Apple is now targeting a spring 2026 release for its long-delayed upgrade to Siri, which means don’t expect it by the end of the year as previously reported.
That’s according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. It marks another slip in the Apple’s push to modernize Siri and show it can keep up in the AI race.
Sources say the Siri team is aiming to roll out the revamped features as part of iOS 26.4, typically released around March. But the exact timing could shift depending on how development goes in the coming months.
The Siri overhaul was first unveiled in mid-2024 as part of Apple’s bigger AI plan. It promised more personalized responses, using on-device data and contextual awareness — a huge jump for an assistant that has been seen as pretty stupid compared to ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
Internally, the delay has sparked finger-pointing between Apple’s AI engineering teams and marketing division, says Gurman. People close to the situation say engineers blamed marketing for hyping features that weren’t ready, while marketing claims they were working off timelines handed to them.
Behind the scenes, the project has faced major engineering problems. One key issue, according to sources, was that Siri’s backend was split between two systems — an older one for basic tasks and a new one for the advanced features. The attempt to merge them led to bugs that made the assistant unreliable about one-third of the time.
As a result, Apple reassigned Siri leadership earlier this year. John Giannandrea, Apple’s AI chief, lost oversight of Siri and consumer-facing products. Now, longtime software head Craig Federighi and Vision Pro leader Mike Rockwell are overseeing the rebuild under a system known internally as “Siri LLM.”
Apple didn’t even touch on the new AI Siri at WWDC. At this point, who knows when the real Siri will even show up.
But inside Apple, some are worried that Siri’s delays are holding up other projects. A planned smart home hub that relied on the new Siri has been indefinitely postponed, and future hardware like AI-powered smart glasses could also be affected.
Despite the delays, Apple is still exploring a longer-term Siri evolution: an always-on, conversational assistant that could function like a personal AI sidekick. One concept app under development, known as “Knowledge,” would work more like a chatbot and draw information from the web.
This Siri revamp has been a major setback for Apple, especially after it advertised an Apple Intelligence-powered Siri was going to be coming for iPhone 16 series users. People who bought the iPhone 16 thinking they would get access now have to wait even longer.
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Vapourware. Jobs is rolling over in his grave right now.