Apple Promised AI. It Delivered... a Slightly Faster Siri
·2 min read·Beginner
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Tim Cook took the stage with the look of someone about to unveil the future of AI. What came next? A lot of catch-up disguised as innovation, centered on a "new" Siri that's basically AI playing catch-up.
In 30 seconds
01Apple unveiled 'Apple Intelligence' with upgraded Siri, but arrives 18 months behind Google and OpenAI's AI race.
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What this means for you
If you use an iPhone, Siri will finally stop being infuriating and might actually help you. If you don't, Apple figured out something right — AI doesn't need to be slow or send everything to corporate servers — but it showed up late and isn't bringing much that Alexa and Google haven't already done.
Thought slapping 'AI' next to a company name guaranteed its stock would soar? Well, the market had a bitter surprise this year.
·1 min·2·Beginner
AI processes locally on devices without sending data to Apple servers, strategic differentiator from competitors.
03Announced features (writing assistance, image recognition) already exist elsewhere, some delayed beyond initial release.
At WWDC 2024, Apple unveiled what it calls 'Apple Intelligence' — a name that sounds important but whose execution is, let's say, strategically positioned. After years of watching competitors like Google and OpenAI zoom ahead, Cupertino decided to gather the scraps, rebrand them, and pretend they invented strategy. The main event? A completely reimagined Siri actually powered by real language models that — plot twist — makes it somewhat useful instead of a voice robot that asks you to repeat everything twice.
Here's the thing that's both clever and slightly ironic: Apple pivoted hard to its own advantages. Deep device integration, privacy-first, most of the AI runs locally on your iPhone without shipping data to Apple's servers. It's the classic move of the late arrival trying to turn lateness into a feature. And it actually works, to a point: having AI run mostly offline instead of being vacuumed to some corporate server is legitimately appealing if privacy paranoia keeps you up at night.
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But let's talk specifics: the concrete announcements are absolutely decorated in asterisks. Writing assistance improvements, better image recognition, smarter HomeKit controls. All useful, all things Alexa, Google Assistant, and ChatGPT have been doing for ages. Apple wraps them in minimalist design and its usual walled-garden ecosystem — which for Apple users means genuine convenience, for everyone else means "here we go again."
The real snag is timing. While the world collectively lost its mind over generative AI in the last 18 months, Apple was still napping. Now it shows up with a sensible, well-integrated vision but zero shock value. It's like a major band waiting until everyone forgot the revolutionary music genre was even cool before releasing their competent cover version.
And then there's the detail that some of the flashier AI features won't even ship at launch — like integrated ChatGPT conversation completion. The promise of tomorrow deferred to an even later tomorrow: the perfect move of someone who announces today what they'll deliver never.
The bottom line? Apple delivered a genuinely thoughtful AI strategy. It's just not the revolutionary moment it wanted you to think it was.
While the tech world was buzzing about OpenAI, Anthropic made its move. They just dropped Opus 5, a model they claim is almost as good as their legendary Fable 5.
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