Apple’s reliance on Google’s Gemini AI model to power key features of Apple Intelligence — including an upgraded Siri — highlights a perceived shortfall in the iPhone’s independent AI capabilities, according to a recent Bloomberg News newsletter analysis.
In a piece titled “Apple’s Use of Google Gemini Shows iPhone’s Lack of AI Advantage,” author Austin Carr argues that Apple’s multiyear partnership with Google, announced on January 12, 2026, effectively undercuts claims of a unique AI edge for the iPhone. The deal sees Apple integrating Gemini models and Google’s cloud technology as the foundation for future Apple Foundation Models and enhanced AI experiences on iOS devices. This move, Carr suggests, resembles an admission that Apple’s in-house AI efforts have not kept pace with rivals, particularly Google itself, which natively embeds Gemini across Android ecosystems for seamless, advanced features.
The partnership builds on earlier reports from 2025, when Bloomberg News revealed Apple was in talks to leverage a custom or powerful Gemini variant (including a potential 1.2 trillion parameter model) for a revamped Siri. Estimates at the time pegged Apple’s annual payments to Google in the range of $1 billion, with some analysts later suggesting the overall deal could be worth several billion dollars over time—echoing the lucrative, long-standing Google search default agreement on iPhones.
While Apple has positioned Apple Intelligence as a privacy-focused, on-device-first AI suite (launched in stages starting in 2024–2025), the Bloomberg News piece contends that outsourcing core generative capabilities to a competitor casts doubt on its differentiation. Android devices, powered directly by Google’s own AI stack, can offer cutting-edge features without similar dependencies, potentially giving them an advantage in real-world performance and innovation speed.
Carr’s analysis frames this as part of the broader Apple-Google dynamic: a mix of cooperation and competition. The collaboration validates Gemini’s strength while underscoring Apple’s challenges in building frontier-level models independently amid massive infrastructure demands. For iPhone users, the result could mean more capable Siri and Apple Intelligence tools sooner — but at the cost of relying on a rival’s technology, which may erode the perception of iPhone as the undisputed leader in smartphone AI.
As the AI landscape evolves rapidly in 2026, this partnership could accelerate feature rollouts for iPhone owners while raising strategic questions about Apple’s long-term positioning against Google, OpenAI, and other players. Apple has not disclosed full deal terms, but the arrangement appears structured as a cloud computing contract, allowing Apple to tap Gemini without fully replicating the massive training and compute investments required for equivalent models.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last August:
Google Gemini? Why not just get a Samsung Galaxy phone which already integrates Google’s Gemini AI as a core component of their AI-powered features?
Google Gemini on an iPhone offers precious little differentiation from Samsung, the chief iPhone knockoff peddler.
If you’re going to with an external AI partner, why not choose the smartest one? We find xAI’s Grok to be more accurate and useful than Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT, and the rest. – MacDailyNews, July 21, 2025
Apple would likely need a CEO who is more open to thinking outside the box than the one with which it’s currently saddled.
Google Gemini. Puleeze. OpenAI’s ChapGPT or Anthropic’s Claude would be better choices. Even better would be for Apple to allow users to choose – gasp! – which AI model they’d like to underpin Siri.
Regardless of what Apple chooses, they will at least be safely behind Apple’s privacy wall.
The issues are: Google’s Gemini is not the best and everyone knows it, Google has a poor reputation for privacy that will tarnish Apple’s, and Google, hello, ripped off the iPhone with Android. Enough with the Google, Apple!
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Makes you want to vomit! Apple has no shame and Google has no morals. Siri is already dumb and lacing her lack of intelligence with stupidity from Gemini is a recipe for disaster. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
Apple has effectively conceded the AI platform war to Google. With Gemini now positioned as the intelligence layer Apple depends on, Google’s advantage will only compound—especially as future versions of Android and Pixel deepen native, first-class integration.
In a world where software—and increasingly AI systems—define the product, Apple is drifting toward being a premium hardware manufacturer rather than a platform leader. I’ve been on the iPhone since version 1 and bought Apple stock when Steve Jobs returned as iCEO precisely because he understood the non-negotiable principle: hardware and software must be designed together.
That philosophy is now gone. This isn’t a one-year misstep; it’s the result of a decade of risk-averse, operationally excellent but vision-poor leadership. Tim Cook didn’t kill Apple overnight—he slowly outlived Jobs’ brilliance. What we’re seeing now is the end of that inheritance, not the beginning of a new era.
The company that controls the AI model, the operating system, the silicon direction, and the reference hardware has a structural advantage in an AI-first era. Google now owns that full stack. Gemini isn’t an app layered on top of Android—it’s becoming a system primitive, co-designed with Pixel hardware and Tensor silicon.
Pixel doesn’t need to outsell iPhone to win. It only needs to define what native, always-on intelligence feels like. That’s how platforms shift.
The real divide isn’t Apple versus Google—it’s platform-native AI versus accessory AI. Google is organizing the platform around intelligence itself. Apple, for now, is integrating AI as a feature. History shows that when a computing shift happens, the side that treats the new interface as foundational—not optional—sets the trajectory.
But heck at least he give us all the “great” TV shows. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.
MDN’s comments aside, Google’s LLM is not going to “power” let alone replace Apple Intelligence. The part of Gemini Apple will be using are the “patterns” Google has accumulated with its Search Engine over many years.
Steve Jobs did the same thing with Google Maps on the iPhone until Apple was ready to do it Right with Apple Maps. (Steve Jobs also made Google Search Engine as default, and it will remain so until Apple does it Right, again.)
What Apple is really doing (behind the curtain) is evolving their innovative Machine-Learning into Machine-Sensuousness – something no one else has never attempted. They are leveraging their unique ecosystem of devices (hardware and software) to (for example) make SIRI “aware” of her/his “surroundings.” AI to this point could only be “conversationally” contexted.
I am not a fan of Tim Cook, but he has grown Apple from Underdog to the Biggest Dog in the history of the planet – something Steve Jobs was never capable of doing. And the good news is, though Tim is not an out-of-the-box genius “Product Guy” (like Steve was), it is naive to assume there are not hundreds (or thousands) of them working for him, behind the curtain.
And to claims that all we see of the iPhone are merely iterative changes to the original concept, I suggest that an iPhone 17 PRO MAX is not even in the same ballpark as the original – and those who owned one of those, know this is true. Today’s iPhone is not just an “evolution” of the original, it is an entirely NEW product; not because Tim made it that way, but because of the brilliant minds that actually created it. Tim’s part was to say “Go.”
Maybe the real mistake behind Apple’s AI isn’t being made by Apple, but by those who are wildly trying to Fix what ain’t Broke. (Are you listening, MDN?)