The demo Mike Rockwell gave at WWDC was interesting. He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone. I hope this is the direction Apple is going to continue in. Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.
I think the key thing is that Spotlight is now creating a... knowledge graph? of everything on your device for Siri's consideration. That's potentially very useful.
I strongly believe Apple can win the consumer AI space. They have incredible distribution and hardware. They just haven’t executed at the application layer yet.
what's worrisome is that they continue to fail at it. it's one thing to say "we're still hashing things out". it's another to parade around Image Generation features that are obviously widely not-cared-for and oftentimes actively disliked
Apple cares greatly about their brand yet this has hurt their brand like nothing else in the past decade
I mean have they, they have an outright majority share in iPhones in some markets, including the US, and lots of other stuff that sells reliably. Granted, I'm sure they'd love to have another blockbuster product, but having what amounts to "utility" status for a $1000 device isn't too bad.
In the EU case, Apple weaponizes people's ignorance about regulation. Apple pretends that the features everyone else has been shipping left and right somehow need extra paperwork and special approvals, because (…checks notes…) pro-privacy EU laws let zero-privacy competitors sail through, but block implementations that offer more privacy!?
What's really happening is Apple unilaterally withholding features while making vague noises about regulation as bargaining chips in talks with EU regulators where Apple is trying to weasel out of punishment for breaking anti-monopoly laws.
The OS restriction aren’t merely based on the region settings, they are also based on Apple Account region/country and on the detected physical location of the device.
Most of them are, some are annoyingly missing. It’s possible to install apps from two different app store accounts, but it’s 10 times more annoying than on Android. Additionally, there are some EU only features, such as third-party NFC payments.
Apple’s performative DMA outrage is getting more pathetic by the iOS version.
Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.
Apple Passwords reliably updates passwords in its database before the password is confirmed to be actually changed. I've been locked out of accounts many times to this. They really need to focus on these basic UX issues.
Yep. I get anxious when Safari starts to offer a new password for an existing account. Having access to previous passwords would be such great UX, but no, no such thing.
1Password has been able to do this for five+ years. Frankly, it doesn't even really need agentic AI, although a talented team could probably make it perform better with agentic AI.
I don't really believe in Apple being that quality team.
I mean every api/app/website has a different way to do this. If there was a standardized api that everyone could conform to to allow this automation I would be all for it. I assume 1p does this by writing custom code/rules for dealing with the most popular sites out there and then erroring out for anything else.
AI could potentially help solve those unpopular site/app/whatever edgecase.
There's a 0% chance it will work. Most websites I've seen have one or all of:
* Force you to use email or SMS as a "second factor" to unlock changing password even if you know the old password
* A stupid idea of password complexity usually requiring one of a finite set of 5-8 "special characters" which is often only revealed after you've chosen a password that doesn't have them. Or in some cases even banning characters other than the ones they check for. There's a standard for this where you put a regex on the password field, which a good password manager will always use, but the kind of idiots who think limiting the entropy of passwords to increase security is the correct way to do things almost NEVER implement this.
* A maximum password length, even as short as 16 characters in many cases
* CAPTCHA etc.
Any effort spent on this would be better spent elsewhere, including even educating other companies on how passkeys should be used.
They’re adding vibecoded shortcuts (the high level scripting for Apple devices). Hopefully that means they worked out some of the long-existing bugs and missing features, but I’m not optimistic. Still, could be a useful tool, especially for less tech-literate people.
Before they add AI they better fix the frigging search function in settings, it is horrible, you need to know their exact words, and Apple has a funny naming sense. Hierarchies nested so deep you never find anything. I come to use Claude or ChatGPT to tell me the right incantations to find a setting.
This looks pretty promising to me. It will likely replace the need to set up OpenClaw for average personal users. The work of getting email, messages, and all the personal data on the phone as context seamlessly is not as straightforward as one might think.
I'm curious how the pricing will work. Would it be free up to some limit and then some subscription pricing? I can't imagine it can be free unlimited usage given the price of serving these models.
Craig mentioned near the end of the keynote that compute intensive things (like image generation) will have rate limits that can be increased bundled with their iCloud + plans. I imagine any request that gets routed to their cloud compute will be subject to limits as well. He positioned it as a value-add to their existing subscription but I suppose that can change.
This is why OpenAI thinks it needs to build its own physical devices. If Apple is only allowing its own AI to operate at the OS level, then that leaves OpenAI with no choice but to build their own.
Meta also realized this and attempted multiple times to build their own hardware but they've given up each time. They started as early as a partnering with HTC in 2011 to make a Facebook phone.
Quite frankly, I'm kind of excited to see what OpenAI can build. I think an AI-first phone could challenge iOS and Android. It's a new paradigm and if OpenAI gets it right, it'll be very hard for Apple and Google to pivot.
I personally think chat + code is the future of apps. For example, I find myself wanting to do many things inside ChatGPT instead of traditional app because I can tell it to do things that are simply impossible on a static app UI. For example, I have some data I want to send to an app but before I do, I want ChatGPT to clean the data in some way first. And then after the data is uploaded, I want ChatGPT to pull some data off the API and make charts that I want to see.
I imagine a world where very intelligent models run at 10k tokens/s, app building is extremely standardized, and it simply builds any app you want inside the OS. IE, if you want a dashboard of your health data, you ask it to build it almost instantly exactly how you want it. I'm already doing something similar today but it's slow and not easy to do for non-engineers.
> If Apple is only allowing its own AI to operate at the OS level
Incidentally, that’s what’s preventing Apple from rolling out their OS-privileged AI in the EU, as the EU mandates equal access for competing AI products. It will be interesting how this plays out.
> do they have to let Anthropic and Deepseek run their models on it too?
provided it gets big enough, yes. the EU's position roughly is "if this hurts an entire market just to benefit you, and lots of people use / rely on it, then you gotta allow it"
Why can't Anthropic or Deepseek take the big risk to develop their own phone? It doesn't seem right that they can simply use EU laws to hop on the ride for free without taking the same risks.
Heh, I noticed the same thing, after the DaringFireball callout last year about the normal product demo progression. It looks "real" this time, but the question is how far along we are: will the journalists have a chance to play with it at the event?
Watching the keynote at our office on a big screen and everyone collectively sighing when they announced the name felt indicative haha.
I think it just feels uncreative? Siri as a brand has some value, but if you want it to feel like a watershed moment where old Siri is "behind us" finally, just give it a new name.
I don't think Apple has the option to rebrand Siri at this stage, assuming people actually call Siri by name. However, turning AI into 'Apple Intelligence' doesn't feel creative either.
This doesn't follow for me. They can trivially allow it to still respond to the old wakeword. They should absolutely change the name in the event they can finally make it useful, because "Siri" is (in my mind and many others') a synonym for "hapless idiot." "Thanks, Siri" has been uttered hundreds of time in my house and my car, and 100% of the time it's sarcastic.
Or just keep calling it Siri, and announce "hey look, Siri does some cool new things."
AI is a technology, not a product. Consumers don't care about technologies, they care about what the product does versus what they currently have.
I think Jobs was an asshole, but one good thing I can say about him is that he understood the difference between technology and products. Imagine if they had called it the "iPod HDD."
The ergonomics of “the new X” sort of fall apart when you’re releasing it in stages. (Not in EU/only in English) It spawns a lot of conversations like “do you have the new Siri? Uh… I think so? It’s still crap though.” You cart around this bad brand image because you pitch this big watershed moment and 2/3rds of people are still using the “wrong” Siri.
Siri and Voice Control were both usable during the same time and it feels like it could work here too.
Totally agree that AI is just an implementation detail though. IMO that new product name should NOT have “AI” in it at all.
It's going to be weird though when my phone has Siri AI and my Homepod has Siri... "please ask on your iPhone" edition. I also don't quite get the distinction of Siri as an app versus the Siri I yell at to make my TV do something.
Amazing how someone again finds a meaningless thing Apple does better than the rest then blows it out of proportions. Makes you wonder if they are on Apple's PR team.
It looks bad from every perspective. I've never seen two apple's in one URL for product category before. apple.com/apple-intelligence
To prove my point, I opened a random date on the Apple website matching today's date to compare. 16 years ago, June 8 (1) Apple released the iPhone 4. There's still no room for jokes about that release, and from this perspective, calling their AI 'Apple Intelligence' feels really weak compared to what they used to deliver.
I agree that some years ago Apple was the strongest in marketing, their brand team had been setting the bar for tech, but I simply can't say that anymore.
For pedantry's sake, they were saying "AI = Apple Intelligence" last year as well, so it's not like they just pulled it out of their butts now that popular opinion has turned against AI.
The chatbots(ChatGPT, Claude et al) showed Apple exactly what can be done, the user base is already well primed. So this is a product definition done for them to execute. If done well they will be able to provide a much stronger integration into the day to day use cases than the chatbots, and can siphon off user time from them. This time around the end to end is easier with Apple Intelligence and more importantly llms doing the work Apple is floundering at. So I am hopeful, but I still see the os/app level integration as not enough in terms of functionality to make it a hit. The primary use case for llms is still conversations and search. Apple should be focusing on that aspect primarily and also add the os/app level integration as a bonus - as something only they can do. If they just do the latter, it will not be as much of a success. Let’s see how they execute.
EDIT: To provide meaningful chat functionality they have to either eat up the cost or charge a subscription for it. This will be first time they charge for Siri - a product that doesn’t garner any positive reviews. This gets even more interesting to watch
> This will be first time they charge for Siri - a product that doesn’t garner any positive reviews.
It seems like revisionist history to say that; lots of people were sold on iPhones years ago because of Siri. They have one of the few business cases for voice assistants, which are notoriously difficult to actually monetize, that actually makes any sense, since "selling iPhones" is meaningful and "selling a subscription" would be nice on top of that.
I wonder how much of Siri AI is Apple-developed and how much of it is Google-developed as a result of Gemini. The a) search demos and b) image generation demos seem unlikely to have been done by Apple alone, the demos being closer to Google Search and Nano Banana respectively.
It looks almost entirely like gemini. The images they showed are obviously nano banana, and the text responses are almost obviously Gemini (I say as a somewhat frequent Gemini user).
I'm sure they customized some of it, but this looks basically like Gemini integrated with iCloud instead of Google Workspace.
The images were the biggest tell, generating using a reference photo of a person, at least Gemini and ChatGPT have two distinct styles. ChatGPT is a little less uncanny valley than Gemini which tries to be too realistic looking, in a bad way because it tries to preserve the original person in the photo, but still can't seem to help altering facial features.
The text responses had Gemini's verbosity. Asking ChatGPT to show me iconic dishes from both Brazil and Morocco (Apple's example), is much cleaner, less verbose. Quick list of dishes and links to the recipe. Gemini just spews a wall of text and bullet points and goes on and on with fluff. Tons of "What this dish is" "Why it works" Same with its frequent use of tables, which I see less of with ChatGPT.
Each Siri demo they did in the keynote had that hallmark verbosity I typically get with Gemini without prompting it to not do that.
Is Siri any more or less than “just” an agentic harness such as OpenClaw? How much of what that harness does is up to the LLM or the harness itself?
In my mind the Gemini LLM defines the bounds of capability and capacity, but any actual functionality or usefulness (or lack of) comes from Apple’s Siri harness.
I was wondering the same. I have to imagine it's mostly Gemini, unless Apple has a big, secret, SotA foundation model no one has heard of? But if it is Gemini, how does that work with their Private Cloud thing? Are they able to load the Gemini weights into it?
I don't care much about Siri, and not a lot about Apple (other than as an investment), but Apple is generally really good about putting out polished tech, and so I'm curious if Siri AI will be up to their usual standards, because if so, it represents a significant usage of AI that has solved hallucination issues.
Edge has had this for a long time. I can highlight a string and right-click, 'Send to Copilot' and click "explain" and it'll prompt it to 'explain this passage, particularly in the context of the current page.'
Note: I have MS 365 personal or whatever it's called this week so I'm not sure how Copilot acts for a completely free user.
Can't even get that right sometimes. A few weeks ago I somehow accidentally activated Siri and it decided that what I wanted was for it to play some kind of terrifying industrial electronic noise music that scared my kid.
Apple Shortcuts have felt like a blatantly obvious AI play to me for a while now.
The interface for creating them manually has been so bad for so long, it feels clear to me that LLM-driven shortcut orchestration was always the endgame. Apple built up their ecosystem of composable "tools", and then trained an LLM on how to call them.
The result, IMO, is the first OpenClaw/Hermes competitor that's feasible for use by the general public.
Everyone with a paid Claude or ChatGPT that they're struggling to use to the fullest is going to have very little reason not to swap over to an upgraded iCloud+ plan (if they don't already have one). I suspect we're going to see mass cancellation of $20/mo plans very soon.
OpenAI's timing for removing their temporary increased usage limits is looking pretty unfortunate...
I think Shortcuts has a few massive flaws that would give me pause enshrining it as middleware for an important thing like a "mainstream OpenClaw".
1 is performance. It's slow. You can run one within the app and literally watch execution flow from one block to the next. Absurd, for the CPU power at hand.
2 is reliance on developers to deliberately implement hooks and "intents" when the developers of at least half of apps including most "big company" apps do not care to bother, often because 95% of their app's surface is actually cross-platform stuff.
Example: There are no shortcut actions for Google Calendar, and Gmail only has one real one which is a generic send email. No "search email" etc.
I'd rather see Apple lean into "computer use" to allow it to use any app that displays things on the screen, but IDK how you make that safe.
> Available on iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory, and Mac models with M3 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory.
It’s really disappointing to see the on-device models being limited to so few devices. And this was after the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro were marketed so heavily with supporting their now failed effort at AI.
Apple has pulled a Tesla here. FSD on HW3 cars is stuck on old software with no upgrade path as of now. Tesla is potentially justifying it by calling it "FSD (Supervised)" so they don't have to do an expensive retrofit to them even though they sold these cars originally with the promise of fully autonomous driving.
All the iPhone 16/Pro owners have been waiting for Apple Intelligence features announced from that WWDC 2 years ago. They didn't get delivered and now won't ever be delivered with on-device intelligence due to the 8GB RAM limitation.
> It’s really disappointing to see the on-device models being limited to so few devices.
At first I thought it was the usual planned obsolescence. Then I realized it may be a true technical limitation. I suspect an embedding model is required to run on device in order to make several of the features work. Embedding models are small compared to LLMs, but, depending on their capabilities, could be the memory driver.
That's specifically the secondary, more-powerful model. It was only mentioned in passing in the keynote, but on this page anyway, it seems to be just the improved dictation in Siri and ability to customize pacing, etc.
The screenshot about pho is funny to me. Bean sprouts are not a good source of fiber. Noodles are not especially healthy. The broth base is not fish sauce, nor is fish sauce where broth gets most of its sodium. Slop city!
Yeah, "Fiber: good source" when 100g of raw bean sprouts gives you 1.8g fiber (less than a 2" kiwi), and pho comes with much less than 100g of sprouts.
Pho is a pretty bad source of fiber.
It sucks that we're skipping over such good tools like cronometer.com to figure out what we're actually eating and going straight to hallucination, adding more confusion to nutrition.
all the limitations of on-device with none of the benefits, it seems? they gotta get SOMETHING out there and soon but idk, i would probably feel safer running a chinese model through a 3P iOS app shell vs. trusting Geminiri to not snitch if i cared about the sanctity of my personal information.
The most notable thing here is that they finally have the primitives to make Siri actually useful across apps. I can't even use Siri to close Google Maps in my car right now.
This is disappointing. I had hoped when Apple revisited AI that they would lean into agents more and give us some sort of agent interface between the phone and a model running locally on your Mac at home. More niche for sure, but much more powerful. Instead we're getting more generic AI tie-ins to apps and "suggestions".
The one thing I've been trying to figure out / hoping will get a fix is that in the apple intelligence settings panel there is an 'extension' that allows it to use chatgpt. I would like to be able to have an extension for local models and/or custom apis.
I’m honestly surprised Apple didn’t retire the Siri brand.
At this point, “Siri” has a pretty strong cultural association with being underwhelming or unhelpful. Even if the new version is dramatically better, convincing people to give Siri another shot may be harder than launching the same technology under a new name.
Feels like a missed opportunity to reset expectations.
Yeah missed opportunity. They could have even had a fake funeral for Siri like Jobs did for OS 9, or a "retirement party" or something. Leave the Siri brand behind and launch this as something brand new.
This whole "coming this fall", "later this year", it's annoying. I miss the days when Steve Jobs used to say "and it's available right now, you can demo it in the hall outside, we're going ot make a billion dollars by tonight."
The demo video there is so underwhelming. They show very basic stuff, which I assumed Siri was already capable of doing... not sure what the big improvement is
And that’s pretty much what they show in the demo, plus asking it for directions on Apple Maps (which it can also do already), and searching for pictures on the Photos app (which I just tried and it can’t do - so it looks like that’s the main feature)
The demo Mike Rockwell gave at WWDC was interesting. He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone. I hope this is the direction Apple is going to continue in. Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.
I think the key thing is that Spotlight is now creating a... knowledge graph? of everything on your device for Siri's consideration. That's potentially very useful.
I think it’s just storing embeddings now.
well there is this: https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/11/kuzu-database-company-joins-a...
I strongly believe Apple can win the consumer AI space. They have incredible distribution and hardware. They just haven’t executed at the application layer yet.
what's worrisome is that they continue to fail at it. it's one thing to say "we're still hashing things out". it's another to parade around Image Generation features that are obviously widely not-cared-for and oftentimes actively disliked
Apple cares greatly about their brand yet this has hurt their brand like nothing else in the past decade
I mean have they, they have an outright majority share in iPhones in some markets, including the US, and lots of other stuff that sells reliably. Granted, I'm sure they'd love to have another blockbuster product, but having what amounts to "utility" status for a $1000 device isn't too bad.
None for the EU
Is it available in China at least or is this another “50% of the userbase gets nothing new in the OS update” year?
Edit: https://x.com/wongmjane/status/2064052590992916840?s=46
Lol
One of the presenters said they're working with regulators in China and the EU to make it available eventually.
In the EU case, Apple weaponizes people's ignorance about regulation. Apple pretends that the features everyone else has been shipping left and right somehow need extra paperwork and special approvals, because (…checks notes…) pro-privacy EU laws let zero-privacy competitors sail through, but block implementations that offer more privacy!?
What's really happening is Apple unilaterally withholding features while making vague noises about regulation as bargaining chips in talks with EU regulators where Apple is trying to weasel out of punishment for breaking anti-monopoly laws.
Nice, waiting to see what they’ll market as “the feature” for when they run ads outside of the US
Change your region. I've done so and haven't particulary noticed anything off, all the EU specific apps are weirdly still available in US appstore.
The OS restriction aren’t merely based on the region settings, they are also based on Apple Account region/country and on the detected physical location of the device.
Most of them are, some are annoyingly missing. It’s possible to install apps from two different app store accounts, but it’s 10 times more annoying than on Android. Additionally, there are some EU only features, such as third-party NFC payments.
Apple’s performative DMA outrage is getting more pathetic by the iOS version.
Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.
I still don't think Siri can do that ::angry::
Here's hoping they've finally fixed iOS's terrible dictation.
>Fix passwords with a tap. >The Passwords app alerts you to weak or compromised passwords and can update them on your behalf without the hassle.
Finally, I hope this works well. Personally one of the worst things to deal with.
Apple Passwords reliably updates passwords in its database before the password is confirmed to be actually changed. I've been locked out of accounts many times to this. They really need to focus on these basic UX issues.
Yep. I get anxious when Safari starts to offer a new password for an existing account. Having access to previous passwords would be such great UX, but no, no such thing.
1Password gives you access to previous passwords you had for that reason.
Unfortunately not for other fields like email, notes etc…
IMHO the perfect password app could just keep all previous versions of any field until the user deletes the history.
1Password does do full previous versions. It might be a newer feature, I’m only seeing passwords, not full versions, prior to 2018.
Does it at least store the old password for a while in some archive, like most competitors do?
1Password has been able to do this for five+ years. Frankly, it doesn't even really need agentic AI, although a talented team could probably make it perform better with agentic AI.
I don't really believe in Apple being that quality team.
> I don't really believe in Apple being that quality team.
Why?
I mean every api/app/website has a different way to do this. If there was a standardized api that everyone could conform to to allow this automation I would be all for it. I assume 1p does this by writing custom code/rules for dealing with the most popular sites out there and then erroring out for anything else.
AI could potentially help solve those unpopular site/app/whatever edgecase.
I'll believe this when pigs fly.
There's a 0% chance it will work. Most websites I've seen have one or all of:
* Force you to use email or SMS as a "second factor" to unlock changing password even if you know the old password
* A stupid idea of password complexity usually requiring one of a finite set of 5-8 "special characters" which is often only revealed after you've chosen a password that doesn't have them. Or in some cases even banning characters other than the ones they check for. There's a standard for this where you put a regex on the password field, which a good password manager will always use, but the kind of idiots who think limiting the entropy of passwords to increase security is the correct way to do things almost NEVER implement this.
* A maximum password length, even as short as 16 characters in many cases
* CAPTCHA etc.
Any effort spent on this would be better spent elsewhere, including even educating other companies on how passkeys should be used.
I hope they don't feed the actual password into the model.
Don’t they say it runs on device? Then why not?
Judgment.
They’re adding vibecoded shortcuts (the high level scripting for Apple devices). Hopefully that means they worked out some of the long-existing bugs and missing features, but I’m not optimistic. Still, could be a useful tool, especially for less tech-literate people.
Just updated to see if I could make a shortcut to toggle `Reduced White Point` accessibility shortcut.
"Try describing something different for the shortcut."
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it still doesn't work.
Before they add AI they better fix the frigging search function in settings, it is horrible, you need to know their exact words, and Apple has a funny naming sense. Hierarchies nested so deep you never find anything. I come to use Claude or ChatGPT to tell me the right incantations to find a setting.
This looks pretty promising to me. It will likely replace the need to set up OpenClaw for average personal users. The work of getting email, messages, and all the personal data on the phone as context seamlessly is not as straightforward as one might think.
I'm curious how the pricing will work. Would it be free up to some limit and then some subscription pricing? I can't imagine it can be free unlimited usage given the price of serving these models.
I doubt the average personal user knows what OpenClaw even is though Google is also producing competitive stuff.
Craig mentioned near the end of the keynote that compute intensive things (like image generation) will have rate limits that can be increased bundled with their iCloud + plans. I imagine any request that gets routed to their cloud compute will be subject to limits as well. He positioned it as a value-add to their existing subscription but I suppose that can change.
This is why OpenAI thinks it needs to build its own physical devices. If Apple is only allowing its own AI to operate at the OS level, then that leaves OpenAI with no choice but to build their own.
Meta also realized this and attempted multiple times to build their own hardware but they've given up each time. They started as early as a partnering with HTC in 2011 to make a Facebook phone.
Quite frankly, I'm kind of excited to see what OpenAI can build. I think an AI-first phone could challenge iOS and Android. It's a new paradigm and if OpenAI gets it right, it'll be very hard for Apple and Google to pivot.
I personally think chat + code is the future of apps. For example, I find myself wanting to do many things inside ChatGPT instead of traditional app because I can tell it to do things that are simply impossible on a static app UI. For example, I have some data I want to send to an app but before I do, I want ChatGPT to clean the data in some way first. And then after the data is uploaded, I want ChatGPT to pull some data off the API and make charts that I want to see.
I imagine a world where very intelligent models run at 10k tokens/s, app building is extremely standardized, and it simply builds any app you want inside the OS. IE, if you want a dashboard of your health data, you ask it to build it almost instantly exactly how you want it. I'm already doing something similar today but it's slow and not easy to do for non-engineers.
> If Apple is only allowing its own AI to operate at the OS level
Incidentally, that’s what’s preventing Apple from rolling out their OS-privileged AI in the EU, as the EU mandates equal access for competing AI products. It will be interesting how this plays out.
I don't personally agree with EU's mandates. I think it's ok if Apple only allows their own models to run on iOS at the OS level.
If OpenAI makes their own AI-phone, do they have to let Anthropic and Deepseek run their models on it too?
> do they have to let Anthropic and Deepseek run their models on it too?
provided it gets big enough, yes. the EU's position roughly is "if this hurts an entire market just to benefit you, and lots of people use / rely on it, then you gotta allow it"
Why can't Anthropic or Deepseek take the big risk to develop their own phone? It doesn't seem right that they can simply use EU laws to hop on the ride for free without taking the same risks.
> coming this fall
I believe we also heard that a couple years ago.
Went out of their way to show actual usage of these features on actual devices in actual people’s hands
Heh, I noticed the same thing, after the DaringFireball callout last year about the normal product demo progression. It looks "real" this time, but the question is how far along we are: will the journalists have a chance to play with it at the event?
In a pre-recorded video after who knows how many takes.
15 years ago they had the balls to run Siri live on stage: https://youtu.be/6rL9EL2LlrA?is=5yMQxs0C2VAC5Lwz
They should have changed the name as per branding. I hear Siri, I subconsciously associate it with really bad software.
Amazing how this time Apple found the `sweet spot` to release Siri AI when the letter combination A and I has fed up literally everyone.
Watching the keynote at our office on a big screen and everyone collectively sighing when they announced the name felt indicative haha.
I think it just feels uncreative? Siri as a brand has some value, but if you want it to feel like a watershed moment where old Siri is "behind us" finally, just give it a new name.
I don't think Apple has the option to rebrand Siri at this stage, assuming people actually call Siri by name. However, turning AI into 'Apple Intelligence' doesn't feel creative either.
> assuming people actually call Siri by name
This doesn't follow for me. They can trivially allow it to still respond to the old wakeword. They should absolutely change the name in the event they can finally make it useful, because "Siri" is (in my mind and many others') a synonym for "hapless idiot." "Thanks, Siri" has been uttered hundreds of time in my house and my car, and 100% of the time it's sarcastic.
Same thing in my head. I only see this going one way, which is tons of people hear that Siri “got better” after this update.
Many of those people will speak a language that’s not English, or live in the EU or China where it’ll still be “Siri”, not “Siri AI”.
“Do you have the new Siri?”
“Yeah I updated… but she still seems so dumb”
“Oh yeah… well that’s Siri for you I guess”
Horrifying for marketing folk, I would presume. You’re just setting people up to confirm that Siri is always useless and improvements are invisible.
we were doing the same thing and giggling a bit that it's basically "AI AI" now. realistically a lot of people thought of Siri as AI already.
Or just keep calling it Siri, and announce "hey look, Siri does some cool new things."
AI is a technology, not a product. Consumers don't care about technologies, they care about what the product does versus what they currently have.
I think Jobs was an asshole, but one good thing I can say about him is that he understood the difference between technology and products. Imagine if they had called it the "iPod HDD."
The ergonomics of “the new X” sort of fall apart when you’re releasing it in stages. (Not in EU/only in English) It spawns a lot of conversations like “do you have the new Siri? Uh… I think so? It’s still crap though.” You cart around this bad brand image because you pitch this big watershed moment and 2/3rds of people are still using the “wrong” Siri.
Siri and Voice Control were both usable during the same time and it feels like it could work here too.
Totally agree that AI is just an implementation detail though. IMO that new product name should NOT have “AI” in it at all.
It's going to be weird though when my phone has Siri AI and my Homepod has Siri... "please ask on your iPhone" edition. I also don't quite get the distinction of Siri as an app versus the Siri I yell at to make my TV do something.
Amazing how someone again finds a meaningless thing Apple does better than the rest then blows it out of proportions. Makes you wonder if they are on Apple's PR team.
It looks bad from every perspective. I've never seen two apple's in one URL for product category before. apple.com/apple-intelligence
To prove my point, I opened a random date on the Apple website matching today's date to compare. 16 years ago, June 8 (1) Apple released the iPhone 4. There's still no room for jokes about that release, and from this perspective, calling their AI 'Apple Intelligence' feels really weak compared to what they used to deliver.
I agree that some years ago Apple was the strongest in marketing, their brand team had been setting the bar for tech, but I simply can't say that anymore.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100608073904/http://www.apple....
Apple notably threw shade at the existing AI implementations, with an emphasis on making Siri AI more human-focused.
The stock price definitely didn't like it though.
The stock market is notorious for dropping on almost any Apple conference or announcement.
I mean, seriously, AI = Apple Intelligence?
It's not even funny, it's not smart. It's like if they released MS Siri and said it's Mac System Siri.
> I mean, seriously, AI = Apple Intelligence?
For pedantry's sake, they were saying "AI = Apple Intelligence" last year as well, so it's not like they just pulled it out of their butts now that popular opinion has turned against AI.
Exactly, I thought one year was enough to prove that everyone reads those letters differently nowadays.
I feel like the hate came more from the "Available today for Developers and later in Beta" than anything
The chatbots(ChatGPT, Claude et al) showed Apple exactly what can be done, the user base is already well primed. So this is a product definition done for them to execute. If done well they will be able to provide a much stronger integration into the day to day use cases than the chatbots, and can siphon off user time from them. This time around the end to end is easier with Apple Intelligence and more importantly llms doing the work Apple is floundering at. So I am hopeful, but I still see the os/app level integration as not enough in terms of functionality to make it a hit. The primary use case for llms is still conversations and search. Apple should be focusing on that aspect primarily and also add the os/app level integration as a bonus - as something only they can do. If they just do the latter, it will not be as much of a success. Let’s see how they execute.
EDIT: To provide meaningful chat functionality they have to either eat up the cost or charge a subscription for it. This will be first time they charge for Siri - a product that doesn’t garner any positive reviews. This gets even more interesting to watch
> This will be first time they charge for Siri - a product that doesn’t garner any positive reviews.
It seems like revisionist history to say that; lots of people were sold on iPhones years ago because of Siri. They have one of the few business cases for voice assistants, which are notoriously difficult to actually monetize, that actually makes any sense, since "selling iPhones" is meaningful and "selling a subscription" would be nice on top of that.
If they are using some mid model and are stingy with web search, I won’t use it more than a couple times.
The only thing I want to know about this new Siri is how to turn it entirely off.
I wonder how much of Siri AI is Apple-developed and how much of it is Google-developed as a result of Gemini. The a) search demos and b) image generation demos seem unlikely to have been done by Apple alone, the demos being closer to Google Search and Nano Banana respectively.
It looks almost entirely like gemini. The images they showed are obviously nano banana, and the text responses are almost obviously Gemini (I say as a somewhat frequent Gemini user).
I'm sure they customized some of it, but this looks basically like Gemini integrated with iCloud instead of Google Workspace.
I'm curious what the obvious tells were for you. I never use any of these tools so I do wonder what sets them apart for those in frequent contact.
The images were the biggest tell, generating using a reference photo of a person, at least Gemini and ChatGPT have two distinct styles. ChatGPT is a little less uncanny valley than Gemini which tries to be too realistic looking, in a bad way because it tries to preserve the original person in the photo, but still can't seem to help altering facial features.
The text responses had Gemini's verbosity. Asking ChatGPT to show me iconic dishes from both Brazil and Morocco (Apple's example), is much cleaner, less verbose. Quick list of dishes and links to the recipe. Gemini just spews a wall of text and bullet points and goes on and on with fluff. Tons of "What this dish is" "Why it works" Same with its frequent use of tables, which I see less of with ChatGPT.
Each Siri demo they did in the keynote had that hallmark verbosity I typically get with Gemini without prompting it to not do that.
[delayed]
Is Siri any more or less than “just” an agentic harness such as OpenClaw? How much of what that harness does is up to the LLM or the harness itself?
In my mind the Gemini LLM defines the bounds of capability and capacity, but any actual functionality or usefulness (or lack of) comes from Apple’s Siri harness.
I was wondering the same. I have to imagine it's mostly Gemini, unless Apple has a big, secret, SotA foundation model no one has heard of? But if it is Gemini, how does that work with their Private Cloud thing? Are they able to load the Gemini weights into it?
IIRC Apple cut a deal to have their own version of Gemini that is hosted just for them.
There was not a single thing they launched that I have not seen Gemini already showcase capability or existing feature wise
Hm, second try? And Siri AI again without dates. First time it was also “later” but was postponed for how many years?
I don't care much about Siri, and not a lot about Apple (other than as an investment), but Apple is generally really good about putting out polished tech, and so I'm curious if Siri AI will be up to their usual standards, because if so, it represents a significant usage of AI that has solved hallucination issues.
But that's a big If!
The killer app would be a locally run Siri that learns about you and your preferences.
It’s weird it says I can ask Siri about a document in front of me but can I ask it about a webpage I’m currently reading?
(It’s been driving me crazy there’s no “AI this” button to discuss whatever is on my screen.)
Edge has had this for a long time. I can highlight a string and right-click, 'Send to Copilot' and click "explain" and it'll prompt it to 'explain this passage, particularly in the context of the current page.'
Note: I have MS 365 personal or whatever it's called this week so I'm not sure how Copilot acts for a completely free user.
Will I be convinced to change my iphone 6s? #suspense
Please don’t suck.
Right? I've been waiting a lot of years for an upgrade to my voice-activated timer setter/music player launcher.
Can't even get that right sometimes. A few weeks ago I somehow accidentally activated Siri and it decided that what I wanted was for it to play some kind of terrifying industrial electronic noise music that scared my kid.
How is this different from the chatgpt apple intelligence thing from last year?
This time they really promise it'll ship
But fundamentally, the real difference is they have now bought and white-labeled Gemini to replace all the stuff they failed to make 2 years ago.
Apple Shortcuts have felt like a blatantly obvious AI play to me for a while now.
The interface for creating them manually has been so bad for so long, it feels clear to me that LLM-driven shortcut orchestration was always the endgame. Apple built up their ecosystem of composable "tools", and then trained an LLM on how to call them.
The result, IMO, is the first OpenClaw/Hermes competitor that's feasible for use by the general public.
Everyone with a paid Claude or ChatGPT that they're struggling to use to the fullest is going to have very little reason not to swap over to an upgraded iCloud+ plan (if they don't already have one). I suspect we're going to see mass cancellation of $20/mo plans very soon.
OpenAI's timing for removing their temporary increased usage limits is looking pretty unfortunate...
Why do I need shortcuts though, I want that to be transparent.
Good point, that's probably gonna be the hardest sell.
I have shortcuts set up to count the hours I log in my work Google calendar and copy them to my clipboard to help me prepare invoices.
So while I've already been sold on what Shortcuts can do, getting the general public to see the possibilities is probably gonna be a challenge.
I think Shortcuts has a few massive flaws that would give me pause enshrining it as middleware for an important thing like a "mainstream OpenClaw".
1 is performance. It's slow. You can run one within the app and literally watch execution flow from one block to the next. Absurd, for the CPU power at hand.
2 is reliance on developers to deliberately implement hooks and "intents" when the developers of at least half of apps including most "big company" apps do not care to bother, often because 95% of their app's surface is actually cross-platform stuff.
Example: There are no shortcut actions for Google Calendar, and Gmail only has one real one which is a generic send email. No "search email" etc.
I'd rather see Apple lean into "computer use" to allow it to use any app that displays things on the screen, but IDK how you make that safe.
> Available on iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory, and Mac models with M3 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory.
It’s really disappointing to see the on-device models being limited to so few devices. And this was after the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro were marketed so heavily with supporting their now failed effort at AI.
Apple has pulled a Tesla here. FSD on HW3 cars is stuck on old software with no upgrade path as of now. Tesla is potentially justifying it by calling it "FSD (Supervised)" so they don't have to do an expensive retrofit to them even though they sold these cars originally with the promise of fully autonomous driving.
All the iPhone 16/Pro owners have been waiting for Apple Intelligence features announced from that WWDC 2 years ago. They didn't get delivered and now won't ever be delivered with on-device intelligence due to the 8GB RAM limitation.
> It’s really disappointing to see the on-device models being limited to so few devices.
At first I thought it was the usual planned obsolescence. Then I realized it may be a true technical limitation. I suspect an embedding model is required to run on device in order to make several of the features work. Embedding models are small compared to LLMs, but, depending on their capabilities, could be the memory driver.
That's specifically the secondary, more-powerful model. It was only mentioned in passing in the keynote, but on this page anyway, it seems to be just the improved dictation in Siri and ability to customize pacing, etc.
The 12gb number is weird, but also telling.
iPhones have 12gb, current Neo has 8gb, the next gen Neo is speculated to have 12gb (as it'll be based on a later iPhone chip).
> Private Cloud Compute
> Your data is never stored
> Used only for your requests
> Verifiable privacy promise
Apple is cooking. Although at that point might as well bring the cloud features to more devices. Yeah it costs more but also locks users in harder.
The screenshot about pho is funny to me. Bean sprouts are not a good source of fiber. Noodles are not especially healthy. The broth base is not fish sauce, nor is fish sauce where broth gets most of its sodium. Slop city!
Yeah, "Fiber: good source" when 100g of raw bean sprouts gives you 1.8g fiber (less than a 2" kiwi), and pho comes with much less than 100g of sprouts.
Pho is a pretty bad source of fiber.
It sucks that we're skipping over such good tools like cronometer.com to figure out what we're actually eating and going straight to hallucination, adding more confusion to nutrition.
Honestly I don’t have much faith in Apple intelligence when it can’t even search my settings.
all the limitations of on-device with none of the benefits, it seems? they gotta get SOMETHING out there and soon but idk, i would probably feel safer running a chinese model through a 3P iOS app shell vs. trusting Geminiri to not snitch if i cared about the sanctity of my personal information.
> all the limitations of on-device with none of the benefits, it seems?
What do you mean?
The most notable thing here is that they finally have the primitives to make Siri actually useful across apps. I can't even use Siri to close Google Maps in my car right now.
More or less stuck AI in all the obvious spots, which will probably be fine I guess. Not super exciting!
This is disappointing. I had hoped when Apple revisited AI that they would lean into agents more and give us some sort of agent interface between the phone and a model running locally on your Mac at home. More niche for sure, but much more powerful. Instead we're getting more generic AI tie-ins to apps and "suggestions".
If this is good, I might finally ditch my 12 mini.
Great, as long as I can switch it off and use my phone as I always have, I'm happy for them.
I can't wait to take a photo of a cricket ball and ask it what it is, ffs.
These people need to get out, touch grass, watch trees swaying in the breeze, and put their phones down before they lose toonmany neurons.
missed opportunity to call it "VibeSiri"
For real this time...
Apple's "New Coke" moment?
The one thing I've been trying to figure out / hoping will get a fix is that in the apple intelligence settings panel there is an 'extension' that allows it to use chatgpt. I would like to be able to have an extension for local models and/or custom apis.
I’m honestly surprised Apple didn’t retire the Siri brand.
At this point, “Siri” has a pretty strong cultural association with being underwhelming or unhelpful. Even if the new version is dramatically better, convincing people to give Siri another shot may be harder than launching the same technology under a new name.
Feels like a missed opportunity to reset expectations.
Yeah missed opportunity. They could have even had a fake funeral for Siri like Jobs did for OS 9, or a "retirement party" or something. Leave the Siri brand behind and launch this as something brand new.
This whole "coming this fall", "later this year", it's annoying. I miss the days when Steve Jobs used to say "and it's available right now, you can demo it in the hall outside, we're going ot make a billion dollars by tonight."
I go on long walks and talk to ChatGPT in depth in its conversation mode about programming and computing in depth.
That’s what I expected from Siri but you can get in from ChatGPT .
Hey look! Here's something new that we could already do but now it costs more and takes more engineering and.. AI
Associated post: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/apple-introduces-siri...
The demo video there is so underwhelming. They show very basic stuff, which I assumed Siri was already capable of doing... not sure what the big improvement is
Based on my experience, I assume Siri is not capable of anything more than setting timers or referring me to my phone to see the search results.
And that’s pretty much what they show in the demo, plus asking it for directions on Apple Maps (which it can also do already), and searching for pictures on the Photos app (which I just tried and it can’t do - so it looks like that’s the main feature)
If it's going to be anything like Gemini on Google Pixel, it'll be great at everything except for trivial tasks like setting timers :).
Newest phones get latest models
Genius way to sell more phones
Really they are just selling on device Ai