As reported by John Gruber, Apple announced on Friday that some of its most anticipated Apple Intelligence features won’t make it in this year’s cycle after all. Apple representative Jacqueline Roy:
Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.
The first sentence is just a recitation of existing Siri features. The second sentence details the features that haven’t made it yet. The third sentence promises for rollouts “in the coming year,” which probably means iOS 19.
Those features were the most interesting ones Apple announced last June, but even at the time they seemed ambitious. Apple said it would build a “semantic index” of your on-device data, giving Apple Intelligence a leg up on the competition by being able to understand personal data that’s not available to cloud A.I. models. It also said it was adding the ability to look at your device’s display and understand what was happening on screen, and using the App Intents framework to allow Apple Intelligence to control your apps and use multiple apps to deal with your requests.
This led to one of the killer demos of WWDC 2024, in which Siri was able to understand when someone’s mom’s flight is landing by cross-referencing an email with real-time flight tracking to get a good answer. From there, the demo pulls a lunch plan with mom out of a text thread and then displays how long the drive is to there from the airport—all from within Siri, rather than individual apps.
It became clear early on that these features wouldn’t appear until later in the iOS 18 cycle, but with this announcement Apple is admitting that it just couldn’t deliver on these ambitious announcements in time. The OS cycle is about to flip over and we’re only three months away from the next WWDC.
Those Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 2024 were vitally important for Apple. The company felt that it had to show that it hadn’t completely missed the boat on the hottest topic in the tech industry, and that it was working hard to infuse the power of AI through all its products. I would argue that succeeded at doing so, and its barrage of Apple Intelligence marketing the past six months has reinforced the point. People in the know might criticize that Apple’s behind, or that its tools aren’t close to the state of the art, but the general perception is that Apple’s in the game—which was a real question last year at this time.
In exchange for all of that, Apple put itself out there and took risks that it might not have if it hadn’t felt immense pressure on the AI front. If you had asked Apple executives a year ago if they should risk overpromising and underdelivering when it comes to Apple Intelligence during the iOS 18 cycle, clearly the answer would have been yes. I don’t want to say that WWDC 2024’s announcements were just about hype, but they weren’t not about hype.
And if you asked those same Apple executives if they were aware that the cost of underdelivering those features in the spring of 2025 would be getting beaten up in the press a little bit for delaying features, perhaps even back to iOS 19? I’m pretty sure they’d say that a little bit of negative press today, when the world isn’t really paying that close attention to Apple and AI, would totally be worth it.
Apple got exactly what it wanted out of WWDC 2024. The penalty for failing to ship some of those features will be the equivalent of a slap on the wrists. But this all increases the stakes for WWDC 2025, when Apple will still need to show that it’s capable of creating useful Apple Intelligence features—and its audience should be more skeptical about the company’s ability to ship them.
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