Apple and AI : Siri the Early Years - by Babbage

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Apple and AI : Siri the Early Years

Babbage<br>Aug 13, 2026

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One of the reasons for studying technology history is to look for recurring patterns: characteristics of either the technology itself or of firms that are built around it that are repeated time and time again.<br>These can be particularly useful as predictors of future behaviour at a firm when that firm has strong DNA that is passed down from one generation of management to the next.<br>It’s generally agreed that Apple is one firm with a track record of acting to preserve and strengthen its DNA. The appointment of 25-year Apple veteran John Ternus to succeed Tim Cook as Apple CEO is just the latest and most prominent example.<br>Which brings us to the subject of this post and the next: Apple and AI.<br>Spoiler alert! These posts suggest that there is a credible scenario where Apple is a huge winner - possibly even the biggest winner - in the ‘AI revolution’.<br>I want to say upfront that there is too much uncertainty about the final shape of the technology underpinning AI to come to any firm conclusions.<br>I’d also like to acknowledge the post Apple is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It by Limited Edition Jonathan which prompted me to think about Apple and AI. I want to emphasise though that I’ll be considering Apple’s position from a very different perspective and that, in the end, I reach conclusions that, although aligned in some ways, are distinctive in others.<br>The core of the argument is that Apple has a track record of scaling the production of leading edge technology to make it available to its millions of customers ahead of its competition. This has been accompanied by long term investment across the whole technology stack, from custom silicon, through compilers and application software. These capabilities, and a willingness to use them, are central features of Apple’s DNA.<br>There is a lot more to the say about this though! We’ll go into (much) more of the detail that supports these arguments in the next post. In the rest of this post we’ll take stock of where Apple is now and its AI journey so far.<br>Siri Arrives: The Dream and The Reality

… for decades technologists have teased us with this dream that you're going to be able to talk to technology and it'll do things for us. Haven't we seen this before over and over, but it never comes true. We have very limited capability you just learn a syntax: call a name, dial a number, play a song. It is such a let-down. What we really want to do is just talk to our device ask a simple question: what's the weather going to be like today and get a response. In fact we don't want to be told how to talk to it, we want to talk to it any way we'd like. Someone else might ask ‘what rain Cupertino’ or ‘is the weather going to get worse today’ or ‘do I need an umbrella today’ and your device, in this case your phone, will figure out what you mean and help you get what you want done.<br>Phil Schiller, Apple SVP Marketing at Apple Keynote that launched Siri

What year and with which phone did Apple launch Siri? Don’t cheat! The answer is below after the short break.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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The answer is 2011 with the iPhone 4S at an October special event. Yes, it’s nearly fifteen years since Siri made its first appearance. It was a momentous few days in Apple’s history. The event was Tim Cook’s first as CEO. Steve Jobs would pass away the very next day.<br>Here is a link to that Siri introduction:

Phil Schiller’s opening words neatly set out the promise of Siri: an assistant that you could talk to in natural language.<br>If we didn’t get the message from the introduction then Scott Forstall’s live Siri demonstration reinforced the point, in Forstall’s own words (my emphasis):<br>… not only did it understand the words I said it understands the meaning and then goes and gives me this weather forecast … the exact words I say aren’t important it’s the meaning behind the words so I could ask this in a completely different way …

After asking for the weather today Forstall then goes on to ask if he ‘needs a raincoat today’, to which Siri responds ‘It sure looks like rain today’ followed by the weather forecast.

Perhaps the cloudy outlook was a metaphor for Siri’s prospects?<br>Readers who used Siri in the decade after it was launched will recognise the acute irony in Schiller’s opening words: Apple was continuing the long tradition of teasing us with a dream. The reality was that Siri would consistently fall short of Schiller and Forstall’s promise. We’ll come to this again in a moment.<br>Put this all aside for now though and consider again how early this is and the prominence that Apple’s management gave to the launch of Siri.<br>The iPhone 4S, also launched at this keynote, used a dual core 32-bit Arm Cortex A9 processor with 512MB of DRAM. This was nowhere near powerful enough to even...