One of the biggest launches in Apple’s history is supposed to come next year, and it’s got nothing to do with hardware. 

The company has promised investors that it will be launching the next generation of Siri, its artificial intelligence voice assistant. There’s a lot riding on the launch of a “more personal Siri” for Apple, which has so far been absent from the tech industry’s AI race that kicked off when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. 

Apple doesn’t usually tell the public its product roadmap, but in Siri’s case, the iPhone maker made an exception. The company was supposed to launch the new AI assistant in 2025. But in March, Apple delayed the upgrade, even after running ads for the feature, to sometime in “the coming year.”

As consumers become increasingly accustomed to holding free-flowing conversations with the likes of ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini chatbots, the pressure is on Apple to keep up. 

CEO Tim Cook told investors in October that Apple has been making good progress on Siri, and that’s “raised the bar meaningfully about what to expect,” said Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster. 

“They basically said that this year, don’t bother us about AI, and we’ll blow you away by what we show next year,” Munster said. 

Apple stock is up 12% so far in 2025, with much of those gains coming in recent months, as the company’s iPhone 17 launch in September impressed investors. But Android-maker Google is at the center of the AI boom with its own models and tensor processing AI chips, and its stock has surged more than 60% this year.

Throghout 2025, AI was everywhere in Silicon Valley — except in Cupertino.

OpenAI released Sora 2, a video-generating app that briefly topped the Apple App Store charts. Anthropic released several new Claude models. Amazon revamped its Alexa AI assistant. Microsoft released software in November that lets companies manage “AI agents,” a term for AI programs that can work for hours at a time. Even Meta, which has faced its own shifting AI strategy, made moves to prepare for the release of its next frontier model, codenamed Avocado, CNBC reported last week. 

And early in the year, Nvidia took the crown as the most-valuable tech company from Apple. That was driven by the insatiable demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units. During the year, the chipmaker started shipping a type of AI computer called the Grace Blackwell NVL72 that pairs 72 separate AI GPUs together and costs an estimated $3 million.

Apple, meanwhile, hasn’t had a major AI launch since 2024, when it announced Apple Intelligence. The software suite included image generators, text re-writers, the ability to summarize push notifications and an integration with ChatGPT.

While the company’s improved AI-powered notification filtering and photo-editing features have been praised, other AI features faced issues. For example, Apple briefly turned off an AI feature that rewrote push notifications from news apps inaccurately (it’s since been turned back on by default).

The most notable of the Apple Intelligence features were the upgrades to Siri, but they were delayed in the spring, with the company saying development would take longer than first thought. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s worldwide marketing chief, said the company “didn’t want to disappoint customers,” in a June interview with The Wall Street Journal.

At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, AI was barely mentioned.

Apple did say that its new chips had better AI performance, and it debuted a number of machine learning features, such as AirPod live translations and intelligent call screening. Developers were also invited to tap into Apple’s foundation models. But the company didn’t announce anything on the scale of the chatbots and generative AI products that its peers have released.

Closing the year, Apple has shaken up its AI leadership ranks, signaling where the company stands when it comes to implementing a strategy to keep pace with rivals’ ground-breaking technology. 

In early December, Apple said John Giannandrea, the company’s machine learning and AI strategy chief, would retire in 2026. Many of his responsibilities will be split among COO Sabih Khan, services chief Eddy Cue and new hire Amar Subramanya, who previously worked at Google and Microsoft. Software chief Craig Federighi also gained expanded oversight over AI, with Subramanya reporting to him, Apple said.

The hiring of Subramanya, who was the head of engineering for Google Gemini before briefly joining Microsoft in an AI executive role, is particularly notable. The iPhone maker doesn’t tend to publicly discuss its engineering talent, especially new hires that don’t report directly to Cook.

The public announcement of a vice president hire like Subramanya shows how important it is for Apple to prove to investors and the public that it’s willing to shake up its AI leadership.

It’s become clear that Apple is playing a different game than its peers, which have taken a cloud-based approach to AI that requires spending heavily on infrastructure.

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon committed a collective $380 billion this year on capital expenditures, much of it on Nvidia-based data centers to create and serve the most advanced AI models.

Apple also increased its capital expenditures, but on a much smaller scale. Apple spent $12.71 billion on capital expenditures in the year ended in September, up 35% on an annual basis, but less than the company spent in 2018. Rather than using Nvidia chips in servers for Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker says it uses chips that it originally designed for its computers because of user privacy reasons.

A key question for Apple is whether it will seek a partner to power the new Siri.

The improvements to the upgraded Siri are expected to include the ability for the voice assistant to do things like make a reservation intelligently based on a user’s travel plans and personal relationships.

Currently, when Siri is presented with complicated queries, the AI offers to have ChatGPT answer the question. At a panel shortly after the Apple Intelligence launch last year, company executives said that there was a chance other foundation models, including Google’s Gemini, could be built into the service. The latest version of Google’s model, Gemini 3, was released in November to positive reviews.

Cook has also said that Apple is open to making big acquisitions, which have been exceedingly rare to date. The valuations of AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have reached levels that make them almost impossible to acquire, even for a company with Apple’s cash flow.

OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation in an October share sale, and Anthropic was valued at $350 billion in November. By comparison, Apple’s largest acquisition of all time is its 2014 purchase of Beats Electronics for $3 billion.

Apple’s lack of spending has led some investors to fret about the company’s AI strategy, putting more pressure on the Siri upgrade.

“Investors have already gotten enough gray hairs waiting for Apple to come out with their AI strategy,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “It’s time to come out and show the world what the strategy is.”

Analysts and consumers may not see the threat to Apple, but company executives do. While testifying in a May trial, Apple’s Cue said AI technology is moving fast enough that users may not need an iPhone in a decade.

That’s because new hardware devices can use AI to create new user interfaces and features that aren’t possible with smartphones. Some early AI gadgets have already hit the market.

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses can use AI to identify objects in a user’s range of view, and Meta announced this month that it bought a startup called Limitless. That company’s AI pendant can record conversations and generate summaries for them. A purchase price wasn’t disclosed.

But the biggest threat to Apple may be from its current AI partner.

Earlier this year, OpenAI bought io, former Apple design guru Jony Ive’s AI devices startup, for $6.4 billion, and now Ive is helping the AI lab build next-generation consumer devices. Ive, who left Apple in 2019, is still widely seen as one of the driving forces behind the hardware maker’s biggest hits, including the iPhone and the iPad.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in November that the company had “finally” finished its first device prototypes. Neither he nor Ive said what the devices are, just that they’re targeting a calmer “vibe” with their hardware than a smartphone.

Earlier this month, Altman told journalists that he believes OpenAI’s real rival isn’t Google, but Apple. He said smartphones are not well-suited for AI companions or other use cases, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But Apple still has time to ready its counter. Ive said in November that it would be about two years before he expects the OpenAI devices to be revealed to the public.

“They have more time than people realize to figure this out,” Munster said. “But as far as the near-term, they’ve got to deliver a 10 out of 10 when this new Siri comes out.”