Ahead of the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro launch in September, Pro Tim Cook is on the defensive. While the recent launch of the iPhone 16e surpassed the iPhone SE of 2022, and 2024’s iPhone 16 family led the market share over the holiday period, the company’s carefully cultivated image of excellence in software that “just works” lies in the tatters of the poor AI rollout of Apple Intelligence.
The competition is pulling further ahead, and there’s no easy way for Cook and his team to catch up.
iPhone 17 Pro’s AI Struggle
AI on Android is well established by Google through both its Pixel hardware and its partners building their own AI software experiences around the Gemini AI foundation. Meanwhile, Apple has yet to finish the roll-out of the first generation of Apple Intelligence. Key elements were always expected to arrive in late Q1. Yet, Apple’s developers delayed parts of the software or had to be removed from public use after offering incorrect news summaries and false headlines.
These losses have been eviscerated in public and have cast a cloud over Apple’s reputation for delivering high-quality software, even if it was later to the game than the competition. That only works if there is a significant difference in the software in Apple’s favour. With the best will in the world, Apple Intelligence has yet to match, let alone overtake, the offerings from Samsung, Honor and OnePlus.
Can WWDC Build Trust For The iPhone 17 Pro?
Apple’s opportunity to speak to its developer base and the broader consumer tech industry will come at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in early June. This is, of course, the same annual event where the Apple Intelligence team took to the stage to talk about the AI software and the features it would unlock in the first year.
Those features included a knowledge of personal context from data on your phone, an awareness of what is displayed on the screen at any point, and having Siri drive actions in your apps without further prompting or interaction by the user. Those features are also conspicuous by their absence.
Apple will be taking to the stage at WWDC and setting out the next steps of Apple Intelligence and how it will fit in iOS 19. Since last year’s promises burned the audience, regaining their confidence will not be easy.
Before WWDC, there is a small meeting of Google’s developer conference. Google I/O takes place in May, with the third generation of Gemini AI likely taking pride of place on the stage. That would build on a mobile artificial intelligence toolset that has delivered on its promises.
The iPhone 17 Pro’s Summer Competition
Android’s AI, powered by Google, will reach consumer hardware before Apple can roll out iOS 19 to the existing iPhone family and the upcoming iPhone 17 family.
Assuming the big players follow last year’s schedule, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip models should be presented in early August alongside improvements to Galaxy AI, with a launch later in the month. Google’s Pixel 10 family should pop up in mid-August, with a launch in the first week of September. All of these will be before Apple’s traditional “second Tuesday of September” launch date for the latest iPhone hardware and iOS software.
Apple’s first public move into the modern world of mobile AI reached consumers nearly eleven months after Android’s AI suite. Since then, it has fallen further behind the competition, seen the brand power of its name diminish, and has faced negative publicity unlike anything in Apple’s recent corporate history.
Apple’s approach to personal data—keeping as much of it on-device as possible, anonymizing any data processed in the cloud, and not mining users’ cloud data for advertising or marketing purposes—has left it without a complete toolset to implement AI. That approach isn’t going to change in the near future.
Cook’s best chance was to be the first to define what AI was for a mobile device. Alas, Android got there first; AI is now tilted towards Google’s approach. Looking forward to WWDC, I wonder if Apple will double down and try to build competent AI apps with limited training data or attempt to radically change the conversation and have its AI efforts “think different.”
It might be the least worst move Tim Cook can make.
Now read the latest iPhone 17 Pro, Apple Watch, and iOS 18 headlines in Forbes’s Apple news digest…
