GoKawiilIt’s more than 18 months since I wrote an opinion piece suggesting that while the wait for the new Siri is frustrating, the privacy payoff would be worth it.
A lot of time has passed since then, and of course user frustration at the ongoing delay has grown significantly. While goodwill has undoubtedly been lost, a recent announcement does provide some hope that privacy may still rescue the company’s tarnished reputation in AI …
I noted last month that 2024 really wasn’t a good year for Apple when it came to new Siri, and that patience is wearing thin in 2026.
Even the most supportive of Apple commenters reached the end of their patience after Apple advertised new Siri features as if they were imminent way back in 2024 and then had to admit that they very much weren’t. It’s now 2026 and we’re still waiting.
Eighteen months earlier I argued that the wait would be worth it. There is a huge conflict between AI-powered features and privacy, and Google’s default approach is to use everything it knows about you across the full gamut of the company’s services. That enables its AI models to maximise their capabilities but at the expense of user privacy.
Apple’s approach to AI privacy
Although Apple Intelligence will be powered by Google’s Gemini models, the company is taking a very different approach to privacy. There will be three different ways in which new Siri requests can be handled, and Apple’s aim is to use the most privacy-protecting method for each task, escalating to each successive layer only when necessary:
On-device
On Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers
On Google Cloud servers
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