A Quick Conversation about Apple's AI & Siri Problem
Saturday, March 15, 2025
In the technology sector, if you aren’t innovating, you’re falling behind. This is no different for Apple, who is not used to being behind on features. Generally, Apple waits until they’ve perfected a technology before introducing it to the public. Recently, this isn’t the case when we consider the cutbacks of the Apple Vision Pro, and this past week, AI features.
Famous Apple watcher, Mark Gurman, who is usually correct on Apple predictions published a scathing blog post about Apple falling behind with respect to LLMs and AI as a whole in his Daring Fireball post entitled, “Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino”.
In his post, Gurman discusses how the promises that Apple announced has hurt the company’s credibility with customers. Siri has always been flawed without much innovation in the past few years, but with Google, OpenAI, and others surging ahead – Apple is left with what he calls Siri’s capabilities as “vaporware”.
In previous iOS updates, Apple had to deprecate and continually delay features because of bugs, AI hallucinations, and parlor tricks with non-differentiating features than that of say Gemini for Google or Claude for Anthropic. Voice assistants are as complex and innovative as ever, and now we’re witnessing the unfolding of what agentic browsers can accomplish.
In a recent blog post, venture capitalist, Om Malik, a legend in his own right, postulates that, “Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighted down by its own market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.”
This reminds me of the best-selling book by Clayton Christensen called, “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. The theory holds that current dominant companies fail to adapt to newer disruptive technologies (AI and LLMs in this case) and failing to pivot from their own strengths and ultimately fail. We see such a case with Intel, missing the mobile generation and ultimately at a crossroads of failure or being broken up and sold for pieces.
As we know, Apple has successfully broken the innovator’s dilemma before with deprecating its successful iPod for the iPhone, eventually releasing the iPad, and creating an ecosystem around which make the company increasingly successful with each pivot. It’s too soon to tell if Apple has reached its peak with major setbacks with Siri and Apple Intelligence, but it is alarming to shareholders and Apple stakeholders alike. It’s certainly a development to watch.