Apple’s secret is that, like the Queen of England, it is never early, and never late. It is always on time. So it is again with Apple’s revamp of Siri, and its integration into MacOS.
Nothing Apple showed in its opening WWDC keynote felt particularly groundbreaking. In fact, the new Siri has none of the agentic AI capabilities a la OpenClaw that dominate today’s headlines.
Instead, Apple simply showed AI capabilities working across its various operating systems and applications, almost entirely in the service of productivity. It’s something that Windows has tried to do, flinched away from, and still doesn’t quite accomplish.
“Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, rather sanctimoniously told the camera in Apple’s pre-recorded video. (I think Microsoft’s in-person Windows Insider event was just as worthwhile.)
C’mon. Apple wasn’t deliberately late to AI—it was simply late. Indeed, if Apple had been on the cutting edge, it wouldn’t be partnering with Google Gemini for its AI services. But for better or worse, Apple simply understands that you don’t need to be first into the market. Remember how the iPod completely upended the pre-existing digital MP3 player space? All Apple needs to do is to provide a better, holistic, superior experience, and people respond.
And from what I saw today, Apple is at it again.
Take the simplest entry point: Apple’s Spotlight application. Spotlight used to perform search queries, unearthing relevant information across a variety of applications. Now Siri is a part of that, too, adding additional context.
Yes, Windows has an answer to that… in various pieces scattered around Windows. Windows Run can quickly launch applications. Command Palette, part of the optional PowerToys suite of utilities, is a nifty way to find files. Yet neither has any particular intelligence attached to them.
If you open File Explorer and right-click a file or files, one of the massive number of options you’ll see is to “Ask Copilot” about the contents of the file—just one, from what I can see. However, the Copilot app within Windows ( Win + C) can’t natively search your files.
So, to put it another way: Command Palette can’t really search files intelligently. The Windows Copilot application can’t access your files. Windows Search and now File Explorer actually can search your files, and intelligently so, thanks to the same semantic search that Apple uses, where you can type “a photo of a man holding two laptops” and receive the right answer. But you just sort have to know that Microsoft added that feature a couple of months ago.
Siri can understand what’s on your screen. Copilot Vision can as well… or did, before Microsoft made it easier to turn off the feature in a recent update. Again, with Microsoft, it’s just never simple!
Microsoft also relies on you to add your Android phone to Windows via Phone Link, rather than simply absorbing it into the ecosystem as Apple does. If Microsoft had a viable smartphone ecosystem, it too could show off nifty little tricks like snapping a photo of a lunch receipt and figuring out who ate each entree.
What I really liked was the analysis Siri performed across several files, analyzing which would be the better solution. I think most shoppers would open up multiple Web tabs and ask an AI to perform the same comparison, which Microsoft Edge can now do.
But Apple’s demonstration showed how such comparisons could be performed locally, with an emphasis on privacy and local intelligence. That’s something that consumers seem to like about ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and others: the ability to make sense and provide assistance to solve problems with a lot of moving parts.
There’s a PR element to it all, too.
One of Apple’s great strengths is its ability to frame the problem. Time and again, Apple showed how Siri could hunt down and discover the proper result to even a vague request, digging through messages and email. And Microsoft can do that!
But instead of poring through stored messages, Microsoft’s Windows Recall used screenshots instead. Recall might have worked, but Microsoft fumbled the ball by not locking down the stored screenshots, which already had the smell of spyware from the beginning.
In Apple’s ecosystem, slurping up that data is perceived as a positive. In the Windows world, however, people start grabbing torches and pitchforks.
In Apple’s world, integrating Siri, which acknowledges a request and provides results, is seen as a good thing. But when Microsoft takes a user’s request for additional context and launches Copilot, it’s seen as an intrusion. Apple has one Siri; Microsoft has…many.
Still, for all of the snark that Apple deserved for being late to the AI party, you have to give it credit for leaning heavily on what small, local, private AI models can do. The Windows world erupts when the operating system or Copilot flags a new feature or offers to help. But the new Siri, backed by Apple Intelligence, goes to show what Windows can and should look like—if Microsoft could ever pull it off.
