On August 22, 2025, MacRumors published a guide that basically confirmed what anyone who has ever yelled “HEY SIRI” into a pillow already suspected: Apple’s voice assistant is being completely gutted. Again. The so-called “LLM Siri” overhaul won’t arrive until spring 2026—because nothing says innovation like promising to fix the thing you broke five years ago.
From “Apple Intelligence” to “Apple Procrastination”
Remember the big keynote last year? The slick videos about Apple Intelligence, how Siri was about to become the friend you never had, capable of finding your emails, surfacing that blurry photo Eric sent, and juggling multi-app workflows like an AI butler? Yeah, about that. In March 2025, Craig Federighi admitted it wasn’t shipping. Not “delayed until the fall.” Not “coming in beta.” Just gone. Aborted.
Apple’s first-gen “hybrid” architecture—a Frankenstein of old Siri command stacks duct-taped to large-language-model scaffolding—collapsed under its own weight. It didn’t work. Siri kept hallucinating, crashing, or refusing to recognize when you were actually talking to it. In one internal test, it reportedly mistook a user asking for “my calendar” as a command to buy a calendar app on the App Store. For $29.99.
The Cult of the Reset Button
The official spin: this isn’t a failure, it’s a reboot. Apple’s moving Siri entirely to an LLM backbone. Forget the band-aids. Forget the “hybrid.” This time, Siri will actually be smart. Morale is supposedly “up,” which is corporate-speak for “Meta poached all the good engineers and the ones left are too tired to argue.”
To underline the reset, John Giannandrea—Apple’s AI czar—was quietly relieved of Siri duties. Enter Mike Rockwell, previously AR/VR chief, because when you can’t ship a headset people want, obviously you should run the company’s most embarrassing AI project.
Corporate Amnesia as a Feature
Here’s the thing about Apple: it survives not by avoiding mistakes but by convincing you the last mistake never existed. Apple Maps? A disaster, until suddenly it wasn’t (and we all pretended Google Maps never existed). Ping, their social music network? Vaporized. MobileMe? LOL. The Newton? A collector’s item.
Siri’s perpetual incompetence has been tolerated for over a decade because Apple is good at aesthetic distractions. But in 2025, when your competitors are running real LLMs that can write symphonies, simulate court trials, and explain Succession’s ending, a voice assistant that can’t even set a timer reliably looks like a war crime against usability.
The Buzzwords Apple Can’t Quit
The new Siri—targeted for iOS 26.4 in spring 2026—will ship with:
- Personal Context: query your own emails, files, photos. (“Show me the file Eric sent” might actually find Eric’s file instead of pulling up Eric Clapton on Apple Music.)
- On-Screen Awareness: Siri will understand what you’re looking at and act on it. (“Send this doc to my boss” while you’re staring at it, instead of Siri replying: “I can’t find Boss in your contacts.”)
- Deeper App Integration: multi-step actions across apps. (“Book me a flight, text Mom the details, add it to my calendar, and make a playlist called ‘Please Let This Work.’”)
Sounds great. Except they already promised all of this for iOS 18. Which means the “innovation” here is not the feature set—it’s Apple’s ability to delay until competitors have burned through three more hype cycles.
Private Cloud Compute: AKA, Please Trust Us
Apple insists all this will run on “Private Cloud Compute,” meaning your data will be processed “securely” in a way that nobody—including Apple—can see. The models will run partly on-device, partly in special secure data centers. They won’t confirm whose LLM they’ll use: Apple’s own, or licensed from OpenAI or Anthropic.
Which is Apple’s way of saying: we don’t actually have this figured out yet. They’re testing. They’re benchmarking. They’re shopping for a brain to implant in Siri’s skull. Siri right now is the AI equivalent of a body on life support, waiting for the right donor.
The Federighi Comedy Hour
Craig Federighi himself admitted the hybrid system “just didn’t work.” It’s rare for Apple to admit anything, let alone failure. But Federighi has perfected the art of hair-swoosh contrition: admit failure with a grin, promise the future will be better, collect applause, move on. Apple fans ate it up. Again.
It’s like being in a toxic relationship where your partner keeps forgetting anniversaries but promises the next one will be magical. And you believe them, because damn, they make a beautiful slideshow.
Siri as Corporate Mascot of Delay
By the time this “new Siri” launches in 2026, Siri will be 15 years old. Fifteen. A surly teenager who still can’t tell the difference between “call Mom” and “play Bombtrack by Rage Against the Machine.”
Apple has had over a decade to fix this. Instead, Siri has been the butt of tech jokes for so long it’s practically a cultural institution. Even Alexa—Amazon’s high school dropout of an assistant—manages to set timers better. Google Assistant was competent until Google executed it. And ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have leapfrogged the concept entirely by simply being better than voice assistants.
Siri, meanwhile, is a ghost haunting every iPhone, whispering, “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that.”
The Bee’s-Eye View
Our cartoon bee buzzes through Apple Park. Inside, a whiteboard reads: “Siri 2026: This Time It Works.” Engineers argue whether to license OpenAI or build in-house. A hologram of Tim Cook floats overhead, chanting “privacy, privacy, privacy.”
In the corner, Siri itself mutters: “Did you mean set an alarm or launch a war in Taiwan?”
The bee holds up a placard: “The future of AI, perpetually two years away.”
The Closing Sting
The 2026 Siri relaunch will be marketed as revolutionary. But it isn’t. It’s triage. It’s Apple trying to catch up after squandering a decade coasting on aesthetics while ignoring the single most obvious category of consumer AI.
Yes, maybe this time Siri will finally work. Maybe it will understand context, screen awareness, multi-app tasks. Maybe it will be private, secure, even impressive. But the fact that we’re still talking about Siri as a potential success story in 2026 is itself the indictment.
Because the real story isn’t Siri’s future. It’s Siri’s failure. And no matter how much Apple reboots, rebrands, or resets, that failure is the legacy: the assistant that never arrived, forever delayed, always “coming soon.”