Apple just celebrated its 50th birthday with a Nasdaq bell-ringing ceremony at Apple Park and a performance by Paul McCartney. The optics were perfect. The AI strategy? Not so much.
Former insiders are saying it out loud now: Apple had a five-year head start with Siri, launched in 2011, and squandered it. “Apple basically blew a five-year lead,” said Walt Mossberg, the legendary tech columnist who covered the company for decades. Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer was more diplomatic, but the message was clear — the original vision for Siri was far more ambitious than what shipped, and Apple never followed through.
The company is now playing catch-up. In January, Apple struck a multiyear deal with Google to integrate Gemini AI into a rebooted Siri. That’s a reversal of the old model: Google already pays Apple around $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on the iPhone. Now Apple is the one paying — and handing over some control to a competitor in the process.
Former employees worry about what that means for Apple’s core promise: privacy. The company has long positioned itself as the anti-Google, the brand that doesn’t harvest user data to fuel an ad engine. But AI models need data to get smarter. If Apple is licensing Google’s tech, what happens to that wall?
Still, some believe Apple can win. Cheyer says the first company to combine “knowing and doing” in a single AI system will dominate the next era of tech — and Apple still has a shot. The bet is that AI workloads will shrink and run locally on devices within a few years, solving the privacy problem and playing to Apple’s silicon strength.
But the clock is ticking. OpenAI just bought Jony Ive’s design firm for $6.4 billion and tasked him with building a screenless AI device. If the next computing platform doesn’t need a screen, Apple’s design advantage evaporates. The company may have missed the boat on cloud AI. The question is whether it can still win on the edge.
