Siri was terrible, and Apple wanted it that way

So back on October 4th, 2011, Steve Jobs got up on stage for Apple one final time and he announced the brand new edition of the iPhone, the 4S, and it was going to have a magical new feature as part of it called Siri. He called it the future of computing. It would talk to you by voice. It would learn what you like. It would be a personal assistant inside of your device. And 2 days later, Steve Jobs would be dead. Fast forward 13 years later as I'm recording this video in 2026, Siri is basically a joke. Siri, turn on the lights. How bright? I don't care how bright, just turn on the lights. How bright? Bright. How bright? Siri, I don't care, just turn on the lights. How bright? Oh my God. Many people, including myself, have it turned off on their phones. It's that bad. Meanwhile, all the other big players in tech are spending tens of billions of dollars a year to try to win the AI race that supposedly Apple started 13 years ago. But here's the crazy thing: while those guys are spending $30, $40, or $50 billion a year, Apple's pretty much spending nothing on AI. I don't mean absolutely nothing, but enough for it not to be important to Apple. They're the biggest corporation basically, well, since forever, the best money printing machine ever invented in the history of capitalism. That's Apple Computer. So how did Apple go from kicking off the lead and belief in AI in the future 13 years ago to basically being a non-entity this year of 2026? This video is the rise and fall of Siri. Rise and fall. Sorry, I didn't catch that. And in this case, I'll tell you the story of how Siri all came together and some of the history of Apple. You'll see that Siri sucking is actually all part of Apple's master plan, and I'll explain it to you, and you'll see it all by the end of this video. But before we get into the story of Siri, there's something worth pointing out. Voice was supposed to change how we interact with companies. That was the promise. You talk, it understands, and things just happen. But in practice, most people stopped using it, not because the idea was wrong, but because the execution never really matched how people work. I've been testing something recently that feels like a different direction entirely, and it's called Whisperflow. And instead of trying to replace how you work, it plugs directly into it. But we'll talk more about that later. By the way, I turn each and every single one of these videos into a deeper dive document that goes with the video. You can download it for free on girdley.com/youtube. So there'll be one for this video too. The idea of having a voice assistant computer that would talk to you— heck, I remember seeing it way back in the 1960s and '50s. In Star Trek. Computer, initiate linkage between this terminal and Starbase computer system Alpha 29. Linkage complete. Apple wasn't the first to even try to build it, and the most recent kind of modern iteration of that was back in 2003. A government agency called DARPA founded a $150 million project out of a research institute in the Bay Area to try to build, well, basically Siri. And like many things in our economy, It wasn't designed to help you or me, like navigate Netflix and stuff like that. This project wanted to help soldiers navigate large amounts of information in real time using their voice. Two researchers leading the thing were named Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, and they left SRI, which is the name of the institute, and went on to found a company called Siri Incorporated. 3 years later, in February 2010, they launched an app that would run on top of the iPhone. That was basically an early version of Siri. Early reviewers of it called it magical. 2 months later, Steve Jobs would make a phone call to these 2 guys and buy their company for $200 million. So you bought them for their engineers and their patents and their knowledge about AI more broadly? Mm-hmm. We like what they do a lot. His idea was not just about an app. It was about how do you create an AI layer across the top of every single Apple product. So then Apple would go on to let their golden child of Siri fail after spending $200 million of it. But understand why, you have to go back to actually the entire playbook that Apple runs in the marketplace. It's more than just Siri. You see, never once in the entire history of computing and Apple have they ever won by being first. In 2001, Apple had launched the iPod, which you're like, cool, yeah, that was like the first portable music player. No, another company called Rio had launched one 3 years earlier. Apple had waited for those guys to launch their product, put out a few versions of it, waited for the market to mature, and then put out their own Apple-ized version of it and dominated. In 2007, Apple launched the first iPhone. Was it the first full-screen smartphone? Heck no. Those have been around for a while. And in fact, back in 1994, IBM had launched the first smartphone. It was a 13-year-old market by the time Apple came in. In 2010, Apple launched the iPad and you're like, cool. Well, that was a big innovation. Well, Microsoft had been pushing tablets since 2001, 9 years earlier. 2015, Apple launches the Apple Watch. Fitbit, the Pebble, Samsung Gear, they had all been in the market for years beforehand. AirPods, not the first to market. Wireless Bluetooth in-ear headphones have been there forever. Same with iCloud. Dropbox had been in the market for years before iCloud came around. The pattern here is that Apple comes in, lets everybody else burn cash at the frontier to figure out what the market's gonna eventually look like, and then they come in and they win. And this brings us back to Siri and how it all went down, that Steve at the early days wanted to have this AI layer across all the products. But then after he died, something changed inside Apple. The answer to the play that they were going to run with Siri came next. And it's explained by the behavior of Apple at that moment. Remember how Apple had bought Siri for $200 million? Well, within 2 years, the 2 founders who had founded the company and obviously should be the ones to kind of lead the effort inside of Apple 'cause they were the visionaries, and understood the technology the best, they were both out of the company. A big chunk of why they left was Kitloss and Chaiyer had wanted to create a do engine, something that you or I could instruct to do things on our behalf. Say, go book me a flight or find me the best flight to Turkey or whatever. And it would come back with the answer. But executives above them at the time inside of Apple didn't want that. They wanted something more narrow and more controlled. And those executives knew that by limiting the ability for Siri to do pretty much anything, of interest was going to make it terrible. And in fact, it came out and there was proof that these executives knew it. Craig Federighi, who was one of the senior VPs at the time, basically wrote down that the behavior and capability of Siri was downright embarrassing. Like, was the guy in charge of all software at Apple, like a very important job, and he would sign off on everything that would get shipped out the door, and he knew it was terrible and they kept shipping it anyway. So this whole video is about how Siri is terrible, but it turns out there is an answer, and I use this answer every single day, and that thing is called Whisper Flow. What it allows you to do is basically, well, create a version of Siri where you can talk to your computer and it actually works. And I am a dedicated user of this, and I'll tell you why. But before I do that, let me just show you how cool this thing works. So I've downloaded Whisper, and the cool thing about it is it works on my desktop, it works on my phone, and it works on my laptop here, right? And they're all running the same software, all connected to the same backend. So what that allows it to do is get super smart to understand how I talk, how I communicate, and how I want to be presented to other people. So here, for example, I'm looking at the comments from my recent video about the rise and fall of Disney World, and here somebody makes fun of Florida. And I could just go back in and say very quickly, like, "Absolutely, Florida is basically a different planet. There is no doubt about that." And magically it just shows up. What would have taken me 30 seconds to type suddenly exists in 4 seconds, straight from my brain to the computer. And the cool thing on your desktop is it works just like any other keyboard. Wherever I can type, I can dictate straight to it, and it transforms my efficiency. When you get 90% of your time back each time you want to type something on your computer, it's magical. And everything from Slack to email, like, I can dictate it all and it just works great. On my phone, it shows up as just another type of keyboard. I click one button and it starts working, and I can say very quickly, hey Dalton, I'm almost finished with the Siri video, I'll update it in just a few minutes. Dalton is our producer, and it just shows up. It's pretty awesome. So besides synchronizing everything across all of the devices so they all start to learn how I work, You can see where Whisper is going. They've included a bunch of different stuff where there's automations where you take voice and then the computer does complex commands. Everything from cleaning up how you type to doing AI prompts, everything in between. And the vision and the future where it's going is amazing. So if you're interested in trying Whisper for yourself, you're tired of Siri and you want to interact with your computer via voice, go to whisperflow.ai. That's their website. Use my code MG3 and you'll get 3 months for free. As a trial. Thanks to them for sponsoring today's video. Hey Dalton, I'm almost done with the edit. Just exactly what I texted you a couple minutes ago. Good job. And it just freaking works. That stuff's magical. Believe it or not, I used to use this stuff back in the late '90s. It is a different planet from all this stuff. I mean, every day this technology is just amazing. And while during the 2010s Apple knew that Siri was terrible, their competitors started to pour millions, if not billions of dollars into building competing things. Heck, in the early 2010s, that's when Sam Altman and others created OpenAI, which would eventually launch ChatGPT back in 2022. Google in the 2010s was dropping tens of billions of dollars to be able to have their own custom versions of chips that would be perfect to run AI when that became available. Amazon pivoted from their early mistakes around their Fire Phone. Check out the video on my channel about it and started to put the Alexa voice assistant in 100 million homes. Meanwhile, as the 2010s went on, Apple was working on other stuff and had tiny teams working on Siri. No big ambition, no moonshot. And if you're watching a lot of the kind of keynotes they were doing during that time, nobody even talked about Siri. It was just kind of this thing, was embarrassing, so they didn't bring it up. And the press thought the same thing. They were mocking Tim Cook and for avoiding AI and letting Siri languish about how terrible it was despite being first to market when Steve was around. Suddenly Tim Cook didn't get it. Or at least that's what the press thought. And you go look at the articles. Apple missed the AI revolution. Tim Cook doesn't get it. He's just an operator. But it's worth asking, what if Tim Cook quietly totally understands the Apple business better than anybody else? Because what Federighi and Cook realized, looking back at the history of Apple, was winning the AI race in the 2010s and even into the early 2020s, Apple shouldn't care. Because ultimately Apple has run the same playbook for 40 years. Let other people at the frontier burn cash, waste money on follies and things that don't work. And then come in later and crush it. And so while everybody else was blowing all this money, Apple was quietly setting the foundation back in 2017 to be where they are today. And that was creating its own version of a new chip. And when you'll see what that chip was designed to do, it'll clear up a lot of what happened with Siri and Apple in general. My editors asked me to ask you people to please subscribe. It would make them happy, especially when they edit, because they're so interested in us getting more followers. So please click subscribe. Thank you. And back in this time, in the late 2010s, while everybody else was trying to win in the software war and figure out the next generation of AI, Apple was trying to play a different game. And that game was they were going to try to lock up the next generation of customers. The first thing they did was take the core of their product, which was the CPU, the little brain inside of each and every device, whether it's a phone or a laptop or a server, and create their own version of hardware, getting away from Intel, who'd been their supplier for a long time. Today, Apple Silicon chips, whether that's the M series or the A series are the most powerful and most efficient chips on the market. And you combine that with them owning the software layer, the operating system that lives on top of it, and that creates a strategic advantage for Apple that other people can't compete with. And if you go look at the press today, as we are in 2026, and take a look at like what's the number one desktop you should buy, it's a Mac Mini by a mile. And they're so cheap, they are like $599. You would be crazy to buy any other desktop. Compared to a Mac Mini. Same with phones, right? They've created their own chips, the A-series chips, that go directly into their phones, which means that Apple can start to offer very competitive, cheap phones that benefit from the entire software ecosystem and service ecosystem they have for just a few hundred bucks. If you want to get a laptop, there's an answer for that. They just released the MacBook Neo. It actually runs on a cell phone chip, which is one of the A-series chips, and if you have a student discount, you can get it for less than $500. That basically is Chromebook price, and it blows it out of the water. Same with tablets, home speakers, the Home over-the-top TV devices. I have an Apple TV, it's freaking terrific. Guess what kind of chip it runs on? An Apple chip. Watches and the famous AirPods. And guess who gets bought these devices at the very low end? They're teenagers. And studies have shown once you buy into the Apple ecosystem, you just don't leave. Heck, every one of us, including me, has had that one family member who is on an Android phone, and we all got annoyed with them having a green bubble as opposed to an iMessage bubble, and we said, please switch. And guess what most of them did? Switched to Apple. And studies show that once you're in the ecosystem, you just don't leave. The reason is everything from iMessage to your Apple ID to, well, basically every part of it just makes it to where you have no good reason to leave. And if you do wanna leave, it's kind of a pain in the butt. A recent survey showed that 87% of young kids who have phones from their parents, they have iPhones. For them, Android isn't even an option. And so while the press was beating up Tim Cook for the approach Apple was taking and how it was missing AI, behind the scenes Apple was running this playbook and taking the punches from these basically pundits. And Tim Cook, the CEO, was playing the long game. As early as 2015, he was reframing the whole narrative around devices to be about privacy. And there's this thing in business called talking your own book. And here was Tim actually talking his own book in front of Congress and media and all that kind of stuff, which was basically creating a worldview and a position on things to, uh, help your own business. And that's what Tim was doing. The Apple ecosystem isn't about the cloud. There's a bunch of servers out in the middle of nowhere in data centers where our stuff's getting uploaded. Basically, Apple is creating a ton of compute in each and every one of our pockets and on our desktops. That's a great place if you're going to make a privacy argument, intelligently turning a limitation where Apple wasn't good in the cloud into a strength by making all the other guys— Facebook, Google, Amazon, who all send your data up into servers somewhere off across the internet, into the villains. And they looked worse and worse every time there was some level of compromise or people's photos were getting exposed or whatever. The plan continued. And in 2018, Apple hired a guy named John Giannandrea. He is kind of famous because he comes from Google and he was the head of AI and search for them. But he wasn't told to build a chatbot or build an AI layer or any of that kind of stuff, or even a ChatGPT competitor. He was told to come in and unify the architecture across all the chips and all the systems for the AI stuff that Apple would later come to do. And this was when in 2017, Apple started to release a thing called the Neural Engine, which was the level of kind of inference computing and stuff like that that AI does, except it would happen on device as opposed to in the cloud like everybody else does it. So while OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, even Google and Oracle, believe it or not, were racing to build bigger server farms, Apple was saying, we're going to put it all in your pocket. And you combine that chip with what Apple would later on announce in 2024, you can start to see that the whole pundit thing where people were saying Apple is behind the times on AI, well, and that was bad— they were totally wrong. They're just all part of Apple's plan. In 2024, Apple launched Apple Intelligence, and it was kind of embarrassing because they'd been behind and Siri was the core of it. But actually, the core of what they announced was that it would all be powered by a product from another company. ChatGPT. And so while everybody else had been fighting to build their own models and overspend for data centers, here was Apple basically going out to the market and saying, well, for the near term, we're going to pick what's the best out there and partner with it, just like we'd done for search. But even though the press laughed at this announcement and thought it was just Apple playing catch-up, it's all just part of the multi-decade plan, and it's part of their playbook they've run over and over again in history. Except in this case, I think it'll work for Apple. And the place we're going with Siri is eventually the world is gonna catch up to the architecture that Apple has built. And instead of the way kind of Meta and ChatGPT and Anthropic all work where they send your data up to the cloud, instead there'll be a different world and one where Apple is perfectly positioned. And that one will be a one where a lot of your private information just stays on the device and the compute happens there. And all the LLM work and AI work happens in your pocket or on your desktop. And for the few things that require the horsepower of the cloud, it'll get sent to someplace private and locked down by Apple. And the proof that this may be smart is you're starting to see a backlash of governments starting to really push back on the level of kind of privacy not happening with AI. Heck, there's a thing here in the government of the United States a couple days ago where they convened a special meeting about a new Anthropic model coming out because they were worried it was going to bring down the entire internet. Europe already has an AI Act. States in the United States and the federal government are starting to act because people are just worried about what can happen if their data and the things AI knows about them get exposed. So the answer to all this is actually Siri was just a placeholder. And as the world continues to evolve where more and more AI stuff gets computed in our pocket or on our desktop as opposed to in the cloud, Apple is perfectly positioned for that world when it comes. And the way Apple will be ready is because they've spent a decade creating these compelling options at the entry level where every young person is coming up and growing up and seeing their parents, seeing when they have an option of what kind of device they're going to give them. They see a MacBook Neo for $499 or, you know, a junky Windows laptop that has trouble turning on. It's pretty compelling. And when those kids get locked in the Apple ecosystem, they're not going anywhere. So if you go back to the beginning of our story where Steve saw the future 20 years from now, back in 2010 when they bought Siri and wanted Apple to be at the forefront of it. The problem was he was totally right. He was just 20 years too early for the play that Apple actually wants to run. And after he passed away, the answer is that Apple looked at what works for them and decided to start running the playbook that always has, which is to be second, third, fifth to market and come in and dominate with their ecosystem. And that's Apple's plan here. And when Steve was gone, Tim Cook became CEO and he smartly started to run the playbook that had always worked for Apple. Rather than to do what basically Steve wanted to do at the time, which was to actually innovate and be a leader. And in this case, following into a market is how Apple wins. And that's what they're doing here again. And the crazy thing about the AI hype cycle is we are definitely in a bubble. Most of these guys are way overspending in infrastructure. And guess who's going to have a lot of capital ready to take advantage of that when the bubble bursts? Apple will. They're sitting on a ton of cash. There are a lot of companies that run basically at the whims of the press or the pundits. Whether you're big or small, if your friends are saying you're an idiot or the press is saying you're an idiot, it takes a lot of conviction to do what Tim Cook did and basically run the playbook that they needed to run despite all the criticism. And the great entrepreneurs, they tend to look and say, hey, I believe in this one particular thing. This is my vision and we're going to stick to it and we're going to make it happen. And that's what I guess Tim Cook has actually done in this case. And a lot of us can learn from that lesson. All right. That's it for the rise and fall of Siri. Let me know what you think of this video in the comments below. If you liked it, say you liked it because it encourages me to make more. Catch you next time.