Apple’s AI Crisis: Is Apple Turning Into All Words and No Show Company?

Apple and AI haven’t had the smoothest relationship. First, the company faced relentless scrutiny for lagging behind in the AI race. Then, Apple’s long-awaited entry into AI-powered experiences with Apple Intelligence, which was meant to be a turning point, instead became a source of constant frustration. What was meant to be a triumphant debut of Apple Intelligence turned into a logistical nightmare, with delays, fragmented rollouts, and underwhelming features tainting the company’s reputation for seamless execution.

Apple’s one hope at turning the narrative around was the release of an AI-powered Siri. Now, with the latest delay in Siri’s AI makeover — pushing the update to at least 2026 — Apple finds itself in a crisis unlike any before.

The State of Apple Intelligence

From the outset, Apple Intelligence has struggled. Not only was Apple late to the party, but most of the Apple Intelligence features the company promised garnered an underwhelming response. There wasn’t anything truly revolutionary in there. Features like Writing tools, Image Playground, and Clean Up fell into the “been there, done that” categories.

Still, there’s always been an unspoken expectation when it comes to such features that even if Apple is late, its execution will more than make up for it. However, with Apple Intelligence, even that expectation has fallen flat.

Unlike the polished, timely releases Apple is known for, AI features have been plagued by delays and inconsistencies, making for a disjointed user experience.

Timeline of Delays and Rollouts

• WWDC 202424 (June 2024): Apple announced Apple Intelligence to the world with the keynote at their annual developer conference, officially marking their foray into the world of AI.
• iOS 18 release (September 2024): iOS 18 is officially released as a stable version, with which, as per norms and expectations, Apple Intelligence should have arrived. However, the initial version of iOS 18 had no Apple Intelligence features.
• iOS 18.1 (October 2024): iOS 18.1 saw some Apple Intelligence features starting to come in. But it was again a slow and bumpy ride with features coming in fragmentation. A lot of features, like Writing tools, a slightly improved Siri with a new interface, Notification summaries, priority notifications in messages and mails, natural language search in the Photos app, and custom memory movies, AI-generated summaries for calls and notes recordings, and AI-powered focus mode arrived. However, the update still left out plenty of features — major ones at that.
• iOS 18.2 (December 2024): Another round of new Apple Intelligence features arrive, including ChatGPT integration, Image Playground, Genmoji, Image Wand, Visual Intelligence for camera on the iPhone 16 lineup. Still, the roster was far from complete.
• iOS 18.3 (January 2025): 8 months after Apple initially announced AI, the set of features coming under this umbrella was still in shambles. All promised features still haven’t arrived, and in what’s probably a first for Apple, the company disabled an AI feature they had already shipped. Due to inaccuracies, AI-generated notification summaries for news apps have temporarily been removed.
• iOS 18.4 (Expected in April 2025): While iOS 18.4 is expected to arrive next month, it still won’t ship with the remaining Apple Intelligence features, even 11 months after the first announcement.

Even after nearly a year, Apple Intelligence remains incomplete and inconsistent, making its debut one of Apple’s most turbulent rollouts in recent history.

Apple Intelligence: More Hype than Impact?

The fragmented rollout of Apple Intelligence features hasn’t been the only problem plaguing Apple’s AI. In fact, far from it.

By far, with all the Apple Intelligence features the company has shipped, it has failed to roll out anything that’s impacted the users’ lives in a meaningful manner.

Not everything about Apple Intelligence is a disappointment. Features like Writing Tools have provided a privacy-conscious alternative to AI-assisted writing, and priority notifications have added some utility to the AI experience. But beyond these few successes, Apple Intelligence remains largely forgettable.

Another feature — Notification summaries — is sort of steeped in a bit of controversy, much like most of Apple Intelligence at this point. While notification summaries can help users quickly scan their alerts, their AI-driven interpretation isn’t always reliable.

Notification summaries aren’t useless; in fact, far from it. But there’s also the fact that notification summaries have led to some huge mess-ups. Summaries struggle especially with text messages that tend to be more informal and can even be too literal, which an artificial intelligence model needs to better cope with. At other times, summaries have outright led to notifications, especially for news apps, that change the whole meaning of the news. It’s one of the reasons Apple has disabled notification summaries for news apps for the time being.

Features like Image Playground and Genmoji work fine, but none of the features bring anything meaningful to the table. For the most part, you might forget about their existence after toying with them for a while.

One feature for which most people, including me, were most excited about, other than the new Siri, was the Clean Up tool. It’s something that could have helped people out in their daily lives, that is, if it worked as well as it should have. Clean Up struggles with even simple edits, making it feel like an afterthought rather than a true AI-powered enhancement. In contrast, Google’s Pixel or Samsung’s S25 already offer a version of this feature that shows what’s truly possible.

Google’s Magic Eraser is even available on older iPhones, and it performs significantly better than Clean Up, removing objects cleanly without distortions. So, why can’t Apple step up?

However, as if all the constant disappointment around Apple Intelligence wasn’t enough, Apple dropped an even bigger bomb in the midst of it all. In hindsight, all the constant letdowns should have been a signal for the biggest disappointment around Apple Intelligence feature — Siri’s delay.

While there were rumors going around that the updates to Siri might arrive with iOS 18.4 in April, Apple pulled the rug from under its users last Friday when the company confirmed that Siri’s AI overhaul has been delayed indefinitely.

While the company wants to ship these features by at least the release of iOS 19 later in 2025 — and yes, the “at least” part is important — there is no clear timeline for when (or if) Apple will be able to deliver on its vision.

Siri’s Evolution: Another Letdown Instead of a Breakthrough

Apple promised a new era for Siri with Apple Intelligence — one that would make the virtual assistant truly useful. Users have been asking for this overhaul for years. And after neglecting Siri’s potential for far too long, it seemed like Apple was finally listening.

With the updates, Siri was supposed to become an indispensable assistant capable of seamlessly integrating with users’ daily lives, helping with anything and everything around your device, thanks to new abilities like contextual understanding, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions.

The improvements for Siri that Apple showcased at the WWDC 2024 last June were truly impressive. With a simple prompt like “When is Mom’s flight arriving?” Siri could understand who you meant by “Mom”, get her flight information from your emails, cross-check it against real-time information for that flight, and tell you the exact time your mother’s flight would land.

After spending years in a stasis, it looked like Siri would finally bloom and step into its potential. And this example was only the tip of the iceberg. With Siri’s abilities to take actions in and across your apps, it finally felt like the average user had a reason to care about all the hype around AI. Apple’s promise to deliver “AI for the rest of us” made sense.

Undoubtedly, Siri’s makeover was an ambitious take on Apple’s part. Yet the company promised the features with a confidence that did not indicate, not even once, the possibility that the features didn’t already exist and were almost ready to be shipped. But I’m left with this question:

Does An Improved Siri Even Exist?

While Mark Gurman’s report suggests that the new personalized Siri works, many Apple fans, including myself, are now taking this information with a grain of salt. It’s been 10 months since the WWDC 2024 keynote and there’s not a single demo for this new and improved Siri that has been shown to the public. If a feature works 80% of the time, can it at least not be demoed?

Even John Gruber of Daring Fireball calls it “vaporware”. No one outside of Apple can vouch for its existence, and that should raise concerns.

It can be argued that Apple, ever since its post-NeXT-reunification era, has followed a rule of not publishing concept videos. So, perhaps we should give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that the LLM Siri really does exist as more than a concept, and the only obstacle standing in the way of shipping it is to get it working 100% of the time.

But it can also be argued that the Apple that hasn’t published concept videos in decades was also an Apple that has never had to worry about falling behind in any sort of technology race. However, the era of AI changed that, and it can be argued that the company found itself in uncharted waters for the first time in a long time.

It wouldn’t be so hard to believe that this was indeed a company scrambling to appease its shareholders.

Apple’s AI Crisis: The Aftereffects of Siri’s Delay

Delays to the personalized Siri have now even led to delays in the release of Apple’s smart home hub, which some refer to as HomePad, because it reportedly relies on the new App Intent features with Siri.

According to a private meeting held by the Siri team, reports of which were shared by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the new personalized Siri is nowhere near ready to be shipped even now. According to the report, the AI-powered assistant reportedly works only 60-80% of the time, meaning that in about one-third of interactions, it simply fails.

In lieu of these numbers, Apple has decided to postpone the launch since the company only wants to ship a feature that users can really count on.

There doesn’t seem to be much else of a fallout from the all-hands meeting with the Siri team. Currently, the reports suggest that Apple doesn’t plan on firing any executives, but that could change in the future. However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a sense of urgency at the company. Reportedly, more executives are being shuffled under John Giannandra, the head of AI at Apple, to assist with the AI crisis and turn the situation around. The company’s AI efforts are also going to be the focus of the discussion at the major offsite exec meeting happening later this week.

Apple Intelligence vs. the Competition: Is It Already Too Late?

The problem with new Siri’s delay isn’t only a question of not getting the features we want. Even if the new Siri exists as more than just a concept and Apple can deliver it in 2026, by the time it arrives, will it already be too late?

The contextualized Siri was the highlight of Apple’s AI efforts. Siri has long suffered at the hands of Apple’s negligence — from being one of the first and best virtual assistants to exist, to becoming an obsolete afterthought. With the WWDC announcement, Siri finally felt like it could again claim a place in the lead.

But while Apple has been struggling to get its AI ducks in a row, Apple’s competitors have been shipping out steady updates to improve their assistants. Google is already tossing out Google Assistant in favor of Gemini on Android. Google’s Gemini is rapidly evolving, offering conversational AI that feels more intuitive and context-aware. It can even perform actions on your Android phone like a true assistant.

Even Samsung’s Bixby has come a long way. Samsung’s Galaxy AI can now take natural language prompts like “My eyes hurt” and intuitively suggest options to reach display settings. Meanwhile, Apple’s settings app is struggling to even return results for simple searches like “Messages” sometimes. You can forget natural language searches anytime soon on your iPhone.

With ChatGPT and Gemini showing us what AI assistants can truly be capable of, what will keep Apple and Siri in the race? Even Apple’s ChatGPT integration in Siri offers such a disjointed experience that it can hardly make a difference. Perhaps Apple should forget about trying to develop its in-house LLM and just buy OpenAI. How else would they close the increasing gap with their competitors seems like an impossible question to me.

Avoiding a Crisis of Faith

The company is now facing a full-blown crisis that extends beyond the crashing of its stocks and disappointing its shareholders. It’s facing a crisis of faith from even its most ardent fans.

There’s no doubt that Apple is now trying to contain this dumpster fire. Along with putting out the statement about the delays in new Siri, Apple has now also put up disclaimers about the delay on their website and (silently) pulled an iPhone 16 ad showcasing the Siri features from YouTube. To be honest, it was a grave mistake on Apple’s part to market the iPhone 16 lineup with Apple Intelligence features, especially the Siri overhaul, when the phone otherwise lacked major changes. It was a gross violation of the trust users put into the company to promote a feature that was not ready to be shipped, even months later.

If Apple wants to regain trust, it needs to give more than a statement or put up disclaimers on its website. I’m not asking them to ship a half-baked product; we’ve already had a lot of those since iOS 18. But there needs to be more transparency around what’s going on and at least some demonstrations to prove that the new Siri really does exist as something more than a concept.

On top of that, Apple is now also reportedly planning a major redesign with iOS 19, iPadOS 19, and macOS 16. At present, it feels like the company is hoping to distract users from its AI fails by dangling a shiny new redesign in front of them. However, if this redesign doesn’t include major changes under the hood to incorporate Apple Intelligence at the OS level, maybe Apple should just forget about it. There’s no amount of changes at the UI level that would make up for the absolute circus AI at Apple has turned into.