Bloomberg's Mark Gurman last month reported that Apple was considering delaying at least some of its promised Apple Intelligence enhancements for Siri until iOS 18.5, and that plan appears increasingly likely based on his latest information.
Gurman said Apple was initially planning to launch the Apple Intelligence enhancements for Siri in iOS 18.4, but it seems that the features have been pushed back until iOS 18.5 due to a lack of readiness and software bugs. Accordingly, none of the promised features are available in the first beta of iOS 18.4 released last month.
In his Power On newsletter today, he said the features will be available in iOS 18.5:
The follow-up release, iOS 18.5, is where the good stuff is supposed to wind up. It has the AI-infused Siri that the company showed off last June, as well as support for Apple Intelligence in China.
Apple's software engineers have been internally testing iOS 18.5 since at least the start of February, according to the MacRumors visitor logs.
Gurman expects iOS 18.5 to be released in May, but beta testing should begin sooner:
The next version of Siri will be a test of whether Apple can mount a comeback. The software is likely be released in May, a full 11 months after it was introduced.
It is still possible that some of the Siri upgrades could arrive in a later iOS 18.4 beta, but Gurman seems to be leaning into iOS 18.5 timing for now.
The upgrades coming to Siri will include on-screen awareness, understanding of a user's personal context, and deeper per-app controls. For example, during its WWDC 2024 keynote, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother's flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps.
Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 model.
Top Rated Comments
I know it's not one person working on this, but it feels like someone procrastinating by doing pointless easy things to avoid the real work.
He purchased Beats for billions of dollars which was to this day the worst purchase Apple has ever made by far. They could have made a streaming music service for less than 100 million. I personally would have bought Pandora because to this day it is still by far the best streaming music service because they actually understand radio algorithmic playlists. Their music selections are so vastly superior.
He then gave the okay for multiple products that were insanely niche and made no sense given Apple’s entire mantra ‘We only want to make a few products, and only what we could affect real positive change to’. They made HomePod which was the exact opposite of what people were buying Alexa Echo devices for. People wanted something insanely cheap with a voice assistant that wasn’t Siri garbage.
Then they made AirPods Max which are $550 headphones that virtually no one would buy because negligible audio enhancement is not worth that much. Then you have the fact that AirPods Max of course only work on extremely few devices. Like imagine not having dongles for AirPods Max so they could function well for video games for the PS5 and Xbox. Just embarrassing.
Then they made Vision Pro which they thought would be a good idea at $3,500. They actually thought that this device that is the exact same thing as an iPhone and a Mac display was going to be bought for $3,500. Try again at $1,000 and you might get a few purchasers but not many because an iPhone is still needed no matter what, and the vast majority won’t be buying a headset that does nothing different hahah.
They released the iPhone 16 devices with the camera capture button and I WOULD ABSOLUTELY PAY TO SEE THE ANALYTICAL DATA on that lmfao. You know how many people use that? It’s guaranteed sub 1% of iPhone 16 owners. It’s the biggest piece of garbage gimmick since peek and pop and Dynamic Island.
Now they went down the AI road making the most useless AI stuff imaginable. Genmoji LOL. And their writing tools don’t even work lmao. I tried a simple proofreading task and it just said ‘error completing task’ or something like that. It’s totally useless.