Over the past few months, Apple has been placed on the spot. While the launch of the cheap entry-level iPhone 16e distracted its fans from AI for a hot minute, Apple Intelligence’s delay is raising major concerns among investors and consumers about its AI strategy.
Admittedly, the generative AI space is volatile, especially with the emergence of ultra-cheap AI models from Chinese startups like Manus and DeepSeek, with sophisticated capabilities surpassing models like OpenAI’s proprietary models across math, science, and coding.
Apple is religiously sticking to CEO Tim Cook’s “not first, but best” mantra, but that move is seemingly losing its traction as OpenAI and Microsoft make significant headway in the AI landscape.
Interestingly, a report by Bloomberg’s Apple sleuth Mark Gurman suggested Apple Intelligence might be two years behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
While the company recently announced that it was delaying Apple Intelligence and the long-anticipated overhauled Siri AI assistant to 2026 with no explanation, longtime Apple commenter John Gruber shared an interesting account on the state of affairs about Apple’s AI strategy — and it’s rotten.
Gruber claims Apple has wrapped itself in a tangled web that it seemingly can’t get itself out of, riddled with an untrue AI story that could potentially ruin its reputation in the grander scheme of things if it fails to deliver on the demos showcased at WWDC 2024.
According to the veteran Apple commenter:
“In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the ‘more personalized Siri’ features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed until the coming year. I should have my head examined.”
Gruber indicates that we shouldn’t have believed the AI dream Apple attempted to sell at its annual developer conference, “I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start,” he added.
A classic case of overpromising and underdelivering?
Gruber argues that Apple was barely able to scratch the surface of its gold-plated strategy, only managing to ship “trivial features,” like Writing Tools and Image Playground.
To this end, the iPhone maker has yet to deliver anything worthwhile as promised during WWDC.
Admittedly, out of the AI-powered entries demoed by Apple, the overhauled Siri AI assistant was seemingly the most exciting. However, Gruber brands the next-gen AI tools as vaporware, claiming the overhauled voice assistant was nothing more than a concept video.
Related: Apple is having trouble matching Microsoft and OpenAI’s advanced efforts
According to Gruber:
“There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?” segment of the WWDC keynote itself, starting around the 1h:22m mark. Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices […]What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.”
The veteran Apple commenter backs his claims by indicating that if these features truly existed, the iPhone maker would have at the very least provided a demo to share the current state of affairs, clearly depicting what they’ve managed to achieve and what still needs a bit of work.
That didn’t happen. If these features exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Apple has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality […] The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
Veteran Apple Commenter, John Gruber
To that end, Gruber says many AI firms lie about their efforts in the landscape, branding it as “BS.” He added that he never expected Apple to be part of the fray.
