Apple down on underwhelming developer conference
We didn’t hear much about Siri at all.
Apple’s stock is down 1.5% today — a drop that began when its annual developer conference, WWDC, began.
Right at the beginning, Apple SVP of Software Craig Federighi addressed the elephant in the room: Apple’s AI software, Apple Intelligence, missed the mark and fixes wouldn’t be immediately available.
“This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year,” Federighi said, before pivoting the programing to focus on what Apple does best: design.
But unifying visual experiences and version numbers, 3D home-screen photos, and web pages that float from edge to edge, while cool perhaps for developers, aren’t exactly the kind of stuff that makes normies excited.
At one point, Federighi seemed to be mocking in a self-aware way the company’s boring improvements to the iPad OS: “Wow. More windows, a pointier pointer, and a menu bar? Who would’ve thought! We’ve truly pulled off a mind-blowing release,” he said.
“This year’s event was not about disruptive innovation, but rather careful calibration, platform refinement, and developer enablement — positioning itself for future moves rather than unveiling game-changing technologies,” Francisco Jeronimo, VP for data and analytics at IDC, told Sherwood News.
Last year, Apple mentioned Apple Intelligence more than 60 times. Execs said it about half as many times this year, and when they did, there wasn’t much substance — like addressing when exactly Apple would deliver on the AI promises made at last year’s WWDC, including having an upgraded Siri respond to questions with information pulled from users’ emails and texts. Siri was mentioned just once. Apple also didn’t mention integration with Google’s AI Gemini, which many analysts had hoped could help improve its paltry AI offerings.
Instead, many of the AI features Apple execs described in the 1.5-hour event were things already announced or that already exist on other platforms, like live translation or the ability to search from images or the phone’s camera. And this time, there was no “one more thing.”
