On Friday afternoon, Apple CEO Tim Cook and senior vice president Craig Federighi addressed Apple Park employees, discussing the scope and scale of artificial intelligence, Siri, and the road forward for Apple.
Less than a day after Apple blew away Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter, Tim Cook and Craig Federighi held a all-hands meeting with Apple on Friday. The topics were wide-ranging, with a focus on the Apple Intelligence efforts that have come under fire from analysts, and other talking heads.
“Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,” Cook said about artificial intelligence during the meeting, according to Bloomberg‘s accounting on Friday. “We will make the investment to do it.”
Ever since the improved Siri got delayed by Apple, and, honestly, for years now, we’ve been making the observation that Apple’s cash pile allows it to wait out any storm, or any failure to launch. Tim Cook made that exact remark at the all-hands meeting.
“We’ve rarely been first. There was a PC before the Mac,” Cook reportedly said. “There was a smartphone before the iPhone, there were many tablets before the iPad, there was an MP3 player before iPod.”
Cook also encouraged Apple employees to use Artificial Intelligence more in the workplace.
“All of us are using AI in a significant way already, and we must use it as a company as well,” Cook said. “To not do so would be to be left behind, and we can’t do that.”
Tim Cook wasn’t alone in presenting to the gathered Apple employees, in person, and virtually. Craig Federighi spoke, but didn’t hold the lectern for very long, apparently.
Hair Force One on the spot for Siri
In a very brief remark, Federighi pontificated on the Siri delay, saying that the problems stemmed from a new system that merged two new and discrete engineering tasks.
Apparently, the tasks of setting alarms and day-to-day smartphone use is difficult to integrate with a large language model as demonstrated during the 2024 WWDC.
“We initially wanted to do a hybrid architecture,” Craig Federighi reportedly said. “We realized that approach wasn’t going to get us to Apple quality.”
“The work we’ve done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the results we needed. This has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned,” Federighi reportedly said to the Apple employees. “There is no project people are taking more seriously.”
The improved Siri is now expected in the spring of 2026.
Engaging the workforce
Artificial Intelligence and Apple’s implementations weren’t the only topics of discussion. The meeting ran an hour, and discussed Apple TV+ viewership improvement, AirPods Pro hearing aid, Apple employee community service, a push into emerging markets, a vague reference to upcoming products, the retirement of Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, regulatory efforts, and environmental issues.
Apple hasn’t historically listened to naysayers, nor social media complaints. Direct feedback is their number one vector of one-way interaction with the Apple-using public. We do know that they read sites like AppleInsider and our friends at MacRumors and 9to5Mac frequently, but pay little attention to forums.
The meeting as held on Friday is rare, and from what we’ve heard as well, incorporated some of those feedback vectors that we just mentioned that are typically ignored.
Apple has held only a handful of all-hands meetings. There was one around the iPhone 4 antenna issue, we know of one after the original HomePod was discontinued, and there was another around the AirPower wireless charging pad after they cancelled it.
So, clearly, Apple may be starting to listen, at least in part, to the wider user base. More importantly, executives are making clear their stance on projects to the “rank and file” at Apple Park.
Overall, we think that’s a good thing.
