AI Has Destroyed Apple’s Future

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 20, 9:15AM EDT

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Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) made a huge mistake when it delayed its Siri AI product until 2026.
That decision may have irreparably damaged the company’s future.

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AI Has Destroyed Apple’s Future — © Mario Tama / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) made one huge mistake that will irreparably damage its future. What was once the most powerful tech company in the world stumbled in June. That’s when it said it would not release its highly advanced Siri AI product until 2026. That means it could be part of its iOS 26.4, which is likely to launch in March or later.

The reason for the delay, according to outsiders, is that Apple is finding it challenging to put artificial intelligence into a new age version of Siri. This is partly because it has to be more “context aware” than early and primitive versions of Siri have been.

Another reason is that tech giants that are further along than Apple in AI projects have stolen some of Apple’s best AI programmers. Some have gone to Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META) and some to OpenAI. There are rumors that these people left because they got multimillion-dollar packages from their new employers. Ke Yang left for Meta this month. Bloomberg describes him as the head of an Apple department that is “developing features to make the Siri voice assistant more ChatGPT-like by adding the ability to pull information from the web.”

There are no rumors that Apple is paying huge sums to get the top AI talent to join it.

Apple is now at least a year behind its largest AI competitors. OpenAI and xAI, for example, have released several generations of their products in the past year. Among the things ChatGPT can do is write software code, draft emails based on a person’s past “voice,” create images and video, analyze complex uploaded files, and translate text and voice from one language to another.

The other way in which the company has fallen behind is that it is not spending tens of billions of dollars to create its own AI data centers. These are at the heart of the ability of AI to learn and to power Apple products. These data centers use tremendous amounts of electricity and water. They chew up Nvidia chips to run them at an alarming rate. Apple is not even in this race.

Apple continues to rely almost exclusively on iPhone sales. In the most recent quarter, iPhone revenue was $44.6 billion out of a total of $94 billion. The iPhone is also the primary driver of its Services business, which added another $27.4 billion tp the company’s total for the quarter. Sales of the new iPhone 17 are likely to be brisk and healthy. That has not impressed Wall Street, as Apple’s stock is flat this year. Meanwhile, the broader market is up 14%, and Meta’s stock is 20% higher.

Another challenge is that the AI products of every major AI company are available for download onto Apple’s hardware. So, iPhone owners already have the AI best of breed. Among the five most downloaded iPhone apps, three are AI products.

Apple is not only behind in the AI race but so far behind that it cannot catch up.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.