As reported by John Gruber, Apple announced on Friday that some of its most anticipated Apple Intelligence features wonât make it in this yearâs cycle after all. Apple representative Jacqueline Roy:
Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, weâve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. Weâve 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. Itâs going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.
The first sentence is just a recitation of existing Siri features. The second sentence details the features that havenât made it yet. The third sentence promises for rollouts âin the coming year,â which probably means iOS 19.
Those features were the most interesting ones Apple announced last June, but even at the time they seemed ambitious. Apple said it would build a âsemantic indexâ of your on-device data, giving Apple Intelligence a leg up on the competition by being able to understand personal data thatâs not available to cloud A.I. models. It also said it was adding the ability to look at your deviceâs display and understand what was happening on screen, and using the App Intents framework to allow Apple Intelligence to control your apps and use multiple apps to deal with your requests.
This led to one of the killer demos of WWDC 2024, in which Siri was able to understand when someoneâs momâs flight is landing by cross-referencing an email with real-time flight tracking to get a good answer. From there, the demo pulls a lunch plan with mom out of a text thread and then displays how long the drive is to there from the airportâall from within Siri, rather than individual apps.
It became clear early on that these features wouldnât appear until later in the iOS 18 cycle, but with this announcement Apple is admitting that it just couldnât deliver on these ambitious announcements in time. The OS cycle is about to flip over and weâre only three months away from the next WWDC.
Those Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 2024 were vitally important for Apple. The company felt that it had to show that it hadnât completely missed the boat on the hottest topic in the tech industry, and that it was working hard to infuse the power of AI through all its products. I would argue that succeeded at doing so, and its barrage of Apple Intelligence marketing the past six months has reinforced the point. People in the know might criticize that Appleâs behind, or that its tools arenât close to the state of the art, but the general perception is that Appleâs in the gameâwhich was a real question last year at this time.
In exchange for all of that, Apple put itself out there and took risks that it might not have if it hadnât felt immense pressure on the AI front. If you had asked Apple executives a year ago if they should risk overpromising and underdelivering when it comes to Apple Intelligence during the iOS 18 cycle, clearly the answer would have been yes. I donât want to say that WWDC 2024âs announcements were just about hype, but they werenât not about hype.
And if you asked those same Apple executives if they were aware that the cost of underdelivering those features in the spring of 2025 would be getting beaten up in the press a little bit for delaying features, perhaps even back to iOS 19? Iâm pretty sure theyâd say that a little bit of negative press today, when the world isnât really paying that close attention to Apple and AI, would totally be worth it.
Apple got exactly what it wanted out of WWDC 2024. The penalty for failing to ship some of those features will be the equivalent of a slap on the wrists. But this all increases the stakes for WWDC 2025, when Apple will still need to show that itâs capable of creating useful Apple Intelligence featuresâand its audience should be more skeptical about the companyâs ability to ship them.
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