Apple hampered its Siri ambitions by penny-pinching
If Apple isn't able to get its Siri improvements out with iOS 19 in the fall, a new report tries to put the blame on early cost-cutting decisions by CFO Luca Maestri.
Apple Intelligence delays are all ex-CFO Luca Maestri's fault, apparently
First it was that Apple is years behind the rest of the industry in AI, then it was that Apple management can't cope. Now according to the New York Times, the reason Apple Intelligence is failing is because Apple was too miserly to spend some cash years ago.
Specifically, the claim is that in 2023, the then-chief financial officer Luca Maestri halved a budget that engineers had wanted for buying GPU processors for AI development work. It doesn't matter that Apple is often the most highly valued firm in the world, you don't get to be CFO of it if you're not in absolute control of spending.
Only, the story is that the engineers first went to Tim Cook with their pitch -- and Cook said yes. Maestri then wasn't just rejecting Apple's engineers, he was saying no to the CEO.
It's not impossible. And in 2023, there wasn't the same mad scramble for AI that there is now, so it's understandably unlucky timing. Or it's that the engineers didn't make a good enough case.
Their case would have seen the team's processor budget double. Maestri did increase the budget, but reportedly less than half of what was originally approved.
He's said to have told the team to be more efficient with the processors they already had.
The AI team therefore reportedly had to negotiate with Google and Amazon to use their data centers instead of, presumably, Apple's own. They were also only able to do some unspecified proportion of their AI development on Nvidia processors, because of availability.
This report does also say that Tim Cook is said to be reluctant to give clear direction to product teams. That might speak to how Steve Jobs said Cook was not a "product person".
Or it could be that communication within Apple management is failing. Whichever it is, Cook seemingly did not tell Maestri no, the team needs that budget.
So the team didn't get it, the team has poor management, and consequently Apple is now embarrassed by the slow rollout of an improved Siri.
Just as with all recent reports about the internal disagreements over AI at Apple, this new account mostly sees it as good news that the company has changed managers. It warns of a shifting deck chairs kind of mentality, and the report warns of how Apple is losing experienced staff to retirement and to being poached.
If Apple is able to turn around its Apple Intelligence fortunes, then in years to come the credit will be given to Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell. The former is the high-profile and charismatic software chief, while the latter headed up the Apple Vision Pro.
Rockwell has replaced Apple AI head John Giannandrea, and will be reporting to Federighi.
But then there is Kim Vorrath. Despite being a very long-time Apple employee, she's not had the kind of profile some other key staff have.
Yet reportedly, she is known within Apple for being a fixer who gets projects back on track. In January 2025, she was moved to the Apple Intelligence team -- and now we're seeing that team shaken up.
Although she's probably not responsible for Luca Maestri stepping down as CFO.
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taken altogether, this brings me to the conclusion that Cook needs to go. Apple needs a “product guy” in charge again.
My guess is that Apple has an LLM-based AI chatbot assistant that is comparable in quality to the competition (no one stands head and shoulders above the rest). And that's a problem. Apple executives undoubtedly realize that "just as good" isn't what they need to deliver. They need to ship something markedly better. An AI assistant that works 60-70% of the time is not reliable enough for Joe Consumer. It's just a waste of resources: time, electricity, water, money. If you had a human personal assistant that would bungle 30-40% of assigned tasks, you'd fire them that first week.
In the same way, if your iPhone failed at subway fare gates 40% of the time, you'd quickly give up using Apple Pay as a transit pass for your daily commute. You'd just pull out your plastic card or shove a paper ticket into a slot.
For true usability, an AI assistant will likely need to be 99.99% reliable. Maybe even more accurate than that. No one has time to query 7-8 AI chatbot assistants and continuously triage through the responses until they stumble upon the right answer but that's the state of the consumer-facing AI industry in April 2025.
The second problem is that Siri's current input method is voice only. Voice input is notoriously unreliable. It works some of the time for some people. This is not news, it has been like this for decades.
You combine a balky input method with unreliable assistance and you get something that might be amusing from time-to-time but not useful in the long run.
Apple needs to make Siri's primary input as text. That will reduce query interpretation errors. There's no surprise that all of the other big AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, whatever) start out as text-based tools.
There's a third challenge for Apple: they prioritize privacy and data security more than the competition. That makes it harder for Apple not easier. Apple's main competition in this area wants to take your AI chatbot activity data and sell it to the highest bidder. Apple has to put more effort and resources into their service because it takes extra work to ensure privacy and security.
Remember Microsoft Recall from last year? Well, it's supposed to ship soon, almost a year late. Reason? Heavy criticism about Microsoft's utter lack of security and privacy features for the service.
Throwing more money at AI model training isn't improving chatbot assistant reliability.
It is very possible that Apple would need to make some significant hardware changes to do this properly. Uploading everything to the cloud is not an option for privacy-minded Apple.
Ultimately Apple needs to treat Siri data with as much caution as your health or financial data.
Same on iOS. It is bloatware caused by annual updates with features being piled on top. Thousands of settings instead of going deep and trying to figure out "what are people are trying to do".
Not that the hardware is bad. MBA is a very nice computer but the main difference between now and 19 years ago is battery life. User experience hasn't changed much.
Siri used to defer to Wolfram Alpha for a lot of things but that stopped working long ago. I imagine the license ran out. The lack of development in Siri has become more obvious with the likes of Alexa coming after and yet being better, and this is even more glaringly obvious now that there has been such a leap with LLMs. It's clear Apple was totally blindsided by AI, and Cook is flat out lying when he says they've been working on it for years. If they truly have had a decent sized team working on a LLM for "years", where are the results? As there are none, why has Cook allowed it to bumble on for so long with no actual progress whilst wasting $10bn on the car? The buck stops with Cook. He has become really stale and settled. He has changed Apple's structure from a nimble, collaborative place to a sluggish monolithic company. He needs to be replaced with someone younger, more charismatic, someone who understands and is more connected to the products. It is clear from his presentations that the only things he adds to his script are the buzzwords above.