Earlier this week I asked if Apple has lost it mojo. But the problem may be worse than that. According to a must-read “Daring Fireball” article by John Gruber, Apple simply lied about what had accomplished in-house with Apple Intelligence.
I said that a good business maxim is “under-promise, over-deliver.” However, Apple has done the exact opposite with Apple Intelligence. The most anticipated feature of the company’s AI plans/services was to be a “more personalized Siri” to be able to have human-like conversations with users. However, such a update of the personal digital assistant has been pushed to 2026, perhaps due to major security concerns.
You need to read all of John’s article (it’s that good), but the highlight is that he said the fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI, and it’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen.
“They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems,” John writes. “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.”
From his article: Who decided these features [personalized Siri with personal context, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions] should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?
If Tim Cook signed off promoting features at last summer’s Worldwide Developer Conference that weren’t anywhere close to being ready for the “real world,” he’s ultimately reponsible for the personalized Siri fiasco as he’s Apple’s CEO.
As Gruber said: Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.
I hope you’ll help support Apple World Today by becoming a patron. Patreon pricing ranges from $2 to $10 a month. Thanks in advance for your support.
Perhaps a bit of “Bait and Switch” to keep people wanting AI to stay with Apple rather than….any alternative. YA think?