Apple Promised a Smarter Siri. What iPhone Buyers May Be Owed.

When Apple took the stage at WWDC 2024 and unveiled Apple Intelligence, the company made a specific promise to every iPhone buyer watching. Siri, Apple said, was about to become genuinely useful, capable of reading emails, understanding a user’s calendar, acting across apps and answering questions that actually required knowing something about a person’s life. The demos were polished. The marketing that followed was relentless. The iPhone 16 launched that September as the first AI phone and millions of people upgraded to get it.

The features never arrived. And as of this month, Apple has spent two years and $250 million reckoning with the gap between what was advertised and what was delivered.

What Apple Said Siri Would Do

The Apple Intelligence vision centered on three capabilities Apple positioned as the headline reason to buy. Personal Context would allow Siri to draw on a user’s emails, messages, photos and calendar, answering questions like “When did Mom’s flight change?” or “What is my passport number?” On-Screen Awareness would let Siri see whatever was on the display at any moment and act on it without requiring the user to switch apps. In-app Actions would allow Siri to chain together tasks across multiple applications in a single request.

Apple demonstrated all three at WWDC 2024 and wove them into marketing for every iPhone 16 sold through the fall. Ads ran on television and online. Anyone who watched those ads and decided this was the year to upgrade was not being unreasonable.

The Friday Afternoon Admission

In March 2025, Apple issued a statement late on a Friday, a timing that is its own form of message management. The statement acknowledged that “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features” and promised delivery “in the coming year.” No specific date. No technical explanation. The ads quietly disappeared from Apple’s website.

John Gruber, who has covered Apple for decades at Daring Fireball, described the delay plainly: the features were being pushed from iOS 18 to the following year’s software cycle. He observed that the Siri personal context capabilities “never felt like something that was going to be ready for real customer usage in this year’s OS cycle,” which raised an uncomfortable question about why Apple had sold so many phones on that basis.

A Year Later, Still Waiting

At WWDC 2025, Apple executives confirmed to The Wall Street Journal and Tom’s Guide that the three flagship Siri capabilities would not arrive until 2026, a full two years after their announcement. Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak explained that the features had not met Apple’s reliability standards.

In practice that meant the Siri running on an iPhone 16 in late 2025 still could not compete with free alternatives, including ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, available to anyone from the App Store. Internal testers on early iOS 26.4 builds characterized the new Siri as something that “doesn’t compete with today’s chatbots.” The assistant Apple had sold as the future of iPhone was losing ground to apps that cost nothing.

The Lawsuit and What It Means for iPhone Buyers

Consumers filed a class action lawsuit arguing that Apple’s iPhone 16 marketing was misleading, that it created the clear impression that the advanced Siri features were available or imminent when they were not. The Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division reportedly found that Apple’s own language, describing Apple Intelligence as “available now,” could lead a reasonable consumer to believe the upgraded Siri was already active on their device.

Apple settled the case in December 2025 for $250 million. The terms became public in May 2026. Consumers who purchased any of the following devices between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025 may be eligible to file a claim:

iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max or iPhone 16e
iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max

Eligible claimants can receive between $25 and $95 per device, depending on how many claims are filed. Filing requires proof of purchase, a device serial number, a phone number and Apple Account information. Apple denied wrongdoing, as is standard in settlements of this kind. A second lawsuit, brought by South Korea’s National Pension Service as a securities fraud claim, remains pending.

WWDC 2026: Apple Finally Delivers

On June 8, 2026, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference at Apple Park under the tagline “All Systems Glow.” It was also Tim Cook’s final WWDC as CEO before handing the role to hardware chief John Ternus on September 1. The centerpiece of the keynote was the product Apple should have shipped two years earlier.

Apple unveiled what it is calling Siri AI, a complete rebuild of the assistant that finally delivers the three capabilities announced at WWDC 2024. The new Siri is powered by a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Google Gemini model, licensed from Google at a reported $1 billion per year and confirmed publicly by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, opened the AI section of the keynote with a direct statement on privacy: “We believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable. Data is only used to execute your request, and outside experts can continue to verify this promise at any time.”

The capability set is precisely what iPhone buyers were promised in 2024. Personal context awareness means Siri can now search a user’s emails, messages, calendar and files to answer questions specific to that person’s life. On-screen awareness means Siri reads whatever is displayed in any app in real time: a user who receives a text with flight details can hold the side button and ask Siri to add the event to a calendar and send the arrival time to a contact, without copy-pasting anything. In-App Actions means Siri can chain tasks across apps in a single request. The dedicated Siri app, also new, stores conversation history and syncs across iPhone, iPad and Mac through iCloud.

TechCrunch noted that the keynote’s structure was itself a kind of admission: Apple led with bug fixes and performance improvements before features, framing a better Siri as one item on a long list rather than the main event. Siri AI will arrive this fall with the iOS 27 public release, expected alongside new iPhone hardware in September. EU and China users will not receive Siri AI at launch due to ongoing regulatory negotiations under the Digital Markets Act. An iCloud Plus subscription expands access to the heavier cloud-based AI features, some of which carry daily usage limits.

The Broader Picture for iPhone Users

The features that already work well in the current iOS, including Writing Tools, Priority Notifications and the Clean Up eraser in Photos, remain available today and are worth using. For tasks that require genuine reasoning, drafting complex emails or research, Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity remain more capable than Siri and are free to download on iPhone and Mac.

The WWDC 2026 announcement is meaningful because it is no longer a promise. Developer betas of iOS 27 with Siri AI are available now. A public beta is expected in July. The full release ships this fall. Apple has committed publicly to delivering the personal context, on-screen awareness and in-app action features before the end of 2026, the same features it promised would ship in early 2025.

The $250 million settlement that preceded this announcement is not an abstraction. It is a finding, expressed in dollars, that the gap between what Apple marketed and what Apple shipped was wide enough to matter. iPhone buyers who made a purchasing decision based on those ads were right to expect what the ads showed. The settlement says so. The WWDC 2026 keynote confirms that what was advertised in 2024 was real: it simply took two more years and one very expensive class action to arrive.