Apple's Planned Upgrades to Siri Runs Into Snags

By Bloomberg Technology

Categories: Startup, VC, AI

Summary

Apple's AI-powered Siri revamp faces significant delays, pushing core features from March 2024 to May-June, with personal context features delayed until September 2025—potentially two years after initial announcement. The competitive pressure from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic advancing their AI capabilities during this delay poses the real strategic risk.

Key Takeaways

  1. Features originally planned for March 2024 launch are now staggered across multiple iOS versions through September 2025, representing a potential 2-year delay from initial introduction, indicating underestimation of AI feature complexity.
  2. Apple's competitive advantage depends not on iPhone sales ($85 billion) but on where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will be positioned by year-end, suggesting AI capability parity matters more than hardware ecosystem.
  3. Apple-Google collaboration on AI models through research lab partnerships is critical to meeting delivery deadlines, demonstrating that even premium tech companies require external partnerships to compete in rapidly advancing AI.
  4. Staggered feature releases (iOS 26.4, 26.5, 27) prioritize core functionality over personal context features, suggesting a risk-mitigation strategy to ship something by fall rather than the originally ambitious feature set.

Topics

Transcript Excerpt

Let let's get into the details. What do we need to know? What's new? What are you hearing from inside the company about the latest snag with artificial intelligence powered Siri? So Apple has been planning to launch the new Siri. This is an AI revamp that initially introduced in June 2024 at its developers conference. I'm gonna tap into features like your personal data to fulfill queries, on stream content, and precise controlled apps. It it was supposed to launch next month in March as part of ...