The iPhone 17 launch just raised Apple’s AI stakes for 2026

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5 hours ago

The iPhone 17 launch just raised Apple’s AI stakes for 2026

Hello again from Fast Company—and thank you for reading this edition of Plugged In.

Last Tuesday, the world marked International Apple Day, a name I just made up to describe a very real annual ritual. Certainly, the annual unveiling of new iPhones—along with updated Apple Watches and AirPods—is the biggest day on Apple’s product calendar. It’s the moment when many people either decide a new iPhone is in their future or that they can eke another year out of the one they’ve already got.

The headline this week was the long-anticipated debut of the iPhone Air, a new phone whose selling point is that it’s an iPhone, except thinner and lighter. Much of the other announcements involved new Apple products that offer even more of what folks liked about predecessors—longer battery life, additional megapixels, improved noise cancellation. Apple gave the base iPhone 17 the ProMotion and always-on display technologies formerly reserved for the iPhone Pro and (finally!) decided to release an iPhone Pro in an exuberantly fun color, “Cosmic Orange.” It also gave all the new iPhones’ front-facing camera a square sensor, allowing you to shoot in landscape mode even if you’re holding the phone vertically, a feature I never realized I wanted but now crave.

Even when Apple doesn’t have anything radically new to reveal (like, oh, a folding iPhone), it’s good at the kind of incrementalism that keeps its hardware progressing in logical directions with clear benefits. This week’s launch was dominated by that sort of news. But Apple didn’t have much to say about AI, an area that’s critical to the future of the company’s products. For now, it’s quietly trying to regain its footing after a period of embarrassingly public failure with the technology, leaving the details of what’s ahead uncertain.

Let’s recap. At its WWDC conference in June 2024, Apple introduced a portfolio of AI-powered features called Apple Intelligence. Among the most ambitious was the Siri voice assistant’s new ability to answer questions that involved seamlessly plucking bits of information from different apps on the fly—such as “Siri, when is my Mom’s flight landing?”; “What’s our lunch plan?”; and “How long will it take us to get there from the airport?”

Apple stoked expectations: “This year marks the beginning of a new era for Siri,” explained the executive who demonstrated the mom-visit scenario in the WWDC keynote video. By the end of the year, however, the company hadn’t shipped the most ambitious elements of its Siri improvements. Last March, it acknowledged, “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.” At this year’s WWDC, it didn’t say anything about Siri’s AI future other than to reiterate the “coming year” timetable.

A new twist developed last month when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple was in early talks with Google to build a new version of Siri on top of Google’s Gemini LLM. Given that more than 15 months had passed since Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2024, I did a double-take at Gurman’s scoop. How could Apple still be in the process of assembling third-party ingredients to build something it had already demoed and claimed was an era-shifting step forward?

Any Gemini partnership might have as much to do with Siri’s longer-term AI trajectory as implementing the specific features Apple announced and then failed to complete. Still, considering the company’s instinctive preference to develop its own technologies rather than rely on others, even a whiff of Google AI becoming essential to one of the iPhone’s highest-profile features would be a big deal. Particularly given that Apple and Google are both long-time partners and fierce competitors.

Clarity about Siri’s smarter, more personalized future is probably months off and won’t arrive all at once. After burning itself with premature hoopla, Apple has every incentive to stay mum until it’s absolutely, positively certain it’s ready to deploy the features it announced at WWDC 2024. According to Gurman, it’s shooting for next spring. That would make them an off-cycle update before Apple’s standard round of OS upgrades for fall 2026, which will likely bring another round of AI enhancements to Siri.

Meanwhile, Google has been bounding forward with its own AI game plan for Android. At its Pixel 10 phone launch last month, it showed off a feature called Magic Cue. It’s not a precise counterpart to the new, unreleased Siri, but also relates to dynamically weaving together data from multiple apps to keep users informed about everyday life. Having lost time to its Siri mishap, Apple may still be scrambling to catch up with Google’s version of this helpful AI vision a year from now.

Now, Apple has hardly dug itself an AI hole it can never emerge from. For one thing, it’s not clear to me that most consumers are prioritizing AI when choosing which devices to buy. The new iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods Pro have plenty of other new features that should appeal to upgraders even if elements of their AI story remain fuzzy, giving Apple some breathing room to figure out what’s next. Deciding to build a Siri experience on top of Gemini might be a healthy sign that Apple understands its own limitations and is willing to try new approaches to overcoming them.

From the Apple II to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad to the Apple Watch, Apple is legendary not for inventing product categories but for reinventing them. Once it shows up, its offerings are often so well thought-out that people forget it was late to the party. So far, nobody else has figured out how to build AI into smartphones and other consumer devices in a way that’s so life-changing that Apple can’t theoretically top it.

I’m not arguing that the new-and-improved Siri’s delayed rollout is a classically Apple-esque act of confidence. Instead, it reflects the enormous pressure the company is under to deliver tangible AI in its products, and its relative inexperience with the technology. But the company still has a shot at turning its misadventures in AI into a fresh start that works to its advantage. That might be the biggest challenge—and opportunity—it faces in 2026.

You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.

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