Did Apple Flub an AI Feature, Or Are They Blowing the AI Moment?
Look, I'm not trying to kick Apple when they're down here. We've been over this, many times at this point. Apple clearly – clearly – misjudged their entry into the age of AI. Yes, they were undoubtedly pushed by the pressures of Wall Street, but still, that's on them. They should not have pre-announced all of these AI features – let alone started marketing them in high-profile commercials with Hollywood talent! – if they were not certain they were going to be ready to roll on time. Yes, Apple has done this a few times before, as John Gruber notes in his post, but this is by far the highest-stakes miss yet. The world is watching and Apple blew it.
The real question now is if they're still blowing it.
Gruber is clearly optimistic that this is more of a hiccup in a shipping schedule – that the "in the coming year" statement he received from Apple means that the features will launch with iOS 19, set to debut at WWDC 2025, which will undoubtedly be in June as it normally is every year. Mark Gurman is less sure noting:
Bloomberg News reported on Feb. 14 that Apple was struggling to finish developing the features and the enhancements would be postponed until at least May — when iOS 18.5 is due to arrive. Since then, Apple engineers have been racing to fix a rash of bugs in the project. The work has been unsuccessful, according to people involved in the efforts, and they now believe the features won’t be released until next year at the earliest.
As with other times these two have bickered in the past – they're always bickering these days – there's probably a way to reconcile these timelines. Apple may indeed make these new features a part of iOS 19, but may not fully roll them out until 2026. Maybe they enter a beta phase in 2025, maybe not. Honestly, it doesn't really matter. What matters is what this potentially points to in the broader sense:
In the lead-up to the latest delay, software chief Craig Federighi and other executives voiced strong concerns internally that the features didn’t work properly — or as advertised — in their personal testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
Some within Apple’s AI division believe that work on the features could be scrapped altogether, and that Apple may have to rebuild the functions from scratch. The capabilities would then be delayed until a next-generation Siri that Apple hopes to begin rolling out in 2026.
This is starting to paint a picture about an Apple internally divided over this issue. And it's a narrative thread that Gurman has been pulling on in recent weeks:
Bloomberg News reported earlier this week that Apple employees are questioning whether Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook or the company’s board needs to take action to change the leadership of the AI group. They believe that, short of major changes, Apple will continue to fall behind. Earlier this year, the company tapped veteran software leader Kim Vorrath to help the team.
It is beginning to feel a bit like the situation when someone had to take the fall for the Apple Maps debacle. And that, of course, ended up being Scott Forstall. Even at the time, and in the years since, the issues there seem more nuanced – that there was some sort of internal struggle tension between those loyal to Forstall versus various other camps within Apple in the earlier post-Steve Jobs era – still, someone had to take the fall. And someone might here as well.
And if that's the case, I suspect it's not because of this one element of Apple Intelligence. Again, this may simply be more of a mistake in how they announced it. The bigger issue, I fear, is around the underlying technology powering Siri itself and trying to upgrade that for our current age of AI. It's the same basic challenge that Amazon faced in upgrading Alexa to Alexa+ – and it's why I'm still quite skeptical that she will end up working exactly as advertised, despite being unveiled. I mean, Apple unveiled these features almost a year ago and just delayed them! Sure, Amazon did a live demo versus Apple's canned one, but still... the roll-out strategy for Amazon feels pretty slippery...
This is why I think it's not a completely crazy strategy to pull Siri back and replace "her" with ChatGPT while they basically rebuild Siri from scratch. While Amazon didn't do this with Alexa, the fact that the new version will have ended up coming out a year and a half after first being announced suggests they may have actually done something similar behind the scenes. And if Apple has instead spent the past year working on solutions that they'll ultimately have to scrap, that again points to some major leadership and perhaps cultural issues. As I wrote earlier this week:
Sure, bringing Kim Vorrath, a long-time get-shit-done task master at Apple, over to the AI team will help. But all of this points to a deeper cultural and perhaps systemic issue. The reality may be that the cadence at which Apple operates is simply different than the cadence at which a company must operate in the era of AI. Perhaps that pace slows as the underlying technological advances level-off. Or perhaps it doesn't!
Yes, on the surface we're just talking about Apple acknowledging a delay of a previously announced functionality from iOS 18 to iOS 19. Not a huge deal. But I worry that – and suspect that – there are quite a bit more issues underneath the surface here ranging from poor leadership and planning to poor execution.
Ultimately, I still can't help but wonder if it wasn't a major strategic mistake for Apple not to start working on their own LLM back when Federighi was said to have his "holy shit" moment while using ChatGPT. It may have been late then, but look at what xAI has been able to do by simply pouring money at the problem. And sure, Wall Street may not have loved Apple in this arms race, but there could be second-order effects here that are almost immeasurable – namely, getting very smart, very fast about building and working with cutting-edge AI, in-house. More so than any other company, Apple has the billions to spend. Right now, they spend it on record stock buy backs. You may answer to Wall Street right now Apple, but ultimately you answer to the consumers of your products.
We'll see there, obviously. There's still a lot of moving pieces – DeepSeek, etc. But the very real reality on the ground right now is not looking good for Apple. To the point where I almost feel the need to upgrade my prediction that Apple will make a major M&A move in the AI space to a near certainty. The real question is if they're scrambling right now to do something ahead of WWDC. It wouldn't change things overnight, of course. But it would put out a building press fire...
Of course, you don't do a multi-billion dollar deal just for that. Or, at least, Apple doesn't. But it's increasingly looking like Apple needs some sort of game change here.
Maybe a couple of them.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler