Ben Wood

Absolutely.

So Siri to date has been a relatively basic voice interface for the iPhone.

You could ask basic questions and what's the time set a time or a bit like Amazon's Alexa used to be.

And Apple has made quite a few promises about where Siri was going to go.

A couple of years ago, they made some bold statements and then they had to do a bit of a mea culpa at this event last year and say, we're not quite ready, but we are going to have news for you in 2026.

And here we are.

And what Apple has done has completely re-engineered the Siri experience.

It's branded its Siri AI just to differentiate it.

I think it'll just remain basically Siri to most consumers.

And it's a much, much deeper implementation of Siri, effectively giving you an AI layer right across every aspect of your iPhone and your other Apple products and linking all of those together.

So that context when you ask for some support, like, for example, ask your...

iPhone, you ask Siri, can you find some information about a conversation I had with Adrian about some book he recommended, and I think it was a couple of weeks ago when we were in California, it would go off and it would spy to your device and it would find that.

So it's deeply, deeply now woven into the platform.

Absolutely, and that's what's so clever.

And this is where I think...

You know, for all of the kind of missteps by Apple with AI, on paper, it still has a very strong position.

But when it's as deeply integrated into the stack that Apple has, which bridges across the hardware, the software, and the services layer, you can understand why tensions start to emerge if the EU are saying, if you are putting it that deeply into the device...

Other people should be allowed that really, really granular access.

And that's philosophically incompatible with Apple's whole approach to the way it does things.

Absolutely.