Apple is stumbled on meetings with breach of promises, delayed features and pale AI models for competitors, which has made AI-Fir users increasingly see their iPhones as expensive artifacts in the AI-powered world.
Warning signals are everywhere. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple insiders expect WWDC 2025 to be disappointed. The company’s highly regarded Apple intelligence feature has proven to be so unreliable that Apple summed up disability news notifications months after creating misleading headlines. The most annoying thing is: 73% of Apple intelligence users report that these features are worthless, while the company’s flagship AI model remains at just 3 billion parameters, attracted by competitors’ products that reach tens of billions.
This is the fundamental failure of the most transformative technological transformation since the automatic Internet. Microsoft, Google and Meta have put more than $300 billion into AI infrastructure in 2025 alone, but Apple has leased the computing power it is trying to attract. The result is a company that once defined innovation now plays a desperate chase game that may never win.
The great AI capability gap
The technological reality is distinct. Although Apple’s AI-enabled model optimizes efficiency with its 3.7-bit per-weight configuration, it simply cannot compete with the original capabilities of cloud-based competitors. Internal benchmarks show that Apple’s larger server model is only behind the GPT-4 Turbo, which has been replaced by an updated, more powerful system. Meanwhile, Apple claims that the 150 billion parameter model that matches Chatgpt’s performance is still locked in internal testing and is considered too easy to occur for hallucination for public release.
Although Apple touts privacy advantages through its private cloud computing infrastructure, the underlying model lacks the inference capabilities that make modern AI truly useful. Apple’s own researchers published a study that shows that large language models, including their own, rely more on pattern matching than real logical reasoning.
The hardware tells an equally disturbing story. Despite the impressive specs of the neuroengine – the M4 chip delivers $38 trillion in operation per second – there are only 50,000 outdated GPUs compared to the thousands of deployments deployed by Google and Microsoft, but only 50,000 GPUs. This infrastructure deficit cannot be overcome quickly. It represents years of underinvestment in the development of artificial intelligence.
WWDC 2025: Break Promise Conference
A year ago, Apple stood on the WWDC stage and promised a revolution. Swift Assist will bring AI-driven encoding into XCode. Siri will gain personal context awareness and understand your emails, calendars and communications. Cross-app features will enable complex workflows with simple voice commands. Today, none of these functions exist.
Swift Assist isn’t just delayed – it’s gone completely from Apple’s roadmap, not mentioned in the current Xcode release, nor formally acknowledged its disappearance. The promised Siri overhaul faces delays called “ugly and embarrassing” by Siri’s senior director Robby Walker, which is unlikely to arrive before 2026, from April to May 2025 or later.
The developer community has been responding harshly. Trust has eroded to the point where developers now view Apple meetings as Apple’s preview possible Release instead of concrete roadmap.
For WWDC 2025, expectations cannot be reduced. Bloomberg reports that Apple is unlikely to preview the distant technology after last year’s embarrassment, and the event will be smaller. The biggest AI announcement? Opening the basic model to third-party developers, but the model is limited to 3 billion parameters, providing a small portion of the features available to competitors. While Google and Microsoft provide developers with access to state-of-the-art models, Apple provided the AI equivalent of a calculator in the age of supercomputers.
Losing AI arms race by design
Competitive areas reveal Apple’s strategic paralysis. Chatgpt has a large market share among consumer AI assistants. Meta AI matched it in just a few months. Google’s Gemini maintains a similar market share based on the measured values. apple? These rankings do not actually have these rankings, and Siri is downgraded to set timers while competitors engage in complex reasoning and creative tasks.
The corporate market shows a dull picture. Although 32.4% of U.S. enterprises (RAMP AI Index) use OpenAI services, Microsoft’s annual AI revenue is $5 billion, while Apple has zero business in Enterprise AI. This is not a market that Apple chooses to ignore, but an omnipotent market for Apple.
Investment data highlights the growing bay. Amazon plans to spend $100 billion on AI in 2025. Microsoft allocated $80 billion. Google has assumed $75 billion. Apple’s spending remains opaque, hidden behind the rental agreements reached with cloud providers it competes with. This approach (rather than building) can prove that Apple will always be behind the companies that control their own AI fate.
The innovation gap is reflected in transportation speed. Despite Apple’s promise of features for 2026 and 2027, competitors have made major monthly updates. Openai’s inference model, Google’s Gemini 2.5, Microsoft’s deep office integration – these are not future commitments, but reality. According to Bloomberg, Apple’s Siri competitors against Apple won’t arrive until 2027, and according to Bloomberg, the competitors will transfer generations before these generations.
When loyalty reaches outdated
History provides sober similarities. BlackBerry commands loyalty with its email integration and physical keyboard until the iPhone makes those advantages irrelevant. When software becomes a distinction, Nokia’s excellent hardware and globally crash. Both companies dismissed the threat until market share disappeared at an astonishing pace.
Apple faces a similar turning point. Survey data shows that a large number of iPhone users will consider switching to get better AI capabilities. This number has risen in the demographics of tech-savvy professionals and young people. These are not accidental users, they will influence early adopters of a wider market trend.
The mechanism of Exodus is not sudden but stable. Start with tech enthusiasts who are frustrated with Siri’s limitations. Then, professionals who need AI productivity choose Google Pixel with Gemini. Young users who grew up with Chatgpt and Claude began to see the iPhone as their parents’ phone, which is technically capable but fundamentally disconnected.
The international market is at its highest risk, with weaker ecosystem lock-in and higher price sensitivity. There is a serious conversion risk in markets where message and FaceTime are less swinging. As other manufacturers successfully sell AI-First devices on AI-First devices at lower prices, Apple’s premium positioning has become increasingly difficult to prove that the software is lagging behind.
The timetable is unforgettable. Experts believe 2025 is a key year for Apple’s intelligence launch. Missed this window, by 2026-2027, ecosystem damage may be irreversible. If market momentum decisively shifts to the AI-Native platform, the 2028 timeline represents a potential point of no return.
The price for safe play
Apple has built an empire with the integration of hardware and software, and coupled with the excellent user experience, it will always win. But AI represents a fundamental platform change, where data, computational scales and algorithmic innovation are more important than elegant industrial design or smooth animation.
The company’s secret culture is beneficial to the launch of surprise products, proving that the disastrously open research on AI development has driven advancement. When competitors leverage cloud computing to provide Apple’s capabilities, its privacy stance, while admirable, became a millstone. The walled garden that once protected the edge of Apple now places it in the AI revolution that takes place outside.
WWDC 2025 will not save Apple’s AI efforts. It may confirm how far the company is lagging behind. With major features delayed until 2026 or 2027, internal chaos is reflected in changes in leadership while competitors make billions of dollars in investments, Apple faces its worst challenges since the 1990s.
The question is not whether Apple can catch up. This is whether the user will wait to find out. In the world of AI conversion, brand loyalty only lasts until the moment your device is out of date. For more and more Apple users, that moment came quickly. Exodus, it won’t be because Apple makes bad products, it’s because they fail to make the product most important in an AI-driven future.
