(Apple)

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan

9/10/25 4:34PM

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.

Rani Molla10h

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan

12h

Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Rani Molla13h

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Rani Molla15h

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Same thing happened with Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026

Jon Keegan15h

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea