Apple is in unfamiliar territory, with the company experiencing a rare miss with its “more personalized Siri,” postponing rollout to “the coming year.”
Apple has a track record of hits that most companies can only dream of, with many of those individual products generating more revenue than some of the world’s biggest companies. Since Steve Jobs’ return in 1997, the company has seemingly been almost immune to the misses many companies experience—at least until recently.
According to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, Apple reached out to issue a statement on its Siri improvements, saying it was delaying them as a result of it taking longer than expected to implement them.
“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
While Apple fans are sure to disappointed, Gruber points out a potential silver lining.
Reading between the lines, and based on my PhD-level fluency in Cupertino-ese, what Apple is saying here is that these “more personalized Siri” features are being punted from this year’s OS cycle to next year’s: to iOS 19 and MacOS 16. Apple’s years in this context aren’t calendar years, but Apple’s OS product years. Those years effectively start at WWDC. The problem, from Apple’s perspective, messaging-wise, is that they don’t talk about future products. They haven’t officially acknowledged there is going to be an iOS 19 or MacOS 16. They haven’t even yet announced that there’s going to be a WWDC 2025. But they do want to set expectations accurately, especially for a feature as high profile — from Apple’s own marketing push — as Apple Intelligence. So here we are.
Is Apple In a Slump?
There’s one big question many are beginning to ask: Is Apple in a slump?
In years past, Apple’s biggest flop was the G4 Cube, a single model of an otherwise successful line of computers. Recently, however, the company appears to be struggling to find its “next big thing,” losing billions on projects.
One such example was Project Titan, the company’s attempt to build autonomous vehicles. After years of rumors, as well as a number of reorganizations and billions of dollars, Apple pulled the plug on Project Titan in February 2024.
Similarly, Apple has invested heavily in its Vision Pro, a device it dubbed a “revolutionary spatial computer.” Unfortunately, sales have been less than revolutionary, thanks to a high price and limited practical application. Apple has reportedly delayed a cheaper version till 2027 after early reports suggested the company had stopped production on the current model.
With Apple now delaying Siri because of issues it is having improving the AI assistant, it increasingly looks like the company may be in a slump.
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