NextFin News - Apple Inc. has encountered significant development hurdles in its multi-year effort to reinvent Siri, leading to a strategic postponement of several core generative AI features. According to reports from Bloomberg on February 11, 2026, internal testing of the new Siri architecture—internally codenamed "Linwood"—has revealed critical performance issues that make the assistant unready for its planned spring debut. The snags were identified during the final validation stages of iOS 26.4, an update previously positioned as the definitive "rebirth" of Apple’s virtual assistant. Consequently, the tech giant is shifting from a comprehensive launch to a fragmented, phased rollout that will stretch across 2026 and into the iOS 27 cycle in 2027.
The technical setbacks are multifaceted, centering primarily on response latency and execution accuracy. Testers found that the upgraded Siri, which utilizes Google Gemini technology for complex reasoning, suffered from significant delays when processing multi-step queries, often lagging behind competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Furthermore, a persistent bug caused Siri to cut off users mid-sentence if they spoke rapidly, while another "fallback" glitch saw the system erroneously defaulting to external ChatGPT integrations for tasks that Apple’s internal models were designed to handle. These issues have directly impacted the timeline for "Personal Context" features—the ability for Siri to scan emails and messages to answer specific life questions—which is now unlikely to see a stable release until May 2026 at the earliest.
This development bottleneck arrives at a sensitive time for Apple’s leadership. John Giannandrea, the Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy who has led Siri’s development since 2018, is reportedly preparing for retirement in the spring of 2026. The project is now being consolidated under the oversight of Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. According to Gurman, the priority has shifted toward ensuring code stability over feature parity, as U.S. President Trump’s administration continues to monitor the competitive landscape of domestic AI development. The delay suggests that Apple is prioritizing the avoidance of "hallucinations" with sensitive personal data, even at the cost of falling further behind Android’s integrated Gemini features.
The broader implications of these snags point to a potential pivot in Apple’s long-term AI strategy. While Apple has invested billions in its "Apple Foundation Models," the company is reportedly weighing a major reversal by considering Anthropic or OpenAI to power the core of Siri, rather than just as secondary search plugins. This internal debate reflects a growing acknowledgment within Cupertino that its in-house generative models may not yet match the sophistication of industry leaders. According to The Straits Times, Apple has even requested that third-party partners train versions of their models to run on Apple’s private cloud infrastructure for comparative testing.
From a market perspective, the delay risks cooling the "supercycle" expectations for the iPhone 17 and 18 series, which were marketed heavily on the promise of "Apple Intelligence." If the most transformative features—such as on-screen awareness and cross-app multi-step actions—are pushed to late 2026 or 2027, Apple may struggle to justify premium hardware upgrades in a saturated smartphone market. However, the decision to delay also demonstrates a commitment to the "Apple way" of polished, reliable user experiences. As the industry moves toward autonomous AI agents, Apple’s struggle highlights the immense difficulty of balancing local on-device privacy with the massive compute requirements of modern large language models. The coming months will determine if Federighi can streamline the "Linwood" architecture or if Apple will be forced to concede its architectural independence to external AI powerhouses.
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