Apple has apparently delayed what is arguably its most important Apple Intelligence feature, contextual intelligence, by at least another month. It’s the latest chapter in what history will remember as the company’s most painfully slow, yet strategically significant, introduction yet.
Bloomberg says Apple has hit a variety of obstacles in developing these tools, with the smart features the company wants to introduce not working consistently.
The company is attempting to build on-screen awareness so Siri can act with the content you are seeing — it might save a message address or even run a series of nested commands such as pulling out a half remembered article from those you read the day before to send to a friend.
Apple has one example in which the intelligence extends to person recognition, so Siri might be able to tell you when your mom’s flight is landing, based on an old email containing her flight number and recognition of your relationship.
These are all sophisticated features, but ensuring they work consistently is essential. You don’t want families waiting forlornly for the wrong flight, or mom waiting for a ride that never arrives. Unlike AI-generated news headlines, these tools really need to work before they ship.
And word is, they don’t, at least not yet….
“Hey Siri, what’s that paperclip in Windows called?”
The inevitability of WWDC
The update had been expected to show its face in April with iOS 18.4. Now it won’t appear until one month before WWDC 2025, in iOS 18.5 in May.
That’s almost one full year since those features were first discussed at WWDC and shows the extent to which Apple has been forced to play for time in this deployment. It has managed to make that time, but the delay can’t be a good thing for the company, given it should also be pouring resources into improvements across all its operating systems as it prepares for its annual developer conference in June.
It begs questions such as just how much of the company’s resources are being spent on AI, and what, if any, additional Apple Intelligence tools it will be in position to announce this year.
One thing we do know is that Apple must announce something at WWDC. Developers will want to know the company is moving forward on AI. That means that merely reprising the features the company managed to ship slowly across the last 12 months won’t do. Nor will pointing enthusiastically at the new support for additional languages Apple is expected to introduce.
To maintain relevance amid the clamor about Deep Seek or Open AI, Apple needs to justify what CEO Tim Cook promised in late 2024, when he said: “We’re pouring all of ourselves in here, and we work on things that are years in the making.”
Betting the bank
Apple understands this. Despite shuttering its Apple Car project, the company spent more on research and development in its just-past quarter than it did a year ago. ($8.2 billion versus $7.6 billion). R&D spending goes up most every year at the company and you can bet your bottom dollar (in comparison to Apple’s near infinite ones) that AI is part of that spending plan.
Throwing money at problems doesn’t always yield results, however.
You need resource allocation and tight control to ensure all the different research teams are working effectively together. This has plainly been a challenge at Apple, given the company recently put one of its best, Kim Vorrath, in charge of getting Apple Intelligence to ship on time. Vorrath is working with John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for machine learning and AI, whose team was reportedly sidelined for access to developer resources until early 2023, according to an earlier Wall Street Journal report. This is no longer true.
Facing the challenge
While Giannandrea’s team builds on the AI-driven tools Apple already has in place, the challenges faced by his group mean they must not only deliver AI in an Apple way, but do so in a way that visibly competes with the larger pure AI companies its rivals are already partnering with.
With so much at stake, it is perhaps better to delay rather than ship anything that does not work. But people’s patience with such delays will not be infinite and with Open AI still threatening to introduce its own device designed by iPod designer Jony Ive, Apple’s execs surely feel a degree of performance anxiety as they struggle to be the real artists they are reputed to be.
Real artists, as Steve Jobs once said, are the people who ship.
You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe.
