Friday, 7 March 2025

Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim:

“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.”

This is a Friday sort of wah-waaah sad-trombone news drop, but it’s good that Apple is getting on top of it, and setting expectations accurately.

Reading between the lines, and based on my PhD-level fluency in Cupertino-ese, what Apple is saying here is that these “more personalized Siri” features are being punted from this year’s OS cycle to next year’s: to iOS 19 and MacOS 16. Apple’s years in this context aren’t calendar years, but Apple’s OS product years. Those years effectively start at WWDC. The problem, from Apple’s perspective, messaging-wise, is that they don’t talk about future products. They haven’t officially acknowledged there is going to be an iOS 19 or MacOS 16. They haven’t even yet announced that there’s going to be a WWDC 2025. But they do want to set expectations accurately, especially for a feature as high profile — from Apple’s own marketing push — as Apple Intelligence. So here we are.

It was already pretty obvious these features weren’t coming in iOS 18.4/MacOS 15.4, because they’re not in the developer betas that are already out. And if these features were coming in iOS 18.5/MacOS 15.5, or even iOS 18.6/MacOS 15.6, Apple wouldn’t have felt the need to issue this “It’s going to take us longer than we thought…” statement today. Delivering the “more personalized Siri” in iOS 18.5 or even 18.6 would have been delivering them on the originally announced schedule — the “coming year” that began with WWDC 2024. That would have been the tail end of that “year”, but within it. But Apple, being limited to the self-imposed opaque verbiage of Cupertino-ese, isn’t going to spell that out. But trust me, you can bank on it: what they’re announcing today is that these features are coming in iOS 19/MacOS 16.

Siri has improved in several useful, but iterative, ways under the Apple Intelligence umbrella in this year’s OS cycle (iOS/iPadOS 18 + MacOS 15 Sequoia), but the big “more personalized Siri” that was shown at WWDC last June is the Siri-related Apple Intelligence stuff that people are, justifiably, most excited about. This is the “App Intents” stuff — the features requiring Siri to have access to and, effectively, understanding of your personal information, in your apps, stored privately on your devices. These are the most helpful-sounding, most practical, most futuristic features of Apple Intelligence. And they’re the sort of features Apple is almost uniquely positioned to offer, alongside only Google, as the provider of a mobile platform and device ecosystem.

From Apple’s own announcement, after the WWDC keynote:

Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to the
user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say,
“Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,” and Siri will locate
and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether
it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, “When
is Mom’s flight landing?” and Siri will find the flight details
and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an
arrival time.

“When is Mom’s flight landing?” is easily understood, by we humans, and a really good example of the sort of Siri interaction that would be obviously useful. But you can also pretty easily see how complex it is on Apple’s side. Siri has long been able to do the “Mom” thing. Your spouse, your kids — you’ve long able to tell Siri to call or text those people by nickname like that. But getting your mom’s flight information out of your email (which I think was the premise of this demo in the WWDC keynote — that the flight info was stored in a message in Mail) or from text messages, and then knowing how to check for current flight status information for that flight, is something far beyond the ken of current Siri. Getting the information requires access to your most personal information — your own email and messages. Getting the correct information from your messages requires the common sense of understanding that you’re obviously asking about some sort of current trip your mom is taking, not, say, an email she sent you about a flight back in 2019, or one from 2022, or even one from December last year. The Siri we currently know lacks that sort of common sense. And then lastly, after getting the correct flight from your email, performing this task requires Siri to have the agency to go look up the current status of that particular flight — and get it right every time it provides an answer.

If Siri answers, “Your mom’s flight is arriving at 4:30 this afternoon, and it’s currently showing an on-time arrival,” you really want that information to be correct if you’ve promised to pick her up at the airport. You’ll be annoyed if you drive to the airport and it turns out she’s not actually landing until 7:30. And you’ll be in real trouble if she’s landing at 1:30 and you show up three hours later, having banked on Siri’s answer being accurate.

It’s very unusual, to say the least, for Apple to announce a product delay.¹ The white iPhone 4 was supposed to debut alongside the black one in June 2010, but, bizarrely, was delayed several times (which I had fun with more than once) and wound up not shipping until the end of April the next year, 10 months late. The original AirPods were announced alongside the iPhones 7 in September 2016, and were supposed to ship in October. They wound up being delayed until December. Apple’s statement in October 2016, regarding the AirPods being delayed, as given to Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch:

“The early response to AirPods has been incredible. We don’t
believe in shipping a product before it’s ready, and we need a
little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers.”

This is exactly why Apple hews to an almost religious policy of not announcing products before they’re ready. When they do make exceptions — when they lapse, as it were, as cited above (and below) — they often regret it. You can’t break a promise you never made, and you can’t miss a ship date you never announced. Even with talented teams and realistic managers, there’s often a long span between how long you expect a project to take and how long it actually winds up taking. Engineering schedules often slip even with predictable technologies, and the non-deterministic nature of LLMs makes their future inherently unpredictable.

Most of Apple Intelligence has felt like Apple has pushed it out a year ahead of the company’s usual level of baked-ness. I’ve held all year long that if the entire industry — along with Wall Street — weren’t in the midst of a generative-AI/LLM mania, that “Apple Intelligence” wouldn’t have been announced until this year’s WWDC, not last year’s. Today’s announcement is disappointing, but to me utterly unsurprising. The Siri integration with personal data through App Intents has never felt like something that was going to be ready for real customer usage in this year’s OS cycle. And if it’s Apple’s general policy not to ship a product before it’s ready, that applies tenfold for a product involving LLM access to deeply private on-device information. It’s better to ship late, but ready, than to ship something unfinished or unreliable to hit a promised deadline. And with something like next-generation Siri, I’d say that’s downright essential. Apple can take the bad publicity today’s announcement is engendering; they cannot afford to squander the trust of their users.