Comment by Workaccount2

Apple is always behind on industry trends, but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool. This is what will happen with the folding phones this year, if rumors are true.

They did still overpromise and that should not be the way Apples does things (although it was hardly the first time; the AirPower mat was announced in 2017).

Whataboutism doesn’t justify what Apple did. They took billions of dollars from consumers using demos of products those consumers never received.

Lately, they've arguably been starting from their own priorities (i.e. pushing and protecting their "services" revenue at all cost) and working backwards to an acceptable user experience from there.

> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.

Then again, remember millimeterwave? But yes, as a general rule I think your point still stands.

> There isn't currently a forcing function.

Investors are the forcing function

> There isn't currently a forcing function

Sorry but if there wasn’t a forcing function then “Apple Picks Gemini to Power Siri” wouldn’t be the headline

> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology

Since when?

> versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats

I agree here, to a degree. It's just that Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats.

I don’t need a Siri LLM. The current Siri is more than adequate for responding to texts and calling while driving. A lot of the “ai integrations” is marketing material for features nobody will actually use

The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.

They're not good enough for that usecase, currently - so almost all interactions make the UX worse, currently.

Might change in the future, I'm just taking about today in January 2026

I'll bite

1. Have a user interface. Sometimes I'll ask a question and Siri actually provides a good enough answer, and while I'm reading it, the Siri response window just disappears. Siri is this modal popup with no history, no App, and no UI at all really. Siri doesn't have a user interface, and it should have one so that I can go back to sessions and resume them or reference them later and interact with Siri in more meaningful ways.

2. Answer questions like a modern LLM does. Siri often responds with very terse web links. I find this useful when I'm sitting with friends and we don't remember if Lliam Neeson is alive or not - for basic fact-checking. This is the only use case where it's useful I've found, when I want to peel my attention away for the shortest period of time. If ChatGPT could be bound to a power button long-press, then I'd cease to use Siri for this use case. Otherwise Siri isn't good for long questions because it doesn't have the intelligence, and as mentioned before, has no user interface.

3. Be able to do things conversationally, based on my context. Today, when I "Add to my calendar Games at Dave's house" it creates a calendar entry called "Games" and sets the location to a restaurant called "Dave's House" in a different country. My baseline expectation is that I should be able to work with Siri, build its memory and my context, and over time it becomes smarter about the things I like to do. The day Siri responds with "Do you mean Dave's House the restaurant in another country, or Dave, from your contacts?" I'll be happy.

I'm sorry, I can't answer that right now.

Would you like to click this button which takes what you said and executes it as a Google search in Safari?

Siri to function above the level of Dragon NaturallySpeaking '95

ANY ability to answer simple questions without telling me to open Safari and read a webpage for myself...?

I should be able to completely control my phone with voice and ask it to do anything it is capable of and it should just work:

"Hi Siri, can you message Katrina on WhatsApp that Judy is staying 11-15th Feb and add it to the shared Calendar, confirm with me the message to Kat and the Calendar start and end times and message."

Could it just fucking work? "Hey Siri turn on the [room name] room lights" and it gives me a positive chime and ... doesn't turn any lights on? In any of my rooms?

Elementary anti-spam.

Does Apple develop a competing search engine?

> no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google

Unfortunately, it probably actually is a small number comparatively. Or at least I would need to see some sort of real data to say anything different.

I feel like people who distrust Google probably wouldn't trust Apple enough to give them their data either? Why would you distrust one but not the other?

Apple still is in the business of selling devices, not customer data - with Google being an external company , I bet there'll be an extensive permissions systems you can limit what the AI can do (or turn it off altogether).

Siri > off is my default. Presumably I could still do this?

>Is android really iOSs competition ?

It ISN'T in this day and age. People don't switch back and forth between iOS and Android like it's still 2010. They use whatever they got locken in initially since their first smartphone or where Apple's green/blue-bubble issue pushed them to or what their family handed them down or what their close friend groups used to have.

People who've been using iOS for 6+ years will 98% stick to iOS for their next purchase and won't even bother look at Android no matter what features Android were to add.

The Android vs iOS war is as dead as the console war. There's no competition anymore, it's just picking one from a duopoly of vendor lock-ins.

Even if EU were to break some of the lockins, people have familiarity bias and will stick with inertia of what they're used to, so it will not move the market share needle one bit.

Of course android is iOSs competition. android is also 75% of the market that apple surely wants bigger piece of.

Performance? We are many years past the point somebody cared about performance. I am writing this on iphone 11 pro and the experience is almost exactly the same as current iOS.

You know what's not the same? Android became pretty great OS. I recently got older Pixel to see how GrapheneOS works and was surprised about Android (which i havent seen for a decade). iOS on the other hand has recently gone trough with very bad ui redesign for no reason.

Imho the main thing Apple has going for it is that Google is spyware company and Apple is still mainly hardware company. But if Apple decides to pull their users data to gemini… well good luck.

>Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?

I guess this venture into politics more than anything else. And I am opinionated on the subject.

But other than that, the point worth centred on is Apple no longer care as much as being the best. They care much more about extracting best business deals and money out of their current position. Which is very different to Steve Jobs era, No money can put crap on his plate.

Please forget Oracle. I don't even know the name of their cloud service. I haven't heard anyone using their service for AI.