Apple AI has been officially delayed until at least 2026. In all likelihood, it won’t fully roll out until the 2027 iPhone 18.
BNN Bloomberg reports that Apple’s AI division is in turmoil. Insiders are stating that upgrades to the Siri Digital assistant are delayed ‘for the foreseeable future. Apple software chief Craig Federighi and other executives voiced strong concerns internally that in their testing, the features didn’t work properly — or as advertised. Apple’s standard response was to decline to comment officially.
The delays to heavily advertised features in mass media for over six months, and demonstrated at the company’s June 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, are an embarrassment. They are impacting sales of the iPhone 16, hyped as ‘Built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence’, as promised features are not available
Apple called Apple AI ‘the start of a new era’. It promised to seamlessly cross-reference a user’s emails, texts, calendar, and real-time flight data to answer complex questions, such as ‘When is my mom’s flight landing?’ followed by ‘What’s our lunch plan?’
On Friday, Apple sent its AppleCare support staff a memo saying, ‘If customers ask about the timing of these Siri features, reiterate that we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.’
Why the delay?
CNN reported that Apple AI was nothing more than a vision to please shareholders. It was more about reassuring Apple users who had seen the progress of Google’s Gemini and its rebadged Samsung AI that it had something better. That narrative is now well and truly exposed as nothing more than embarrassing, unsubstantiated, marketing hype. Read Apple made a rare stumble.
Apple of course, won’t comment. Analysts suggest that fixing Siri will require more powerful and expensive AI models, which will strain the current hardware. The iPhone 16 has 8GB of RAM, whereas the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL has 16GB (its minimum is 12GB for actual AI functionality). The Pixel 10 Pro XL may have 24GB. Apple saves money by using smaller RAM, claiming that iOS is more memory-efficient, but AI is a whole new ballgame.
Apple quietly included ChatGPT (as a text query) in iOS 18.5. But the Catch-22 is that it is not the multimodal voice AI chatbot experience that others offer. According to insiders, that is likely to come in iOS 20 in 2027.
Apple is having a hard time reconciling what data AI chatbots need to function with its current privacy terms. Read AI chatbots spy on you. It appears that running sophisticated AI on-device is impossible, raising significant security and privacy concerns for AI in the cloud.
CyberShack’s view: Apple AI delayed. Perhaps for the best.
Apple founder Steve Jobs famously said that Apple must never let its customers be crash test dummies (find the bugs). But Tim Cook et al. have consistently ignored that advice from the grave, and Apple AI is but one of its many serious missteps.
Samsung knew it could not develop AI on its own, so it enlisted Google’s help. Samsung AI is a customised version and works pretty well on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. It benefits from Google’s ongoing innovation without requiring an army of AI engineers on staff.
Apple’s hubris and arrogance led it down a path where it believed it could do a better job. Clearly not now, anyway.
Apple has become an AI straggler – far behind Google et al., in the most critical generational change since the internet.
Apple fans will slavishly wait for its AI, which, when it works, must be well behind Google Gemini or ChatGPT.
There is a good read at AppleInsider, which provided the header image for this article. More history at Beebom.
Comments