Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

Yesterday’s “Awe Dropping” Apple launch event, which rolled out the refreshed iPhone, the new iPhone Air, and Apple Watch lineup, included plenty of the usual hallmarks of an slickly produced Apple launch. That included leaps in performance, increased “NITS,” and cool-sounding features like “fusion cameras” and “vapor chambers.”

But compared to last year’s iPhone 16 event, there was a whole lot less talk about Apple’s grand plan for AI: Apple Intelligence.

A lot has happened since then, so let’s review how we got here.

A Siri-ous stumble

First announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June 2024, the company showed some compelling demos of how an Apple Intelligence-enhanced Siri could dig through your apps to surface the information you needed — features that the company said would be rolled out “over the next year.”

The plan showed generative-AI writing tools sprinkled throughout different apps, along with less useful features like an Image Playground and Genmoji. There was an integration with ChatGPT (which seemed a little tacked-on), and Apple promised that all of this AI would keep your information private. 

A few months later, in September 2024’s “Glowtime” Apple event, it became clear that only some of these new features would be available when the iPhone 16 was released with iOS 18. In the following months, despite a huge amount of hype and marketing around Apple Intelligence, it failed to move phones.

In March 2025, in what may go down as one of the company’s most consequential stumbles, Apple announced that it couldn’t deliver on the most impressive AI features it promised in its launch event, such as the superpowered AI Siri. Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy told Daring Fireball: 

“It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

Apple watchers were hopeful that they would get an update on Apple Intelligence at Apple’s June 2025 WWDC, but it underwhelmed. 

Awe Drop

The video of this week’s event featured 11 mentions of Apple Intelligence, but execs made no mention of the missing features. The few mentions highlighted features that Apple had framed as part of Apple Intelligence. 

• Live audio translation: The feature that might have the greatest impact on the most number of users came during the announcement of the AirPods 3 — live audio translation. Described as “powered by Apple Intelligence,” the feature stood out among the few mentions of AI during the event. The feature can show translated speech on the user’s phone or spoken into the user’s ear, and can be used for two people in a conversation.

• Workout Buddy: A previously announced AI-powered feature that combines health and exercise data to feed the user encouraging prompts while working out was featured as part of the Apple Watch and the new AirPods Pro 3. 

Mostly, Apple Intelligence was mentioned in the context of iOS 26, due to launch later this month with modest AI features like translation, transcription, and summarization. 

So… what’s the plan?

The whole Apple Intelligence fiasco appears to have been extremely chaotic for Apple.

Apple has lost some key AI leaders to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, leadership of the AI team has been reshuffled, it’s reportedly considering using Gemini, Anthropic, or ChatGPT to power Siri, and there were even reports that the company might hit the reset button and just buy Mistral AI or Perplexity. 

Officially, Apple hasn’t announced a date for delivering on its promised Siri upgrade, but Bloomberg reported that internally, Apple is targeting spring 2026 to roll out the improved voice assistant and advanced AI features as an incremental update to iOS 26.