Eshu Marneedi

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s long-promised overhaul for the Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs, threatening to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Some features, originally planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later, they said.

Inside Apple, many employees testing the new Siri have found that these features don’t yet work consistently. And it’s nearing crunch time for the software to be ready. Though iOS 18.4 won’t be released publicly until April, the beta version for developers is expected to debut as early as next week.

Forget the new Siri: The current version of Siri is more inept at answering questions than ChatGPT even with the OpenAI integration. I’m unsurprised — vindicated, even — the new Siri has been delayed once more because Apple is struggling with even the most basic of Apple Intelligence features and has been for months. The entire machine learning division at Apple needs a gut and redo because of how comically useless the team is at even developing easy ML or artificial intelligence features. The iOS 18.4, now iOS 18.5 version of Siri, doesn’t, to my knowledge, even rely on new large language models at all. It’s instead powered by App Intents, a technology that has already existed for years, and the existing so-called foundation models powering subpar features like notification summaries. These features were announced eight months ago, and there isn’t even a sign of them coming to market anytime soon.

I’ve slowly but surely concluded that Apple isn’t cut out for AI or ML anymore. The 2011 and 2025 versions of Siri are nearly identical, feature-wise — they still get questions wrong, punt questions to a third-party service (Wolfram Alpha in 2011; ChatGPT now), and are extraordinarily unreliable. The ChatGPT integration, just like 2011 Siri, still doesn’t have contextual replies, i.e., asking follow-up questions without explicitly mentioning the context is impossible. I was excited about ChatGPT coming to Siri — forget about App Intents — but Apple couldn’t even make a basic web integration correctly. It’s no wonder that it’s having a hard time building features Gemini has had since last September.

It’s idiotic to give Apple even a small pass for being late because it got caught off-guard by ChatGPT. Everyone did. Google did and sounded a five-alarm fire, quickly shipping Bard half a year later. Bard wasn’t good — it wasn’t even decent — but it came in spring 2023, just a few months after ChatGPT, while Apple’s similar offering is rumored to come next spring. I’m calling it right now: The Siri LLM is going to pale in comparison to whatever OpenAI has by then, which will most likely be ChatGPT 4.5 or even GPT-5 with some reasoning apparatus. Bard was to ChatGPT what Siri will be to ChatGPT, except three years later. There is genuinely no excuse for this lack of direction coming from the most valuable company in the world. Apple, without a doubt, has more talented engineers, more money, and more resources than Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity combined, and if it can’t find the people to write the code, it should go out and find them tomorrow.

The fact that we’re waiting nearly a whole calendar year to receive an iOS update “demonstrated” (it was scripted) at the Worldwide Developers Conference video presentation last June is a testament to Apple’s utterly poor leadership. Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, needs to go. He is bad at managing a technology company, he’s bad at politics, and frankly, he’s a bad person. Apple, under the last year of his leadership, is behind in AI, fighting a non-winnable war with the European Union, and about to be tariffed to the sun and back even after donating a $1 million bribe to President Trump’s inaugural committee. Even Russians who bribe their president get what they want, but Cook’s company is still fighting a lawsuit from the Justice Department for no reason. That’s the result of pointless political posturing.

Every day Cook remains in the chair is another losing day for Apple. This week, Apple is behind on Apple Intelligence. Last week, the company resumed advertising on a platform owned by a neo-Nazi. Before that, it got into a spat with two independent developers saying Apple “approved” a pornography app on a third-party app marketplace in Europe. Earlier, it scraped its first-generation augmented glasses product. In January, it got flamed by the British Broadcasting Corporation for sending inaccurate summaries of news stories to millions of people. I genuinely cannot remember the last piece of good, heartening Apple news I’ve read in a while. It’s hard to write about this company — it’s so hard that I, a blogger who reads about Apple for a living, spent the long weekend procrastinating about writing this piece.

What is the deal with Cook writing love letters to Elon Musk on X? Apple last week announced an “Apple Launch” event for the rumored next-generation iPhone SE, and the only place it posted the preview was X. It sent no emails to the press, didn’t choose to advertise on any other social media platform, and didn’t even post a copy on its own website. I’m dead serious: Anyone on Apple’s homepage or newsroom will have no clue that an announcement is scheduled next week. The only way to find out is by following Cook on X, a platform Apple has no stake in. It’s delusional to think Apple is anything but a spineless, directionless mess of a company in 2025. Its best product is Apple TV+ — not the iPhone, not the Mac, and certainly not Apple Intelligence. It’s fighting with regulators around the world, its developers are reluctant to build anything, and its chief executive’s only strategy is to give more money in bribes to the “special government employee” running the country into the ground.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”¹, giving money to Nazis, or swatting developers away like flies isn’t going to fix Apple’s problem. Hiring engineering talent to fix Apple Intelligence, working out a proper deal with OpenAI with money to bring the advanced voice mode to Siri, and making amends with developers to boost Apple Vision Pro are genuine strategies to repair the company’s defaced public image. An Apple Invites app that doesn’t even have iPad or Mac versions and with a design that frankly is painful to look at isn’t the solution to these problems. Bringing a broken, downright useless AI suite to a platform used by a grand total of about 14,000 people globally isn’t a way to juice sales of a $3,500 paperweight. If you told me I’d write these words about Apple even a year ago, I’d have told you to get a life. But they’re coming from me now, and I mean them. Tim Cook needs to go.

I look forward to writing about the new low-end iPhone on Wednesday, whatever it’s called.