For an AI loser, Apple did an terrible lot of successful final 12 months.
The mess that was the Apple Intelligence rollout was embarrassing, to make sure, however by all of it, the corporate stored doing what it does finest: promoting iPhones. With this week’s information that it’ll use Gemini models to power the long-awaited smarter Siri, Apple appears to have taken a giant ‘ol L in the entire AI race. However there’s nonetheless a serious problem forward — and Apple isn’t out of the working simply but.
Apple Intelligence bought off to a well-documented tough begin in 2024. The iPhone 16 was “Constructed for Apple Intelligence,” however shipped with out it. Options arrived over the following few months, however the so-called smarter Siri never materialized. Apple execs admitted they’d gone again to the drafting board, folks in cost had been shuffled round, and all of it regarded like a giant failure on Apple’s half.
But it surely doesn’t precisely look like individuals are able to ditch their iPhones for Google’s Gemini-imbued Android telephones. In response to IDC’s Q3 2025 report, “Demand for Apple’s new iPhone 17 lineup was sturdy, with pre-orders surpassing these of the earlier era.” Counterpoint Analysis calls Apple the worldwide smartphone “market chief” in 2025 with 10 percent year-over-year growth in market share. In the meantime, Apple Intelligence is far much less outstanding within the iPhone 17’s advertising and marketing than it was with the 16; it’s a must to scroll halfway down the iPhone 17’s product page earlier than you get to the primary point out.
The stalling tactic labored, however nowadays buyers escape in hives in case you don’t point out AI each 5 minutes. Apple needed to give you one thing in the best way of a method, and within the second half of 2025, we began listening to reviews that it might be looking at outside partners, quite than constructing its personal fashions from scratch. It wouldn’t be completely unprecedented; Apple already lets customers entry ChatGPT instantly in iOS and has promised from the beginning that it could add extra third-party LLMs on this vogue. However this week’s deal isn’t about including a fast option to chat with Gemini on an iPhone. You may already do this within the Gemini app. That is about constructing smarter Siri on Google’s fashions and working all of it in Apple’s Non-public Cloud Compute. If and when a better Siri arrives this 12 months, it’ll have some critical Gemini DNA.
You could possibly argue Apple made the appropriate name from a enterprise standpoint, however was it the appropriate Apple transfer? Think about Tim Cook’s own words in a 2009 earnings call: “We consider that we have to personal and management the first applied sciences behind the merchandise we make…” That was the inspiration of the corporate’s push to develop its personal silicon, which has completely been a successful technique. However both Apple thinks AI fashions aren’t a major expertise in spite of everything — extra like an underlying service it can construct merchandise on prime of — or it has made a critical misjudgment about AI as the following platform shift and dangers falling behind. Low stakes stuff!
That’s the problem: turning Apple Intelligence right into a product folks truly need, not one which they really feel detached towards
And to make sure, Apple doesn’t management the future of each a part of the iPhone. It hasn’t gone out and constructed a search engine, or its personal wi-fi community, or an algorithmic social media platform. All of these issues run on an iPhone, however they aren’t core elements of the iPhone’s identification, and AI may very effectively wind up the identical method. Possibly there’s a touch in the best way that Apple has seemingly shifted from encouraging builders to adopt its own App Intents framework to using the Anthropic-developed MCP as the basis for agentic features. If AI simply wants to search out the appropriate hooks to get issues finished, then the actual fashions it’s working matter much less. But it surely all hinges on the product that Apple creates round AI — and that begins with Siri.
That’s the actual problem forward of Apple: turning Apple Intelligence right into a product folks truly need, not one which they really feel detached towards. It wants to show Siri into the factor the corporate has promised all alongside, not a glorified timer-setting machine. Apple could make an exquisite product — little question. Can it do this with out management over its personal fashions? Can it do this quicker than Google or Jony Ive or another competitor able to make a run on the backyard partitions? The deal could also be inked, however the actual work begins now.
