Apple’s “Think Different” and “not first, but best” have been its worst enemies in the generative AI landscape. While its competitors like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Google are making bank in the ever-evolving category, the iPhone maker hasn’t made any significant headway, save for trivial features like Writing Tools.
Last year, during the annual WWDC event, the company promised to overhaul its digital assistant Siri with a flagship and next-gen AI experience. It also unveiled Apple Intelligence, the answer to Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini.
But it has now been well over a year and change since the iPhone maker made the promise, but it all seems to be vaporware. The company recently announced that it had delayed Apple Intelligence’s launch to 2026 without an explanation.
However, this move has received backlash, with multiple users indicating that the company used false AI ads to push iPhone 16 sales. The company has landed itself on the wrong side of justice, battling the lawsuit.
More recently, Google capitalized on Apple’s misfortunes with AI in a hilarious advertisement (soundtracked to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s The Next Episode banger) for its upcoming flagship Pixel 10 phone (via artificial intelligence on IG):
“If you buy a new phone because of a feature that’s ‘coming soon,’ but it’s been ‘coming soon’ for a full year, you could change your definition of ‘soon’ — or you could just change your phone.”
The ad then flashed “Ask more of your phone” text alongside the launch date, which is slated for August 20, 2025. Perhaps more interestingly, the advertisement evoked a futuristic vibe with the camera roving up and down the sides of a jet black phone, the kind featured in previous Apple ad campaigns.
Apple has been building 2 versions of Apple Intelligence concurrently
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In June, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, and Apple Global VP of Marketing, Greg Joswiak, discussed the company’s AI approach, highlighting the reason for Apple Intelligence’s delayed launch.
As it turns out, the iPhone maker has been working on two versions of the Siri architecture simultaneously. The executives revealed that the first iteration (V1) was inferior compared to the second one (also known as V2), which boasts “a deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we wanted to create, to get to a full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri.”
We realized that V1 architecture, you know, we could push and push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards, and that we had to move to the V2 architecture.
Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi
Federighi indicated that he could share a demo of the V2 architecture in action as it’s already in in-house use, but admitted that it has not reached the quality to make a great Apple feature.“When we started with Apple Intelligence, we were very clear: this wasn’t about just building a chatbot,” he added.
To that end, it seems highly unlikely that Apple will announce the launch date of its AI strategy until it is ready to seed it.