Siri AI Beta Wins Praise, Loses This Tester to Old Habits — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- The author tested Apple's Siri AI developer beta as a San Francisco tour guide and called it an "everything tool," later praising its iOS 27 beta ability to index phone contents and surface old texts and photos
- Siri AI failed to displace the columnist's existing routines, as he drifted back to manual Instagram browsing and Yelp searches while remaining a regular Anthropic Claude user on his phone
- Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, says Siri will draw criticism versus peers but won't push iPhone's vast installed base to switch away from Apple's defaults
- Ramon Llamas, research director at the International Data Corporation, argues Apple's long-cultivated data privacy reputation could win over users who previously distrusted other AI tools
- Avi Greengart, founder and lead analyst at Techsponential, reports the opposite experience, saying the latest beta has him using Siri more than before and faster at locating buried phone information than any other method
- Generative AI backlash may keep a solid segment of iPhone owners from trying the new Siri at all regardless of feature improvements, per the piece
Why it matters: Analysts quoted in the article identify iPhone's installed base and Apple's privacy reputation as structural moats that will keep everyday users on Siri even if a power user drifts away, which is why one columnist's fading enthusiasm is unlikely to matter. A separate cultural rejection of generative AI, also flagged in the piece, could still carve out holdouts regardless of Siri's feature quality.
Ask SkimNews
