When Apple releases the OS 27 updates in a couple months, everyone’s iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch will get a real proper conversational AI installed.
Siri AI, as Apple calls it, is more than just a basic phone voice assistant. It’s a standalone app with a full conversation history that can take complex prompts and deliver answers from a broad set of knowledge. You can upload documents to it and ask it to perform actions. In other words, it’s like ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude. Only it’s going to be pre-installed on hundreds of millions of devices.
Like it or not, the new Siri AI is going to be competing with, and judged by the standards of, those other popular AI tools. And all those competitors have set a pace and expectation for major new releases every few months rather than once a year. If Apple isn’t prepared for a Siri AI cadence that resembles other AI companies, it’s just going to appear hopelessly behind, right where it has been for the last two years.
To be clear, the new Siri AI is a massive improvement over old Siri in just about every way. It understands you better, it’s smarter, it gives you answers and context that the old Siri could never. Being able to pull context from Messages, Mail, Contacts, and web history results in delightful personalized answers that really make Siri start to feel like your assistant.
But it’s no ChatGPT, or Claude, or Gemini. Those other frontier models, despite their own problems, have access to far more information and a much deeper understanding of complex queries. They can take much bigger and more complex inputs and do much more interesting and detailed things with it. Once Siri becomes a full chatbot, it’s going to be compared against the chatbots people use today, and it’s going to come up wanting—except for its access to your on-device personal data, which is a major advantage.
In the short term, Siri AI’s shortcomings are not going to be a big problem. Users will be so overjoyed that “Siri doesn’t suck anymore” and impressed by some of the genuinely useful things it can do that they’ll overlook how much better other AI models are at so many things. But the honeymoon period won’t last, and it’s only a matter of time before users start looking at the latest from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic and asking, “Why can’t Siri do this?”
Siri AI needs frequent major updates
Apple is accustomed to making significant improvements to core components only once a year, mostly aligned with the introduction of its new operating systems. For most things, that’s fine. For AI, that’s an absolutely glacial pace. In the last year alone, the major foundation AI models have released many big model updates:
- Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.1, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, and Opus 5 along with other variants like Mythos, Fable, and Sonnet.
- OpenAI — ChatGPT 5, GPT 5.1, GPT 5.2, GPT 5.3, GPT 5.4, GPT 5.5, and GPT 5.6.
- Google — Gemini 3 Pro, 3 Deep Think, 3.1 Pro, 3.5 Flash, along with variants like Nano Banana Pro and Flash Lite.
In addition to these model updates, these products constantly add new capabilities. New image generation and editing. Video generation. New voice modes. New vision capabilities. Connections to other apps and services and the early stages of agentic (AI that can take actions on your behalf) capabilities. That’s not to mention the huge emphasis on developer-focused stuff like AI coding, interface and art generation, and frameworks to integrate into other products.
Apple’s biggest Siri AI model is based on the same technology foundation as Google’s Gemini, but with Apple’s own training data, weights, safeguards, etc. So it’s essentially Apple’s own foundation model, which it calls Apple Foundation Model (AFM) 3. After the release of the OS 27 updates in September, Apple will expand the availability of Siri AI to new languages and regions in the months that follow. That’s good, but it is far from enough.
For both the models that run on our iPhones and Macs (AFM 3 Core) and on cloud servers (AFM 3 Cloud), Apple needs to release multiple significant updates every year. We can imagine a release cadence: AFM 3.1 in December, AFM 3.2 in March, and AFM 3.5 in May, etc. All leading up to AFM 4 with the OS 28 updates.
This sort of update schedule, with significant and obvious improvements to the quality of Siri AI throughout the year, is table stakes in the AI race but utterly foreign to the way Apple usually operates. To fail to take up a release schedule like this is to invite the same unfavorable comparisons Apple has labored under for the last two years: that all the other AI products just put Siri to shame.
Can Apple do it?
Apple isn’t used to operating this way. It’s used to pushing out a big OS update in the fall, then following it up with a few tweaks and additional features in point releases while it spreads its latest features to all the languages and regions it supports.
A development schedule that releases a major update to a core technology several times a year would be a big change for Apple, but this might just be the time to make it.
There’s a new CEO starting in September, and Apple has made some un-Apple-like moves recently, from unifying its operating system naming scheme to building an honest-to-goodness budget MacBook and designing newer products so that they’re easier to repair.
If there ever was a time for Apple to re-examine its release cadence, that time is now.
Foundry
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.
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Software updates, bugs, and problems
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