Apple’s Spin on AI and iPadOS Multitasking
The Wall Street Journal (Mastodon, Mac Power Users Talk, Slashdot):
Apple’s AI rollout has been rocky, from Siri delays to underwhelming Apple Intelligence features. WSJ’s Joanna Stern sits down with software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak at WWDC 2025 in Cupertino to talk about the future of AI at Apple—and what the heck happened to that smarter Siri.
Stern asked the executives if Apple had a working version of the more personalized Siri when the company demonstrated the features during its WWDC 2024 keynote.
According to Federighi, it did.
“We were filming real working software, with a real large language model, with real semantic search, that’s what you saw,” said Federighi.
“There’s this narrative out there that it was demoware only,” added Joswiak. “No.”
Stern asked some tough questions. The Apple guys looked nervous. I thought they mostly gave reasonable answers, but of course they aren’t going to tell us what we really want to know. (What was going on internally that we ended up here? When will the features ship? What are they doing to fix Siri?)
I do want to call out that, in multiple interviews, they are kind of setting up strawmen to knock down. They keep saying that people say Apple is behind in AI because it doesn’t have its own chatbot. To me, Apple has been clear that it has a different strategy, and I think that strategy mostly makes sense. I have never heard someone wish for an Apple chatbot. The issue is that everyone can see that Apple seems behind in executing said strategy, both that features didn’t ship on time and that the ones that did ship don’t measure up to similar features from other companies.
Secondly, they seem to be trying to debunk John Gruber’s claim that Apple showed vaporware at the last WWDC. But Apple’s assertion that there was actual, working software doesn’t contradict anything Gruber wrote. He put it at level 0/4 because there wasn’t even a live demo, just a pre-packaged video. If it can’t be demoed to the media in a controlled setting, even calling it “demoware” would be charitable. Wikipedia says, “After Dyson’s article, the word ‘vaporware’ became popular among writers in the personal computer software industry as a way to describe products they believed took too long to be released after their first announcement.” Is that not exactly what happened here?
“This narrative that is was vaporware is nonsense”. Craig Apple. My guy. You announced something that never shipped. You made ads for it. You tried to sell iPhones based on it. What’s the difference if you had it running internally or not. Still vaporware. Zero difference 🤣
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.
The underlying message that they’re trying to convey in all these interviews is clear: calm down, this isn’t a big deal, you guys are being a little crazy. And that, in turn, aims to undercut all the reporting about the turmoil within Apple – for years at this point – that has led to the situation with Siri. Sorry, the situation which they’re implying is not a situation. Though, I don’t know, normally when a company shakes up an entire team, that tends to suggest some sort of situation. That, of course, is never mentioned. Nor would you expect Apple – of all companies – to talk openly and candidly about internal challenges. But that just adds to this general wafting smell in the air.
[…]
Guess what, Apple? A lot of other products from other companies that were labeled as “vaporwear” also existed internally at those companies in various states at various points.
[…]
And when Stern pushes them that even with the AI stuff that has shipped within the products, that she’s not really using any of it, Joz implies two things: first, that she might not even be aware that she’s using some of it, because it’s behind-the-scenes (I’m going to go ahead and guess she’s aware) and second, that while she may not be getting utility out of Apple’s AI tools, many others are – such as you know, himself. This is the new “you’re holding it wrong”.
I didn’t like that part, either. Of course, Stern was aware of that.
Apple’s Craig Federighi and Greg “Joz” Joswiak sit down with Mark from Tom’s Guide and Lance from @techradar to unpack some of WWDC 2025’s biggest reveals, and they don’t hold back. From the truth of the Siri reboot delay to Apple Intelligence’s bold vision and the surprise of iPadOS stealing the show, this interview covers it all.
As it turns out, Apple was simultaneously working on two versions of underlying Siri architecture. V1 was used to build the initial Siri demos. But V2 was needed to deliver a complete solution to customers.
“We set about for months, making it work better and better across more app intents, better and better for doing search,” said Federighi. “But fundamentally, we found that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren’t getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected.
“We realized that V1 architecture, we could push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards, and that we had to move to the V2 architecture.
“As soon as we realized that, and that was during the spring, we let the world know that we weren’t going to be able to put that out, and we were going to keep working on really shifting to the new architecture and releasing something.”
Even with the second-generation architecture, Federighi said that Apple is still working to perfect the Siri features. In the interview, Apple’s marketing chief Greg Joswiak confirmed that the “coming year” refers to 2026, so it is likely that the company is currently planning to launch the features as part of iOS 26.4 next spring.
I’ll just repeat that I have almost no interest in the next-generation Siri features. I just want Apple to make the basic stuff—announced back when Steve Jobs was still alive—fast and reliable. Apple never seems to talk about this, and nobody asks them.
I have no ill will against Craig and Joz but man their interviews after this year’s WWDC are terrible. Almost as if they didn’t rehearse answers to the most predictable questions.
The right answer should be “We tried, we failed, we’re trying again. We will only ship great products, and if we’re late so be it. We will get it right. But did you see what we DID ship? It IS great. Let me show you…”
I think that’s pretty much what they did, actually.
Andrew Cunningham (MacRumors):
And after many incremental steps, including a big swing and partial miss with the buggy, limited Stage Manager interface a couple of years ago, Apple has finally responded to requests for Mac-like multitasking with a distinctly Mac-like interface, an improved file manager, and better support for running tasks in the background.
But if this move was so forehead-slappingly obvious, why did it take so long to get here? This is one of the questions we dug into when we sat down with Federighi and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak for a post-keynote chat earlier this week.
[…]
“If you want to rewind all the way to the time we introduced Split View and Slide Over [in iOS 9], you have to start with the grounding that the iPad is a direct manipulation touch-first device,” Federighi told Ars. “It is a foundational requirement that if you touch the screen and start to move something, that it responds. Otherwise, the entire interaction model is broken—it’s a psychic break with your contract with the device.”
Mac users, Federighi said, were more tolerant of small latency on their devices because they were already manipulating apps on the screen indirectly, but the iPads of a decade or so ago “didn’t have the capacity to run an unlimited number of windowed apps with perfect responsiveness.”
Apple has said this before, and I don’t really get it. Apple has had windows that move with great responsiveness when dragged with the mouse for 25 years. Mac OS X 10.0’s system requirements were a PowerPC G3 processor and 128 MB of RAM. Stage Manager was initially introduced as requiring an M1 processor. Then Apple added support for A12 iPads. The new iPadOS 26 multitasking also works on A12 iPads, which were introduced in 2019. iPadOS 26 will, of course, be mainly used in 2026. There’s a bit of a gap there.
And, of course, “unlimited apps with perfect responsiveness” is a strawman that doesn’t exist on any system, iPad, macOS, or PC.
So, to me, it really seems more about Apple’s software architecture (note that macOS ran great on the A12 DTKs and didn’t need all of their RAM) or its unwillingness to consider a more traditional user interface than it is about hardware or a fundamental difference between touch and a mouse/trackpad. I just think that Apple has an attitude about the iPad being special and different from the Mac. This also came out when Spoonauer and Ulanoff asked for guidance about who should buy an iPad vs. a Mac. Federighi and Joswiak first said that one should buy both and resisted comparing the two platforms.
It was, of course, sarcasm. But he didn’t really land it. Because it was also a sort of strange acknowledgement that perhaps Apple should have just been doing things this way all along. Which is to say, like a Mac.
So why didn’t they until – checks calendar – some 15 years after Steve Jobs first sat down in the comfortable chair on stage with the device? Some of it, as Federighi talks about in this interview were technical limitations. The first several iterations of the iPad were certainly more akin, hardware-wise, to an iPhone and not a Mac – bust those “just a big iPhone” jokes out of cold storage. But clearly just as big of a part was that Apple really, really wanted the iPad to be a different type of device. Filling a space in between the iPhone and a Mac, just as Jobs envisioned.
Among my many frustrations with iPadOS is how, since its debut, it has aggressively kicked backgrounded apps out of memory, particularly older Safari tabs. This is because it only barely has virtual memory, and only then for specific tasks on some hardware.
Previously:
- WWDC 2025 Keynote
- iPadOS 26 Announced
- The Talk Show Live, Without Apple
- Why Apple Still Hasn’t Cracked AI
- Siri Product Knowledge
- How Apple Fumbled Siri’s AI Makeover
- Rotten
- Apple Delays “More Personalized Siri” Apple Intelligence Features
- Reduced Stage Manager iPad Requirements
- Stage Manager’s iPad Requirements
Update (2025-06-13): John Gruber (Mastodon):
But that Siri demo in last year’s keynote is almost like a series of screenshots. We never see Peterson speak to Siri and then watch the results come in. There’s not one single shot in the whole demo that shows one action leading to the next. It’s all cut together in an unusual way for Apple keynote demos. Go see for yourself at the 1h:22m mark.
I spoke this week, off the record, to multiple trusted sources in Apple’s software engineering group, and none of them ever saw an internal build of iOS that had this feature before last year’s keynote. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t such a build. But none of my sources ever saw one, and they don’t believe there was one, because they’re in positions where they believe that if there had been such a build, their teams would have had access to it. Most rank and file engineers within Apple do not believe that feature existed in an even vaguely functional state a year ago, and the first any of them ever heard of it was when they watched the keynote with the rest of us on the first day of WWDC last year.
[…]
Apple is sticking with the euphemism “in the coming year” for when we can expect to see these next-gen personalized Siri features. Gurman reported today that they’re shooting for next spring. I confirmed with Apple at WWDC that “in the coming year” means “in 2026”.
I would also like to know if the revised Siri architecture will be able to handle common basic tasks, or if that will take yet another fifteen years and a couple redesigns. It will be extremely funny if I can soon ask Siri when my mom’s flight arrives and it is able to find the information buried in some email or iMessage, but it still unable to stop the only active timer.
The full interview with Joanna Stern is now available.
In an interview this week with Swiss tech journalist Rafael Zeier, Apple’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that iPadOS 26's new Mac-like features strike a good balance between productivity and simplicity. He added that macOS is not optimized for touch-screens, although rumors suggest that might change one day.
“We want to retain all the simplicity of the iPad, but still allow iPad users who want to go deeper and further to push it at their own pace to doing more,” said Federighi, in a sit-down interview at Apple Park’s podcast studio. “I think with macOS, you’d lose what makes iPad iPad, which is the ultimate touch device. But there are lots of things the two platforms can learn from one another, and that’s where we’ve adapted our best ideas to each.”
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One thing to take into account is that there are apparently 3 class actions attempts against Apple related to iPhone + Apple Intelligence.
@Michael, as always, very good wrap-up.
If I compare this week with past WWDCs, it makes me hopeful. Muted, yes. Spin, well, of course. But certain priorities seem... better. (Or better late than never in terms of iPadOS.)
Being old school, I don't care for a chatbot. Never cared to use Siri. (Do you still need to say "hey Siri"? Don't know, don't care.) I'm aware that most Liquid Glass stuff is a very early developer beta - read; text you cannot see - and I (hope) Apple will listen to feedback over the next month or two.
"We were filming real working software, with a real large language model, with real semantic search, that’s what you saw,” said Federighi."
Bullshit. Bullshit! They showed us a behind the scenes video of The Weekend making a music video on iPhone.
Show us behind the scenes of the pick my mom up from the airport video. I triple dog dare them.
@Bart, one spelling error... it's The Weeknd. Only two Es. (I'll guess your spellcheck thought it knew better than you. That's AI for you!)
Yeah bullshit!
We want Apple to implement an AI like Google and OpenAI et al and make it easy for people to populate the web with hyperrealistic videos and photos of fake news.
Theses are the hero companies people.
People will look back at this time and see the AI accelerationists as enabling autocrats. It's already easy for them to say 'Fake news' when accused - nothing will be provable in the future.
As someone who actually likes the iPad as an iPad -- focused use, finger-only friendly and calm, yet flexible -- great for beginners... the current Split-view / Slide-over is a damn good windowing system. Especially slide-over. You don't realize what you got till it's missing, as I discovered in 26b1.
The full windowing system in IPadOS 26 is great for certain types of users but boy does it really need keyboard and mouse/trackpad to use well. Not so great for fingers. But would be great for heavier tasks or when you don't have a laptop sitting right next to it.
I've use Stage Manager on the rare occasions I really needed it and will use 26's windowing mode as well. I love that it's there.
But 99% of the time, iPad Classic Multitasking(tm) is really damn good, and even damn-gooder when looking back at the very first iterations (like when slideover paused apps behind it) and realizing that for the most-part, they really got it right.
Anyway, glad to see Stage Manager is going out to pasture a bit (some people seem to like it -- I could never figure it out).
Dreaming here: "Spaces" for window mode would be nice. Replace Stage Manager with Spaces please?
And I'm really, really hoping they bring back iPad Classic Multitasking (slide over and split screen) because the current 'full screen' is really unusable for me, and the window mode is not a good replacement. Perhaps they could even address a few of the small shortcomings of Classic mode.
Too bad about the AI.
The new free-for-devs AI Foundation Model sounds quite interesting for devs, though. That $99 gets you a lot.
(of if they can blend the two -- this is just beta 1 after all so maybe MVP. Combine Full Screen mode but add-in slide over, add auto-tiling if dragging a window or app icon next to a full-screen or out of a split-screen. It's gotta be as easy as before.)
Apple Learning Model for Text. Apple Learning Model for Photos. Apple Learning Model for Code. Etc. Naming to set the stage for incremental, task specific, improvements. After years of caution they jumped on the AI bandwagon instead. Decision by committee. Now they are paying the reputational price.
The whole line from Craig and Joz about (to paraphrase) "We're not shipping the AI integration until we get it right" is BS. If that's true, how in the heck did they keep shipping Siri with so many bugs and failures?
I swear, Siri is no better now than it was 10 years ago except they bolted on some random stuff like the ability to show sports scores. It's just as unreliable now as it was then. Sometimes I try to use it for more than just setting timers, alarms, and reminders. And 50% (or more) of the time it fails to do what I asked.
Like seriously, what does the Siri dev team DO all day? Nothing apparently.
I do understand the idea of wanting to keep the iPad special and not just shoehorn macOS into it. But we long passed the time where the hardware in the iPad was in some ways superior to a traditional PC. Imagine how amazing the device would be if they had embraced it for a touch based general computing platform rather than trying to keep it more locked down like iOS.
Really all I want is a simple way to use my Apple Pencil with powerpoint and zoom.
The new windowing system on the iPad is not a win.
Multiple overlapping windows are already messy on high-density desktop operating systems, particularly on laptops with smaller screens. On low-density iPads with even smaller screens, they make almost zero sense. I have multiple Android tablets that support windowing, and there's a reason nobody uses these devices in that mode.
Apple was right to seek a better option. They failed with Stage Manager, and now they're publicly admitting to failure. This isn't good; it's a sign of Apple's growing ineptitude in UI design.
I'm not sure if they're travelling out of the woods yet, or if the worst is still to come. The new liquid glass look gives me Windows Vista/Aero Vibes. It will probably be toned down in the next betas, but as it stands right now, it seems to decrease readability in certain situations. Also, the redesign of the photos app (and others) hides essential controls to a point where most users will never know that they are even there. iOS "intuitive" design and discoverability of functions has been in decline for years. To give 2 examples, you just have to know that you have to swipe from the edge for some menues, or pinch zoom in the print-dialogue to save something as a .pdf,... All of this is obvious bad, user hostile design. A sign that this still flies, that they are even considering it isn't the greatest sign for the future of Apple, imho.
Also, Siri seems to be gettin even worse, again. Over the last days and weeks, I had it refuse or completely misunderstand commands that have been more or less reliably working for me for years.
I'm afraid it will get progressively worse until it's so bad that the shareholders can't ignore the consequences anymore and the leadership of Apple gets new faces installed. Until then, I'm kind of dreading the - as usually probably not downgradeable - `26 releases.
Personally I don't see "just a big iPhone" as merely an old joke, because to a first approximation that IS what the iPad has always been. Even after the software was renamed to iPadOS.
@Niall I just want them to make the phone the things they advertised all last year, or give us a look at why they thought they could advertise that when it won't even be ready until nearly two full years later. And that's still their optimistic estimate.
They keep talking about actually useful personal assistants and have ever since they released Siri, and yet what they did in fact release was mostly toys.
At this point it's not about Apple Intelligence or AI in general. I just want them to stop lying.
@Ben The way I interpret that is that Siri meets their quality bar and the new AI stuff was even worse.
@Plume I get that it’s a failure to come up with something better, but it seems much better to me than doing nothing, so long as they keep the basic full/split screen stuff from before as an option. Or do you have a specific idea of what they should have done instead?
Finally a tech journalist who gets access to Apple and asks some real questions. Not hard. Not tough. Just straight up relevant questions.
What a relief.
"do you have a specific idea of what they should have done instead?"
Combine the app switcher and the current tiling window manager into a unified tiling windowing system.
I wonder if v1 of Personal Siri was supposed to run locally and v2 now shifts completely to Private Cloud Compute.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. For this to work, Siri needs to be accurate, truthful, and fast. I find the spring 2026 deadline highly unrealistic. What other company has demonstrated this level of reliable, near real-time output? Why would Apple, of all companies, be the first to crack it?
Heck, they can't even satisfyingly filter spam in our iCloud Mail inboxes. And wouldn't that be a prerequisite for Personal Siri?
