This surprised us because we didn’t know running around like a chicken with your head cut off was a policy. 

Last year’s WWDC was supposed to be the moment Siri got clever. The company promised an AI assistant that would finally understand context and work like a real sidekick, even boasting it could find you flight details or remember who recommended you a book.

Instead, it pulled the ad campaign and shelved the best bits. Now, the company says it’s redoing the whole thing.

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi told the Wall Street Journal: “There’s no need to rush out with the wrong features and the wrong product just to be first.”

Which is handy, because Job’s Mob was neither first nor present. While rivals have been firing on all AI cylinders, Apple turned up with a watered-down version of generative tools and a half-baked Siri that no one uses.

The company’s executives say they’re building Siri from scratch on a new architecture, which is corporate code for “we blew it and are now starting over.” Federighi claimed the previous version “didn’t converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to.”

For a company with more cash than some nations and an army of engineers, that’s a curious excuse. But instead of owning the delay, Apple has decided to wax philosophical.

“We see AI as a long-term transformational wave,” Federighi said, as if everyone else hasn’t already surfed past.

In iOS 26, Job’s Mob is borrowing OpenAI’s tools again, letting users chat with ChatGPT or make images with DALL·E. Apple insists it’s working on its own models but seems happy to rent the brains of others for now.

Federighi said the company wants its AI to be invisible, not just another chatbot bolted on top. That’s nice, but the reality is Siri can’t even find a calendar entry half the time.

He likened Apple’s AI approach to how it handled the internet in the early 2000s. “It was an enabler for Apple,” he said, noting that not everything had to be built in-house.

The trouble is, being the delivery van for everyone else’s AI isn’t a strategy.

Apple’s marketing boss Greg Joswiak fell back on the gospel of Steve Jobs. “What we have to do is create the right products and tell people about them. And if we do that, everything else will work out.”

They might want to focus on the first half of that sentence. Because right now, the only thing working out is for Apple’s competitors.