This is when Apple's big Siri upgrade may come
Apple
is targeting spring 2026 for the release of its long-delayed
Siri
upgrade, marking nearly two years since the company first announced the enhanced AI features. According to Bloomberg, the revamped voice assistant will arrive as part of iOS 26.4, potentially launching in March based on Apple's historical release patterns.
The upgraded Siri was originally showcased at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2024, promising features like personal context awareness and cross-app functionality. However, the company has repeatedly pushed back the release timeline due to technical challenges that left the features working correctly only about two-thirds of the time.
"This just doesn't work reliably enough to be an Apple product," Apple's software chief
Craig Federighi
told The Wall Street Journal, offering his most candid assessment of the delays. The admission represents a rare moment of transparency from Apple, which typically avoids demonstrating features it cannot deliver on schedule.
Quality over deadlines
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Apple's leadership has emphasized that product quality takes precedence over meeting artificial deadlines, even as competitors advance their AI capabilities. "We never want to disappoint customers," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's marketing chief, in the Wall Street Journal interview. "But it would've been more disappointing to ship something that didn't hit our quality standard, that had an error rate that we felt was unacceptable."
Federighi explained to YouTuber iJustine that reliability is crucial for user adoption: "When you have an experience like asking Siri to do something, either it becomes something you can depend on reliably, or it's something in the end you're not going to use."
The technical challenges stemmed from Apple's attempt to merge two different underlying architectures. Bloomberg reported that Siri's system was split between existing capabilities for basic tasks and newer platforms for advanced features, creating bugs that necessitated rebuilding the entire system.
Architecture rebuild changes everything
"We realized that V1 architecture, we could push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards," Federighi told TechRadar and Tom's Guide in a joint podcast interview.
The delays have had broader implications for Apple's product roadmap. According to Bloomberg, a planned smart home hub that relies heavily on the new Siri features has also been postponed indefinitely, preventing Apple from entering a new product category.
The company's approach differs significantly from competitors like OpenAI and Google, focusing on integrating AI throughout its ecosystem rather than creating standalone chatbot applications. As Joswiak noted in the podcast discussion: "The features that you're seeing in Apple Intelligence isn't a destination for us. There's no app on intelligence."
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