One reason Apple Inc.’s brand is so valuable is that for decades, it had a reputation for only making promises it could keep.
It did this thanks to a notoriously stubborn and difficult chief executive officer in Steve Jobs, who surrounded himself with talented lieutenants and listened to what his investors thought but ultimately made all of his decisions by consulting with a Congress of one: himself.
Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs, and that’s been fine for the years since Jobs has no longer been with us. Cook’s long tenure at Apple, and a gift for supply chain logistics, made him the right CEO when Apple’s largest challenge seemed to be iterating and building the iPhone to sell billions of them around the world. In his own way, Cook was as good a promise keeper as Jobs.
Yet, all of a sudden, Captain Cook seems to be in uncharted territory. He’s found himself there thanks to opening up his decision-making to the whims of Wall Street, which was demanding some big news on what Apple would do with artificial intelligence. I don’t think Jobs would have allowed himself to be rushed, but Cook did. By prematurely introducing Apple Intelligence to the world, Cook gave his company a deadline it wasn’t sure it could meet, and now it hasn’t. The company has broken promises to customers, with TV spots trumpeting features that are still nowhere near completion, nudging customers to buy a smartphone that costs $1,000 and more and does not do as advertised. (Naturally, there was small print.)
The more primitive “Apple Intelligence” features that have shipped have been disappointing. First, news organizations complained about misconstrued summaries, which Apple tweaked while never admitting fault. Now the problems are deeper: When non-nerd friends message you to ask how to “turn off these pop-ups because it keeps getting my messages wrong,” you know Apple has goofed in a way that stretches well beyond the chattering tech press. Normal people think Apple Intelligence doesn’t work.
Cook is moving to stop this blip from becoming a crisis that would call his leadership into question. His biggest step to date has been to reorganize the executives responsible for running the effort, as first reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman earlier this week. Now in charge is the man who spearheaded the Vision Pro headset which, while not exactly a hit, is widely regarded to be an impressive technological feat (and it’s actually real, which is more you can say for the updated Siri).
Even with these changes, Apple’s enhanced Siri can’t be expected to land on iPhones until 2026 at the earliest, denying Wall Street the iPhone sales “super cycle” that had supposedly been in the cards thanks to this vague idea that consumers would clamor to upgrade. Some of the more conversational features are more likely to arrive in 2027. That tentative due date will seem further and further away if competitors like Amazon.com Inc.’s new Alexa are released on time and perform as advertised.
Alexa+, with its integrations and clean interface, is the kind of AI application Apple should have built by now. Unfortunately, it hasn’t — so now the company must do everything it can to make sure consumers can use these other services unencumbered.
That’s the way forward, here — a return to the roots of the iPhone as a place for external developers to create ground-breaking applications. To get out of this AI hole, and keep the iPhone on the cutting edge, they need to borrow that famous battle cry from the former Microsoft man Steve Ballmer: Developers! Developers! Developers!
It’s what Apple has always been good at. As Apple watcher Jon Gruber stressed in a recent blog post, the Mac computer line became the industry choice for creatives because it was the best platform with which to use Adobe’s products. The iPhone, similarly, became the world-changing device it is because of the likes of Uber, Spotify and Google Maps.
Apple’s primary role is — and always has been — to build hardware and an operating system capable of supporting such innovative ideas. But in more recent years, this purpose has been complicated by the company’s desire to exert more control — in the name of privacy, it says — while also building up its own services business as another valuable income source. This now means that AI on the iPhone is only as good as Apple can currently make it. As developer Gus Mueller wrote recently: “I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s.”
There might have been a window when Apple felt it could build its own AI and keep everyone else out, but that’s closed now. Apple urgently needs to find a way to open up its devices to be properly built upon by others doing it better. I’m confident it can do this with sufficient guardrails around privacy, instituting the same kind of watchdog arrangement it put in place to make sure its App Store wasn’t a risk to consumers. I’m certain it can find ways to make heaps of money as that gatekeeper since, despite the tumult, the iPhone is still the most capable mobile device for running AI, and its enormous user base is locked in. Failing to adapt to the new AI moment, however, could be a mistake with Nokia-sized consequences.
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