Comment by johnthuss a day ago
The biggest NEW thing here is that this isn't white-labeled. Apple is officially acknowledging Google as the model that will be powering Siri. That explicit acknowledgment is a pretty big deal. It will make it harder for Apple to switch to its own models later on.
There's zero chance Apple would want to end up with a situation of "buy our iPhone with Gemini" competing with "buy our Android with Gemini".
They will do everything possible to avoid that and so re-brand is the only likely outcome.
This is a double-edged sword. Apple would love any failure to be blamed on Google, but not the branding to go with it.
Apple's brand is so dominant that even if they say Siri is "powered by Google", most users will still perceive it as an Apple service. The only way that changes is if Apple consistently and prominently surfaces the Google name on Siri — which seems unlikely (but who knows when the stakes are so high).
Apple is already taking the risk of being blamed for their own AI right now, though (an AI that is much more prone to incredibly dumb errors than Gemini), so I don't find it that obvious that they wouldn't just continue taking the blame for Siri as they already do, except with an actually smarter Siri.
If I were Goodle, I'd offer Apple a very significant discount to have visible branding of "powered by Gemini".
I'm sure Apple is more than happy to pay the premium for cleanness.
Maybe they'd prefer it for aesthetics, but OTOH in iOS 18.2+ they support off-device ChatGPT and apparently refer to it as "ChatGPT" both in settings and when prompting the user to ask if they want to use it.
If they do refer to it as "Gemini" then this is a huge win for Google, and huge loss for OpenAI, since it really seems that the "ChatGPT" brand is the only real "moat" that OpenAI have, although recently there has been about a 20% shift in traffic from ChatGPT to Gemini, so the moat already seems to be running dry.
I don't see why - iOS originally shipped with Google Maps as standard, for example. Macs shipped with Internet Explorer as standard before Safari existed
The Google Maps situation is a great example of why this will be hard. When Apple switched to their own maps it was a huge failure resulting in a rare public apology from the company. In order to switch you have to be able to do absolutely everything that the previous solution offered without loss of quality. Given Google's competence in AI development that will be a high bar to meet.
several years after that they still have their own Maps though, they didn't go back to Google Maps.
That's the point of what the person you replied to is saying.
it's hard but not impossible. Unless Apple didn't learn the Google Maps/Maps lesson.
Well, yeah, Apple's Maps.app wasn't good enough when it launched (it's solid now though). That feels like a separate thing from white labeling and lock-in. Obviously they would have to switch to something of similar or better quality or users will be upset.
But it's a whole lot easier to switch from Gemini to Claude or Gemini to a hypothetical good proprietary LLM if it's white label instead of "iOS with Gemini"
I prefer Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation and public transit. However, I still keep Google Maps around for business data and points of interest. This is where Apple Maps is still lacking significantly. The fact that Apple still prompts me to download Yelp to view images of a business is insane to me.
>it's solid now though
Depends on where you are. In my experience here in Sweden Google Maps is still better, Apple maps sent us for a loop in Stockholm (literally {{{(>_<)}}} )
Yep, in my rural area Apple maps is not usable, Google maps works fine. Waze, also Google, is even better.
I was in agreement with the parent before I read this, and now I'm in agreement with you. It is a great example, I know so many people who never switched back to Apple Maps because it was so poor initially. Personally I find it a considerably better experience than Google Maps these days, but those lost users still aren't coming back.
Mobile digital mapping was already a useful thing though. Even though Apple Maps was initially a failure I still came back to it every so often to see how it was progressing and eventually it ended up pretty good.
Maybe I'm weird but mobile assistants have never been useful for me. I tried Siri a couple of times and it didn't work. I haven't tried it since because even if it worked perfectly I'm not sure I'd have any use for it.
I see it more like the Vision Pro. Doesn't matter how good the product ends up being, I just don't think it's something most people are going to have a use for.
As far as I'm concerned no one has proved the utility of these mobile assistants yet.
Apple ultimately developed their own map application specifically because Google was unwilling to remove the Google logo from the Google Maps app, no matter the price.
It'll absolutely be interesting to see if "Google" or "Gemini" appear anywhere in the new Siri UI.
As someone who hasn’t used Google Search in several years, I will be upset and less inclined to use the AI if it’s kicking me out to Google search result pages to show results. This is what I fear. Some of this already happens with Siri and Apple Intelligence today. I’m sure Google would love to see even more of it, to serve up ads and take advantage of their new revenue streams in agentic shopping.
Why so?
Apple explicitly acknowledged that they were using OpenAI’s GPT models before this, and now they’re quite easily switching to Google’s Gemini
The ChatGPT integration was heavily gated by Apple and required explicit opt-in. That won't be the case with the Gemini integration. Apple wants this to just work. The privacy concerns will be mitigated because Apple will be hosting this model themselves in their Private Cloud Compute. This will be a much more tightly integrated solution than ChatGPT was.
I think they want it to work well with web search. That’s why Google is the obvious choice. Also their ai offering is low risk of getting eliminated where as open ai could fail at any time
There is just too much money being burned in AI for Apple to keep researchers. Also models have no respect for original art which leads to a branding issue of being a platform for artists.
Apple is competent at timing when to step into a market and I would guess they are waiting for AI to evolve beyond being considered untrustworthy slop.
It appears to be lack of competence given they lied about the initial features of Apple Intelligence.
First, they touted features that no one actually built and then fired their AI figurehead “leader” who had no coherent execution plan—also, there appears to have been territorial squabbling going on, about who would build what.
How on earth did Apple Senior Management allow this to unravel? Too much focus on Services, yet ignoring their absolute failures with Siri and the bullshit that was Apple Intelligence, when AI spending is in the trillions?
Where does it say that it won't be white-labeled?
Yes, Apple is acknowledging that Google's Gemini will be powering Siri and that is a big deal, but are they going to be acknowledging it in the product or is this just an acknowledgment to investors?
Apple doesn't hide where many of their components come from, but that doesn't mean that those brands are credited in the product. There's no "fab by TSMC" or "camera sensors by Sony" or "display by Samsung" on an iPhone box.
It's possible that Apple will credit Gemini within the UI, but that isn't contained in the article or video. If Apple uses a Gemini-based model anonymously, it would be easy to switch away from it in the future - just as Apple had used both Samsung and TSMC fabs, or how Apple has used both Samsung and Japan Display. Heck, we know that Apple has bought cloud services from AWS and Google, but we don't have "iCloud by AWS and GCP."
Yes, this is a more public announcement than Apple's display and camera part suppliers, but those aren't really hidden. Apple's dealings with Qualcomm have been extremely public. Apple's use of TSMC is extremely public. To me, this is Apple saying "hey CNBC/investors, we've settled on using Gemini to get next-gen Siri happening so you all can feel safe that we aren't rudderless on next-gen Siri."