I won’t reprise the sad story of how Apple went from being at the forefront of AI technology with the launch of Siri in 2011 to being hopelessly left behind in 2025.
The company’s current approach appears to be to retain the Siri branding for simpler tasks, while using Apple Intelligence for the shiny new things – but there’s now an obvious problem with this …
Most of those shiny new things haven’t actually materialized. The gap between what the company promised iPhone 16 buyers and what it has actually given them so far is huge. Again, no need to go over old ground – just the headlines tell the story:
Indeed, things have reached the point where people are so fed up of waiting for Apple to fix things that a 9to5Mac poll revealed that the vast majority of readers would like the option of installing a third-party AI as their default iPhone assistant.
Apple long since burned the Siri brandname. It’s so embarrassingly dumb, and has been the butt of so many jokes, that it’s now irredeemable. The iPhone maker seemed to acknowledge this when it announced the Apple Intelligence branding for the new features, but there are two problems here.
First, Apple Intelligence was always a dumb name, being too long and clunky to use in full, and stupidly abbreviating to … AI! How that got past the first round of reviews is utterly beyond me.
Second, all of the mess of the fanfare launch followed by back-tracking and delay means that the Apple Intelligence brand has also been pretty badly tarnished.
For both reasons, I’d argue that whenever Apple finally does launch its all-new intelligent assistant (what has so far been referred to as next-gen or all-new Siri), and it finally does do all the things the company has promised, it will be time to ditch both brands and give it an all-new name.
A fresh start, a fresh name, a fresh image.
It needs to be something which trips off the tongue as well as Siri – a nice friendly name – but bearing absolutely no resemblance to it. Suggestions in the comments, please …
Highlighted accessories
Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
