The iPhone’s Last Stand – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

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A Working Siri<br>Dithering | Jun 9

A Working Siri

The iPhone’s Last Stand

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

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Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware. After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game, and just in time for this Article.

Project Solara

Last week, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft put forth a vision for a new ecosystem of hardware devices under the banner of Project Solara:

The concept — which isn’t entirely clear from that video, but was more fully explained on stage — is that in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud. In other words, as I wrote in February, Thin Is In:

This is even clearer when you consider the next big wave of AI: agents. The point of an agent is not to use the computer for you; it’s to accomplish a specific task. Everything between the request and the result, at least in theory, should be invisible to the user. This is the concept of a thin client taken to the absolute extreme: it’s not just that you don’t need any local compute to get an answer from a chatbot; you don’t need any local compute to accomplish real work. The AI on the server does it all.

I made the case in that Article that server-side inference would dominate AI workloads, thanks in particular to increasingly high memory demands for agents. What I found intriguing about Microsoft’s vaporware, however, is that it showcased a use case wherein this thin client approach was compelling for reasons beyond KV cache.

Specifically, for most of tech history computing has been indistinguishable from interacting; that’s why we place so much value on new input methods, as they often set off new paradigm shifts. By the same token, the problem with wearables as the paradigm beyond the iPhone is that interacting with them generally sucks. Sure, you can imagine a future where voice interaction is completely seamless or where a device can "see" what you see, but anything longer than a few seconds is much less convenient than simply swiping on your phone. Agents, however, compute on your behalf, without any interaction necessary: a few seconds is all you need to get work done for hours — at least in theory.

Siri AI

Apple, a company that can actually make devices, was under heavy scrutiny going into yesterday’s WWDC keynote for a different concern: can the company make AI? And, if your standards are the state of the art in AI circa June 2024, when Apple took their first crack at answering the question, they did quite well. The company’s pre-recorded keynote took great pains to show actual demos — spinning indicators and all — and they worked! Here was the first one of what Apple is calling "Siri AI":

What’s fascinating about this specific demo is that it also showed just how far behind Apple is. New head of Siri Mike Rockwell successfully used Siri to set a reminder to enter a lottery for concert tickets, demonstrating context awareness and the ability to interact with the Reminders app through Apple’s App Intents framework; what would have been state of the art would have been asking Siri to enter the lottery on his behalf when the time came. In other words, to act outside of the interaction paradigm that has traditionally defined computing, and which Apple has dominated.

At the same time, the fact that Apple is behind the state of the art might not matter that much given Apple’s market and opportunity in that market. To start with the former, Apple is targeting consumers, for whom traditional chatbot functionality is probably sufficient for the vast majority of their AI needs. Siri will be able to give you recipes, tips on do-it-yourself projects, or generate images. Moreover, the fact that Siri will have access to your iPhone gives it all of the same advantages that made me optimistic about Apple Intelligence in the first place. From an Update after that initial June 2024 launch:

The key part here is the “understanding personal context” bit: Apple Intelligence will know more about you than any other AI, because your phone knows more about you than any other device (and knows what you are looking at whenever you invoke Apple Intelligence); this, by extension, explains why the infrastructure and privacy parts are so important.

What this means is that Apple Intelligence is by-and-large focused on specific use cases where that knowledge is useful; that means the problem space that Apple Intelligence is trying to solve is constrained and...