Apple needs a killer AI Siri to fuel upgrades from older iPhones

Watch Apple's 'It's Glowtime' event here

Apple long ago missed its deadline for launching an AI-supercharged Siri, but the company now says it’s finally on track to deliver the upgrade in 2026.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

This year’s delay has intensified pressure on Apple to deliver a truly breakthrough AI experience on the iPhone. Another miss would reinforce perceptions that Apple is falling far behind rivals in artificial intelligence — and risk ceding control of the next major computing platform to competitors like Google or OpenAI.

A hit LLM Siri, however, could spark an avalanche of upgrades from millions holding onto older iPhones.

Steve Kovach for CNBC:

Apple has to solve its AI problem.

Following an exodus of top execs, including AI boss John Giannandrea, Apple said it has the team in place to deliver the Siri upgrade in 2026, which could come as much as 21 months after the original announcement.

Apple needs that new Siri to be good. Not just good enough to match the capabilities of popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, but also good enough to convince folks with older iPhones to upgrade to a new device so they can use it.

Users need an iPhone 15 Pro, or better, to use Apple Intelligence.

For investors, it’s their best bet to see a boom in Apple shares from AI.

Unlike the $20 per month OpenAI charges to use the full version of ChatGPT, Apple doesn’t charge for Apple Intelligence. Unless Apple changes its strategy and starts charging a subscription, its only hope is to leverage AI to move new iPhones, Macs, and iPads.


MacDailyNews Take: A useful LLM Siri also will underpin Apple’s push into smart home hubs and accessories and, importantly, smart glasses, too.



Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!

Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.

11 Comments

  1. We definitely need a versatile, capable, agentic and performant SiriGPT.

    This was meant to arrive earlier in 2025, and it boggles the mind that the Giannanderrrrra’s of Apple didn’t see this and instead focused on making the crappy Siri 1.0 a nanosecond faster.

    When I hear Siri today ask me if I want ChatGPT to answer, even simple questions that Siri previously would have answered, I am enraged that Siri has been left to rot so badly for well over a decade.

    We all know Steve Jobs has been rolling in his grave so fiercely over this travesty of failure that I have wondered whether Apple has secretly wondered if this was the energy source they were looking for to go truly carbon neutral, given the incredibly unreliable nature of wind and solar to be 24×7 rock-solid reliable.

    At least we don’t have that Rush Limbaugh identified leftist Apple savant Daniel Urin Bilgewater’s take on why renewable energy is the energy source Apple has wedded itself to but can never rely on – just like we can never rely on Siri 1.0 to do more than it could when first launched in 2011.

    4
    4
  2. As an Apple enthusiast I quit even attempting to use Siri when looking for a tropical fish store it sent me to eat sushi. Grok is the elephant in the room its getting harder all the time to not see it. I used Open AI but was disgusted with the liberal woke mindset on everything! Google’s mantra has gone from don’t do evil to I am evil. I don’t like what Google has done with the internet. Hitting constant demands to sign in with my Google account turns me around like idiots who think their business living in the facebook getto where you can’t see their excuse for a web site if you haven’t signed up with Meta. I recently cut ties with Godaddy when hosting a simple web site costs $270 a year. Really? I converted my site to WordPress and hosted it on Hostinger for $80… for four years! All this to say Apple has a lot to lose ignoring Grok. Grok should at least be sanctioned in the Apple universe as a viable choice…

    7
    3
  3. Yeah.

    And I’m sick of the Apple AI is bad because Apple has better privacy and security BS.

    My privacy has nothing to do with asking where a store is; or asking for directions; or a math question, etc.

    Most Apple people have just given up on Siri.

    I have an iPhone 13 MP. Why upgrade? Colors? The “island” vs Notch? An always on screen?

    Only reason to upgrade is the substandard batteries all my lastest generation Apple products that are going bad prematurely.

  4. I asked Siri directions to a local coffee shop. Instead, Siri told me to check my white privilege and asked whether I felt left like my assigned gender was incorrect and gave me directions and an appointment to the closest gender affirming care clinic for surgery.

    YIkes!

    2
    4
  5. Better put “beta” after the new Siri incarnation, like “SiriAI beta”. Remember what happened when Apple Maps was released? Lots of bad press is waiting for a weak app that doesn’t live up to expectations.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.