Apple’s AI delays have some of its most influential fans fuming

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in spring last year that his company had all kinds of big AI plans. Many of them have yet to materialize. 

Do you remember when Apple told the world it was going to bring artificial intelligence to its phones, which would allow them to do all kinds of amazing things?

That was June. And, it turns out, a bunch of the stuff Apple promised was coming has yet to show up, and now may not show up for some time — if ever.

If you’re a normal person, you probably don’t care about this. But for close Apple watchers and Apple fans, this has become an increasingly big problem: It’s making them wonder whether Apple made a distinctly un-Apple-like mistake last year, by showing off stuff it doesn’t know how to deliver.

And that has them worrying about the state of Apple itself.

That crisis of faith materialized most prominently on Wednesday, via a blistering post from John Gruber, an influential Apple blogger. The title gets right at it: “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.”

Gruber’s argument boiled down: Apple hasn’t shipped the most consequential features it showed off in June — like the ability for the phone to sift through your emails and texts, and to tell you when your mom is arriving at the airport. More worrisome is Gruber’s belief that Apple doesn’t actually know how to deliver that kind of feature, and that what it showed off in the spring was mere “vaporware” — perhaps the most damning thing you can say about an Apple product.

Even more worrisome: It wasn’t just that Apple showed this stuff off at a developer conference — it has been telling normal people that these features are coming soon, via an ad campaign it has now shelved.

Add it all up, Gruber said, and it points to a deep malaise at the company — one he says is ultimately a problem for CEO Tim Cook. If Cook can’t figure it out immediately, Gruber argued, “then, I fear, that’s all she wrote. The ride is over.”

“When mediocrity, excuses, and bulls—t take root, they take over,” he said. “A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.”

Gruber isn’t the only one worried about the state of Apple’s AI efforts. Earlier this week, Ben Thompson, an analyst, noted the delays and concluded, “It appears Apple tried to do too much all at once.”

These critiques have been building for some time: In November, Marques Brownlee, a hyperpopular tech reviewer, assessed the AI features that Apple had rolled out by then and was unimpressed. “Apple’s made this promise that this huge thing is coming,” he said. “I think that promise is starting to fade.”

I’ve asked Apple for comment.

Does any of this matter in the real world? Maybe. Apple’s stock is down 10% this week, double the decline that the broader Nasdaq has seen. Of course, there are other reasons for investors to be concerned about Apple — namely, the specter of a trade war that could dramatically increase costs for Apple’s supply chain, which is highly dependent on China.

That said: A year ago, Google was in the middle of what seemed like an existential crisis as it stumbled through its own AI rollout — you may recall embarrassing “woke” results from its Gemini chatbot or equally embarrassing answers about putting glue on your pizza. But Google kept at it, and for better or worse, Google now gives you AI-generated answers much of the time, whether you want them or not.

It’s also possible that Apple can simply sidestep this problem entirely by leaving the AI to companies that spent a gazillion dollars chasing AI and focusing on what Apple does really well: making high-end hardware at scale.

Analysts are excited about new Apple devices — like a newly released desktop PC that’s supposed to work really well with the computing demands state-of-the-art AI requires.

“Apple doesn’t need to have its own industry-leading AI s—t. Not right now at least. That’d be great if they did, but it’s fine if they don’t,” Gruber told me via email.

“What Apple has are the best platforms to use AI from anyone. Best phone to use ChatGPT is iPhone. Best phone to use Claude or Perplexity is iPhone. ChatGPT has a fantastic native Mac app. Even Google makes a really good Gemini app for iPhone… Apple should be hammering that.”

What’s a bit strange is that “Apple makes good hardware for other people’s AI” was, in fact, a major component of Apple’s AI pitch last year, and people like Thompson thought that was quite smart.

“Having an interface for the folks that want to spend billions of dollars to do these huge large language models, to plug in and sort of take it or leave it — it’s Apple leveraging their position of being the trusted device in people’s lives, and getting everyone to dance to their tune,” he told me in the spring.

Could Apple just focus on that version of AI, instead of trying to play catch-up to everyone else? It would be very unlike Apple to pull an about-face and announce that a very big thing they promised was never going to happen. It’s also very unlike Apple to get this kind of grief from some of its biggest fans.