Apple could stay in penalty box on AI delays
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Apple could really use some of Steve Jobs’s famous reality distortion field right about now.
For the world’s most valuable company, a couple of pieces of reality have been clear for a while: Its current iPhone cycle is weak, with revenue from that product line up only 1.6% from a year earlier in the last six months of 2024. And despite weakness in the business that accounts for more than half of the company’s revenue, Apple’s stock has been a star—outperforming most of its megacap tech peers over the past 12 months and until recently carrying a valuation premium to all of them.
But that premium has taken a hit over the past week following reports that Apple is delaying the rollout of significant artificial-intelligence enhancements to its Siri voice assistant. This “more personalized Siri" would have access to on-device data across multiple apps and would thus be key to delivering a truly AI iPhone.
These features were widely expected to be included in the new iOS update to be unveiled at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, especially since Apple previewed some of them at last year’s conference. But in a statement on March 7, an Apple representative said “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features," adding that the company expects to roll them out “in the coming year." That leaves open the possibility that the AI-enhanced Siri upgrade might not come out until early 2026.
That admission curbed expectations of a major AI boost for the new iPhones launching this fall. “The delayed rollout of a more advanced Siri means Apple will have fewer features to accelerate iPhone upgrade rates in FY26," Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in a
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