Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.
Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.” And maybe rightly so—people aren’t exactly hot on the technology, and it’s not hard to find takes published online that Apple’s sluggishness to produce new AI features has been good, actually. Or that the company’s tendency to temper its hype around the tech is a low-key advantage.
Gurman also writes that Mike Rockwell is still considering “leaving his role as vice president of Siri engineering — or Apple altogether — next year.” Rockwell headed up development of the ill-fated, but technically impressive Vision Pro headset before he asked for and was handed the Siri AI reins. He has reportedly been grumpy about not getting enough credit for fixing Apple’s digital assistant. If Rockwell leaves, Gurman indicates today that his Siri AI work could go instead to “Amar Subramanya, a Google veteran who was hired last year to shore up Apple’s AI efforts, and Sebastien Marineau, a Federighi deputy.”
Siri’s AI glow-up that came with iOS 27 finally fulfilled many of the promises that Apple made back in 2024, but it’s still more limited than other AI systems—you can’t ask Siri to carry out lengthy agentic tasks in the background, for instance. Gurman says he is told Apple wants to make Siri AI more agentic, and points to a recent earnings call in which Ternus called agentic AI capabilities “promising.”
Apple is updating its software development process across its major platforms’ next major OS updates, according to Gurman. For iOS 28 and the others, he says the company is adjusting its development cycles to allow more time for “coding, exploration and feature development” and less for actually rolling changes into the operating systems. Apple employees “say they like the change, indicating that it creates more time for coming up with ideas and exploring them before needing to lock things in.”
One wonders if rushing the timeline for folding those ideas into Apple’s operating systems will just mean more bugs for those of us actually using them. I suppose we’ll find out next fall.
