Siri Didn’t Rescue Apple

Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) new Siri upgrade won’t work in the EU or China for now. China is the world’s largest smartphone market. So, in China, consumers will use old apps on current Apple products. Siri works, supposedly, the way products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT do. Many of its features were teased at the Worldwide Developers Conference, but those features aren’t available today. It will use Apple’s “world knowledge” data instead of Google search data. Google’s Gemini will power many of Siri’s features. It has child safety features, but not much else. It would be kind to say the release, among Apple customers, both current and future ones, and Wall St., reacted as if the new service was anything more than an AI product they can already download on their iPhones. The new Siri also works with other Apple products.

Apple says the new Siri will be in “beta” when it comes out in a few weeks. That means Apple’s development is not done. It is a reminder of last September, when Apple did not launch an AI product at all. Consumers and investors were to wait until this year when a new AI-based iOS would be released. That never happened.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, tried to brush aside concerns about whether Siri was good enough to compete with AI products like Gemini and ChatGPT, which have been on the market for years and have hundreds of millions of downloads. “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing A.I. for the sake of A.I., without clear regard for the people — all of us — that it’s ultimately meant to serve,” he said. Of course, there is the argument that Apple could not get its AI product out the door due to poor planning and the departure of several of its top AI programmers to competitors’ programs.”

Apple senior management kept using the phrase, “this Fall, the isall.” In other words, Siri has a ways to go before it is really a competitor in consumer-facing AI.

Stock price is not the only measure of a product launch. On a day when the overall tech stocks rallied. Apple was down 2%. Its year-to-year performance is about the same as the S&P 500’s.

It used to be that when Apple introduced a new iPhone, former CEO Steve Jobs would take the stage, and the day the new iPhone was available to the public, people slept in long lines outside of Apple Stores. It is unlikely that there will be long lines outside Apple stores this year.

Apple needed more than a mundane product to show it had caught the competition. One would think people have waited long enough for that. They will have to wait a little longer.