Does Apple have an AI problem? If so, can it overcome it or is it already too late? As Apple has just been sued for false advertising, let's revisit and understand how it ended up there and what it can do to fix it.
It is wild to think that Siri was released 13 years ago, on October 4, 2011, alongside the release of the iPhone 4s. At the time, I remember a very efficient Apple commercial promoting Siri, showing a person jogging and giving vocal instructions to Siri.
The Siri animation was futuristic and so well polished that you would expect that it would finally be a vocal assistant that actually works, unlike all vocal assistants at the time.
Unfortunately, Siri was only good for a very limited set of instructions, such as creating a meeting or finding directions on Apple Maps.
But it was all fine, because I knew at the time that it was only the first iteration and that Apple would refine it year by year until it becomes an integral part of your life.
But close to 15 years later, I only use Siri to set home scenes, to dim the lights. "Hey Siri, set up the cozy scene". Or perhaps being in a car and asking "Hey Siri, take me home." That's barely it.
Ironically, in the original commercial, we can see a woman locked out of her place and telling Siri: "I'm locked out." Siri replies: "I found 3 locksmiths fairly close to you." 13 years later, if you tell Siri "I'm locked out", it replies: "None of your accessories can do that." Talk about incremental progress. Is that even incremental regress?
Let me try to ask Siri a few questions on the latest version of iOS, being 18.3.2:
Question: What's the latest version of PHP?
Answer: Do you want me to use ChatGPT to answer that?
The integration of ChatGPT is so bad that I simply don't use through Siri. I have downloaded the ChatGPT app and use it daily. I even set the Action Button of my iPhone 15 Pro Max to kick off ChatGPT vocal. Talking to ChatGPT is what should have been talking to Siri 13 years after its release.
If Siri was an acronym, it would stand for Subpar Intelligence, Resulting in Ineffectiveness.
I still cannot believe how bad Siri has always been and without much visible progress.
Therefore, Apple is now at a place where competitors have built far, far better products. So, Apple presented its AI solution, famously named Apple Intelligence. It looked great on paper (translate: in commercials), but the reality is that they oversold it. It has become so bad that Apple removed some of its ads and is now sued for false advertising. New features are being pushed further with no end in sight, whilst other firms like X and Microsoft are releasing their own AI search and vocal tools, respectively Grok and Copilot.
This leads to the fundamental question: will Apple be able to catch up to its competitors?
To learn about the future, let's learn about the past. I'm following Apple long enough to remember the Apple Maps fiasco. In September 2012, Apple released its own version of Google Maps. The problem is that version one was not ready for prime time. Instead of calling it a beta version, Apple marketed it as version 1, which led to extremely poor user experience and, ultimately, an official apology from Apple.
Today, eleven years later, Apple Maps is – by far – my favorite map app. Apple proved that working hard and consistently on a problem over a long period of time often leads to incremental success.
But building an AI framework seems far more complex than building a map application. First, Apple is extremely careful about privacy, which is a fundamental challenge when you want to provide a context-led AI assistant.
Second, the competitors are progressing at an extremely fast pace, which means that Apple cannot simply play catch up, they have to reach the same level of quality as its competitors and perhaps try to do it in an Apple-way that makes it even more compelling and user friendly.
Apple spent $10 billion on Project Titan, its massive electric car project, only to abandon it after years of research and development.
Then, it released the Apple Vision Pro, selling an extremely niche product instead of going for the mass market of much cheaper smart glasses – I bought the Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses and adore these.
Meanwhile, even though its Severance TV series is hyped at the moment, Apple is spending lots of money on its Apple TV+ platform, still lacking behind Netflix.
Sure, Apple is still the number one company in the world and generates tons of money every second, but the tech world is a fast-pace one and requires laser-focused attention to details. You can only afford so many mistakes in the business world.
Let's revisit the progress of their AI platform frequently and stay close to it. Maybe there's hope.
