Originally published in Svenska Dagbladet by Björn Jeffery, May 22, 2025
Apple is last among all tech giants when it comes to AI. Internally, they are talking about a crisis. Has Apple lost its capacity for innovation?
A sinking ship. That is how a person from Apple’s AI team describes the situation to Bloomberg. The major AI initiative Apple Intelligence has not gone as expected. Much of the promised functionality has not been released at all. It simply does not work well enough.
Apple is now being sued by users for marketing something that does not exist. The product appears to have been launched far too early. The big question is: why?
Confidence is otherwise Apple’s greatest strength. The company has rarely been the first with new technological leaps, instead waiting until it can release its own unique version. The most famous example is the iPhone, the flagship product that now accounts for roughly half of the company’s revenue. Apple was far from the first with the concept of the smartphone. But when it arrived, it took the world by storm.
That is how it has looked historically. But now a change is becoming apparent.
Let us look at three examples from the company’s many product launches.
In autumn 2012, Apple Maps was released — a mapping service for the iPhone. The maps were one of Tim Cook’s first major launches as newly appointed CEO. The concept was familiar and Google Maps was the clear market leader. But when Apple Maps launched, it automatically became the default choice for all iPhone users. Many could perhaps have lived with that, had the service been as good — or better — than what they were already using.
But Apple Maps was not good. It was so poor that Tim Cook had to go out and apologize to the company’s users. Only many years later did the service become usable and competitive. An embarrassing blot on the record.
Another launch — the most spectacular in recent memory — was the face computer Apple Vision Pro, unveiled in June 2023. The much-discussed product was supposed to represent a new paradigm in computing. But the product was expensive — over 30,000 kronor — and uncomfortable to wear for any extended period. And the most important question of all, nobody could really answer: what was it actually for? To this day, it remains a mystery. An expensive one.
This brings us to last summer, when Apple presented Apple Intelligence — its own AI acronym. Together with partner OpenAI, the intention was to combine the security and privacy of the iPhone with the power of ChatGPT. But what was shown at the lavish presentation did not work in practice. For example, it was promised that you could retrieve your driver’s license number by searching with your voice — a feature that did not exist. Even today, nearly a year later, they have major problems. Among all the tech giants, Apple now sits dead last when it comes to AI.
When it comes to AI, Apple’s vaunted self-confidence appears to have evaporated. Here it has been important to be fast rather than to be the best. Now they are neither. One of the cornerstones — Apple’s voice assistant Siri — was introduced as far back as 2011. It was a technology acquisition that allowed the company to advance its position. But since then, they have fallen seriously behind. As users now expect AI responses — fast and advanced — Siri looks increasingly like a relic from another era.
Internally, they speak of a crisis. The way Apple develops products has not worked in this area, and executive reshuffles and reorganizations have followed one after another. The pace of competitors like Microsoft and Google is substantially higher, in organizations of comparable size to Apple. Compared with the vast ecosystem of AI startups, Apple looks like a dawdler.
Under normal circumstances, the pace would not have been a problem. Apple is a company that has dominated both the stock market and consumers’ wallets when it comes to technology. For much of the world, they have been perceived as overwhelmingly the best, and through that they have built enormous loyalty to the brand. But what is shaking now is internal. Apple is releasing products that seem unfinished — and that the market does not need. Who could not have waited another couple of years for a lighter, cheaper face computer?
For the first time in many years, Apple appears stressed. They cannot find the next iPhone — a new blockbuster that can build future growth. And now AI threatens to upend the way people use their mobile phones.
Being slow and excellent has historically been Apple’s model. There is still time. But being slow and poor is something the market will not accept forever. And that is where Apple is right now when it comes to AI.
