The ever-elusive \u201cSiri, But Make It Actually Good\u201d is not just a quirky side project at Apple that\u2019s not going well, according to the claims in some anonymously sourced new reporting. From the sound of it, new Siri is more like a white whale dragging a huge group of Apple\u2019s product engineers to the depths along with their ship, loaded with what were supposed to be exciting new Apple gadgets.<\/p>\n
Last year, anonymous sources leaked to Bloomberg\u2019s Apple scoop guy Mark Gurman<\/a> about three novel products in Apple\u2019s pipeline that were meant to be released in 2025, but delayed\u2014at the time\u2014until spring of this year.<\/p>\n Two of those products were reportedly codenamed J490 and J491. The J490 reportedly would have been Apple\u2019s answer to the Amazon Echo Show 8<\/a>\u2014or a HomePod mini<\/a> with a screen featuring an Apple Watch-like interface. Gurman says the J491 was (or is?) a wall-mounted J490. Gurman\u2019s report also notes a third and considerably more whimsical product that seems to fit into this family: essentially another J490, but on a little robot that moves around your tabletop.<\/p>\n The personality, if you will, that\u00a0you would be interacting with when you use any of these theoretical products would be Siri. Specifically, \u201cThe new Siri, currently planned for this coming March,\u201d Gurman wrote at the time, which would be \u201cuseful for a device aimed at controlling appliances, music and communications within a home.\u201d<\/p>\n That is, if the cool version of Siri Apple started hyping in 2023<\/a>, and started overtly advertising in 2024 had ever become reality.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But it still hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n And according to a fresh new Gurman report<\/a>, these products are in suspended animation because of Apple\u2019s slow-motion Siri disaster. The ambition to release a great smart home product represents Apple trying to \u201ccreate its next big moneymaker,\u201d in Gurman\u2019s telling, but Apple\u2019s struggle to cook up an AI model of its own<\/a>, followed by its embarrassing decision to just rent one from Google<\/a>, followed by hype for the new model<\/a>, followed by more delays, mean no new moneymaker, other than all the company\u2019s other<\/a> new<\/a> moneymakers,<\/a>\u00a0I should say.<\/p>\n Whatever the J490, its sibling, and its robot cousin are actually going to be called, they were supposed to be launched approximately right now, Gurman\u2019s sources say, alongside the new \u201cpersonalized\u201d version of Siri attached to iOS 26.4. That obviously isn\u2019t happening, so now those sources are saying we\u2019ll all have to wait until September. But to be safe, maybe don\u2019t lock in any plans that involve having a new-Siri-powered smart home assistant this fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ever-elusive \u201cSiri, But Make It Actually Good\u201d is not just a quirky side project at Apple that\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[351,111,139,69,3379,1548,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-331131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-apple","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-siri","13":"tag-smart-home","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}