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Siri

With AI Siri Delayed, Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 May Be Next

by admin June 17, 2025

If you were itching for a new pair of AirPods Pro, you may want to clip those fingernails because that itch could persist for another year. According to yet another Apple analyst, the AirPods Pro 3 might be delayed until 2026, extending the previous rumored timeline that projected a release this year. The rumored delay comes courtesy of Apple analyst Jeff Pu, who corroborates previous intel from fellow analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. If Pu and Kuo’s info are correct, it would make the AirPods Pro 2 three years old before the release of the next generation.

Apple Product Timeline by Jeff Pu, GF Securities Hong Kong pic.twitter.com/jEIGMi7Twv

— Jukan Choi (@Jukanlosreve) June 15, 2025

In modern Apple time, three years is basically a century. In iPad years, it’s even longer—those guys can’t go 14 minutes without releasing another iteration. And as for regular, non-Apple, human years, I think it still seems like a long time to wait for another iteration of AirPods, though if the rumors are to be believed, the update could be worth the wait. Apple is reportedly considering some major upgrades that include the addition of a health sensor and potentially—and this is a weird one—cameras.

According to a previous report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, infrared cameras might be coming for your next pair of AirPods Pro, which sounds strange on the surface but makes a lot of sense once you start to unpack some potential use cases. For one, infrared cameras could enable new hand gestures, making them part earbuds and part wearable—a move that Apple is clearly interested in based on rumors of a health sensor. What’s even more interesting, however, are the cameras’ implications for AI. According to Gurman’s report, the cameras will “feed data to AI,” which could mean really any number of things, but it would mean one thing for sure, and that’s that AirPods Pro are going to get some kind of AI infusion. That dose of AI could be the problem.

While we can’t say for sure what’s delaying Apple’s next-gen AirPods Pro, if I had to guess, Apple Intelligence has more to do with the holdup than you think. Wireless earbuds, outside of AirPods, have been trending in the direction of AI for a couple of years now. Nothing’s Ear wireless earbuds, for example, were the first wireless earbuds to roll out a ChatGPT integration, which, as I wrote back then, is theoretically kind of an ideal gadget to showcase AI. There’s a chance that Apple might be following in that direction with its next pair of AirPods, which is interesting and potentially useful but problematic when you consider that Apple Intelligence—in particular, its AI Siri upgrade—hasn’t exactly gone off without a hitch. If Apple is really interested in infusing its AirPods Pro 3 with AI and the whole AI thing isn’t exactly going well, then…

It’s hard to say for sure what’s causing the delay, but there’s pretty much only one thing Apple has been struggling with as of late, and it’s AI. Adding some credence to that theory is the fact that, according to Bloomberg, AI Siri won’t arrive until spring of next year. The timing, then, could be ideal, but if the two products are tied together, then I wouldn’t hold your breath since, according to Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, Apple wants to “have [Siri] very much in hand” before it starts talking about dates for “obvious reasons.”

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Zombie AI Siri May Shuffle Onto iPhones Two Years After It Was First Announced

by admin June 13, 2025

At this week’s WWDC 2025 keynote, Apple’s senior vice president of software, Craig Federighi, strutted up on stage to the sound of Ratt’s “Round and Round” playing in the background. “Love’ll will find a way, just give it time… What goes around, comes around,” Stephen Pearcy belted out as Federighi, in his brilliant white mane, stood tall under the spotlight. He immediately went into all the updates that came to Apple Intelligence in 2024 and 2025. But one thing was missing, and Apple knew we were all thinking about it.

“We’re continuing to do the work to make Siri even more personal,” Federighi said. “This work needed more time to meet our high quality bar, and we’re excited to tell you more about it in the coming year.”

Apple may tell us more about its delayed AI Siri in 2025, but according to the latest rumors, we may not actually see it until spring 2026. Bloomberg’s Apple rumormonger Mark Gurman reported, based on a usual slate of anonymous sources, that the tech giant will offer a personalized, conversational Siri as part of the iOS 26.4 update. If Apple hits the spring 2026 target, that will be close to two full years after Apple first said it was coming at WWDC 2024.

For its part, Apple told Bloomberg that some AI upgrades are coming this year. Gurman suggests Apple could share an AI Siri beta sometime in the fall if it meets the company’s “high quality bar.” In the meantime, it’s hoping to tide consumers over with the iOS 26 “Liquid Glass” redesign and Visual Intelligence—which lets users ask ChatGPT questions about what’s on your screen.

At that point, we’ll have already experienced two whole cycles of Google’s increasingly AI-filled Android OS on smartphones. Gemini has long ago overtaken Google Assistant as the phone’s default chatbot. At last month’s Google I/O, the Alphabet-owned company took its AI integration a step further by suggesting people would want to pay for a $250 AI subscription bundle that includes full access to the most advanced version of Gemini along with other perks like NotebookLM and access to its Veo3 model through the Flow filmmaking tool.

Compared to the competition, Apple’s AI features seem like small fish in a deep and ever-widening pond. Apple is juggling two sides of its business. Sales analysis shows consumers are largely ambivalent about AI features on phones, and neither Google nor Apple has sold that many more phones because of AI alone. At the same time, investors want Apple to compete in AI with the rest of big tech, damn the consequences and the users who would prefer to not use a chatbot for everything.

Apple isn’t its usual stoic self in the wake of the Apple Intelligence delay. Gurman reported that, internally, the engineering side of the company is arguing with the marketing end about who oversold whom. Apple is still working on its own large language models—the underlying AI that powers chatbots like ChatGPT. It’s at this point we would hope Apple would try for something truly unique, rather than following in the footsteps of other tech giants. We may not be nearly as enthusiastic about AI-enhanced Siri as much as we just want an assistant that can tell us the weather and check emails without a host of issues cropping up. The best way to smooth over the wrinkles with annoyed Apple fans could be as simple as releasing that Pixar-inspired, AI-powered lamp. At least that will be something we haven’t seen before.

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June 13, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

It’s Time to Kill Siri

by admin June 9, 2025

However, it’s fair to say that Apple and even Amazon’s Alexa have had a cultural cachet that Google Assistant never enjoyed. It wasn’t unusual to hear Siri or Alexa’s name in a movie or TV show; they were much more recognizable than Google’s generic-named voice assistant. This may be why Amazon decided to keep the Alexa branding and simply add a “+” icon to denote the new souped-up version of Alexa powered by the latest large language models—and perhaps why Apple is still hanging onto Siri.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

This might have all been OK if Apple actually delivered on its promise and released a functioning, much-improved Siri when it originally said it would. With a massive marketing push to put Apple Intelligence in everyone’s mind (maybe a regretful move), it would have been a great opportunity to wow users with a much-improved Siri. Months later, customers are left wondering why Siri—new look and all—still lags behind.

But the broader problem affecting all large language models isn’t just the branding, but the user interface. Harrison compares it to the days of command-line computing and the shift to the graphical user interface (GUI) in the ‘80s and ’90s. It wasn’t the graphics that made the latter more popular, but the discoverability and explorable interface. In the command-line era, you had to remember how to do anything. With GUI, you could put anyone in front of a computer, and they’d be able to figure out how to navigate the operating system.

If you put someone in front of ChatGPT or Gemini, say it’s an incredible tool, and tell them to ask it anything, they’ll just stare blankly at the blinking prompt. “It’s like we’ve gone back 30 years in interface design. They have no idea what to do or say.” Harrison says he did this exact experiment with his parents: They asked what the weather was tomorrow, and the AI responded that it didn’t have that information.

“We’ve regressed in discoverability,” he says. “A regular person, not the tech people, if all they’ve been doing is setting timers with Siri for the past 10 years, and now they have to think about it in a fundamentally different way—that’s an extremely hard problem. Some sort of renaming of the application is going to be important.”

Saying goodbye to Siri would be a big move for Apple—after all, it has spent more that a decade investing in it. But most people today still use it for playing music, checking weather, and setting timers, and aren’t even pushing the boundaries of its current, relatively limited, capabilities. It’s hard to see that changing anytime soon, even if Siri’s feature-packed next generation arrives as promised.

“For 99 percent of the planet, this kind of AI revolution has totally gone over their head,” Harrison says. Like the 10-year transition from command line to graphical user interfaces, rethinking the way we use these personal voice assistants will take time and education, but maybe a new name will help Apple with the transition.

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June 9, 2025 0 comments