It's incredibly rare for Apple to announce a delay to one of its products. But that's exactly what it's just done with its advanced Siri features, which were due out soon and are now not going to make it till towards the back end of the year – I expect it to be released in the next iOS upgrade cycle now.
I think this delay reveals something fundamental about the world's most successful tech company and its relationship with innovation. Consider this telling coincidence: In the same year that OpenAI released GPT-3, one of the first truly large-scale LLMs, Apple executed a 4-for-1 stock split. That juxtaposition tells us everything we need to know about why Apple now finds itself playing catch-up in the AI revolution.
The pattern is depressingly familiar in successful businesses. A company achieves spectacular success, then gradually shifts its focus from transformative innovation to shareholder value – dividends, stock splits, and the comforting predictability of incremental improvements. Meanwhile, the future takes shape elsewhere, often in messier, less immediately profitable corners of the industry.
Apple has long been characterised as a "fast follower" rather than a pioneering innovator. It wasn't the first to make an MP3 player, smartphone, or even a personal computer. This strategy served Apple brilliantly in the past – observing others' mistakes, then delivering exquisitely refined products with unmatched attention to design, usability, and integration. The first iPhone wasn't novel in concept, but revolutionary in execution because it had a unique interface: multitouch. In fact, I would argue this was the last time Apple’s user interfaces went in a bold direction.
But AI presents a fundamentally different challenge. This isn't merely a new product category to be perfected – it's a paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology. Unlike hardware innovations where Apple could polish existing concepts, AI is redefining the entire computing experience, from point-click or touch-tap to conversations. The interface layer between humans and devices is transforming in ways that might render Apple's traditional advantages increasingly irrelevant.
More troubling still is the misalignment between Apple's business model and AI's trajectory. Apple thrives on high-margin hardware in a controlled ecosystem, while AI is primarily software and services-driven, often benefiting from openness and scale. If computing evolves toward AI-first, conversational experiences, Apple's hardware prowess and locked down approach could become secondary considerations for consumers.
A spectacular distraction
While Apple has been meticulously crafting its spatial computing future with Vision Pro, the company has stumbled in the AI present – a misstep that may prove costly in ways Tim Cook's spreadsheets cannot yet quantify.
The postponement of the new Siri features isn't merely a scheduling hiccup; it's a revealing moment that exposes the company's strategic blind spot. There's a profound irony here: the company that tantalised us with the Knowledge Navigator concept in 1987 – a remarkably prescient vision of conversational computing – has become the technological equivalent of an absentee parent, promising to show up for the AI revolution but repeatedly texting that it's running late.
The billions poured into Vision Pro reflect Apple's hardware-obsessed DNA, a comfortable space where the company can control every micron of the experience. Meanwhile, the messy, evolving landscape of conversational AI – the interface revolution actually happening now – has been left to competitors who embraced the chaos and imperfection inherent in emerging technologies.
This isn't to say Vision Pro lacks merit. It's a spectacular achievement in many ways. But Apple appears to have backed the wrong horse in the race for the next transformative interface. While OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have been rapidly iterating their AI offerings in public, Apple has been polishing a headset that, however brilliant, remains peripheral to how most of us will interact with technology tomorrow.
A company that once moved boldly – because it had to in order to survive – now moves more cautiously, weighed down by its success. Each financial quarter brings big profits but perhaps diminishing courage and ambition. The adventurous and playful spirit that conceived the Knowledge Navigator and made a big bet on multitouch interfaces has been displaced by the conservative instincts of a company with too much to lose.
What Apple needs now is precisely what brought it back from the brink in the late '90s: bravery. Rather than simply building on the iPhone, work out how to tear it down. Perhaps it will even take a skunkworks project unburdened by the company's current success metrics, free to reimagine the fundamental relationship between humans and machines. A space where failure is acceptable if it teaches valuable lessons about conversational computing.
Apple isn't out of the AI race, but it's running with untied shoelaces, and it keeps tripping up. The question isn't whether it can catch up technically – its resources ensure that's possible – but whether it can rediscover the institutional courage to embrace the messiness of revolutionary change. In today's tech landscape, playing it safe might be the riskiest strategy of all.