GoKawiilA number of people have been complaining that the new Siri demos during the keynote videos were a little on the slow side. There were notable lags of several seconds between Siri requests and the task being carried out.
But while the ideal we’re aiming for is for AI tasks to be carried out as quickly as possible, what we saw is kind of good news …
Apple was roundly criticised back in 2024 for using concept videos of features it was unable to demo.
What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.
That criticism was deserved, and Apple admitted that things were going to take longer than expected, deleted the offending video, and settled a $250M false advertising lawsuit.
The company seems to have learned its lesson. While the keynote wasn’t live, it does appear that all of the video demonstrations were conducted in real time, as TechCrunch noted.
Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response. These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024.
Indeed, John Gruber observed that there weren’t even any cuts between individual demos.
The demos were all shot in single takes, with no editing. In fact, I think most of them were single takes of multiple demos back-to-back.
What Apple showed off, then, appears to be a genuine reflection of how the new AI features work today. The company may have been using a later alpha version of iOS 27, of course, but what it showed is reality rather than ambition. And as Gruber comments, showing real-world speeds is incentive for Apple to speed things up.