Is Apple Still Just Whispering About AI While Everyone Else Is Yelling?

Apple’s (AAPL) WWDC 2025 kicks off with a lot of cameras and not a lot of confidence. After overpromising and underdelivering last year, the tech giant is walking into its annual showcase with something hanging over it: AI silence.

Yes, Apple has two billion devices. Yes, its integration ecosystem is unmatched. But right now, the question being asked — quietly by investors and loudly by competitors — is this: Where’s the AI breakthrough Apple promised last year?

Last Year: Siri Makeover, Big Talk

In 2024, Apple finally joined the generative AI party, announcing “Apple Intelligence” with the headline promise of a new, smarter Siri. The assistant would supposedly handle conversational commands, pull from apps and the web, and automate workflows — in other words, catch up to what OpenAI and others had already launched.

But that Siri didn’t show up. The fall rollout skipped the core feature everyone was watching. What came instead was text and image generation, some notification summaries, and a lot of underwhelmed reviews.

As tech reviewer Marques Brownlee put it bluntly last November: “They’ve been talking about it for a while, and I think that promise is starting to fade.”

Even Apple has admitted delays. In March, the company told blogger John Gruber that new Siri features are still “going to take us longer than we thought.” CEO Tim Cook repeated the message on Apple’s earnings call in May. Translation: not this WWDC. Maybe September.

This Year: More Hardware, More Holding Pattern?

With WWDC now here, analysts like Evercore’s Amit Daryanani are setting expectations low.
“Expectations are rightfully tempered this year,” he wrote last week, noting that Apple isn’t likely to drop any game-changing AI news just yet.

Ben Reitzes of Melius Research agrees: “We have no doubt they are making adjustments to the strategy behind the scenes,” he said. But don’t expect details until the fall. And that’s the problem.

Apple’s Privacy Problem Is its AI Problem

Apple has built its reputation on privacy. But that principle is slowing its AI ambitions. Where OpenAI, Google (GOOGL), and others run massive cloud models that get smarter with every user interaction, Apple wants most of Siri’s processing to happen locally — on the device. That’s a tall order when iPhones and iPads don’t have the raw compute power or memory to match AI workloads.

To get around this, Apple now uses a layered approach. First comes on-device AI — fast and tightly controlled, but constrained by hardware. Then there’s its new Private Cloud Compute system, a homegrown cloud that promises more power while claiming no one, not even Apple, can access user data.

But when both of those come up short, Siri falls back on OpenAI’s ChatGPT — a practical solution, but one that hands over control and blurs Apple’s strict privacy lines.

That third layer is telling. When Siri can’t get the job done, Apple hands off to OpenAI. It’s a practical fix — but it undercuts the privacy pitch and, more importantly, hands over control to someone else.

Apple Falls Behind Nvidia-Powered Rivals

While Apple’s AI remains tightly siloed, its competitors are scaling up fast on Nvidia-backed infrastructure. Apple doesn’t use Nvidia chips. It builds its own hardware, which is good for control but not ideal for speed to market in generative AI.

Apple may eventually “get it right” — like it did with the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. But so far, it’s not shaping the AI narrative. It’s following it. And for a company that sells itself on defining the future, that’s unfamiliar territory.

So What Do Apple Investors Want Now?

They want proof. Not polish. Not a slick keynote. They want real AI product momentum — or at least a roadmap they can see. Because until Apple shows that Siri 2.0 exists in more than just a slide deck, the leadership void in consumer AI is Apple’s to fill — or lose.

Is Apple a Buy, Sell, or Hold?

According to TipRanks data, Apple (AAPL) holds a Moderate Buy consensus based on 29 analyst ratings. That breaks down into 16 Buys, nine Holds, and just four Sells — a fairly bullish vote of confidence even in a lower-expectation environment.

The average 12-month AAPL price target sits at $228.65, suggesting a 12% upside from the current price.

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