Apple’s much-hyped Apple Intelligence, unveiled with grand promises of revolutionizing its ecosystem, has stumbled badly, with its flagship AI-powered Siri upgrade mired in delays and dysfunction. Touted as a game-changer at WWDC 2024, the revamped Siri—meant to leverage personal data and on-screen context for smarter interactions—remains vaporware, plagued by engineering setbacks and unmet expectations. As competitors like xAI, OpenAI, and rivals Microsoft and Google surge ahead in the AI race, Apple’s failure to deliver a functional, cutting-edge Siri has eroded its credibility, leaving users and investors questioning the company’s ability to innovate in a field it once pioneered.
So, Tim Cook – who is ultimately (but, seemingly never will be held) responsible – has trotted out two high-level executives on a gaslighting… or as M.G. Siegler so cleverly calls it, “Liquid Glasslighting” tour.
Joanna Stern for The Wall Street Journal:
For years, Apple events felt haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs. This week, a different ghost hovered: Siri.
A year ago, on this same sunny and pristine Apple Park campus at the Worldwide Developers Conference, the company unveiled its grand vision for artificial intelligence.
“Apple Intelligence” was a suite of generative-AI tools with an exciting centerpiece: a Siri that was finally smart. Some Siri features arrived, but the coolest—where Siri can respond to things you’re doing on your phone, as if it were your sidekick—never did. Apple quietly pulled plans, even stifling an ad it had run to hype the feature.
After announcing new operating systems this week, Apple executives are defending the company’s AI strategy. Big time. In fact, they are now saying the company is rebuilding Siri from the ground up.
“This stuff takes hard work, but we do see AI as a long-term transformational wave as one that’s going to affect our industry and of course our society for decades to come,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told me in an interview at the company’s headquarters. “There’s no need to rush out with the wrong features and the wrong product just to be first.”
Only Apple wasn’t first, not even close. Its Silicon Valley competitors are running laps around it in terms of AI smarts. The promised Apple intelligence features that did arrive? I don’t use them. I bet you don’t either.
MacDailyNews Take: Attempt, yet fail – laughably.
Great hair, though! (No, not you, Joz.)
See also:
• Apple to strip not-so-secret robotics unit from struggling AI chief John Giannandrea – April 25, 2025
• Apple removes Siri from John Giannandrea, hands it over to Mike Rockwell – March 20, 2025
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Craig should have Benn fired years ago. There are so many software bugs from Safari to Mail user to many other programs. Apple needs to get back to basics and stop screwing with more bloatware functionality and liquid glass crap. Without Steve they are mired in Microsoft land a place where simplicity dies for the sake of adding useless crap functionality which compromises user experience to a high degree. Get a new head of software and move back to simplicity and give me backache ability to configure my Mac. So tired of getting an update with a bunch of crap auto on. Apple you are a real mess. You are save d by Windows being even worse. we need a different company to come on the scene like Apple did in the early 2000 and provide what Steve did … the ability to customize my machine and simplicity.
Get back in your golf cart, about your’s and Apple’s speed, and dream of “Days of Thunder” glory, cuz dreams is all you got while all we get is your nightmares!
“vaporware”, oh like the other “features” that no one uses? Every year apple releases new “features” of the os and every year these features get sweeped away as users ignore them as no one uses them. pfft. what the hell do these programmers do every day?
The problem with Apple’s programmers these days is a rampant “next bench policy”.
Let me explain.
Programming staff and managers talk to the person the next desk over and the managers talk to their teams and say, “What would YOU want next?” and “What would make YOUR life better?” What programmers want and would like to have are all too often far from what will make the life of the person out in the rest of the world much better. (The term originated in the very late ’70s [or at least that’s when I first heard it]. Hewlett Packard’s PC division had this problem to such an extreme that it almost completely sunk that division in the early ’80s.)
One of Steve Jobs’ best traits was to be able to see past the vast majority of that and get staff (hardware and software) to focus on what is really best for the end user. Clearly neither Craig Federighi nor Greg Joswiak have that ability. Maybe no one at Apple has that ability today.
To Cityzen (X) … pointing out Apple’s severe shortcomings is not whining. It’s stating facts. I rarely use chat systems, but occasionally do for work and then it is 99% of the time Messages — though that has become buggy as of late with individual texts showing up on my Mac Pro as much as five or more minutes after they are sent. I don’t use any social media accounts.
I spend my time doing work that has absolutely nothing to do with “AI” (which does not exist anywhere at all) or social media. Hell, I started using the Mac almost from the first day of its existence because of SANE. (For those who don’t know, for almost a decade Apple ][s and ///s and Macs were the only desktop machines (excluding the very high end workstations of the time) that completely followed IEEE computation rules thus making computations precise and trustworthy.) Where is the Apple equivalent today in anything it does?
Why isn’t Apple teaming with AutoDesk and Ansys as well as others for the VisionPro? Where are the major announcements of those collaborations? Major teaming there could move the fields of all those companies forward significantly! While I only work peripherally with those, I’d buy a VisionPro in a heartbeat if Apple had a direct tie in to those companies.
So, Cityzen (X), I’m not whining. As an Apple equipment user since the late ’70s, I feel I have a right to point out where Apple is very clearly getting it wrong. Will I switch to Windows or Linux or other if Apple does not right its ship? While that is very unlikely, it is possible. For Apple there’s still time to fix this. It must.
There is always Linux
Nailed it. Best to use and enjoy our stuff, reading about it especially here- reading about Anything here is a detour into negativity and usually far away from the actual truth.
Citizen (X). You’ll likely dismiss this response as coming from a whiner you easily mock.
I’ve been an Apple user since 1989. I love Apple, but the company is not the same company it once was. Originally , and up do the death of Steve Jobs Apple was deeply concerned about making hardware and software that “Just Worked” and empowered the end user to be more productive and able to be crazy enough to change their world. It wasn’t about market share, or market value. These are two things that didn’t drive Apple’s products or decisions. Rather, they built premium products, sold at a premium price, to premium customers.
Today’s Apple no longer views the customers as producers empowered by their products to impact their world. Now, Apple sees their customers as consumers. It’s no longer about building great products but selling the most products. Despite all their claims to the contrary their products don’t work correctly or empower people in the same way. But they are selling more and more and people accomplish less.