Delayed Siri Features Settlement

In other words, as predicted, they got away with it. They even got to officially say they did nothing wrong.

A fine is just a fee to break the law.

TL;DR You could get $25 up to a per-device cap of $95 for finding receipts, filling out paperwork and scanning or mailing them that could take an hour, probably more. Note that the "Attorneys" who are doing you this "favor" get $70 million. That's like 70,000 hours – 35 years – billed at $1000 per hour. 🧐

§ Case 5:25-cv-02668-NW Document 77 Filed 05/05/26 Page 16 of 38

We need laws that make these settlements a lot higher. They need to be higher than the profits made from the scam

If we don’t do that, society is going to keep getting worse as companies continue to profit from bad faith behavior

Siri has never performed like its launch commercials. $250M is a slap on the wrist for 15 years of false advertising.

When Siri's "intelligence" effort failed, if could have been salvaged if it transcribed voice to text properly. That's literally the basis of its interaction. It sucks at that task even today (which is why it sucks at everything else).

Siri is the Liquid Glass of VUI (Voice User Interface). "Hey Google" and "Alexa" have mogged it for a decade. Now every random voice startup and open source transcription model mog it.

The Siri team should hate each other for having let each other down. IYKYK

Siri is an exemplar of a greater sickness within Apple, and more broadly within software; the loss of learnability, and loss of command.

Put bluntly, Siri should have been a structured voice recognition command system; effectively Applescript for voice. Every application should have had its entire command structure (menu in macOS) exposed to it, and users should have had to *learn* how to drive Siri.

Siri instead seeks to learn users, and there's simply to much complexity, too much nuance, too much variability for that to work.

And thus the greater failing in software in general; the idea that "intuitive" means "does not require a user to learn how to do it" leads to "the product is an unlearnable black box".

As for what the Siri team should feel @Hammer; the people who made it all left Apple the instant their stock grants vested, which happens for pretty much every Apple acquisition.

I wonder if the failure to deliver the Siri Apple Intelligence features has led to any changes to software development at Apple. I'm not in software, so I'm saying that from a broad, organizational-planning angle. That was the only tentpole software feature for iOS 18, so take that away and there wasn't much software-wise to promote. Putting so many eggs in one basket within the annual release schedule seems like it was a setup where this would eventually happen.

@Someone +1, could not agree more. Siri could have been structured, and people would be using it today, with smiles on their faces.

Back in the 80s, the formula for Interactive Fiction game parsers was developed to a very compelling standard; people still play those games, and many others, today, after having learned, at most for each new game played, any commands/verbs specific to that game. It's terrific. Yet the technorati think that the ideal of Siri, or AI more generally, is not a few well-chosen written words typed on keyboards and read on-screen, but is instead some imaginary analog of a human spirit in a multi-modal, all-knowing, all-being cybernetic avatar. It's just sad, really.