Apple rolls out improved AI-powered Siri while partners and developer access expand

All of a sudden, Apple is winning AI

Macworld Has Apple focused too much on AI over the past few years, or not enough? It depends on who you ask. On the one hand, the topic is faddish, inescapable, and faintly apocalyptic, and I get thoroughly depressed listening to AI buzzwords at Apple events. But on the other, can the company afford to be left behind? Yeah, I know: the food’s terrible, and such small portions. It turns out, however, that Apple may have played this one exactly right. With the benefit of hindsight, the company’s curious mixture of enthusiastic lip service and wait-and-see standoffishness appears perfectly judged. Apple is part of the AI conversation, while remaining far less committed than its quicker-acting, more reckless rivals. It’s enjoying the benefits, without having to suffer the consequences. Let’s start with the benefits. Following years of substandard performance and delays, the new AI-powered version of Siri has emerged as a genuinely useful chatbot. It can’t do everything ChatGPT offers quite yet, but it’s reliable for quick questions, is clued into the iPhone data like no other chatbot, and is set up for a wide range of actions. It’s private, fast, and, in typical Apple fashion, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. For the vast majority of iPhone owners, Siri AI was worth the wait. It does everything it needs to, and it should calm the negative voices clamoring about its place in the AI ecosystem. The real trick, however, is that Apple has achieved this without exposing itself to the trials and tribulations currently afflicting more AI-forward rivals. Take OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and perhaps the biggest name in this field. Apple recently sued it for theft of trade secrets, but this was hardly unprecedented. In 2023 alone, the company was sued three times (one, two, three) for copyright infringement by a total of 21 authors and The New York Times, while a fourth suit that year representing 16 anonymous plaintiffs alleged “an array of harms from copyright violations to wiretapping.” In subsequent years many more lawsuits followed. These related to (among other things) stalking, murder, suicide, and two separate mass shootings (one, two). Legal challenges will likely continue for the foreseeable future, as will the keen interest of regulatory bodies. In terms of public perception, OpenAI is divisive, to say the least. It has some intense supporters, but the company is associated in many eyes with slop videos and images, drought, unemployment, and a cavalier approach to other people’s intellectual property. Even Elon Musk, no stranger to global unpopularity, calls the CEO of the company “Scam Altman.” That gentleman doesn’t do himself any favors, to be fair. Siri AI isn’t the best chatbot on the market, but it’s good enough.Apple It might seem like I’m giving OpenAI a hard time, but it’s really only one example of the backlash. Each time a company commits itself to AI, it risks financial and reputational damage. Such as Google and its racially diverse Nazis, Samsung and its confusing data consent terms, and Microsoft and its harmful responses. When not dunking hilariously on its owner, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot is getting him in legal hot water by creating deepfake pornography and denying the Holocaust. By contrast, Apple has got off incredibly lightly. Criticism of its AI efforts has mostly revolved around the company being slow to market. The worst scandal has probably been iOS AI notifications sometimes getting confused. But here it is, with a working AI chatbot just a couple of months away from debuting on billions of devices.. And without the substantial investments in AI infrastructure, which make it harder for rivals to step back. Why build your own unpopular data centers when you can use Google’s? Success isn’t just about what you gain, but what it costs you. And on those terms, Apple appears to be winning AI.

2 hours ago

For Apple to make its AI era succeed, it has to get back to its roots

Apple owns the smartphone. It owns the devices and the ecosystem around them. It owns the on-campus product launch. Steve Jobs built that, Tim Cook protected it, and now John Ternus has to carry it into the AI era. That’s the hard part. Especially when you consider that Apple is two years behind schedule when it comes to getting real AI into the hands of users. The recent Siri AI rollout everyone was waiting for didn’t change that. In fact, it felt to me (and many others I’ve talked to in the ex-Apple circles) like a starting point with potential, rather than a finish line with a plan. A key factor: Cook played his last keynote as CEO safe.  If you’re optimistic, it’s easy to classify Siri AI as a credible path to Apple weaving the technology through every app, device, and experience over the next three to four years. My question is simple: Can the market wait that long? Even confirmation that Apple is building with Gemini fell flatter than expected.  In the Steve Jobs era, partnering with Google in any way (hell, even sharing a parking lot) was unthinkable. I still have trouble accepting it as someone who worked directly with Jobs on the iPhone, iPod, and IPad. News that Apple is working with Nvidia and Google on top models operating within the Fort Knox-grade Apple labs should’ve knocked people off their sleek chairs in the Apple auditorium. Instead, it was met with a sleepy “Oh, wow, there it is.”  That said, building on top of Gemini allows Apple to do what it does best: Perfect the user experience and application layer. So, what did Apple’s foray into AI accomplish?  Rolling out Siri AI at Apple’s annual developer conference reinforced that success will require attracting and retaining technical talent with options to go to another Big Tech firm or hyperscaler at literally any moment. One area where it can offer something compelling beyond paychecks, real estate, and benefits: developer creativity. And this stems from the days of Steve Jobs expecting world-class products leveraging the best technology and software available and tested into the ground for user experience. If Apple wants the ecosystem dominance it had in the early iPhone years to carry into AI, developers need real tools and the freedom to build with them. Opening Xcode to third-party models, Gemini included, is a real signal that Apple knows the future of AI runs on access, quality, and creativity. Developers are the ones who’ll bring this to life on Apple hardware. For the Apple faithful. And for the masses. That matters. Siri is where regular people will actually feel whether this strategy works. We’ve all been waiting for a Siri that’s genuinely useful. The Siri AI rollout, while arriving a bit late, felt like a step in the right direction. As the AI boom meets the memory crunch, I’m left with two questions tied to Apple’s next phase: 1: Is Siri AI the start of a real shift, or still too incremental? 2: How fast can Apple get useful, trustworthy AI into every corner of the ecosystem? I believe the answers are in Cupertino. With Ternus. And, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports, with a restored focus on building out the design team along with hardware, software, and services. The fierce battle for talent will carry through the next era of AI and hardware innovation. And things are already fundamentally shifting toward unexpected moves at a blinding pace. OpenAI recently announced a chip. Google is pivoting away from search. Intel and Qualcomm emerged from hibernation with new offerings designed to handle massive amounts of compute.  But I’m encouraged that Apple will return to glory with a renewed approach led by Ternus to what made the company great under Jobs.  My own experience working on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad in the early to mid-2000s tells me that the best Apple products have always come from one place: hardware, software, design, services, and developer tools all solving the same problem for the same person. Ternus knows this better than almost anyone. His job now is to make AI useful, trusted, and native across the devices people already live with—and to get Apple back to its scrappier roots, shipping things people can’t imagine living without. The encouraging sign is that Apple Intelligence, now anchored by Siri AI, is being treated as a layer across the whole platform. It just doesn’t feel like the organizing idea behind a new generation of products yet.  To me, Apple’s Siri AI rollout felt more like a game of catch-up following lofty promises made by Cook in 2024, rather than category creation leading into Ternus’s tenure. I believe my old boss Steve Jobs would have pushed for a bigger leap—and I don’t think he’d have shipped Siri AI without a native agentic layer underneath it. But it’s a start.

11 hours ago