Apple’s AI Disaster - A Rare Failure

Article Highlights:

• Apple has faced criticism for its buggy software in recent years.
• The launch of Apple Intelligence has been riddled with issues, leading to class action lawsuits.
• Internal turmoil within Apple has hindered the development of Siri and AI technologies.
• Competing companies, such as Google, have advanced quickly in the AI space.
• The future of Apple's software is uncertain, with major updates announced but performance quality in question.

Hi, welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion.

Apple has often taken existing technologies and made them better, or at the very least got people talking.

So in recent years, when Apple Software became buggy, why does it feel like Apple Software has become a complete buggy mess in the past couple of years?

I spent the last week or so collecting a ton of examples of Apple software not behaving correctly.

I'm talking everything from minor UI glitches to entire applications or features not working altogether.

And it's a shame because Apple software used to be one of its main selling points, or just questionably designed in some cases.

It's clear that Apple may be starting to overripe it. Nothing underscores this more than Apple Intelligence.

Announced last June it was Apple's take on AI and a year later it's still mostly vaporware.

And the company was still talking about it in WWD in June of 2025 like nothing had happened.

Apple Intelligence was so bad that there's multiple class action lawsuits against the company for false advertising.

You can't just promise something, sell phones based on that thing and not deliver.

That's illegal, the lawsuit states. Apple's advertisements cultivated a clear and reasonable consumer expectation that these transformative features would be available upon the iPhone's release.

Contrary to defendants' claims of advanced AR capabilities, the products offered a significantly limited or entirely absent version of Apple Intelligence, misleading consumers about its actual utility and performance end at the same time.

It's frustrating because they promised so much. And yet MKBHD isn't being dramatic here.

A report from the publication the Information in April revealed that many of Apple's most impressive AI demos were staged.

There were a trickle of features rolled out, but they were a half-baked and rushed job.

For once, Apple seems to have lost control of the narrative. How did the world’s most valuable tech company, the company that gave us the iPod, the iPhone, and Apple Silicon end up fumbling the single biggest tech shift in recent memory, that is generative AI?

Now we're leaving aside how useful AI can be in this conversation, focusing on what happened with Apple and what happened is very interesting.

Behind the scenes within Apple's AI division there was bitter infighting, mistrust, engineers walking out, bosses being fired, fragmentation, and frankly, chaos.

So, let's take a look at all of this and how it happened. Before we start, just a quick word of housekeeping.

A big thank you for everyone who's been watching these videos on Spotify.

All the uploads are available there if you want to check it out. Cheers.

You are watching Cold Fusion TV; we knew the world wanted a really complete picture of what Apple is thinking about the implications of Apple Intelligence and where it's going.

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.

Right? According to the information, Apple quote unquote faked those sleek demos at last year's keynote.

They weren't running on real devices, and even some of Apple's own engineers had never seen them work in practice.

It wasn't just one or two things missing.

The most impressive part of the WWDC demo, the moment where Siri pulls up flight info from mail, cross-checks lunch plans and messages, and maps your route was completely staged.

That scenario never actually ran on test builds.

In fact, the only part of the system that worked was the pulsing rainbow ribbon around the screen's edge. That's it.

Even Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, was reportedly shocked when he ran a pre-release of the software on his phone.

It couldn't do half of what was already shown to the public.

In addition to this, in the campaign for the iPhone 16, Apple Intelligence was all over advertisements from TV to online media to billboards.

Advertising a phone whose main feature didn't even exist isn't a good look.

And let's not forget a lot of what was shown off in the Apple Intelligence demo was actually relying on ChatGPT and not Apple's own model.

So not only did Apple arrive late, it showed up empty-handed and borrowed someone else's tools.

Not very Apple-like. Apple has always played the long game.

They wait to see how others flop or succeed, then enter with a polished product that redefines the category.

The Apple Watch wasn’t the first wearable. The iPhone wasn’t the first touchscreen phone.

But it felt like the first one that worked how you wanted it to.

Multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, great software.

Apple didn't invent it all, but they all made it click and worked together seamlessly.

And that’s the Apple playbook. Let others tinker, then step in and clean up the mess.

But this time the strategy didn’t play out as usual.

When generative AI exploded onto the mainstream in late 2022, Apple held back.

To be fair, Google was also caught off guard by ChatGPT, and I've made an entire episode about how the company was in panic mode.

Feel free to check it out on the channel, but here’s the difference.

Google quickly regrouped. Within months it had launched Bard and then Gemini, which is now powering a growing ecosystem of AI tools across Android and the web.

Meanwhile, Apple was mostly silent. There was something wrong, and the cracks started to show.

Let's start with the obvious: Siri. It’s the one tool that Apple should have figured out by now.

When Siri launched all the way back in 2011, it looked like the future.

But even in 2025, it's a joke, getting even less capable as time passes.

There’s no conversational functions.

It's not context-aware or even reliable for basic tasks.

Ask Siri something slightly complicated and you would either get a canned response, a web search, or nothing at all.

Now compare that to Google’s Gemini Live. A new voice-first experience where you can talk naturally to the AI, interrupt at mid-sentence, ask follow-up questions and even switch between typing and speaking on the fly.

A lot more than I thought I would.

So Gemini Live is a conversational Gemini where you pull up that like full screen thing, whatever.

It has access to your screen and then you can give it access to your camera.

You open up the camera and you can just ask it about your surroundings and point it at stuff and ask it about what it's pointed at.

It has not missed once.

Do it, us, right?

Yeah, ask it about us.

All right, let's do it.

We’re supposed to be looking at the camera. What do you see here?

It looks like you're in a podcast studio. Are you getting ready to record a new episode?

Yeah, I'm about to record this episode with these two people here.

Is there anything you think I should ask them?

Oh God, that's awesome.

Since you're podcasting with two people, you could explore the dynamic of their relationship.

Ask them how they first met or what it's like working together.

It often leads to interesting stories.

I want you to tell me about these headphones he’s wearing. What are these?

Those are Audio Technica ATH and 50x headphones.

They're pretty popular in the audio world.

Gemini integrates with Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Calendar, and more.

And it's built into Android.

And Samsung isn't far off either.

Samsung's Galaxy AI has real-time COD translation and a lot of other features.

But one thing that stands out and highlights everything I'm talking about is the object eraser function.

Both Samsung and Apple have it, but the stark difference in quality is astounding.

So for Google and Samsung, AI is here and usable today, but for Apple, it's still coming soon.

And that is the key difference.

So the question is, is this just a technological gap or a reflection of something deeper?

And the biggest thing is they were blindsided when generative AI with ChatGPT and GitHub launched back in November 2022.

I'm told Apple Intelligence wasn't even an idea back then.

Why? Well, they missed the boat.

There was philosophical disagreement and philosophical disinterest in the topic of artificial intelligence.

I write about how Craig Federighi, Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering, doesn't really believe in these multi-billion-dollar projects.

To be fair, this slow car crash of a disaster for Apple isn't just one man or one bad call.

It actually stemmed from years of internal mismanagement, missed opportunities, and a leadership team that just couldn't decide what Siri or their version of AI was supposed to be.

So what actually went wrong behind the scenes?

To answer that, we have to turn our attention back to Siri again.

Back in 2011, Siri wasn't even Apple's idea.

It was an app that Apple bought for $200 million.

At that time, Steve Jobs had massive plans for it.

But sadly he would pass away just as Siri launched.

And from there, things got really messy.

First up was Scott Forstall, one of Jobs' closest allies.

He handed Siri over to Richard Williamson, an Apple senior executive, and that move turned out to be not so great.

Williamson reportedly clashed with the team and only approved Siri upgrades once a year.

Imagine trying to work under those conditions.

By 2012 there was the Apple Maps fiasco.

Of course, many of you would remember that the headlines practically wrote themselves.

Warped buildings, missing landmarks, and directions that made no sense.

The internal fallout from the disaster was swift.

Both Forstall, in charge of Apple Maps, and Williamson were shown the door.

Maps eventually got better, but Siri was put on the back burner.

Enter Bill Stior, a research expert from Amazon brought in to fix Siri.

This should have been a turning point, but it wasn’t.

Instead of a unifying vision, the Siri team fractured, engineers fought over direction, and many just left.

By the time Siri Kit, Apple’s developer tools for Siri, arrived in 2016, Alexa and Google Assistant had already run away completely, stealing the spotlight.

Then in 2018, Apple made a big move.

They poached John Giannandrea, who ran AI at Google. Finally, it seemed like Apple was getting serious.

Giannandrea, or JG as is known inside Apple, took control of Apple's machine learning and Siri efforts.

He reported directly to Tim Cook and had full control over Apple's AI strategy.

On paper, this was brilliant. A huge deal.

In reality, however, things started moving at a snail's pace under JG and his top deputy, Robbie Walker.

It took two years just to drop the "hey" from "hey Siri".

Walker also poured time into shaving milliseconds off Siri's response time, while reportedly ignoring efforts to improve quality or emotional context.

Talk about wrong priorities.

Some engineers even began building an LLM powered empathy layer for Siri.

But Walker told them to drop it.

They thought this was stupid, so they ignored him and worked with another division behind his back.

That alone shows you how fractured Apple's internal culture had become.

Meanwhile, Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, had his own vision and very little faith in JG's team.

He quietly formed up a separate AI division inside his own group called Intelligence Systems, then hired hundreds of engineers to essentially do JG's job in parallel.

Yep, Apple had two competing AI teams inside the same company.

And it gets worse.

The teams began fighting over resources, direction, and even marketing ownership.

JG's division was reportedly nicknamed "aimless" by engineers under Federighi.

There was even more dysfunction after this, which crippled serious progress.

But something was brewing.

As the internal fighting continued, Siri's development continued to suffer.

And in the background, a man named Sam Altman and his team at Open AI was working on something that would change the world forever.

It was, of course, ChatGPT software that would kick off the large language model boom.

It was clearly a big deal, or at least worth looking at at the time, but JG downplayed it.

He insisted that these models had limited utility.

Kind of true, but the thing is, they were vastly more useful than he thought.

He would double down, ignoring ChatGPT and focusing on building Siri with internal tools.

And eventually, they trained two models, but to no avail.

They still fell short of ChatGPT's performance and reliability.

Unfortunately for the Apple AI engineers, they only got half of what they were promised in the 2023 Apple chip budget because Apple's CFO told them to do more with less.

Internally, Apple does have its own data centers with around 50,000 GPUs.

Many of them are over five years old.

As a result, Apple's AI group had to go hat in hand, begging outside providers like Google and Amazon just to get enough computing power.

And now you can see it's no surprise then that Apple Intelligence hit delay after delay.

Meanwhile, inside the company, morale has begun to crack.

Engineers were frustrated and left in the dark, told to keep building features without knowing what, if anything, was going to ship eventually.

The vision fell apart and Apple still had to have something to show, if only for their shareholders.

But time was running out.

Once the curtains were pulled back, there was nowhere left to hide.

All was revealed at the WWDC event in 2024 and to a lukewarm response.

But the event was only the start.

As the months passed, many began to notice that Apple was an emperor that wasn’t wearing any clothes.

In March of 2025, the fallout began.

As Bloomberg reported, Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development.

Apple stripped control of Siri from JG and Robbie Walker.

They were replaced by Mike Rockwell, the executive behind the Vision Pro.

He’s someone known for executing polished, technically complex projects.

A good sign.

Finally, in June of 2025, Apple had their next WWDC keynote.

And front and center was once again Apple Intelligence.

Viewers were naturally skeptical of when they would actually see these features working on their phones.

The issue isn't just about missed deadlines.

It's about culture.

Apple builds its 21st century legacy on simplicity, secrecy and control.

But AI development doesn't work like that.

It's messy, open, and iterative.

You just don't get a Steve Jobs famous "one more thing" moment if you're not willing to experiment publicly.

And Apple just wasn't wired for that.

So while the rest of the big companies pulled ahead with generative AI, Apple spent years bickering behind the curtain.

And now it's cost them some of their reputation.

As mentioned, the company was hit with a class action lawsuit.

And this was for falsely advertising its AI features.

Two more lawsuits followed in April.

And again, it's all just not a good look for the company.

So what's the future?

So Apple says that Siri will roll out in the fall with features like personal context, on-screen awareness, and tighter app integration built in.

And this time the executives aren't worrying about another delay.

So we'll just have to wait and see how good it is when it all finally comes out.

But we're not yet to the point where it's delivering, you know, at the quality level that I think makes it a great Apple feature.

And so we're not announcing a date when that's happening.

Also at WWDC 2025, Apple announced its biggest software shakeup in over a decade.

Every major platform like iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, and tvOS is getting a major design overhaul.

Now Apple's entire ecosystem is unified with a glacier look inspired by visions.

Think transparency, refraction, reflection, and depth.

And a whole lot less skeuomorphism.

Some savvy commenters on the keynote realized that this might be a way to detract from the glaring failure that was and still is at the time of writing Apple Intelligence.

Apple's journey with Siri and AI has been a complex one.

While the competition has moved forward, Apple has been fighting amongst itself internally.

It really shows a difference in where the company is at today, along with software bugs, a failed launch of the Vision Pro, and a myriad of other problems that seem quite un-Apple.

Like, is Apple losing their direction?

A lot of people do say that Steve Jobs would have never let a lot of this stuff fly, and that's saying something, even if it's just a bunch of outside observers.

But what do you guys think?

Do you think this is all just a bump in the road for Apple or a sign of things to come?

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Anyway, that's about it from me.

My name is Degogo and you've been watching Cold Fusion.

And I'll catch you again soon for the next episode.

Cheers, guys. Have a good one.

Cold Fusion. It's new thinking.