Siri > Apple Intelligence > Gemini: A Death Foretold

Fifteen years ago, when Apple introduced Siri, it felt like the future.

Now, January 2026, Siri is still… basically useless.

Not because it got old.

Because it never actually evolved.

For years, we tried to justify it: "Oh, it’s about privacy," "Apple is a hardware company," "They’re playing the long game." Then came Apple Intelligence with a fresh coat of paint and big promises. And now, Gemini. Not as a vision, but as an emergency exit.

But to understand how we got here, we need to go back to the beginning.

The 2011 keynote: the future that never moved forward

I just watched the original Siri presentation on YouTube. The 2011 one, when Apple launched the iPhone 4S. Steve Jobs was still with us. The stage was different, and the hype was real.

And something weird happened: everything they showed that day is exactly what we’re still doing with Siri today.

As we can see in the image, here’s what we actually do:

1. “Siri, wake me up at 8.”
2. “Siri, set up a timer for 5 minutes.”
3. “Siri, call my girlfriend.”

If we’re lucky. Because let’s be real, even asking it to schedule a meeting is still a coin toss.

Fifteen years later, that 2011 demo is still the final product.

Apple Intelligence: Just a costume

Apple Intelligence was a patch. Pure marketing. New glowing colors, "generative emojis," and promises of "context" that never really landed. It was a desperate move to say, "Hey, we’re doing AI too!" without actually having the tech to back it up.

In practice, Siri stayed limited. No real memory, no "chain of thought," no actual power. The problem wasn't the branding; it was the fact that Apple couldn't evolve the product itself.

$5 Billion for being late

How does the most valuable company on Earth end up paying $5 billion to its biggest rival?

Simple: they fell asleep. While OpenAI was training GPT in garages and Google was rebuilding everything around DeepMind, Apple was busy obsessing over making the iPhone a millimeter thinner. (Which, don't get me wrong, I love. But still.)

The problem isn't the money. It’s the culture. They couldn't build a decent LLM because their "on-device privacy" obsession and lack of external data left them flying blind in the Generative AI race.

A death foretold

Siri started as the future. Apple Intelligence tried to mask a problem it never solved. And Gemini? Gemini is an admission of failure.

This deal is historic not because of the price tag, but because of the message: Apple can't do this alone. (And they’re calling Google for help!)

Siri is dead (even if they keep the name). What we have now is a "designed by Apple" costume with someone else's brain inside. It’ll probably work better? Sure. But it feels like a total surrender.

The truth is, the future Apple promised never arrived. It just took them way too long to admit it.

P.S.: If I had written this a year and a half ago, we’d be talking about a "historic alliance" with OpenAI. Remember that? Apple Intelligence was supposed to be powered by ChatGPT. In the end, Sam Altman was just a summer fling, and Apple ended up knocking on Google's door. Will this marriage actually last... or are we still going to be asking Siri only about the weather?