pays the bills for publications so information can be researched, written about, published, then indexed by Google. Google has broken that cycle of trust many times over the years. It first did it by boiling the frog, gradually taking more of this revenue for itself, squeezing out everybody else. This has already forced the closure of many, many enthusiast sites, and several AppleInsider employees are refugees from that. It is doing it now by amalgamating several results from multiple sites into one AI summary. It now leads most searches with that, accuracy, accreditation, and payment be damned. Inevitably, the AI will increasingly feed on AI-generated content. This closed feedback loop reinforces specific ideas, eliminates human publication, and ultimately creates a web where the only place you can get any information is from trillion-dollar companies. The only way out of this mess is to stop treating AI like some kind of all-knowing tool that replaces human work. It can accelerate and enhance work done by humans, but it will never replace it. Apple could face a similar dilemma with Apple Intelligence as app intents and LLM Siri are finally rolled out. If users can get all of the information they need via voice interactions with Siri, there won't be much point for opening the app itself. Developers with sprawling UI elements and beautiful design could lose ground to utilitarian single-screen apps that interact solely through generative AI. Apple's on-device systems will be front and center, benefiting from developer's hard work, but without good ways to monetize apps beyond active service subscriptions. All of these companies have a responsibility to think about how the changes brought about by AI will affect incomes the world over. Hopefully they'll all realize that AI can be dialed back in some respects to ensure humanity can still shine through, whether it's via human-written articles or app UI. When Apple finally revealed Apple Intelligence, I was excited by everything they shared. It was on-device, private, secure, and not actively training on user data. Apple's AI tools were smart, if boring. Rather than promise lies like a thinking computer, Apple gave us generative autocorrect, writing tools, and system-wide summaries. Image Playground was and is a terrible attempt at competing on that front. It was somewhat excusable during the beta cycle, but nothing has changed since that bad superhero Mom example during WWDC, and that's not sustainable when competitors release new versions constantly. Though, I do think Image Playground needed to release to help see how users would take advantage of the model, kind of like Animoji or Memoji. It acted as a working example of Apple Intelligence in something more tangible than grammar checks. But yes, the images it makes are terrible if not horrific. Genmoji is neat and useful though. Apple even tied ChatGPT into Siri and its Apple Intelligence tools, but in a smart way that ensures user privacy. The implementation isn't dissimilar to how Siri calls out to Google privately to conduct a search. Of course, none of this mattered because the doom patrol was out in force to say how behind Apple was. Sure, it couldn't make a Pixar-grade image from a prompt, but the other tools were useful and most importantly, built into the devices they already owned. From the September release to today, many people have discussed just how far behind Apple is in this AI race. I think it comes down to a perception issue. Outwardly, Apple is behind. Why is anybody's guess. Apple isn't shipping new, obtusely named models every week with granular improvements and made-up new milestones. The executives aren't promising to end humanity's need for work. Apple is doing what it does best -- working internally until something is ready, then releasing. In fact, Apple Intelligence might be one of the few examples of Apple releasing something before it was ready. My guess is that they had planned to announce all this at WWDC 2025, and we'd have gotten a more polished version of what we have today this fall. Instead, Apple has been trying to get something new to say about Apple Intelligence with every iOS 18 release. It's all been done in the name of playing catch-up with competitors that aren't even following the rules of their own race. They invent new terms and new goalposts to celebrate empty victories at every turn. It's all very disingenuous, and AI fatigue has already set in. I ask everyone all the time, here, in the AppleInsider Podcast, among friends and family, and even just people I'm conversing with in public - "what have you done with AI?" Really think about it. People don't know what AI is for or what it can do for them, just that it's supposed to be good and Apple is behind. "It's Brawndo, it's got electrolytes." I've tinkered with AI from other companies, and they're interesting, but I've not found anything that'll help me directly. To be fair, I'm not exactly the target audience for many of the offered tools. I'm not coding with GitHub Copilot or flooding the internet with slop images and articles in an attempt to make pennies in ad revenue. I am writing, though, and I am using Apple products. So, the only AI that's made any difference in my life is actually Apple Intelligence. It's not huge, and I'm not yelling from the rooftops or anything, but it is a difference. But that's okay, because it is having a positive effect in my workflows without sacrificing anything, and that's what good technology is about. It doesn't always have to be a big deal. Summaries on notifications and mail, even when wrong, are useful for triage. Instead of getting a Slack notification that's so long it ends in an ellipsis, I just get the gist in a summary. We're awash with email here at AppleInsider. Hundreds if not thousands a day. I can see what the actual point of whatever random email I get without opening it. Apple Home isn't packing my notifications thanks to grouping and summaries. Writing tools have replaced Grammarly, a $150 per year subscription. And, for what it's worth, Grammarly got worse when it implemented artificial intelligence. I can take a screenshot of a table on a website, ask Siri to send it to ChatGPT, and give me the HTML version of that table, and get it. It still needs to be deeply proofread to be sure it's accurate, but it's faster than creating that table from scratch, and hand-coding the HTML. These are quaint use cases and not stealing jobs or disrupting the market, but they are tangible. For my needs, Apple is winning, and that's enough. Perhaps it's not that different from my use of iPad Pro as my main computer. There are more powerful devices that can do more, but I don't need them. That doesn't mean iPad Pro is behind those other products, it's just a different platform and strategy. It is quite funny to me to see everyone praising Amazon on Alexa+ when all they've seen is canned demos and a few tech reporters playing with it. I'll reserve judgement for when it's out in the wild on exactly how it compares to the competition. For whatever reason, Amazon has been completely excluded from the AI conversation, if only because everyone believed that the company gave up on Alexa. It's quite the turnaround to go from layoffs and losing money on a product to endorsing it as the future of Amazon. After a keynote with no new products, everyone is talking about how far behind Apple is again. It's quite impressive, actually. Alexa+ won't start rolling out for another month and several of its features involve reminders and integrations with Ubering, similar to classic Siri. Be excited for the upgrades, sure, but I frankly don't understand the sentiment that Apple is further behind because of a demo. It reminds me a lot of how tech pundits would talk about a Samsung Galaxy release in February being miles ahead of iPhone. The device they're praising is a generation ahead of the fall iPhone, so of course it's got better specs, it is meant to compete with the iPhone coming out in seven months. While it's interesting to see how everything functions while it's all still in flux, I'm more concerned with how it compares once it reaches a steady state. There will be a maturity point eventually, and my expectation is that privacy, security, and access to on-device personal information will have Apple in the lead. One thing others have pointed out and I agree with: the biggest problem Apple has is the same one that bites it again and again. The company's secrecy and need to work behind closed doors just isn't helping in the AI race. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google Gemini are at the starting line with the other lanes empty. The gun goes off and they're running neck and neck. Suddenly, in the fourth lane, Apple bursts out from underground slightly behind the rest. It leaps out briefly taking a breath only to dive back into its tunnel like some kind of subterranean whale. The racers don't even look back at this odd spectacle as they pass Amazon, its starting line a mile into the race. Amazon starts running as the rest pass. Apple is nowhere to be seen as it's back underground preparing to surface again somewhere later. The crowd sees the contenders and the progress they are making. Meanwhile, everyone is wondering where Apple is in this race. They're nowhere to be seen, and even Amazon is running now. Apple must be behind. I know it is unfair for me to say Apple Intelligence is the only AI making a difference for me because it is the only one built into my devices. That's a whole different discussion the European Union will eventually try to weigh in on. It'll be interesting to observe this metaphorical race going forward. There is an AI ceiling, at least on the consumer side in the near future, so I expect Apple will inevitably "catch up." Now if I haven't beaten this metaphor to death just yet, allow me one last smack. The real loser in this race isn't any of the competitors, but the observers. The discourse has gotten so extreme, so silly, and out of the space of reality, that the consumers using artificial intelligence are the real losers here. We've all been robbed of something precious and had it packaged then sold back to us with a pretty bow and a guise of progress. We were promised a revolution that would be either cataclysmic or life-changing. They said stealing all of the information on the web was necessary to change the world. They even said that it was too hard and too expensive to pay for and properly credit this content, so for the most part, they just didn't bother. Worse yet, the courts bought that argument. We never got that revolution, but they did steal everything. We got better autocorrect and AI slop. They got record profits. Every writer has a footprint, and a style. There are turns of phrase that they like using. For instance, our Managing Editor, Mike Wuerthele, can look at our texts blind and tell which one of us has written a piece without seeing a byline. It's disconcerting to see these turns of phrase stolen verbatim from a piece, mashed up with content from other venues, and then put forth as Google gospel at the top of nearly every search result. If you're a tech pundit looking for a clickbait headline, the only thing that'll get more clicks than Apple being behind is apparently Apple delaying an expected feature. The company bit off a bit more than it could chew with its personalized Siri based on app intents that it showed off during WWDC 2024. It's not coming in iOS 18.4 and likely not at all in iOS 18. The whole concept was built on the existing app intents system that would allow Siri to understand what was on screen or buried within apps. It would allow the system to parse data found in separate places on the operating system, like Contacts showing who your mom is, Mail having an itinerary for a flight, Calendar having an event, and iMessage having a mention of an arranged ride. All this could combine to result in an answer to a query to "when is Mom arriving?" There are a few obvious problems with implementing the technology behind the feature. The system is incredibly complex and, like we've seen with summaries, it is prone to hallucination. And unlike summaries, which are harmless if wrong, this new Siri can't be wrong when dealing with crucial data and actions. If users have to go check the work of the AI, then there isn't a point. All of this was being built on the old Siri model. Siri is still and would still be a machine learning model that accesses Apple Intelligence tools the same way it accesses app functions. And all that will be changing soon enough. Perhaps Apple realized the key component to this app intent system for Siri is having Siri be an LLM as well. Whatever the reason, it isn't coming before June. The level of integration provided by app intents being tied to Siri and Apple Intelligence could have leapfrogged Apple ahead. It would be something visible, understandable, useful, and above all, private. That said, the delay is good news for users. It's a sign Apple has learned its lesson with pushing out Apple Intelligence features that aren't ready for prime time. The need to have AI in 2024 pushed some boundaries Apple was uncomfortable with, and things started breaking. The BBC wasn't happy with notification summaries, and that was a black eye on Apple's efforts. Now imagine that same issue but with getting details of your mother's flight wrong. She probably doesn't want to wait in the airport for a few extra hours, and you certainly don't want to be circling or sitting in a parking lot for half of the day. Of course, this, combined with Amazon's announcements and ChatGPT's 40th new model version this week, has Apple being labeled as "behind" again. In the grand scheme, in the public eye, I'm not going to say that's necessarily wrong, but I wouldn't bet against Apple either. Apple was behind in the smartphone market, the tablet market, the smartwatch market, the headphone market, and the $3,500 headset market at one point. If we're calling Apple behind here even though it is providing tangible benefits for users, so be it, but don't bet against them being a bigger player soon. Apple Intelligence has had a rough start. Public perception places Apple far behind the competition. Delays are inevitable as Apple's need for perfection and security wins out over investor pressures. Meanwhile, I'll continue to benefit from Apple Intelligence and almost none of these other models as everyone yells about how behind they are. I'm excited for what's next.