Our good pal Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse.

Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker also said that it’s unclear when the enhancements will actually launch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private.

Walker is not a top executive; he’s a senior director at Apple, just as Gurman writes, which means he reports to someone who’s listed on Apple’s leadership page. Either way, some manager with an indeterminate amount of power within the confines of Apple Park decided it was a good idea to pull the team together. That’s an intriguing snippet of news. What’s also newsworthy is the fact that Apple spent months advertising a feature that seemingly, again, does not exist. (I’ll get to that in a bit.) Someone who ostensibly leads the Siri team in some fashion doesn’t know when (read between the lines: if) the “more personalized Siri” will ever ship, which is arguably the largest disaster within Apple since the Apple Maps fiasco of 2012.

During the all-hands gathering, Walker suggested that employees on his team may be feeling angry, disappointed, burned out, and embarrassed after the features were postponed. The company had been racing to get the technology ready for this spring, but now the features aren’t expected until next year at the earliest, people familiar with the matter have said.

I don’t know who these “people” are. Just two paragraphs ago, Gurman said the “people” relayed to him that nobody, including the higher-ups, knows when the new Siri will ship. But now, apparently, he’s got a source just a few sentences later who can “expect” the features to come next year “at the earliest.” I believe nobody knows anything about the status of the new Siri.

Still, he praised the team for developing “incredibly impressive” features and vowed to deliver an industry-leading virtual assistant to consumers.

Walker needs to get onstage at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and demonstrate exactly one “incredible impressive” Siri feature that currently exists on any of Apple’s platforms. I don’t want him in a video. I want him in front of a live audience all with tomatoes in their hands so they can pelt him if he can’t defend himself.

Apple shares had fallen 16% this year through Thursday’s close, part of a broader stock rout that has walloped tech companies. The stock rebounded Friday, but pared gains during the afternoon. Apple was up 1.4% at $212.58 as of 2:18 p.m. in New York.

People wonder why I despise this publication.

But when Apple demonstrated the features at WWDC using a video mock-up, it only had a barely working prototype, Bloomberg has reported. Walker told staff in the meeting that the delays were especially “ugly” because Apple had already showed off the features publicly. “This was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it’s done,” he said. “We showed people before.”

“We showed people before,” Walker is quoted as saying. Bingo. Apple has built a reputation for delivering on products. When it said Portrait Mode was coming later during the iPhone 7 Plus announcement back in 2016, it really did come out. When it announced Deep Fusion at iPhone 11’s keynote in 2019, it delivered. ProRAW? Delivered. ProRes? Delivered. I can name hundreds of things Apple promised in keynotes and delivered just months later in beta. Each of those times, the media was briefed on the features and was shown them live, even if they weren’t stable enough to ship in even a developer beta release of the software. But this time, as John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball, noted in his beyond excellent introspection of the situation, Apple didn’t demonstrate any of these new features to the media because they probably didn’t exist.

When Gurman writes the new Siri was a mere “barely working prototype,” I’m almost certain it was just a hard-coded user interface. I truly believe there was no large language model powering that experience. Apple’s marketing and development teams work in tandem, in parallel, almost all the time, so it wasn’t just a fabricated video. The Siri team really did spend a few weeks in Xcode coding up a nice-looking interface to show onstage. The Human Interface team really did spend months crafting the beautiful Siri glow animation to show off during the keynote. It was all an elaborate marketing spiel intentionally created to mislead viewers and the media. As Gruber wrote, Apple truly can no longer be trusted on almost any timeline in the future. If it says a feature is coming “later this year,” I’ll take it with a grain of salt. Expect to see more harsh criticism of Apple’s delayed timelines in my operating system hands-on articles later this year.

“To make matters worse,” Walker said, Apple’s marketing communications department wanted to promote the enhancements. Despite not being ready, the capabilities were included in a series of marketing campaigns and TV commercials starting last year.

Gurman is paraphrasing again, but this is good introspection on Walker’s part. Unfortunately, it’s not the low-level engineers clicking on Xcode every morning who need to hear this — it’s Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing chief, who deserves to be severely reprimanded for publicly advertising a feature that, by Apple’s own admission a few months later, does not exist.

Walker also raised doubts about even meeting the current release expectations. Though Apple is aiming for iOS 19, it “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” Walker said. The company has several more priorities in development, and trade-offs will need to be made, he said.

I’m calling it now: This feature will never come to fruition. Clearly, “several more priorities” are vastly more critical than shipping a feature announced nearly a year ago. I’d love to know what those priorities are; what priorities could possibly take precedence over developing a feature already advertised? Imagine someone went to a fast food restaurant and placed an order, making a total of five orders for the kitchen to prepare. Instead of preparing those orders, the manager goes, “I want you all to get the frier ready for tomorrow’s lunch rush.” Tomorrow’s lunch rush should never be given even a modicum of priority over today’s five orders — never, never, never. Every Siri feature “in the pipeline” should be delayed indefinitely.

The fact that this order hasn’t been passed down to senior managers from the higher-ups is a complete failure of leadership. Speaking of leadership:

Walker said that there is “intense personal accountability” about this effort shared by his boss John Giannandrea, the head of AI at Apple, as well as software chief Craig Federighi and other executives.

As of Friday, Apple doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis, according to people with knowledge of the matter…

This mess was created entirely by Federighi and Gianandrea, neither of whom have adequately prepared their teams for developing a set of features on a time crunch. I give app developers a hard time about shipping OS-specific updates months after iOS release day — three months after WWDC. It’s been a year and Apple still hasn’t developed a key feature demonstrated in the WWDC keynote. If Apple executives truly felt “intense personal accountability,” they would’ve gotten to work six months ago.

Walker compared the endeavor to an attempt to swim to Hawaii. “We swam hundreds of miles — we set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance — but we still didn’t swim to Hawaii,” he said. “And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn’t get to the destination.”

This quote should be the entirety of the Apple Intelligence portion of this year’s WWDC keynote, ending with the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme song.

He added that some employees “might be feeling embarrassed.”

“You might have co-workers or friends or family asking you what happened, and it doesn’t feel good,” Walker said. “It’s very reasonable to feel all these things.” He said others are feeling burnout and that his team will be entitled to time away to recharge to get ready for “plenty of hard work ahead.”

Clearly the pep talk has done nothing, as the meeting was leaked by one of these employees to one of the best Apple reporters less than a week after Apple’s initial announcement.

Walker ended the meeting upbeat, saying that Apple will “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant.”

We’ll see about that.