Some Apple Employees Have 'Concerns' About iOS 26.4's Revamped Siri

[Macaholic868]

Well it’s October and they realistically have until the end of spring of 2026 to deliver a beta. I know many will doubt if it’s not out in beta by late January / mid February but as long as they actually deliver by the spring, at least in a developer beta, I don’t think it’ll be another complete and total PR disaster.

We know they are talking with external partners to use their engines or LLMs for some of it to bridge the gap, so until we know more details about why they are worried, it’s hard to read the tea leaves. I think any employee would be worried given the massive brain drain to Meta and other AI startups.

So is it the tech itself, is it the brain drain without the new leadership having much of a track record, are their parts that will be licensed that only some employees are aware of on a need to know basis before Apple publicly announces a partnership with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity? Is it some or all of the above?

Let’s say the personal Siri stuff is coming along well but the general knowledge stuff isn’t looking great but Apple is close to announcing a partnership with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity to fill in that gap so Apple process the private, sensitive stuff on device and in its Private Cloud but it licenses the tech or lets another provider handle the general knowledge stuff, but only select employees know that’s coming?

There’s just so many unknown, unknowns that it’s hard to speculate. Here we go again is the default reaction and I get why.

I’m not saying it’s a nothing burger. It could be, but even if it isn’t are we talking a small burger or a quarter pounder, a half pounder or a full on pound of meat here? IDK because there isn’t enough information to speculate. 🤔

 

[chineseguy38]

More empty promises from Tim Apple 😂

 

[ronno]

I don't have an issue with him releasing that.

It's that people on tech forums eat up the "information" like it has been passed down from heaven on stone tablets. Which for me is really amusing.

People on rumors sites want rumors 🤫

 

[Flight Plan]

As an aside, Vision Pro may be a flop to you, but Apple you can bet, got a lot out of it and doesn’t consider it a flop.

Yep, data and information. Arguably the most important things you can get when you want something to not be a flop.

Like everything else Apple does, some will like it and some will dislike it.

Most will bloviate on MR that they hate it or it's somehow inferior. It may or may not be. But 80% will dis it bigly.

At this point, Apple is long past due releasing it.

At this point, Siri and Alexa get 85% of the job done for me. I'm happy to wait.

Release what you have it so I can continue not using Siri .

Did you mean "Release WHEN you have it"? If so, I'm okay with that.

Here I was hoping employees were worried because it was so good. Instead, employees are worried because it’s so awful.

How do we know that? It just says they "have concerns". My manager says the same thing, but until I have a deeper two-way conversation, I have no idea what her "concerns" might be. They could be about me, they could be about one of my employees, they could be about an implementation plan we have, they could be about our strategy for holiday coverage, or they could be about something I haven't even heard about yet.

We need to hold our horses and just wait for more information. Always assuming the worst is just adding artificial and unnecessary stress.

More likely he didn't release any details because he has no details and just wanted something to publish.

This is possible, entirely possible.

Or it’s to do with how journalists sometimes work when they get told information if they publish every nook and cranny then you can pinpoint who it has actually come from

This is also possible.

It's good news just look at the dumpster fire that is Windows 11 and Copilot. In the age of corporate AI less is more.

I disabled Copilot. Windows 11 is fine and I use it on two different computers.

“Concerns” is such a vague word it’s almost meaningless without more context. It’s a slow news week for Gurman’s paid newsletter so he needs to toss in something juicy. Hence the single, detail-free sentence. Siri 2.0 could be a dumpster fire, but it also could be suffering from the usual issues that plague all software six months before release.

Yours is the most reasonable analysis I've ever seen on this entire subject.

The AI bubble is gonna pop before this new Siri ever comes out lol

Do we have an AI bubble? I don't know. I will say that I see a lot of "bubble behavior" all around all things AI. One of those things is the appearance of many companies that tout their AI prowess, but have no evidence of being able to attribute actual EARNINGS to the use/sale of AI products or services.

Additionally, the term "Artificial Intelligence" is not really all that clearly defined.

For one person, Siri being able to give movie times and locations is AI. For another person, you have to be able to carry on a 2-way conversation. For me, the AI assistant must be able to interpret context, and be able to carry on compound conversations with multiple subjects, all without misunderstanding me. Also for me, the assistant must not overrely on Large Language Model results.

The true test for me would be, "Can this AI carry on a conversation with my mother (if she were still alive)? She didn't think procedurally like I do. It's because I was contaminated by years of writing code and being in IT. I could have breakfast with her, and God bless her soul, 45 minutes later, she has updated me on every member of both sides of the family, her friend in the hospital, my cousin with this medical condition, and somebody else's kid who's in advanced classes in school. My mother would refer to my dad as "daddy", and that's been ever since I was a kid! An AI would get confused just conversing with my mom, thinking that there are twelve other people party to the conversation, but how can that be when her father passed in the 1970s and I haven't seen some of my cousins for more than 20 or 30 years?

I can track all that, even if I did occasionally have to ask mom to clarify some pronoun she used, only to learn that there was a new person she was talking about.

Tony Stark's Jarvis or Friday could track all of that. But they're still fictional and there's no commercially available AI assistant with the ability to do anything close to that. That's my benchmark. We still have such a long way to go, and that's just to come to agreement on what AI even is.

But man oh man, this sure is an exciting time to be alive. For sure!

 

[Reeneman]

Can’t believe this site made an article from a one word line from Gurman which tells us nothing. On a release which is 6 months away!!!

Talk about running out of article ideas

6 months isn’t that long for such a complex development.

 

[Naraxus]

This is Gurman ...

You get better, more accurate reporting with Weekly World News or The Onion

 

[citysnaps]

People on rumors sites want rumors 🤫

If I were going to publicly take Apple or Cook to task, I would want verified facts. Rather than rumors. It's only fair.

Seems most people here are OK with relying on rumors with respect to the above. And don't care what the adverse consequences might be.

 

[apple2022]

We will (literally) have cars that drive from A to B without intervention almost every time that you can have full-blown conversations with while it drives you around before Apple can implement an assistant that can actually assist you. Meanwhile the conversation mode in ChatGPT is really great, listens, stops when you interrupt it, speaks very naturally, etc.

 

[0xjf]

LOL right? Siri is completely useless and even ios26 sucks plus autocorrect got worse! I asked Siri for a 50 minute timer, while wearing my Apple Watch Ultra and wearing AirPod pro 2 and with an iPhone 16 pro max. The timer wasn’t set. I missed a personal goal. Siri is useless.

I am an apple fan to my core but if they can’t deliver on improved AI assistant features, I will strongly consider using pixel 10 pro fold full time.

 

[Naraxus]

Yeah, I'm not sure what to say anymore.
If one doesn't think the Vision Pro is a flop, I don't know what would ever be considered a flop to that person.

I wonder if these people think it's a flop

How Apple's Vision Pro is helping this ALS patient to perform simple tasks

Mark, 64, from Pennsylvania, who has ALS, has become the first patient in the world to use an Apple Vision Pro to help him communicate.

abcnews.go.com

Apple Vision Pro as an augmentative tool in surgery: a double-edged scalpel - PMC

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Stanford Medicine uses augmented reality for real-time data visualization during surgery

Stanford Medicine physician uses augmented reality to streamline data visualization during surgery.

med.stanford.edu

The Apple Vision Pro as a Neurosurgical Planning Tool: A Case Report - PMC

With its recent release, the Apple Vision Pro (Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA) represents a promising technological advancement of mixed reality in the field of neurosurgery and medicine more broadly. With all new technologies, it is critical to ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[turbineseaplane]

I wonder if these people think it's a flop

How Apple's Vision Pro is helping this ALS patient to perform simple tasks

Mark, 64, from Pennsylvania, who has ALS, has become the first patient in the world to use an Apple Vision Pro to help him communicate.

abcnews.go.com

Apple Vision Pro as an augmentative tool in surgery: a double-edged scalpel - PMC

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Stanford Medicine uses augmented reality for real-time data visualization during surgery

Stanford Medicine physician uses augmented reality to streamline data visualization during surgery.

med.stanford.edu

The Apple Vision Pro as a Neurosurgical Planning Tool: A Case Report - PMC

With its recent release, the Apple Vision Pro (Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA) represents a promising technological advancement of mixed reality in the field of neurosurgery and medicine more broadly. With all new technologies, it is critical to ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Flop ≠ “no uses for anyone”

 

[avanpelt]

Apple needs to focus on having Siri do the things they probably won’t ever let any third-party assistant do — interact directly with device settings, accounts, data, and apps on the device. It needs to be the best at those things.

The nonsense about Siri trying to answer “world knowledge” questions needs to end. It’s a failure at that task. Apple ceded that ability to third-party assistants or search engines years ago.

Along those lines, every time I ask Siri something while I’m driving and it says, “Sorry, I can’t show the result to you while you’re in the car”, I want to throw my iPhone out the window. It’s idiotic. Thank God we have alternatives like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that can have mostly coherent conversations in the car these days.

 

[Siliconguy]

6 months isn’t that long for such a complex development.

Can’t believe this site made an article from a one word line from Gurman which tells us nothing. On a release which is 6 months away!!!

Talk about running out of article ideas

The important thing is the schedule. March next year I can decide whether to stand pat on Sonoma until 27 comes out hoping against hope that it doesn't suck eve more, move to Tahoe and hope it works, or throw up my hands in disgust and goto the Fedora/Ashahi Linux install. I have a base M1 Air, so with the AI models sucking up storage and the 8 GB RAM it's not likely to do that well.

 

[erihp]

this is terrifying, could it really be WORSE??

where have these concerned engineers been for the last 10 or so years?

 

[erihp]

We will (literally) have cars that drive from A to B without intervention almost every time that you can have full-blown conversations with while it drives you around before Apple can implement an assistant that can actually assist you. Meanwhile the conversation mode in ChatGPT is really great, listens, stops when you interrupt it, speaks very naturally, etc.

if youre talking about out Tesla, no you wont.

if youre talking about Waymo, its (literally) already here, I see it every day.

 

[smulji]

I wonder if these people think it's a flop

How Apple's Vision Pro is helping this ALS patient to perform simple tasks

Mark, 64, from Pennsylvania, who has ALS, has become the first patient in the world to use an Apple Vision Pro to help him communicate.

abcnews.go.com

Apple Vision Pro as an augmentative tool in surgery: a double-edged scalpel - PMC

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Stanford Medicine uses augmented reality for real-time data visualization during surgery

Stanford Medicine physician uses augmented reality to streamline data visualization during surgery.

med.stanford.edu

The Apple Vision Pro as a Neurosurgical Planning Tool: A Case Report - PMC

With its recent release, the Apple Vision Pro (Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA) represents a promising technological advancement of mixed reality in the field of neurosurgery and medicine more broadly. With all new technologies, it is critical to ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

MS' HoloLens was doing these things as well. We know how that went

 

[ronno]

If I were going to publicly take Apple or Cook to task, I would want verified facts. Rather than rumors. It's only fair.

Seems most people here are OK with relying on rumors with respect to the above. And don't care what the adverse consequences might be.

$3 trillion company can withstand some rumors.

 

[Boeingfan]

The good news is that we can always go back to encyclopedias, street directories, and phone a friend. Siri... well, let's just say that they're preparing her redundancy paperwork in HR, because HR never fix problems, they just manage them out 😄

 

[Silverado]

I have more than just some concerns about the current version of Siri. And I am talking about functionality that used to work a few years ago.

 

[transpo1]

Well it’s October and they realistically have until the end of spring of 2026 to deliver a beta. I know many will doubt if it’s not out in beta by late January / mid February but as long as they actually deliver by the spring, at least in a developer beta, I don’t think it’ll be another complete and total PR disaster.

We know they are talking with external partners to use their engines or LLMs for some of it to bridge the gap, so until we know more details about why they are worried, it’s hard to read the tea leaves. I think any employee would be worried given the massive brain drain to Meta and other AI startups.

So is it the tech itself, is it the brain drain without the new leadership having much of a track record, are their parts that will be licensed that only some employees are aware of on a need to know basis before Apple publicly announces a partnership with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity? Is it some or all of the above?

Let’s say the personal Siri stuff is coming along well but the general knowledge stuff isn’t looking great but Apple is close to announcing a partnership with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity to fill in that gap so Apple process the private, sensitive stuff on device and in its Private Cloud but it licenses the tech or lets another provider handle the general knowledge stuff, but only select employees know that’s coming?

There’s just so many unknown, unknowns that it’s hard to speculate. Here we go again is the default reaction and I get why.

I’m not saying it’s a nothing burger. It could be, but even if it isn’t are we talking a small burger or a quarter pounder, a half pounder or a full on pound of meat here? IDK because there isn’t enough information to speculate. 🤔

Great response! There are just too many unknowns right now.

 

[TonyC28]

Well, my iPhone 16 Pro was built for it. So, ya know, we’re…uh…ready when you are, Apple.

 

[supergt]

Well, my iPhone 16 Pro was built for it. So, ya know, we’re…uh…ready when you are, Apple.

There's a $50 iTunes gift card with your name on it once the inevitable class action lawsuit settles.

 

[Artemiz]

It's very simple.

Apple aims for excellence. Consistency.

LLMs are simply incapable of this.

Have you looked at the excellence that is iOS 26 yet?

I got a dark mode Passwords app icon for a light mode setup. Not sure what kind of rock you've been living under, but what Apple has been doing the past few years has been neither consistent nor excellent. Or even close to that.

 

[Virinprew]

At least, we don't have to worry about Siri being Skynet anytime soon.

 

[dampfnudel]

It’s a shame Apple keeps struggling with it. Their hardware is usually solid, but the software remains half-baked, at least when it comes to Siri/AI. Apple just can’t attract the right people to “finish” the job.