Apple rumored to detach the toxic Siri brand from Apple Intelligence marketing
The iPhone maker could detach the toxic Siri brand from Apple Intelligence in its marketing in an attempt to salvage its reputation following embarrassing setbacks.
When Apple unveiled Siri to the world during the iPhone 4s introduction in 2011, the digital assistant felt like something straight from the future. Fast forward to today and the troubled Siri is arguably the worst digital assistant on the market, one that’s routinely the subject of ridicule on late night shows and the web.
Apple is aware of the toxicity of the Siri brand, caused by the embarrassing delay in delivering an AI-infused Siri and the engineering and organizational changes the move prompted within Apple. And now, Apple is rumored to leave an AI-enhanced Siri out of the conversation at its upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference in June, and detach the Siri brand from Apple Intelligence in its marketing.
Rumor: Apple to detach the Siri brand from Apple Intelligence marketing
Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett, writing at Bloomberg:
Sources at Apple say that, for the next version of iOS, slated for introduction at WWDC 2025 in June, the company plans to focus on upgrading existing Apple Intelligence capabilities and adding some new ones, such as an AI-optimized battery management mode and a virtual health coach. Significant upgrades to Siri—including the ones promised nearly a year ago—are unlikely to be discussed much and are still months away from shipping.
We actually didn’t expect an AI-optimized Siri to be in the conversation at the WWDC. Apple said the promised Siri features will roll out “in the coming year.” This means the enhanced assistant won’t be part of the initial iOS 19.0 release this fall. Instead, it’s said to arrive as part of the iOS 19.4 update in Spring 2026.
And this:
The Apple sources say the company, despite its hopes for LLM Siri, is also preparing to separate the Apple Intelligence brand from Siri in its marketing. It’s a tacit admission that the voice assistant’s poor reputation isn’t helping the company’s AI messaging.
This is probably a smart move on Apple’s part. An even smarter move would be to update its internal processes so that it’s impossible for Apple’s marketing department to promote non-existent features in ads and for Apple’s leadership to approve them in the first place.
To that end, Gurman reports that Apple will “for the most part stop announcing features more than a few months before their official launch.” Under the new rule, previewing new operating system features in the summer ahead of their fall launch would still be fine, as opposed to advertising features like an AI-infused Siri, which don’t have a firm release date.
The report includes an interesting quote from Dag Kittlaus, one of the original co-founders of Siri Inc., the digital assistant startup that Apple bough in April 2010 for a reported $200 million. “All of the foundational model companies have no idea what an assistant is, while Apple has been working on the concept since 2010,” he told Bloomberg. “They still have the button, the brand and, if they do a brain transplant for Siri, they have every opportunity to take over as the assistant of choice.”
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