Apple Insists It Had a Working Version of Personalized Siri Features Last Year ⇥ techradar.com

Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak found time to chat with a few journalists and media personalities this week. Both sat down for video interviews with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal and Mark Spoonauer and Lance Ulanoff from Future U.S. publications, while Federighi alone spoke with Justine Ezarik.

Ulanoff, of TechRadar, quoting Federighi:

“We found that when we were developing this feature that we had, really, two phases, two versions of the ultimate architecture that we were going to create,” he explained. “Version one we had working here at the time that we were getting close to the conference, and had, at the time, high confidence that we could deliver it. We thought by December, and if not, we figured by spring, until we announced it as part of WWDC. Because we knew the world wanted a really complete picture of, ‘What’s Apple thinking about the implications of Apple intelligence and where is it going?'”

As Apple was working on a V1 of the Siri architecture, it was also working on what Federighi called V2, “a deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we wanted to create, to get to a full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri.”

Federighi insisted Apple had a functioning, working version of the “V1” architecture that really could do the complex things it showed in its feature presentation at WWDC last year, but it apparently did not work well enough. Federighi said they have the “V2” version working today, too — but was not interested in providing a demo of either version, nor commit to a date more specific than “2026”. This is a message it was careful to reinforce in other interviews.

I can understand why Apple would want to dispel the idea that it never had a truly functional version of this software. Joswiak, speaking to Stern, said “there’s this narrative out there that … it was demoware only. No […]”. From a user’s perspective, however, this is a distinction without a difference, relying almost entirely on the fuzzy boundary between software that works only for the purpose of a single filmed demo, and software that works so poorly as to effectively be the same. But putting this on the record will be important as Apple prepares to defend itself over allegations of false advertising. That is, I think, who this statement is for — not for me, you, the public at large — but for itself and, by extension, its shareholders.