Apple faked the upgraded Siri demo and advertised non-existent products

One of Apple's biggest blunders in years is the advertisement of an advanced Siri upgrade under the guise of "Apple Intelligence," which has now been officially delayed by the company. But, Apple used this feature to sell the iPhone 16 generation, and still to this day, the biggest and most sought-after feature within Apple's umbrella of Apple Intelligence features is yet to be released.

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Craig Federighi

We are now getting some behind-the-scenes details about why a fully integrated and upgraded Siri hasn't come to fruition and the position Apple was in with the technology before an announcement was made at WWDC 2024. According to a report from The Information, former Apple employees speaking to Wayne Ma, the journalist behind the recent piece, high-profile Apple leadership styles are partly to blame. John Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 and began overseeing the development of Siri, with his official title being the Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

According to the report, Siri engineers already felt like "second-class citizens" at Apple, and this problem was exacerbated by struggling to keep up with constant iOS updates and features being released by the iOS software team led by Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering.

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John Giannandrea

The problems began when John and Craig's managerial styles began to clash, with reports indicating that John is more a slow mover, listening to concerns and letting those underneath his position take charge of the project, while Craig is the opposite, being described as brash and quick, but also very efficient and knowledgable.

The Information reports that much of what the public knows about Apple Intelligence is because of Federighi, who eventually gained his own AI team separate from Giannandrea's. The AI team on the iOS side began absorbing more responsibilities, and this wasn't appreciated by Giannandrea's Siri team, who were reportedly very slow to make any progress.

Deleted Apple TV ad for non-existent Apple Intelligence + Siri feature

A damming piece of information that indicates a divide between the two software teams comes from members of the Siri team, which, The Information reports, had never seen a working version of the Siri 2.0 upgrade. For those who don't know, Apple showcased demos of Siri pulling data from across various apps and answering questions such as "When is my mom's flight going to land?" or the voice assistant accessing a user's email, messages, and calendar. This was the Siri Apple ran multiple advertisements for to sell its latest generation of iPhone, with some of those ads now even being removed.

According to The Information, citing former Apple employees, the only working piece of what was demonstrated to the public, and at the time was on Apple's test devices, was a pulsing, colorful ribbon that appeared on the edges of the iPhone screen when a user prompted Siri. Moreover, another source said Apple didn't have any of the revamped Siri products in a functional state when it unveiled them at WWDC 2024 -- they were non-existent.

Apple has now delayed the revamped Siri, or Siri with integrated Apple Intelligence features, until sometime in 2026.