Apple is delaying the only Apple Intelligence feature everyone wanted

Macworld

Remember the iPhone 16 ad where Bella Ramsey asked her phone to remind her of the name of the person she had a meeting with a few months ago? You probably won’t be able to do that until the iPhone 17.

Apple on Friday confirmed (via Daring Fireball) that the new personalized Siri that was originally expected to arrive in iOS 18.4, then pushed back to iOS 18.5, now won’t arrive until sometime in the coming year. With WWDC just a few months away, it seems likely that the revamped Siri will be delayed until the iOS 19 cycle, and probably in a 2026 update.

The main features being delayed, according to Apple’s statement, are onscreen awareness, personal context, and app intents, three of the most anticipated Apple Intelligence features. Onscreen awareness lets Siri see and understand what’s on your screen so you can ask it to do something like, “Add this person to my contacts,” while personal context, as seen in the Ramsay ad above, lets Siri use its knowledge of the messages, events, and other personal information on your device to help it give information tailored to you.

But App Intents is probably the most disappointing feature that will miss the deadline. The feature will let you take action across various apps with Siri, something users have wanted for years. For example, Siri could retrieve flight information from a third-party app and send it to a friend with a single command.

Apple Intelligence has had a bumpy rollout. None of the features were available when iOS 18 arrived in September, and they have been slowly rolling out in updates since. Apple temporarily disabled its news summary feature earlier this year after a series of erroneous alerts, and also removed the Sketch option from Image Playground generation. These Siri features were always promised to come in an update to iOS 18, even when first announced at WWDC, but that didn’t stop them from running ads for iPhone 16 that included the features. Now, they won’t be available until at least the time iPhone 17 is on the shelves.

There’s a reason the delay was announced quietly and on a Friday following a week of announcements—it’s an embarrassing admission of how far behind Apple is on AI. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported earlier this week that the “conversational” Siri-based rival to ChatGPT and Gemini won’t arrive until 2027. With this new delay, it’s likely that Apple is going to be playing catch-up with the likes of Google, Samsung, and OpenAI for years to come.