Last June, at WWDC 2024 Apple announced all of its new operating systems as it always does. And then it went into Apple Intelligence. The marketing name for their suite of Artificial Intelligence features is similar to Samsung’s Galaxy AI. Now, we already knew that Apple was behind the competition on this front, but a lot of the features they showed off were legitimately pretty cool. Little did we know that some of these features were destined for iOS 19 and not iOS 18. Like the contextually-aware Siri.
On Friday, Apple announced (sort of) that the More Personalized Siri (also known as contextually aware) would be delayed, with features rolling out “in the coming year”. The way it is worded sounds like this won’t even debut in iOS 18 at all but instead start rolling out with iOS 19, which will roll out in September as usual. Apple also released this info on a Friday afternoon, following the end of Mobile World Congress, when a good portion of the industry was flying home from Barcelona. So, it’s very obvious that Apple was looking to bury this info.
Apple spent billions on false advertising
Features get delayed quite often, so what’s the big deal? Well, the fact that Apple marketed the crap out of this feature and the rest of Apple Intelligence to sell some iPhone 16s, only for it to not be available on the iPhone 16 and likely launch with iPhone 17 if not later.
In fact, for the iPhone 16 round of ads, I can’t think of a single ad that did not include Apple Intelligence, when talking about the iPhone 16 generation. This means Apple spent billions telling you to buy their shiny new phone so you could use features that aren’t available. That’s a textbook case of False Advertising.
Following the announcement of the delay for Siri, many content creators and journalists were still upset with Apple, because they were including this feature on the product pages for products announced just a few days beforehand. Apple has now started to add disclaimers to the product pages, though it is pretty vague. Simply saying:
“Siri’s personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions are in development and will be available with a future software update.”
It’s better than nothing, but it’s also a good idea to not mention a timeline since this could get delayed even further. Apple also pulled the Siri ad from WWDC 2024 over the weekend.
Will this new Siri come with iOS 19?
This has a lot of people wondering if we will see this new More Personalized Siri come with iOS 19 later this year. My bet is, probably not, at least not with the initial release of iOS 19. I’d expect some features of this new Siri to launch in iOS 19.1 or 19.2, which usually launch in December and February, respectively.
However, the big questions is whether Apple will even mention it at WWDC when it unveils iOS 19? My take is, that’s a no from me dawg. Rumors point to Apple unleashing some major redesigns for all of its platforms this year, to bring everything into a more cohesive ecosystem. And that is going to take up a good amount of time in the keynote at WWDC. Don’t forget that Apple has macOS, iOS, iPad OS, tvOS, watchOS and now visionOS. That’s a lot to go over in just two hours.
Now that we know there’s a redesign coming, and we’ve seen a few apps launch since last year with this new design from Apple, it looks like Apple had to make the choice between AI and a redesign for iOS 18, and went with the former, when they should have chosen the latter.
Apple is severely behind when it comes to AI
There’s no beating around the bush here, Apple is definitely behind its rivals when it comes to artificial intelligence. Despite using AI in its products for years now. There’s a number of features within iOS, even before iOS 18, that used AI. But it was more behind-the-scenes tasks that many people didn’t see or spend time on.
Apple is so far behind that it is enlisting ChatGPT to help with Siri. That’s really the only Siri feature that was announced, and launched. Which it is kind of clunky, because of the fact Apple is putting privacy first, and ChatGPT is a third-party. Though, there’s talk of Apple moving to Gemini in the future, as Google’s models appear to test better for Apple, than Open AI.
The staggered roll out of AI features from Apple this year really shows how behind they are. In fact, iOS 18 launched with exactly zero Apple Intelligence features. Despite having a few in the betas leading up to the iPhone 16 launch. It was iOS 18.1 that we first saw some of the first Apple Intelligence features.
Can Apple catch up? Of course they can. But it might involve opening their purse. Apple might need to purchase an AI company like Anthropic to get back on track and catch up to Microsoft, Open AI, and Google. Which Apple can do. On their last earnings call, they had over $162 billion in cash on hand, which can be used for acquiring companies.
Acquisitions are no stranger for Apple either, having had over 130 acquisitions since 1988. With the most recent one being the acquisition of the Pixelmator app last year. Of course, some of the big ones we think of are Beats and Intel’s smartphone modem business (which finally produced the C1 modem in iPhone 16e).
Did Apple bet on the wrong horse?
Apple spent a ton of money and time working on the Vision Pro, only for it to ultimately fail. Apple has sold approximately 200,000 Vision Pro headsets in a little over a year. And Apple has talked very little about Vision Pro over the last six months. It really hasn’t been mentioned since WWDC 2024.
Instead of spending all that R&D money and time on XR, or Spatial Computing as Apple likes to call it, the company should have spent that money on building AI. This is how companies are going to get people to buy phones in the future, as there’s only so many changes you can make to the hardware now, but software can make pretty large changes.
It’s unclear if Apple has fully given up on the Vision Pro, like they did the Apple Car, but it definitely seems to be on the back burner right now.
Is this Apple Maps all over again?
Some of you may remember when Apple Maps launched in 2012 with iOS 6. It was built and launched because the contract with Google for some apps like YouTube and Google Maps on the iPhone had expired. So instead of paying Google, Apple decided to build Apple Maps. And it was a colossal failure at launch. It was so bad, filled with inaccuracies, and even the icon was a failure. The icon literally showed a vehicle driving off a bridge. This forced Apple to issue a public apology, which Apple very rarely does. I can only think of a few times that Apple has come out to apologize publicly. And the iPhone 4 wasn’t one of those times, Apple simply blamed users for holding their phones wrong.
Apple greatly improved Maps over the following years. By building an entirely new map database, and it started collecting its own data using cars with sensors and cameras, like Google does with its Maps product. It also added 3D city views, augmented reality walking directions, and better search functionality. Today, many feel that Apple Maps is even better than Google Maps (which has largely been unchanged over the past decade).
Essentially, if Apple can fix Maps, then it can fix Apple Intelligence. It may take a few years for this to happen, however.
