Here comes new Siri again
The core promise of "Apple Intelligence" was always vaporware. Last Monday, Apple took the stage at WWDC to reintroduce a Siri that was first reintroduced in 2024, a recursive loop of disappointment that has become the company's signature move in the AI race. We're now on generation two of the "new Siri," a product that existed in reality only as a glorified ChatGPT wrapper and a set of marketing slides. The fact that Apple has to stage a second debut for the same product it already failed to la
Analysis
The core promise of "Apple Intelligence" was always vaporware. Last Monday, Apple took the stage at WWDC to reintroduce a Siri that was first reintroduced in 2024, a recursive loop of disappointment that has become the company's signature move in the AI race. We're now on generation two of the "new Siri," a product that existed in reality only as a glorified ChatGPT wrapper and a set of marketing slides. The fact that Apple has to stage a second debut for the same product it already failed to launch tells you everything about the chasm between its PR machine and its engineering output.
Let’s be clear: Apple wasn’t just late to the generative AI party; it stumbled in, promised a premium open bar, then served everyone lukewarm tap water and a bill for the inconvenience. The WWDC 2024 Siri was a masterclass in misdirection. It had a pretty new glow, a handful of voice options, and an emergency eject button to ChatGPT for any question slightly more complex than "What's the weather?" The transformative, on-device, personal AI ecosystem—the part that actually mattered—was deferred to an indefinite "later." That "later" has now been sued into existence. The company is settling a class-action lawsuit over allegations that its Apple Intelligence promotion was materially misleading. This isn't just bad press; it's a formal, legal acknowledgment that the emperor has no code.
What we're witnessing is the collapse of Apple's carefully cultivated mystique. For decades, the company's brand was built on a simple, powerful premise: we don't announce things until they work. That ethos has been utterly vaporized. Now, Apple operates like a Silicon Valley startup that over-promises to investors, only with a trillion-dollar market cap and a captive hardware ecosystem. They are announcing products at a conceptual stage, then spending the next 12 to 18 months frantically trying to make the reality catch up to the keynote fantasy. This is the Microsoft playbook from the Ballmer era, and it’s a shocking fall from grace.
The new "new Siri," based on whatever Apple shows us this week, is likely to be competent. It will probably summarize some notifications, draft emails with slightly less robotic phrasing, and maybe perform a few basic cross-app tasks that Google Assistant has handled for years. It might even have a marginally better personality. But that’s the tragedy. The bar for Apple isn't innovation anymore; it's parity. We're not asking for magic, just for the basic functionality that makes a $1,200 phone feel like a 2024 device, not a 2020 device with a better camera. The company that once defined the future is now sprinting just to catch up to the present.
And the "playing from behind might not be a bad move" take is dangerously naive. Yes, it lets others take the arrows for early-adopter pitfalls. But it also means Apple forfeits the narrative. It cedes the high ground of "AI pioneer" to OpenAI, Google, and even Meta. More critically, it breeds cynicism. Every new feature announcement now comes with an invisible asterisk: subject to actual delivery in a future software update, possibly for a different set of devices, and we reserve the right to fundamentally change it at any time. This erodes the trust that is Apple's most valuable asset. When you tell customers "it's coming soon" for a year, "soon" becomes a hollow, meaningless word.
The real cost isn't just to Siri's utility; it's to the iPhone's perceived value. If the headline AI feature is a perpetual work-in-progress, why upgrade now? Why not wait until Apple actually ships the thing it showed off nine months ago? The company is inadvertently training its users to ignore its announcements. That's a death spiral for a business model built on annual upgrade cycles and premium perception. The legal settlement is a symptom; the disease is a fundamental break in Apple's product development and marketing philosophy.
What Apple needs to do is radically, almost perversely, un-Apple-like: manage expectations downward. Stop the theatrical, reality-distortion-field keynotes for unfinished software. Be brutally honest about what exists today and what's a five-year research project. Show a demo, then immediately show the 10 ways it will fail today. That kind of raw transparency would be so shocking it might actually rebuild some credibility. But the company is institutionally incapable of this. The entire Apple marketing apparatus is designed to present a seamless, flawless reality, not a buggy, promising beta.
So when Craig Federighi takes the stage this week, watch not for the shimmering animations, but for the qualifiers. Every "coming this fall" needs to be scrutinized. Every demo needs to be wondered at under the light of last year's broken promises. Apple's AI problem isn't a technical debt; it's a credibility debt, and it's compounding at an alarming rate. They're not just playing catch-up on technology anymore. They're playing catch-up on trust. And in that race, being late is not a strategy—it's a verdict.
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