Apple pushes back hard on whispers that its AI-powered Siri is vaporware.
The issue started after last year’s WWDC 24 reveal of personalized Siri tech that still hasn’t launched. Critics called it vaporware. Apple execs deny that.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, says the tech isn’t shipping yet because Apple is treating AI as a “long-term transformational wave” — no rush to launch an unfinished product. 
“There’s no need to rush out with the wrong features and the wrong product just to be first,” Federighi said.
He explained to Tom’s Guide and TechRadar that Apple demoed the first version of Siri’s new AI last year to show its vision. But a second version, still under development, will ship in 2026.
“We were filming real working software with a real large language model with real semantic search,” Federighi told The Wall Street Journal.
Apple marketing boss Greg Joswiak pushed back on claims the demo was fake.
“There’s this narrative out there that it’s demoware only. No, it was… something we thought, as Craig said, we’d actually ship by later in the year,” Joswiak said.
“We felt it had an error rate that was unacceptable.”
The execs made clear Apple’s goal isn’t to build a chatbot to compete with ChatGPT or Bard but to infuse AI across all its platforms.
Federighi said:
“This wasn’t about us building a chatbot… we weren’t defining what Apple Intelligence was to be our chatbot. That was never our goal… We want to bring intelligence deeply integrated into the experience of all of our platforms in a way that’s ‘meet you where you are’ — not that you’re going off into some chat experience in order to get things done.”
Apple wants developers to use its foundation models to build smarter apps.
Watch the full interview with Craig Federighi on Tom’s Guide:
And the WSJ chat here:
